PSYCHOLOGY AND THE CHRISTIAN LIFE T. W. PYM D.S.O.,M.A. BL 53 .P94 1922 ' pym, Thomas Wentworth, 18bb- 1945. . . I Psychology and the Christial 1 1 f p Psychology and the Christian Life T. W. PYM, D.S.O., M.A. Psychology and the Christian Lif e /^j^ToTpi? T. W. PYM, D.S.O., M.A. X^-iX.iu.Lc Head of Cambridge House, Examining Chaplain to the Bishop of Southwark, Formerly Chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge New ^BJr York George H. Doran Company Copyright, 1922, By George H. Doran G)mpany Printed in the United States of America TO MY WIFE Preface This book is intended to be simply an introduction to the study of psychology in its application to the Christian way of life. Each chapter touches upon subjects which deserve a volume to themselves. Chapter I is the barest skeleton of general psycho- logy, admittedly only just sufficient to give to the beginner an idea of its method and of some of its principles. Chapter II does no more than open the door to the possibilities of psychology applied out- side religion. In Chapter III I have omitted the deliberate criticism which the teaching of the New Nancy School might seem to require before it was applied to Christian teaching on Faith. Nor in this chapter is the psychology of Faith considered except in one limited aspect. Throughout the constant references made in Chapters IV and V to the new psychology and psycho-analysis I have intentionally refrained from attempting to divide and further de- fine the "sub-conscious," and from using such words as "sublimate" or "complex." (Apart from a de- sire to avoid difficult and technical language I find in the new psychology many phrases or words used Vll VIU Preface freely but seldom with exactly the same content by different psychologists. "Complex" is just such a word.) Again in these chapters neither sin nor temptation are considered fully; examples of both are given to illustrate certain principles ; further ap- plication of those principles can be easily made by the reader. Chapters VI and VII, dealing with the Person- ality of Jesus Christ, must seem, after what has been written during the centuries since His earthly life, superficial and inadequate, chiefly because of their omissions. In Chapter VIII I have not tried to do more than illustrate the possible application of psychological common sense to life in general. Some of this book's omissions can be repaired by anyone willing to read one or more of the books mentioned in the bibliography on page 172. The object of this book is to provide something in the nature of a summary of psychological theory, in so far as it bears on Christian Faith and ethics, for the use of those who have not the time to read deeply in psychology yet need the help that psychology can give. The full application of psychology to Chri':tianity obviously demands more exact scholarship and greater scientific learning than any page of this volume displays. It is strange that no such book has yet been written; when it comes to be written it is Preface IX bound to be, in language, length and price, beyond the range of the ordinary man and woman. I have, therefore, done my best to fill a need which I believe to be real and urgent, but I am also conscious of the inadequacy of this book to its subject. The new psychology is developing so rapidly that it may seem risky as yet to attempt, on the founda- tion of its conclusions or inconclusiveness, to build anything into the fabric of religion. I believe that the risk must be run. Although we cannot afford to adopt as axioms in religion what are only disputed theories in the realm of psychology, neither can we afford to disregard and to neglect the use of dis- coveries in this science simply through the fear that the scientific conclusions of this year may be modi- fied by those of another. However, with one ex- ception, I hope I may fairly claim to have taken as a basis for discussion moderate rather than extreme theories in psychology. Admittedly in following Coue and Baudouin in Chapter III I have attached much greater importance to the influence and power of reflective auto-suggestion than most psycho- therapists would probably allow. On many points the psychologists differ so con- siderably that one is bound to choose between alter- nate theories; as for instance, in the adoption of "self," "sex" and "social" (or "herd") as the three most fundamental or primary instincts in man. X Preface The books to which I consciously owe my in- formation in psychology are acknowledged in the text or at the end. My other chief debt in the pro- duction of this book is acknowledged in the dedi- cation. T. W. Pym. Contents CHAPTEK PA«B I: PSYCHOLOGY AND COMMON SENSE . . 15 Psychology viewed as Applied Common Sense — Concentration of Attention — Power of "Sug- gestion" — The Subconscious Mind — Adaptabil- ity and Habit — Dissociation and Repression — Distribution of Energy — Association of Ideas — The Primary Instincts — Certain Principles. II: PSYCHOLOGY IN THE WORLD .... 35 The General Relation of Psychology to Reli- gion — Psychology Applied to Industry — To Publicity — To Education — To Medicine — Need of Its Further Application to Religion — "Sug- gestion" Defined — Auto-Suggestion. Ill: FAITH AND SUGGESTION 48 Faith and Effort in Christianity — The Psychol- ogy of Faith — Spontaneous Auto-Suggestion With and Without Religious Faith — The Law of Reversed Effort — The Power of Imagination — The Failure of Faith — "Reflective Sugges- tion" as an Act of Religious Faith Described — Its Dangers — ^Other Questions to be Consid- ered First, IV: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SIN 73 The New Psychology — The Psychology of the Liar — Of Temptation in General — Sin as Mis- application of Energy — Sin Through the Prim- ary Instincts — Redirection of Energy — The Re- ligious Instinct. V: CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHO-ANALYSIS 100 The Psychology of Repentance — Of Forgive- ness — Comparison with Psycho-Analysis — Con- fession — Self-Examination by Association of Ideas — Worry and Remorse, xi 135 xii Contents CHAPTZR PAGE VI: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JESUS— HIS TEACHING 117 The Psychology of Jesus — His Sinlessness — His Confidence — His Teaching on Faith — On Prayer— The Psychology of the Forgiving Spirit — The Power of Love and Hate — In- ternal Harmony — Unifying Purpose in Life. VII: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JESUS— HIS PRAC- TICE Psycho-Therapy and Suggestion— The Healing Miracles of Jesus — Their General Conditions — Attitude of Mind Required— The Method of of Jesus — Sickness and Forgiveness — The In- sight of Jesus — Psychological Teaching of Jesus. VIII: GENERAL CONCLUSIONS 151 The Cure of Souls — The Training of the Clergy — Expert Directors — The Secret of Per- sonality — Need of Hope — Formation of Public Opinion— Contribution of the Individual— The Influence of the Idle Word— Public Worship and Attention — Length of Services — The Psy- chology of tlie Masses — Their Recreation — Conclusion. FOR FURTHER READING 172 INDEX ,., . . , ,, . ,, ,., . 173 Psychology and the Christian Life Chapter I : Psychology and Common Sense Psychology is the science of behaviour; its field of inquiry is human nature. It is the one branch of science within the understanding of the ordinary man. The science of chemistry needs books, labora- tories, demonstrators. No one can study mechanical science without machines or drawings of them, and even then their parts and functions must be explained to him. These and all the other sciences defy the amateur. And if by "amateur" we mean the casual and inaccurate inquirer, who thinks that any fool can be a scientific student of human nature, then psychology too defies him. Psychology has its experts, its men of research, its technique, its laboratories, its schools. Yet in a sense, we are all psychologists and every man may be his own laboratory. If I have a per- sistent pain in my body, I go to a doctor and rely upon him to discover what is wrong with me and why, and to prescribe accordingly: if he tells me that I need it, I allow him to put a cage over my face and to open me up, so that he can satisfy his 15 i6 Psychology and the Christian Life natural curiosity as to my general contents. During my convalescence he may, if I play my cards well, consent to explain to me better than I knew before what was wrong with my works ; my nurse may or may not be induced to supply further information. Yet, however much I may glean from these sources and from a study of my own physical sensations, I leave the nursing-home with a knowledge of surgery and medicine that barely justifies even the use of the word "amateur." If I have been very quick and bright on the subject in the sick-room, my medical attendant may say unguardedly, "You ought to be a doctor yourself." But even with this encourage- ment I must forsake other studies and take up this matter professionally, if I am to fulfil his hopes of me. Or again, I may have a cold; someone has told me (I could never have guessed it) that eucalyptus will cure me. Perhaps it does. But how did I get the cold? I suppose that I sat in a draught or that somebody sneezed over me. Such information is easy enough to acquire and is not scientific, but even these possible causes of my sore throat and heavy head are not things I should have been likely to find out unless someone had told me; perhaps it was in the papers. Next time I will use a spray. A cold is a very simple affair, common enough at least to seem simple ; but any reasonable connection between damp Psychology and Common Sense 17 socks on my feet and germs in my nose or throat is not easily apparent to me; nor have I more than a nodding acquaintance with my mucous membrane. I may persevere year after year in the study of the colds I catch, use many remedies, discuss more, but at the end of it all I shall still be less than an amateur in the science of bacteriology or physiology. But when I pass from the behaviour of germs to human behaviour I am on familiar ground. Every conscious moment of my life I am behaving. I am myself a laboratory for the study of this science and I can study it myself. I am surrounded by other people whose conduct I can observe and compare with my own. For instance, if I am working out a mathematical problem and do not notice my friend's remark the first time he says, "Do you agree with the views of the Daily Mailf" I should be able after- wards to explain why I had not answered him at once. I should say that my attention had been concentrated on my work; that my mind was so fully occupied with my calculation that no remark so lacking in originality as his own, could under the circumstances penetrate quickly to my consciousness and divert my interest. That explanation is psychological ; the rea- son given would, in the main, be right. It sounds obvious enough but it brings me to the threshold of the science. Certain outward conduct on my part has been noticed ; I can explain that conduct to myself l8 Psychology and the Christian Life or to anyone else in terms of mind. Such observa- tion of human conduct in cause and effect forms the whole structure of psychology. The above illustration has been chosen as a fair sample of the average man's psychological interest. He would scout the idea that it demanded or de- served any further definition than "ordinary common sense." Certainly that description suffices. One pur- pose of this book is to encourage any reader who claims, as all men claim, that he has an average supply of this common sense, to develop it on psy- chological lines, to extend its range, and to apply it more particularly to morals and religion. We have noted the point at which most people would stop thinking out the cause of the particular behaviour already described. Let us try to get be- hind the explanation already given and discover causes further back. Such questions as the follow- ing present themselves : "When I am concentrated on work which requires my full attention and freedom from interruption, why exactly is it that a casual remark does not at once break into my conscious mind? The vibrations of the voice strike my ear, my hearing is not impaired, and yet I do not really hear the remark. Or do I hear it and not know that I hear it? Am I really prevented from appre- hending the remark at once, or is it simply that Psychology and Common Sense 19 I do not want to hear it? What do I mean when I say that I am concentrated on anything?" Now the concentration of attention is in general character similar to the concentration of physical energy required for driving a golf -ball or delivering the final punch in a boxing contest. At the moment of impact the maximum of physical force, not merely of hand or arm but of the whole body, is imparted through the head of the driver or the boxer's fist. The club or the fist is the channel by which the energy of the whole body is conducted from within to with- out. The method must be learned and practised before perfection or even skill can be reached. In much the same way mental energy is summoned from various reserves and is applied to the one thing to which a man wishes to give concentrated attention. To a certain extent we can all so apply our attention, just as any man can deliver a blow of some sort with his hand; but equally, training in mental concentra- tion is necessary to any man who wishes to have available the maximum of mental energy to use where he wishes. In this way we can detect the difference between "hearing" and "listening." I Jiear the remark of my interrupting friend; the words become recorded automatically through my receiver, the ear; but I do not listen. I have drawn on the mental energy usually at the disposal of my hearing faculty and am at the moment applying it elsewhere. 