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So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal
salvation tallies very closely with the account of "conversion" as
it is given by other religions. It has little to tell that is not
already familiar to the reader of William James's "Varieties of
Religious Experience." It describes an initial state of distress
with the aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with
the futility of the individual life, a state of helpless self-disgust,
of inability to form any satisfactory plan of living. This
is the common prelude known to many sorts of Christian as
"conviction of sin"; it is, at any rate, a conviction of hopeless
confusion. . . . Then in some way the idea of God comes into the
distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without substance or
belief. It is read about or it is remembered; it is expounded by
some teacher or some happy convert. In the case of all those of the
new faith with whose personal experience I have any intimacy, the
idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea floating
about in a mind still dissatisfied. God is not believed in, but it
is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the
needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit
together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take
the sting from death. Under this realisation the idea is pursued
and elaborated. For a time there is a curious resistance to the
suggestion that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by
such phrases as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness,
as the Collective Mind.
I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the
idea of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous
prejudice against divine personality created by the absurdities of
the Christian teaching and the habitual monopoly of the Christian
idea. The picture of Christ as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself
before minds unaccustomed to the idea that they are lambs. The
cross in the twilight bars the way. It is a novelty and an enormous
relief to such people to realise that one may think of God without
being committed to think of either the Father, the Son, or the Holy
Ghost, or of all of them at once. That freedom had not seemed
possible to them. They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the idea
that the Christian God is the only thinkable God. They had heard so
much about that God and so little of any other. With that release
their minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of
God.
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