20 Psychology and the Christian Life If I want to I can test the degree to which my work interests me and the amount of concentration I am putting or am capable of putting into it. But the matter can be taken still further. Not only my mind but my will is engaged. I am work- ing because I want to work ; that does not mean that I like to work; it only means that, whether I like it or not, I have decided to do it. In that sense I "wish" to do it, I "will" do it. I am not conscious of thinking this out as I sit down at the table; but if I try to think it out now, I know that certain motives made me decide to work, and that as their result at least one thought passed through my mind at the time: "I will do so-and-so." That suggestion, made to myself, set in motion a machinery of whose work- ing I am not fully conscious. Consciously I dismiss other things from my mind, refresh my memory as to the exact point at which I must take up the work and consciously apply myself to it. But at the same time the determination to work, the intention or will to do it, is affecting me in those vast and largely unknown regions of the mind below the level of consciousness — the subconscious mind.^ This will '■ "A little reflection on human behaviour, as we experience it in ourselves and as we see it all round us in the world, should suffice to convince us that many human thoughts and actions have no consecutive antecedents in the stream of con- sciousness, but are motived by causes arising from some other source. Sometimes we can clearly recognise the source, some- times we have a vague inkling of it, and sometimes the causes of our thoughts and actions are hidden from our introspective Psychology and Common Sense 21 not help me if I have turned to the work reluctantly or in doubt as to my ability to do it ; for then I should have set the machinery of my subconscious mind in the reverse direction. All my efforts to do the work will be handicapped by the effects of the suggestion I have made to myself that I cannot really do it. However great the concentration of my mental energy on the matter in hand I shall more quickly set free energy to listen to interruptions because fundamentally, even though I do not consciously think so, my attitude could be expressed in the words, "Interruptions don't really matter." But if I mean to do the work and believe I can, my concentration of mental energy is assisted by the subconscious mind. How ? We cannot tell ; but it is as if some sentinel were placed over me to block the entrance of anything irrelevant. That is partly why, when I become conscious that I am being ad- dressed, it is at first a struggle to divert the amount gaze. The causes of which we are half conscious can often be brought into full consciousness by deliberate effort. Some- times also a motive of which, up to a certain point of time, we had been quite unconscious will suddenly flash into con- sciousness. Again, we are all familiar with disconnected thoughts, images and emotions which arise in consciousness and of whose connection with the rest of the conscious stream, or with conscious memories, we are quite ignorant. ''To account for these phenomena psychologists have been driven to assume the existence of an unconscious part of the mind, lying, so to speak, below the conscious, from which psychic elements may rise into the stream of consciousness." A. G. Tansley in "The New Psychology," p. 38. This "unconscious part of the mind" is referred to in the present book as the "subconscious mind." 22 Psychology and the Christian Life of mental energy necessary to attend to the inter- ruption. Let us now suppose that a man is habitually inter- rupted in his work ; perhaps he shares rooms or an office with other people. Some of the interruptions are in the nature of openings for irrelevant conversa- tion : his friend cannot read the daily paper without commenting on it aloud ; another person in the room works better, if he knocks off every half -hour and talks or reads for a few minutes. The persistent worker suffers therefore, not from one interruption as an isolated experience, but recurrently. How will this repetition of the nuisance affect his conduct? We shall not discuss the forcible words or actions which he might employ to secure complete silence, but imagine that he is obliged to do his best under the given conditions. It is clear that his ability to make progress with his work will depend upon his ability to adapt or adjust himself to circumstances. Part of such adaptation may come automatically; the development of the human race through the ages has been one long history of adjustments. The man's own life, mental and physical, from the cradle onwards has consisted of one adjustment after another. Adaptability, to some degree at any rate, is a universal quality. Largely without realizing how it comes about, a man will adapt himself to interruptions, as he forms any Psychology and Common Sense 23 other new habit of life necessary to his environment. How, then, will he behave? ( 1 ) The conversationalist may need to repeat his remark three or four times before gaining the con- scious attention of the worker. Imagine that for the first time you are reading a book in a room with a striking clock. At the first quarter you notice the strike, that is to say you become conscious or aware of it. After three hours you have adapted yourself to It and you cease to regard it. How has this come about? Your only conscious thought on the subject has been : "Oh, that's a striking clock ! I suppose it will do that every quarter. Well, it won't interfere with me," By some such thought you are doing very much more than you imagine. You are discon- necting the strike of the clock from the rest of your experience ; you are putting the clock and all thoughts of it into a corner of your mind, into which you do not intend to look. Each time the clock strikes you do this again until at last the clock is "dissociated" from your conscious mind altogether. All thought of it is repressed. All adaptation to circumstances is not necessarily achieved through this dissociation and repression, but much of it is. The worker may treat the interrupting talker in the same way and deliber- ately or almost automatically disconnect him, cut him off, cease to regard or even be aware of his speech. (2) This conduct, however, will not suffice if the 24 Psychology and the Christian Life interruptions come from one of those people who are not content to make casual remarks without some acknowledgment. The worker may discover that a policy of mere silence will not succeed and that he must adapt himself to the nuisance in some other way. He therefore develops a different habit, again not always deliberately but almost by accident ; at any rate the habit would seem to him accidental unless he considered it closely. Practically all the remarks of the casual talker can be answered with a very small expenditure of mental energy. The longer the prac- tice continues on both sides the less energy will the worker need to spare for this. Talker: "They prophesy an anticyclone soon, I see. Worker: "About time too. Rotten weather for the time of year." Soon the habit becomes so fixed that no pause is necessary before the reply except that calculated to remind the talker that his conversation is inoppor- tune. The whole business is eventually so automatic that, given four or five such interruptions an hour, the worker could afterwards only recall with an effort the remarks made on either side. It must be noted that both the above methods, while enabling the worker to maintain persistent work, will inevitably, though he himself may not notice it, impair the quality of that work. When Psychology and Common Sense 25 using the first method, however much he may dis- connect the interruptions from his conscious think- ing, he is not at harmony. There is a jangle, a struggle, however slight, going on within him, no less actual because he is barely conscious of it. Some of his energy is being diverted to sentinel duty. If he use the second method some of his mental energy, however little, has to be diverted to answering the talker, and both methods prevent him from being absolutely free to concentrate the entire attention of his mind on his work. This general description of behaviour is not meant to be exhaustive. Many other considerations may afifect the worker's conduct in one direction or another, according to his general temperament and character and so forth. If we were considering an actual person known to us or a particular type of person, our description of his probable behaviour would be modified accordingly. For instance there is the type of man who would never really acquiesce in those conditions of work; he tells himself that he cannot work properly under those conditions and that "So-and-So gets on his nerves." His work suffers not only at the moments of interruption but in be- tween, when he is expecting an interruption to come, and immediately after the interruption, when with difficulty he suppresses his irritation. The lack of complete harmony already mentioned has emerged 26 Psychology and the Christian Life into his conscious mind; the nuisance is not entirely detached and repressed, nor can the man bring him- self to settle the thing one way or the other. He continues to make strenuous efforts to carry on his work and to remain civil, but all the time he is ex- pecting to fail in the attempt; every day when he goes to work he makes the suggestion to himself, "I can't do it; my work is bound to be poor." Thereby he sets in motion a machinery which will go far to ensure the failure he is expecting. Indeed the very strenuousness of the efforts he makes to concentrate on his work and to keep his temper will emphasise and strengthen the suggestion with which he started the day : "However hard I try, I shan't succeed." Let us now carry this inquiry into the causes of behaviour still one stage further back. Reference has already been made to the existence of motives of some kind which bring the man to sit down to his work. Motives there must be. We have now to ask ourselves what seems a silly question ; because at first it appears silly most people never ask it, or at least never attempt to answer it. Yet it is the kind of question Socrates thought fit to press. It is this : "Why exactly do I do anything? Why do I choose one thing instead of another? When, for example, I start what I call 'my work,' why do I do so ? What is the impulse? What is my aim?" To put the Psychology and Common Sense 27 question in a more practical and finite form, "Have I any purpose in life? If so, what is it?" Now the possible answer to the first batch of ques- tions is simply legion : "Because I like it. Because it's my livelihood. Because I have ambitions. Be- cause it interests me. Because it will help other people. Because it will help me to beat So-and-So. Because So-and-So wants me to do it." Each of these answers could be followed by a further "Why?" in the true Socratic method until the fundamental reason were reached, and that reason would almost certainly have reference to the other question, "What is your purpose in life?" So could any action be traced back to its source, provided the analyst were sufficiently skilful. The method employed by him or by oneself in attempting to determine the causes of one's actions and behaviour is largely that of the "association of ideas." There is a chain of ideas and incidents between even a trivial action and its primary source. Many of the links in this chain will become obvious on examination, but some of them may be missing ; a deliberate effort to recall them to mind may or may not set in motion a machinery which will cause the incident or idea to emerge into the conscious mind from that storehouse of all mem- ories — the subconscious mind. But this will not always happen. When I am trying to analyse an action of my own, I find perhaps that it sprang from 28 Psychology and the Christian Life a sudden idea that flashed into my mind as someone was talking to me. The idea had a real, though not obvious, connection with what was being said. I cannot trace the connection either in the conversation or outside it ; from some preconceived notion of my own I search for the link on the wrong lines. I do not get it. Perhaps someone else could help me. Anyhow, the thing being trivial does not matter; I was only trying to know myself better. Anyone who so tries to analyse the causes of his actions will find by practice that the association of one idea with another, the connection between thought and be- haviour, is by degrees easier to establish. I am not at the moment advocating any such detailed intro- spection, which may be both morbid and silly; it is enough to note that anyone who cares to do so can prove to himself the association of ideas from pri- mary cause to ultimate action, even if all the links cannot always be found. In the principal example which we have been con- sidering the cause is easy to determine; the man is concentrating all his mental energy on his work for some reason which he could easily give. There will not be many links to find before we reach the final cause ; he wants to secure a certain position in order that he may marry; he is ambitious and wishes to become distinguished above the heads of other people; he is out after money and what money can Psychology and Common Sense 29 buy, or he is driven by fear of poverty; he aims at power and leadership ; he beHeves he has a mission in life and works to improve the conditions of society by attaining a position of influence or by advancing- science and learning. Whatever the fundamental cause of his desire to work, it will be found to be connected with a "primary instinct." The word "instinct" can be and is used loosely to describe forces which are not primary; for instance, "curi- osity," which is part of our human inheritance, is often referred to as a "natural instinct." So it is, but it cannot rank as of the same primary importance as for instance the "self-instinct," which, unless we modify it by thought, makes every person put self first; or again the "sex-instinct," by which creation, reproduction and love figure among the chief factors in determining human conduct. By reference to such primary instincts most conduct can in the end be explained, not merely conduct in matters of impor- tance, such as a man's work in life, but often enough the pace at which he walks, the other habits he dis- plays or adopts. Thus our purpose in life, if we have one, the object at which we aim, is connected with the various primary instincts. One man is led along by one such instinct and the whole purpose of his life is directed by it with or without his knowledge. In another man a primary instinct is baulked, and his whole life 30 Psychology and the Christian Life and most of his actions are influenced by the stop- page. Yet another man controls and regulates his instincts, as far as he can, to serve some set purpose, himself compelled thereto by the predominance of one of them within him. Let us now return to the point from which we set out. We started with the assumption that the study of human nature and behaviour — psychology — can be undertaken by the ordinary person. We took what is an everyday occurrence in the life of many people and examined it. Much that has been said about it in this chapter would have revealed itself to anyone who thought it worth while to apply ordinary common-sense methods to the investigation. Only on certain points have I introduced facts or theories derived from the researches of the professed psychol- ogist. It must be admitted that the inquiry has opened up immense practical possibilities ; these will be further indicated in what follows. For the mo- ment let us record the facts or working principles of which we have obtained a glimpse, not in tech- nically accurate phrase but in practical language: (i) No one can think without using mental energy. This energy may be dissipated or concen- trated, wasted or developed at will. (2) Everyone has "sub-conscious mind," mind, that is to say, of whose workings the person is not conscious. This sub-conscious mind is extremely Psychology and Common Sense 31 sensitive to suggestions whether coming from the conscious mind of the person or from outside sources. Such suggestions develop and extend, in- fluencing the conscious thought and the general be- haviour of the person to a great degree. (3) Everyone adapts himself more or less to cir- cumstances. Such adjustment is a law of life and much of it is unconscious or at any rate unthought. Everyone, however, can think out the changes re- quired to meet new circumstances and new ideas, and the person who does so gains greatly in power; by selecting the new habits which he will adopt, both of mind and behaviour, he increases his natural adapt- ability and turns it into an instrument by means of which he can deliberately m.ould his life. (4) To discover the original first cause of a thought or action, a person must find the ideas con- nected with that thought or action and trace them back. Many of the links may be missing, because the conscious mind cannot contain the memories of a lifetime. Most of these memories are stored in the sub-conscious mind and, if a man could recover them, they would explain much in his life for which he can find no conscious reason. [See (2).] The method of recovering these memories is known as Psycho- Analysis. (5) Everyone is responsible for the loss of some of these connecting ideas because everyone tries to dis- 32 Psychology and the Christian Life connect unpleasant or forbidden ideas and memories from conscious thinking. After a time such an idea becomes almost entirely disconnected. The person no longer represses it consciously. The sub-conscious mind guards it jealously, and we say quite honestly "I don't know what made me say this or do that." Or "Where on earth have I heard that name be- fore? I simply can't remember." Forgotten ideas, repressed wishes emerge from time to time into the conscious memory and appear in dreams wearing a disguise. (6) Such a repression may lead to internal conflict. The conflict will be serious if some primary instinct has been baulked of its natural outlet. The conflict will drain the person's energy to a greater or less extent, and will affect behaviour. In extreme cases the behaviour will be abnormal and the repression will result in physical suffering or some kind of nervous illness. (7) Most actions ultimately spring from and most motives are based on one of the primary instincts. These for our purpose in this book may be defined as: (a) The self-instinct, the instinct of individuality. "To myself I matter more than anything or anybody else." The function of this instinct is self-preserva- tion, the care of the individual. (&) The sex-instinct, or instinct of reproduction. Psychology and Common Sense 33 The function of this instinct is the preservation of the species or race. (c) The social or herd instinct, the instinct by which man finds it necessary to pass his life with other people, and to imitate them. The function of this instinct is the preservation of society, of the existing community. (8) All the human emotions as well as all the lesser instincts, e.g., love, lust, curiosity, fear, anger, pride, imitation, ambition, religion, jealousy, hate, are con- nected with one or more of these primary instincts. (9) It follows that in no conscious thought or action does a person employ merely what we term mental or physical energy. If most thought and action is derived ultimately from primary instincts, such thought or action has an emotional quality, which, generally unacknowledged, would be ex- pressed by a man in the words 'T will," meaning *T wish." His energy belongs not only to his mind or body, the instruments through which he expresses himself, but also to his instincts influencing his will. This combination of energies may be called psychic energy. In the chapters that follow, the word energy alone will be used, combining every kind of energy that goes to form the driving power of the human personality. (10) Any man's purpose in life is very closely re- lated to his primary instincts. 34 Psychology and the Christian Life The first nine of the above paragraphs deal with this one question about human thought and conduct — "How does it happen? How does it work?" They are purely descriptive and non-moral. The use of such a phrase as "purpose in life" in the tenth paragraph introduces a moral idea. Then what about God?, Chapter II : Psychology in the World This book is not an attempt to defend Christianity in the face of modern psychological research.^ Long ago the scientific proof of the influence and power of heredity and environment in human life fastened afresh on the defenders of religion the difficulty of maintaining a place for free-will ; to examine, as we now shall, how it is that the inherited instincts in- fluence a man's life, or to how great an extent his opinions are moulded and his behaviour directed by the "suggestions" of his environment is not really to increase the difficulty. It always has existed and will remain to be faced, and it has been met again and again. The attitude in which we approach psychological discovery is rather this : I claim to have at any rate a margin in which I can choose ; I maintain that by making wrong choices I lessen that margin and bind myself with chains not laid upon me by any inheri- tance in the flesh or by the circumstances of my ^ A Christian apologetic on this point has already been written. Rouse and Miller. "Christian Experience and Psy- chological Processes." (Student Christian Movement, 2s. 6d.) 35 36 Psychology and the Christian Life environment. I believe that there is a power avail- able for my use, coming from God and capable of breaking those chains, I accept the proved and tested discoveries of physical science; I accept, not the latest fads, but such facts and principles of psychology as the experts in that science declare by common consensus of opinion to be established ; but I also believe in the Holy Spirit. I am not, there- fore, concerned with the question whether or not the achievements of religious faith are simply the result of "suggestion" working mechanically in the sub- conscious mind; that religious faith does so work, I am certain ; but I am equally certain that it works also in other ways, and that a suggestion based on a true faith in God and applied psychologically will be more powerfully eflfective than a suggestion based on a belief in psychology alone. Thus my aim is rather to discover, with the help of psycholog}', how faith in God works, and to apply psycholog)^ to moral questions, problems of personal life and the activities of organized religious bodies. In such application the Christian Church is behind-, hand. In the industrial world the new psychology is being widely applied in a practical way. Research into fatigue and its causes, into the relation of mental to physical fatigue, is resulting in many improve- tnents in factory methods ; motion-study is bringing further improvements. Motion-study is little more Psychology in the World 37 than elaborated common sense based on the law of adaptation and habit; if a workman's tools are not handy to his reach in the order in which he requires them, or if his physical movements at the bench are more frequent and complicated than they need be, energy is wasted and production is lowered; his habits must be formed from deliberate choice and not by unconscious adaptation. Again, to introduce new factory methods without regard to the worker's suspicion that he is being "speeded-up" merely to the employer's advantage would show a fatal ignorance of the most important psychological factor in the situation. Such lessons are being learnt not only by employers, works-managers, foremen and welfare- workers, but by many intelligent young men, who are entering industry from all classes. A young mechanic said to me the other day, "Can you recom- mend me a book on Psychology? / want to learn how to Jmndle men." There are hundreds like him. In the realm of Commerce and also of Politics what may be called the psychology of advertisement is being employed day by day with more delibera- tion. The social or herd-instinct already referred to is being manipulated and the power of mass-sugges- tion is wielded with definite intention. For example, the firm that advertises from a thousand hoardings that "Mosso" is the cure for all ills, knows what it is about, and the power of the imitative instinct; 38 Psychology and the Christian Life ■millions of people buy "Mosso" as a result, certain that countless tubes, bottles or boxes of it must be 5old annually to account for the profits available to spend on advertising: the social instinct compels them; they follow the herd; they try "Mosso." Suggest to me often enough that such and such a politician drugs or drinks and I shall believe you ; or at any rate I shall entertain suspicions of his integ- rity and, without repeating your actual rumour, I shall inevitably and without realizing it convey that suspicion to others; that is, at least, if I do not know the psychological trick of it all. Tell me from the posters and columns of three papers that Mr. Mug- gins is the greatest Englishman of the century and that he has a unique personality, and I shall in time fall beneath its spell myself. I shall take as my opinion what I am told is the opinion of the herd. Common sense has revealed this method to people all down the ages and it has been fruitful in results. Shakespeare and Napoleon had not much to learn about human nature; but neither of those two had the tested scientific knowledge, which is to-day at the disposal of the commercial or political manipu- lator. The psychological method in these depart- ments of life is becoming much more widely under- stood and more frequently applied with expert deliberation. Educational experts daily attach increased impor- Psychology in the World 39 tance to the study of psychology ; already to enter the teaching profession without any interest in this science is to be behind the times. The application of recently evolved theories about "suggestion" to child-life is spreading; in a few years' time no child will pass through any school or even through any nursery, uninfluenced by the results of modern child- psychology. Already for adults there exist many systems of mind-culture and memory-training, which give excellent practical advice as to how to succeed in business or other walks of life. I do not know how far they are psychologically exact, but there is no reason to doubt much of the efficacy claimed for them. Most of all in medicine is psychology welcomed and developed, so much so that to many people psychology simply means psycho-therapy. It is well to remember that though this particular application of psychology has its own special name and clinics, it is only one (hitherto the most advanced) of the developments of psychology. In saying further back that everyone could be a psychologist and should endeavour to develop common sense by a closer observation of human nature, the last thing I meant was to encourage the fashionable craze for psycho- analysis or to produce amateur psycho-therapists. A general knowledge of physiology and other depart- ments of medical science is absolutely necessary. 40 Psychology and the Christian Life except for most exceptional people, before psycho- analysis can be successfully or indeed safely under- taken. It is, however, the successful advance in the appli- cation of psychology to medicine that emphasizes the lack of any such serious application of this science to religion. Doctors have discovered what Christians should have known. A method of cure for mental and physical ills is now scientifically demonstrated and applied. Jesus indicated this method quite clearly two thousand years ago. In some matters, such as repentance and confession. His advice has been followed through obedience based on faith in Him. Psychology can explain in part how such obedience works; it is humihating that the advice of Jesus should not have been sufficient for all His followers to act upon, but it is better to act upon it now that science is corroborating it than not at all ; so encour- aged we may gain a stronger and more effective faith in Christ's teaching about the power of God, where science as such utters no corroboration. In certain other respects groups of Christians or individual followers of Christ have adopted His teaching more literally and applied it more deliber- ately; Faith-Healing is recognized and practised in the Christian Church, not only at Lourdes but in the Anglican Communion and in other religious bodies ; the genuine achievements of Christian Science have Psychology in the World 41 emphasized the teaching of Jesus about faith. But Christianity as a whole to-day is not merely failing to understand or, understanding, courageously to present and uphold the teaching of Jesus in this matter, but is being outstripped by those who have discovered the truth of part of His teaching, without always acknowledging Him as their Master. "Master, we saw one casting out devils in Thy name ; and we forbade him, because he followeth not with us." And Jesus said unto him, "Forbid him not : for he that is not against us is for us." ^ Psycho-therapists, even those who are not professing Christians, tend to regard the presence or absence of religious belief as an important factor in their patients ; not only does religious emotion often form a conspicuous element in the complicated states which they attempt to analyse, but real belief in God, when it exists in a patient, can be used as efifectively as the patient's belief in his doctor or medicine or system of treat- ment. From the Christian point of view, surely, there is much more in faith than this but, generally speaking, we do not use even that much. At this point let it be stated again that while the science of psycho-therapy is the best of all illustra- tions of the degree to which the Church as a whole is behindhand in the application of psychology to its work in the world, it is only an illustration. We are ^ Luke ix. 49-50. 42 Psychology and the Christian Life not primarily concerned with the relation of religious faith to the practice of medicine or the cure of disease. Our contention is that psychological dis- covery as a whole is, in a less ambitious way, at the disposal of the Christian believer with average in- telligence, who will take the trouble to learn a little more than common sense and some power of observa- tion already provide for him. It is not easy to summarize shortly what can be claimed for psychology in its application to industry or education or medicine. This is, at any rate, part of the claim: "Most people live below their maxi- mum in every respect ; they tire when they need not ; they fail when they might succeed ; they accept limi- tations which do not or need not really exist for them ; closer observation of themselves and of others would immensely increase their powers of judgment, turning intuition into wisdom, guess-work into cer- tainty." It cannot be the object of this book to do more than apply to Christian morality and faith in certain respects this just claim and the method of its achievement. The most fundamental application rests undoubtedly in what may be called "The Law of Suggestion," already briefly described. Experts in psychology differ as to details in the working of this law, but not seriously enough to affect our in- vestigation of it. We shall consider it from the standpoint of the New Nancy School, founded at Psychology in the World 43 Nancy in the year 19 10 on the teaching and research work ot Emile Coue. For the most part I do not intend to argue or orove his conclusions; they are fairly and sanely supported in "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," the work of his chief disciple and exponent, Charles Baudouin. Without denying that they should be critically investigated we may accept them as working theories; our inquiry is not les- sened in value because the new psychology, like any new branch of knowledge, is developing rapidly year by year. Any later modifications in the conclusions on which we base our present study of the subject are not likely to invalidate the main principles. "Suggestion" is to be distinguished from the popu- lar conception of "Hypnotism." It is not a matter of the exercise of A's will-power over B nor of the alleged "hypnotic" fascination exercised by one person over another. Such phenomena have been misdescribed and exaggerated and do not concern us here. Nor does suggestion mean merely hypnotic treatment. There are three accepted classes of sug- gestion : (a) Hypnotic treatment. The subject is put into a hypnotic state by deliberate means. A hypnotic state is a state of mental relaxation in which the sub-conscious mind is specially sus- ceptible to "suggestion." A profound hypnotic state is like a "trance" or deep sleep, but the words are 44 Psychology and the Christian Life also used to describe a condition in v/hich there is no loss of consciousness but merely a "light hypnosis." If the subject will submit himself to treatment he can be put in this state and then the necessary suggestion is made to his sub-conscious mind. He is roused again to his normal state, and the sug- gestion, working through his sub-conscious mind, will ultimately affect his conscious mind or be- haviour. This is one form of hetero-suggestion and it belongs to the practice of medicine. There are limits to the suggestion that will be so accepted, limits not of amount but of quality and character. The suggestion, for instance, that the subject should perform some act contrary to his moral sense is not likely to be accepted or developed by the sub- conscious mind. Yet to submit to frequent hypnotic treatment from the same person results in a very strong belief on the part of the subject in the powers and control of the operator, combined possibly with love or fear of him. This in itself constitutes a powerful suggestion in the mind of the person so treated and gives to the operator a certain control or, at any rate, personal influence over the subject. Obviously this influence can be wisely employed and then gradually eliminated, or it can be abused by ignorant or evilly-disposed people. Hypnotic treat- ment lies in the province of the skilled psycho- Psychology in the World 45 therapist and should for the most part remain there. (b) There is another form of "hetero-sugges- tion," ^ which has already been described. It is the suggestions made to us by the habits, examples, opin- ions prevalent in our environment to whose in- fluence our social or herd instinct makes us sus- ceptible; or again the deliberate suggestion, scien- tifically applied by one person to another who is not actually in a state of induced hypnosis. (As will be noticed later, it is not easy exactly to define hypnosis or to draw a hard and fast line between a "hypnotic state" and "not a hypnotic state but something bordering on it,") (c) There is auto-suggestion.^ Until compara- tively recent times this has received less attention than that given to hetero-suggestion of one kind or another. The new psychology lays increasing stress on the paramount importance of the suggestions that we make to ourselves or that we adopt. Coue goes so far as to include practically all hetero-suggestion within the sphere of auto-suggestion ; he maintains, to put it briefly, that hetero-suggestion must become auto-suggestion, before it can be translated into ac- tion, and that this second phase — the transforma- tion of the idea into action — is the essential and characteristic element in the process of all sugges- *i.e., "suggestion" conveyed to a man or administered to him by other people. " i.e., the "suggestion" a man makes to himself. 46 Psychology and the Christian Life tion. However that may be, it is auto-suggestion rather than hetero-suggestion of any kind with which we are now concerned and to which in this chapter and the next I refer by the word "suggestion" alone. The claims for the effective practical power of such suggestion are beyond dispute. I do not pro- pose to establish this fact by quoting detailed proofs with examples from books on the subject. It is beyond question. Our own individual experience would prove it to any of us on reflection. Again and again I have done a difficult thing which, hu- manly speaking, depended on my own efforts, be- cause, as I am convinced, I set out with the cer- tainty that I could do it; in so approaching the task I was suggesting to myself that it "could be done," "was as good as done." Again and again I have failed at the same thing through no con- scious slackening of effort but simply because I approached it despondently — "I suppose I must tackle this, but ..." On those "buts" hang my failures in rows. Nothing will convince me of any other explanation of my experience than this: in making the suggestion to myself "I can," I set in motion the wheels of a machinery whose driving- power helped to achieve success; the idea of suc- cess was transformed into successful action. When I suggested to myself at the outset doubtful success or practically certain failure, I shut the doors on Psychology in the World 47 power at my disposal, or worse, initiated an idea which in spite of my efforts translated itself into actual failure. Many of us by personal experience have come to realize this ; when we read it in psycho- logical books we murmur "Exactly so. I've always thought as much." But there is more to learn. This power can be wielded more deliberately. There are certain times when we are in a more receptive state for such suggestions than we are at others. Again, the state in which we are most receptive can be in- duced deliberately by ourselves; we can select the ideas which shall be introduced or suggested for our sub-conscious mind to transform into fact. We can gain greater control. We can discard worthless habits and fashion useful ones. We can develop capacities which we did not formerly believe to exist in us. We can unlock reserves of power hitherto unrealised. Chapter III: Faith and Sug- gestion We have now cleared the ground enough to en- able us to consider psychology in relation to the Christian way of life. As generally preached and presented, this consists of two fundamental parts — faith in God, and effort to perform His will. There is, or there should be, a link between these two; thus: "I try because God is with me; He has promised to help me if I try. My faith in Him must be, indeed will be, followed by efforts to serve Him ; my efforts to serve Him will only succeed in so far as I put my trust in Him." In spite of this connection most people tend to consider the two parts separately; many a man be- lieves in God's power at the bottom of his heart, but he does not consciously apply that faith to his own efforts to live rightly. Of the two lessons that have been drilled into the professing Christian —"Have faith in God," and "The Christian life is a fight" — it is the second that has made the deepest impression, and this for more than one reason. It is not that the first has been preached less often 48 Faith and Suggestion 49 or less sincerely, it is rather that the second is ap- parently more practical ; it gets home easier. To be a fighting Christian, to struggle on for Christ's sake may involve great sacrifice and hardship ; prac- tical Christianity may demand painful control of selfish desires. But it is a Gospel of movement; it can appeal to human nature through the social or herd-instinct in man ; it appeals to man's vitality ; all life is a struggle; a life spent for Christ in the service of the community is a good struggle, some say, the best of all. That more people do not respond to that appeal is due to the fact that to many it has never been adequately presented; it is regarded, wrongly enough, as almost anti-social. Men often think of the Christian fight as a fight to save their own souls. Or, if they do not think this, at any rate, the Christian appeal has never been linked on to their social instinct; or else one of the other two primary instincts governs them more strongly. Even so, it can be fairly maintained that the call to the struggle of the Christian life is easier to understand, to test, to obey, than the call to hold the Christian faith. Faith in God is intangible; it seems negative, quiescent; it implies thought rather than talking, patience rather than action ; it is Eastern rather than Western. Men know so little about God; He is unfathomable, His ways past finding out. Some- 50 Psychology and the Christian Life thing at least of such an attitude is apparent in many of the keenest Christian believers ; for Christ's sake they carry the world on their shoulders — their shoulders, not His. They are undoubtedly upheld in their efforts by fundamental faith in Him, but they do not deliberately apply it in detail to the work they do for Him in life. When things go wrong they worry; when things go badly wrong they "fall back" upon their beliefs ; having ex- hausted their own efforts on His behalf, and failed, they suddenly remember His promises : "Well, after all God is working His purposes out ; His will must be done all right in the end." Thus the commonest way in which men use faith in Christ is not as a power that shall make their efforts for Him suc- cessful, but as a consolation for the failure of those efforts. With some such a consolation may become a drug; they seem to succeed so little, let God do it. The phrase, "the Christian's hfe is a fight," refers not only to the Christian's fight against evil in the world around him and to his struggle to further the Kingdom of God, but also to the struggle which must take place within himself, if he is to achieve strength of character and nobility of personal life. In this sphere of the personal life the dispropor- tion between faith and effort is still more marked. Here, most of all, may the noise of Paul's battle- cries drown Paul's teaching on faith. Men agonise Faith and Suggestion 51 to conquer bad habits; they strain and struggle to surmount this or that temptation; they plod and stumble doggedly after the ideal. And what of faith and the promises to faith? They do not under- stand how it all works. Faith is invaluable as a general background to life, but the chief use to which many excellent people put it could be ex- pressed in the words, "I don't seem to get any better ; but I mustn't expect to see results or depend on them ; I must have faith in God." Even such an attitude towards life is magnificent; it is the faith of heroes ; it is the faith, very largely, of the Chri^ian tradition and of the Christian Church. It is not the faith of Jesus Christ. If you doubt this, open any one of the four Gospels and study any single passage in which the teach- ing of Jesus about faith is given. The faith of Jesus surmounts temptation, casts out devils and overcomes the world. The Church as a whole and most Christians as individuals have not that faith. Of course we all know of, and know personally, many Christians who do not need psychology to convince them that Jesus was right. They do not fuss or worry; they never quench smoking flax; they never complain; they always expect the best of everyone and everyone always expects the best of them. They wield an influence out of all propor- tion to their brains, their education and even their 52 Psychology and the Christian Life personal attractiveness in other ways. They have a driving force of character that is neither hard nor masterful. Five minutes with such a man is like a tonic, even though he only talks about the weather or the drains. It is the faith of Jesus that makes a man like this ; yet even among the sincerest and most devoted Christians of to-day it is very rarely to be found. The rank and file of us may as well admit that we are not like that, and welcome whatever will help us to approach it, recognising all true knowl- edge as of God, through whatever channel it comes. For those who will make this admission there re- mains the possibility of applying psychology to their faith; only thus will the faith of most of us ever work wonders. At first such an idea may seem to rule out divine power altogether, but this is not so. For instance, I believe in the accuracy of my watch, at least, we will suppose that I do ; by a mechanical process within me the result of this faith is that I am not flustered when other people consult their watches and tell me that I shall be late; I know better. My faith in the machinery of my watch suc- ceeds through the machinery of my mind in giving me a sense of repose with regard to certain de- tails of my daily life. Again, suppose that instead of a watch of my own I rely on the watch of a friend; his watch is just as good a time-keeper as Faith and Suggestion '53 mine, but there is this further advantage for me that the friend is,: always with me and that he guarantees, with or without the help of the watch, to keep me up to time. Not only am I more con- fident now because I have a friend as well as a watch to keep me right, but if ever the watch will not work or goes wrong, the friend helps me himself. No human analogy of God's dealings with man is exact and complete, this, perhaps, less than many, but it fairly illustrates the point at issue. God works through the laws of the mind, as He works through the other laws of nature ordained by Him, but He is not Himself bound by them. Let me trust in psychology as I trust in a watch of tested accuracy; let me trust also in a Friend who makes no mistakes, who can and does help me through machinery, which I can discover, or in other ways. But God has given us machinery which can be used intelligently, and use it we should to the full. The faith of many people is slovenly; they neglect to invoke the aid of their intelligence and invoke divine power instead. If not useless, it is at any rate irreverent for me to pray over-night for a lucky set of questions in an examination on the morrow, or for divinely revealed information as to the names and dates of the kings of Israel and Judah, if I have through laziness failed to acquire the necessary facts by study. 54 Psychology and the Christian Life Perhaps we should dwell for a moment on the statement just made that God works through "nat- ural" laws — laws, if not known at any rate wholly or in part discoverable. Many recorded occurrences in the past that once appeared to be contrary to the laws of nature, are now seen to have been only "con- trary to the laws of nature as then known." By observation and inquiry we can often trace how prayers have been answered, i.e., through a chain of apparently normal and natural occurrences. But let us be clear that this attitude towards the sub- ject does not rule out the reality of Divine power. That would be one extreme ; the other extreme, also to be avoided, is to regard every response to faithful prayer as an abnormal intervention of divine provi- dence. The experience of faith denies the first assumption; the facts of life give the lie to the second. We will now return to the relation of faith to effort in the Christian life, psychologically consid- ered. In the average man most "suggestions" that he makes to himself are spontaneous rather than deliberate or reflective. My attention is suddenly attracted; I notice something and spontaneously make a suggestion to myself. My attention, as a boy, is drawn to the fact that on a particular morn- ing I have awakened at 5.30 a.m. contrary to my usual habits, because I am starting on a country Faith and Suggestion 55 outing at 6 a.m. It follows spontaneously that I make the suggestion to myself, "I can wake myself at whatever hour I like without being called." Such a suggestion, if made, may perhaps work out into what eventually becomes a habit, a habit whose efficacy is based on my belief in it. Or I enter an exhibition of pictures and my attention is drawn by a crowd of people in one corner. Spontaneously I make the suggestion to myself, "That's the im- portant picture in this room; it's very good." The instinct of imitation carries me along. Away goes my independence of judgment, and thus, as Bou- douin points out, do people become conventional in their opinions. By the time I reach the picture the suggestion is already translating itself into ac- tion in my mind ; I stand ten minutes in front of it and when I move on, I think I know why it Is a good picture; I have sought and found reasons for an opinion which originally I adopted as one of the herd for no adequate reason. My thinking has not been consciously dishonest, but, intellectually it is altogether false and bears no relation to real merit or lack of it in that particular picture. As I leave the gallery I say to a friend, "You must look at 'Flame-Morning,' by Pentarg in the first room; wonderful colouring, etc., etc." Thus is formed on most subjects that hope and despair of all thought- ful people — public opinion. 56 Psychology and the Christian Life These illustrations suffice to explain the general nature of spontaneous suggestion. The next ex- ample we shall take is connected more obviously with the emotions, and we have noticed already the great force inherent in any suggestion connected directly or closely with the emotions. Imagine that you are a public speaker and generally suffer a little but not excessively from stage- fright. One evening on a crowded platform five minutes before you rise to speak, your attention is suddenly caught by the fact that you will have to stand near the edge of the platform without any table or rail' in front of you, on which you can occasionally rest your hands; spontaneously the suggestion enters your mind, 'T shall never do myself justice like this; I shall be nervy all through." That is enough, and nervy you will be; the fear of ever having to speak under those conditions again will dog a man through life, and as a result he will always be more nervous when he encounters them. How a child should be handled from its earliest years so that it may use spontaneous suggestion to the advantage of its best development, and how such education should be linked with the child's religious faith, is not within our present scope. We are concerned rather with the remedy for our own condition of im- potence and of slavery to wrong suggestions. The remedy should be fairly obvious. Any man Faith and Suggestion 57 who habitually brings his religious faith right into his daily life, and is acutely conscious of the pres- ence of Christ with him in life is not likely to start many harmful suggestions. He reads the Gospels not as a duty or simply for critical study, but as the vehicle of ideas with which he would impreg- nate his mind. His thoughts about God, his faith in Him, are not detached, vague, remote; they are dominant. He may be nervous when he speaks in public ; he finds it puts a finer edge on him ; it does not worry him, because God will use him. God will use him even if there be no table behind which to take refuge. When his attention is aroused to the fact that no table or rail is there, the spontaneous suggestion that he makes to himself is not "Can't" but "Can." H he had the choice he would prefer the table, but "It doesn't really matter." Nor does it. The suggestion thus made affects his conduct not only on that night, but throughout his life; he finds after that first night that "Can" was right; this dis- covery further strengthens the suggestion and in future he is indifferent to the presence or absence of rail or table. The chief point to note here is the fact that he makes practically no conscious effort. The less faithful Christian would make a gallant struggle to throw off the feeling of paralysis, would speak courageously in spite of his difficulty and would suffer accordingly. What he attempts by 58 Psychology and the Christian Life what we may call Christian effort the man of faith achieves through faith. At the risk of repetition it is well here to meet two objections from opposite extremes. Someone will complain, "My faith in God does not work like that; I haven't got the necessary faith to do that kind of thing." The answer is, "The thing works really through a proved law of the mind which is at the disposal of anyone. The actual process by which the idea is transformed into action does not depend on your faith in God; it is done for you. It is only the idea, the suggestion, required t6 set the machinery in motion, which springs from trust in God. Have you not sufficient trust in Him to believe that the Holy Spirit will help you to start the right idea instead of the wrong one?" But an- other will say, "The whole thing is nothing more than auto-suggestion and machinery of mind; a mascot would serve the purpose as well." This point I will not here argue, and I cannot prove it, any more than I can convince any unbeliever of the existence of God by so-called proofs. To the be- liever (and him alone we are considering) I say: "Given the same machinery in both cases, the value of your mascot in starting the right idea lies simply in your own belief in the mascot. That is good for the purpose; my faith is better. I believe in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is a power outside Faith and Suggestion 59 myself which actually gives me the right idea." There is all the difference between spontaneous sug- gestion (however well governed by faith in a mas- cot) and a suggestion which is not simply sponta- neous in me but comes into my heart and mind from God Himself. In many things for many of us the matter will not be so simple. A spontaneous suggestion may seem to result from the sudden arousing of atten- tion, but it may emerge in the form in which it does emerge as a result of many previous suggestions, whereby our conduct is already bound. We imagined the probable conduct of a nervous speaker upon the first occasion on which he found himself without a table in front of him. We may admit that the advice just given in regard to similar circumstances, of whatever nature, in our own lives might have proved most valuable, if given in advance. But our past lack of faith, our ignorance of the power of suggestion, have fastened certain ways of think- ing and acting upon us for good. That is not quite true, but for the present we shall not deal with extreme cases but with the every-day human nature of the ordinary man, who tries hard to improve and thinks he does not or cannot; and it must be instantly conceded that, bound as he is by bad sug- gestion and weak faith, the mere saying *T can" 6o Psychology and the Christian Life will not in certain respects help him to gain free- dom and power. The first advice for such a person is that he should slacken his efforts to improve. Such an apparently outrageous proposal demands qualification. We have been dividing and shall continue to divide effort or struggle with ourselves from effort and struggle with the world around us. The Christian life is and must always be a fight against evil in the world ; the Christian must pit himself against the cynic, the crude materialist, the selfish schemer, and if he fail, must redouble his efforts; all the grit and de- termination, the trained will-power, which we are always being exhorted to acquire, is needed; no amount of suggestion based on faith in God will rid us of this necessity. In that sense the Christian life will always be a fight. But, as we have seen, any person trying so to live effectively for Christ in the world has another struggle, an inward one. The two are, of course, intimately connected in practice: if my personal life is wholly unsatisfac- tory, my efforts for Christ in the world will be so much the less valuable. The internal struggle is only here regarded as a thing apart because it is in this domain that it is of first importance to remove the emphasis from effort and lay it on faith. Why? How can a boy stop biting his nails by ceasing to fight against the habit? When a man is struggling Faith and Suggestion 61 hard against habits of impurity in thought or act, can it ever be right that he should stop trying? Psychologically, the law of the mind on which such advice would be based, and by which such questions would be answered, is defined by Coue as the law of "reversed effort." In his own words, "When the will and the imagination are at war, the imagination invariably gains the day," Now suggestion is in the realm of the imagination, effort in the realm of the will. This means, therefore, that when a powerful suggestion, working uncon- sciously, is opposed by the deliberate, conscious efforts of the will, the power of the suggestion will often be greater than the power of the will. Whether or not the law of reversed effort is a com- monplace, accepted by the majority of psychologists, I do not know. I accept it as generally true be- cause it exactly fits my own personal experience and that of many others, who are perhaps often un- conscious of its power when they say, "And the harder I try, the worse I seem to get." This is how it acts. For example, you are trying to strengthen your character and to make yourself a better instrument for God's purposes in the world. You are up against some long-standing habit of your own, sloth, irritability, impurity or any one of a host of others, varying in moral importance. Its chains are on you and you know it; that is why 62 Psychology and the Christian Life you struggle to be free. But you have always failed in the past and the memory of past falls, of unsuccessful resolutions, forms the strongest pos- sible suggestion to you that you cannot rid yourself of this thing; each fresh effort by its very intensity strengthens the hold of this suggestion upon you, so that you build higher and higher the barricade you seek to pass. Nine times out of ten will your imagination defeat your will. You know it your- self; before now you have thought, "I wonder if I worry too much about it; perhaps if I didn't try so hard I might do better.*' But generally that* does not work, because your surrender of the struggle includes a denial of any living faith in God's power to rescue you. Your many failures have used up your faith; though throughout your struggles you clung to God, you did not cling to Him as to One able to save to the uttermost ; the struggle remained on your shoulders, and friends consoled you with the reminder that the Christian life was always a fight. But in the heart and mind of man the Chris- tian life should be less a fight than a faith. And so it has been with you when you have succeeded in some internal struggle by the effort of your will (as you would think) ; such effort and capacity for effort must remain, but on the occasions when you succeeded, will and imagination were not really at variance; you told yourself beforehand that you Faith and Suggestion 63 could do it, that it was absurd that you should con- tinue failing ; some such faith fired your imagination and the right suggestion was initiated. The efforts of your will strengthened that suggestion and helped to transform it into accomplishment ; the two reacted on each other favourably and combined to produce success.* But where the sense of past failure is too strong for this to be possible, how can the right suggestion be introduced? To make myself reiterate 'T can do it" is not much use; that is merely another form of screwing myself up to the necessary pitch and setting my teeth; in itself it constitutes an effort and may have the reverse effect to that which I desire. Now, two indications have already been given of the force which an idea possesses, when suggested without any conscious effort: (i) spon- taneous suggestion, already considered in this chap- ter, is entirely effortless. The idea just slips into the mind because the attention has been suddenly and involuntarily concentrated; (2) we have noted * It is to be noted that I am not recommending a substitution of "faith" for "will." Baudouin (see p. lo of "Suggestion and Autosuggestion") seems to go so far as to declare such a sub- stitution necessary. If this is actually what he means we cannot follow him all the way. Under the circumstances I have been here describing the main emphasis must be removed from "effort" and put on "faith." The desire to improve must of course remain, and the readiness to employ the efforts of the will when next called upon; but the condition of mind must cease to be one of struggle and must become one of assurance. 64 Psychology and the Christian Life that when a state of hypnosis has been induced, an idea can be easily introduced which will work most powerfully in the sub-conscious mind. A hypnotic state is obviously one in which the patient has given up all effort of any kind. Now spontaneous suggestion is, from the nature of the circumstances imposed on us, impossible, and hypnotic treatment is ruled out as being no part of a normal mental and moral training. We must, therefore, aim at some method whereby the idea we wish to develop may be introduced into^the mind with the minimum of conscious effort. This method is termed by Coue "reflective suggestion," and it coincides in a remarkable degree with the practice of devout worshippers of God throughout the ages, the practice known as meditation. First, quiet and freedom from distraction and interruption must be secured; the body must be comfortably at rest as well as the mind, which must relax and make no effort of any kind. Progress towards the state de- sired can be assisted by mechanical means; the eye may be fixed on some bright object at rest or mov- ing rhythmically; or the attention of the ear may be engaged by some regular sound such as the tick of a clock in the silence. The dreamy state, which results, is such as most of us have experienced. All kinds of thoughts pass in succession through the mind in this semi-hypnotic condition ; we have found Faith and Suggestion 65 ourselves without any effort building up some "day- dream"; the last thing we ever thought was that by so "day-dreaming," by letting our imagination dreamily play over some future possibility, we were allowing an idea to enter the sub-conscious mind at a time when it was abnormally sensitive to sug- gestion; yet so it was, and years later without ever deliberately aiming at it, we have step by step reached the position then pictured in our imagina- tion. The idea has transformed itself into action.^ Such, roughly speaking, is the state at which we are now aiming, though we must stop short of the point where we may be in actual danger of falling into a doze. Our purpose when in this state will be to introduce into the mind with the least possible effort the necessary idea in a form of words and * I know in my own life at least one such result, which I can only explain on this assumption. I had seemed to myself, without any particular intention, to say and do just the very things which might have been deliberately intended to produce a. certain result, and did actually produce it. I had not meant it; I had never thought of aiming at that result; it was too uncanny and too complete to be explained to my own satis- faction either by luck or by coincidence. I traced it back without any sort of doubt to one or two occasions at intervals of a year or two, when I had been in the habit of dwelling idly on the idea on the lines of "Fancy if !" etc. "How nice it would be !" etc., day-dreams indulged in as a form of idling and dismissed as such from ray conscious thought an hour later. Yet my sub-conscious mind saw to it that I got what I wanted. Luck and coincidence there may have been, but nothing will convince me that my explanation of the chief factor is not right. I came to my conclusion about this and certain other things rather like it a considerable time before I ever read any book on psychological processes. . , 66 Psychology and the Christian Life to hold it there; we may, for instance, repeat the formula, to the rhythm of a clock or of our own breathing. We should make no effort of will to- wards the achievement of the formula in action, but simply let the mind dwell on it as a statement or as a picture. Twice daily most of us are in a condition entirely suitable for the initiation of a suggestion without any artificial preparation — during the time when we first wake in the morning but are not completely roused, and last thing at night before actually drop- ping off to sleep. The artificial state is obviously easier to attain for people living in the country, where the noise of a stream, waterfall, bees, etc., may be sought as a natural aid to the relaxation of mind and body. But many people in towns could find the time and opportunity at least once daily to induce this state in themselves, using a period usually devoted to rereading the newspaper or to doing nothing in particular. The time given to the experiment should not exceed fifteen or twenty minutes in length ; such a rule is a necessary precau- tion against the deterioration of the practice into mere mooning, idling or sleeping. After some experience anyone will find the right state easy to acquire within a few minutes. The form of words should be in positive rather than negative terms: e.g., not "I shall not be so bad-tempered to-day," Faith and Suggestion 67 but "I am really good-tempered" or "My temper is daily improving." Further, as suggestions, so em- ployed, is powerful to remedy not only the ills we know, but those we know not, the formula should be as comprehensive as possible; e.g. not simply, "My temper is daily improving," but rather, "I am improving daily in every way." The method is elaborated in greater detail in Baudouin's book, which also records the literally miraculous successes obtained step by step by people who under the in- struction of Coue or others have learnt the method. He maintains that it can be learnt by anyone who will take the trouble to read about it, and that was in part the object of his own book. This view I neither accept nor recommend, as will be seen later. Without stopping at the moment to consider ob- jections or the resemblances or differences in detail between the practice of religious meditation and that of reflective auto-suggestion, let us make an attempt to combine the two and apply science to religion in this respect. The method would be described as a daily Act of Faith, influencing no doubt our whole approach to prayer itself, but equally not to be con- fused with prayer or taken as a substitute for prayer or for ordinary religious meditation. How then would anyone engage in such an Act of Faith? He would secure the material conditions already de- scribed and would read, perhaps more than once, 68 Psychology and the Christian Life some passage in the New Testament describing the power of faith or some cure of our Lord's. He would so be helped to dwell in his mind on the power of God promised without any question to those who believe. While so meditating he would make, or just think, in God's presence the petition that he might choose rightly the suggestion to make — "Grant me a right judgment." The book is by now laid down, the real relaxation of mind and body has begun; the eye may be fixed -on a "Head of Christ" or Cross or Crucifix, placed very near, so as to maintain the sense of Christ's presence and tender love and power ; the eyes will soon close and the man would no longer attempt to think of what he had been reading, or make any effort to think about God, but would (as far as possible without effort) simply introduce into his mind the chosen phrase or phrases : "The humility of Jesus is mine," "The purity of Jesus grows stronger in me daily," and would dwell on them again and again. The inclusive phrase might well be, "I can do all things through Christ." It cannot be too often emphasized that these are not to be regarded as acts of resolution, such as are recommended at the conclusion of ordinary religious meditation; they are not determined resolutions made by the man; they are simply statements, sug- gestions (that is, ideas), slipped into the sub-con- Faith and Suggestion 69 scious mind in its most sensitive state. Why any thought of effort or of the exercise of will-power must be eliminated has already been explained.^ In such an act of faith we can go further than in the practice of reflective suggestion ; while choos- ing by prayer the best and most suitable idea to in- troduce, we believe that the Holy Spirit Himself may in our period of relaxation provide the par- ticular suggestion we most need for our repetition, though not perhaps the one we have chosen. Our attitude will therefore be expressed in the words "Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth." But at the time we must not spare thought on this, or search for it. Relaxation must be complete. In- spiration may come to a man in this way. but if it does not come he has an idea ready for sug- gestion. An Act of Faith, repeated as a regular habit, will not only affect a person in certain particular direc- tions. The practice would also train anyone in men- tal concentration; this may sound curious when so much emphasis has just been laid on complete re- laxation, but most people's inability to concentrate their attention on anything is partly due to their inability to free the mind from other distracting thoughts. We all envy the man who can easily and completely turn from such distractions and apply *p. 40. 70 Psychology and the Christian Life himself wholly to the matter in hand. More than this — the practice would inevitably make God more and more accessible at other times, on a bus-top in the roar of traffic or in a crowd amongst many other voices. The sense of Christ's presence would come more and more easily in ordinary daily life. We may claim for such an Act of Faith not only the experience of modern Psycho-Therapeutic Clin- ics, but the testimony of mystics and saints of many ages and religions. Many Christian believers have much to learn from both the Yogi of Hindustan and the French savant; the help of neither was needed by Brother Lawrence. The method may in all seri- ousness be regarded as the practice of communion with God and the channel for the exercise of His resistless power in human nature. So strengthened we might go back to the fighting line to use more confidently our eflforts and will-power in the great struggle, certain that by faith we had acquired a strength that cannot fail. Yet this method cannot be recommended to all and sundry. It is not everyone who is fit, even if willing, to practise such reflective suggestion with safety. The recommendation cannot be adopted impulsively as a short cut by anyone casually reading about it. De- liberately to relax the mind's attention, to leave its doors open, to loosen control of thought and to drift into day-dreams is dangerous. Evil thoughts may Faith and Suggestion 71 enter the mind in the preliminary stage of relaxa- tion. They may easily disturb or distract the man who has undertaken the experiment lightly and with- out considering its full implications, and he may find his soul wallowing in the mire instead of rising on wings. We must consider certain fundamentals before we can safely embark on the practice of re- flective suggestion artificially induced. Yet we may practise it naturally on falling to sleep at night and on first waking. Amongst the many pious recom- mendations made to us in childhood or since, which are habitually disregarded, is that of letting our first daily thought be of God and of commending our- selves again to His care as we fall asleep. Make such advice a little more definite and it has a psy- chological as well as a devout significance. Let the first and last thought of the day be an Act of Faith ; let the mind be filled with the thought of God's power, and of your power through Him to do His will; apply such thought, with as little effort as possible, to the particular sphere of your life in which you feel you need the application of power. But to attain real communion with God and living contact with His power in this way is not so easy as may appear from its description. Each must first ask himself the question — "Do I really want God in my life absolutely? Am I whole-hearted in my willingness to receive Him, or am I merely trying 72 Psychology and the Christian Life to use Him for the time being?" or again, "Am I in a fit state for Him to come to me? What if unacknowledged and unrepented sin blocks the chan- nel of His approach? Am I trying to achieve power in life by a short cut?" TJtese questiotts will now be considered, and until for each person they have been satisfactorily answered no practice of reflective auto-suggestion artificially stimulated as an Act of Faith can he profitably or even safely undertaken. Even then if would he best if the practice were adopted only under the guidance and direction of cmother person qualified by age or experience to give advice._ Chapter IV: The Psychology of Sin No practical advantage for the purposes of our inquiry will accrue from a detailed examination of the theories of Freud and Jung and their disciples. "The New Psychology" ^ can be studied sanely in the book of that title by A. G. Tansley. There are many points in the new psychology itself about which there are differences of opinion among ex- perts ; there is also a tendency both among experts and the general public, as with any new discovery in science, to explain everything by it, to apply it to everything, and to make of it a philosophic unity, where no such unity has been proved or is likely. The chief sign of this tendency is the advertised reference of the new psychology to sex; this is a matter on which notably the experts differ in degree; but those of the general public who take an interest in the whole subject have gained the impression that sex underlies everythirtg; every dream is to be sexually explained; every abnormality of character * Not even this book is infallible ; nor does it treat the sub- ject in fair and adequate relation to religious belief and moral conduct. 73 74 Psychology and the Christian Life or behaviour is to be traced to a sexual origin. It may in part be our own fault for attempting to understand what is beyond our reach; but the pub- lished works of some psycho-analysts are also re- sponsible. Admittedly the sexual application of the new psychology has been further explored than any other aspect; time will almost certainly modify some of the theories now bandied about, and research into other aspects of the subject will restore a balance. Meanwhile the public mind is becoming permeated with the suggestion that psycho-analysis means sex-analysis and nothing else; psychology it- self to many people already means sex-psychology^ Like any other factor in public opinion, this sug- gestion spreads rapidly and is accepted on hearsay without examination; it exercises a morbid influ- ence. People concentrate their thoughts and con- versation on sex in a manner which any psycho- analyst would be the first to admit to be unhealthy. Nobody is in reality to blame for this state of things; psychology, as we saw at the start, is the most human of the sciences; its theories or conclu- sions are more nearly within the comprehension of the layman than those of any other science. We must expect to suffer the disadvantages as well as the advantages of this fact, and the latter are greater both in number and importance. For instance, the new psychology teaches us : The Psychology of Sin 75 (i) That many forms of what the layman speaks of as "hysteria, delusion, obsession, neurasthenia," are due to the blocking of a primary instinct or to the dissociation and repression of a past event from the conscious memory. In many cases the cause of the illness can be discovered by psycho-analysts and the illness can be cured. This is not our concern, but that of skilled practitioners. (2) That the sex-instinct with its perversions and byways plays a large part in human conduct in a manner that has not previously been defined or explained. This is our concern, but we must preserve a proper sense of proportion; religion at any rate is concerned with much else besides sex in its narrow sense ; so, for that matter, is psychology. (3) That there are certain theories about homo- sexuality, i.e., the diversion of the sex-instinct in a man or woman, boy or girl, towards a member of the same sex. Hitherto any such tendency has been regarded as an abnormality and perversion. As such in its physical expression it is still regarded; but the new psychology shows many ways in which the sex-instinct of a large number of people, by no means moral perverts, may at some time be diverted from its normal channel, and, not being adequately provided for in another way, find expression in those persons' attitude towards people of the same sex as themselves. This is a matter for the study 76 Psychology and the Christian Life of ministers of religion, doctors, and above all, of parents, and of all those who have the care of chil- dren, in so far as it may lead to moral perversion or to obsession of one kind or another. It is not here our concern to examine it in detail, but it is well that there should be no misunderstanding. Homo-sexual tendencies and inclinations are not harmless ; they contain latent possibilities of physical perversion, but even in the pure-minded they result in wasteful expenditure of emotion. Absorption of interest in any one other person drains the energy of man or woman into a useless passion and mor- bid sentiment, energy which could and should be redirected into channels less selfish and more profit- able and productive. Such redirection of energy will be consideration later. There are, however, elements in the new psychol- ogy and in the method of its application which are most relevant to Christian faith and morals, and within the comprehension and at the disposal of us all. Some of these psychological elements have already been outlined in these pages, and the law of suggestion has been considered. If we have found advantage from a reverent attempt to answer the question "How does faith in God work psy- chologically?" we may be encouraged to face the question, "How does temptation work? What is its psychology?" It should not be sufficient merely The Psychology of Sin 77 to answer that temptation comes from the world, flesh, or devil; that is simply to define its source. As we could define faith more intelligibly than by saying that through faith comes the power of God, so we can grapple better with temptation and sin through examining their source and their method of action. Ond illustration will serve to prove the urgency of this further inquiry. On a super- ficial examination of his character and conduct a man may discover that his temper is vile or that from time to time he lies blackly. We have seen why a mere effort of will-^power, however gal- lantly exercised, may not cure him ; even if he tackle the question by counter-suggestion as advocated in the last chapter, he may not succeed, because he is aiming at removing not merely something that is wrong and tiresome in itself, but something whose chief significance is that it is the symptom of evil more deeply seated in him; so is toothache the symptom of an exposed nerve or of internal decay; it cannot be adequately met by oil of cloves a{>- plied on the surface. For example, there are at least three quite dis- tinct types of lies; knowledge of these types is neces- sary to those puzzled by lying in themselves or others : (a) There is the "pathological" liar. He need not detain us long. He falls within the province of 78 Psychology and the Christian Life the trained faith-healer or psycho-therapist or per- haps of the brain-specialist or surgeon. He literally cannot help lying. He may be in most or even in all other ways an apparently normal member of society, but he is deceitful in most trivial things. He lies where he has no sort of advantage to gain. It is useless to blame or exhort him. You may not meet him very commonly, but he exists. (b) He is to be distinguished from the man who lies from lack of education. I do not mean that such a man has no moral sense, no power to dis- tinguish between right and wrong. But he has a genuine inability to distinguish truth from false- hood. He lacks the power of exact thought and precise definition. He knows perfectly well when he is deliberately "lying" in a moral sense, but even such a lie is not so deliberate and, therefore, not so morally offensive as the lie of the educated man. The man of poor education has no training in men- tal accuracy ; his environment has not fostered either that or truthfulness. He slips into a "moral lie" easily on that account, and one's dealings with him should be directed accordingly. There is a moral sense, a conscience, to work on, but again mere blame or exhortation is both useless and unfair; besides these he deserves sympathy and instruction. (c) In such lying and the lying of normal and educated people, which is the third type, the lie. The Psychology of Sin 79 even morally considered, is not the most important thing in itself. When I tell a lie what makes me do so ? It is no answer to tell me that I am wicked, that I have evil in my heart. I know that per- fectly well, but I want to get at the root of the evil so that I may know exactly where I am. On further examination what do I find? Yesterday I lied from fear, or from selfishness, or vindictively, or from ambition, or just from sheer mental indolence. The answer may not be clear absolutely at once; but the links between the lie and the motive from which it sprang are not generally hard to find or many in number. Having then discovered myself to be cowardly, or crudely selfish, revengeful, slack or unscrupulously ambitious, I still ask myself "Why so?" To those not used to self-analysis of any kind the search now becomes more difficult, but the question can generally be answered. "I did not realize what a hold my dislike of So-and-So had on me. He is in my way ; I want to get on. I suppose" I really want to damage him in the eyes of other people. Therefore I lied about him." Uncon- trolled self-instinct is at the root of the thing. Sel- fish desire to get on at all costs led me into lying, and that desire, not the lie, is the chief offence to be dealt with. Or again, "I suppose I have got into the way of making myself out to be better or more clever than 8o Psychology an'd the Christian Life I really am. I almost persuade myself that I have done things that I have not, and barely realize that I am lying when I talk about these things. I am too anxious to stand well with other people and care too much about their opinion." Here the social or herd instinct is seeking wrong expression; pride and desire for influence brought the lie to birth. Yet again, "Fear made me lie. I am afraid of being found out. I have given way to my sex- instinct immorally and seek to conceal the act or to repeat it." Or as a simpler example of the lie that comes from the sex-instinct : "I said I missed the train. I lied. I wanted an extra hour with j> my young man. For the present we will not go into the question of possible remedies for such underlying causes of falsehood, /it is important just to notice that most lies can thus be traced back to a primary source and that that source will generally be found to be con- nected directly or indirectly with the primary in- stincts. ) In outline that is how all temptation works and all sin comes to be. Whatever be accounted its origin theologically, whatever our view of its moral significance and religious remedies, it is well to explore the method of its working in us ; that is one of the ways to secure its defeat. Our diagnosis of our moral condition, our search of cause for effect is similar to that employed daily by any med- The Psychology of Sin 8l ical practitioner. Our general method is in a normal matter akin to the psycho-analytic method used by experts in dealing with abnormal people. The psy- cho-therapist's insistence on the importance of pri- mary instincts in the details of life is equalled by our own sense of their importance when we hold a court of moral inquiry into our conduct. Such rigid inquiry has been urged by Christian teachers in all ages under the name of self-examination; the pro- cedure of such self-examination has often been in its own way as highly skilful as psycho-analysis itself. Yet the average Christian regards any such self-examination as tedious and unnecessary, as a duty to be performed for God's pleasure by the in- tensely religious with the object of achieving a grovelling sense of sinfulness. Whereas penitence for sin is a duty to God, the process by which we reach the penitent stage serves another purpose as well; self-examination, seriously undertaken, leads us to understand and so deliberately to regulate the forces that would otherwise govern us against our will. Let us now examine fdrther how temptation X works and sin follows from it, and then, in the next chapter, to what extent penitence itself has a psy- chological as well as a religious significance. Though only one example has been given here, self-exami- nation will reveal to anyone that sin derives its \ / 82 Psychology and the Christian Life power in us from one or more of the primary in- stincts; however many links connect the instinct with the act, however indirect or circuitous that con- nection, that relation exists between the one and the other. The psychological explanation of what Chris- tians call sin is roughly as follows. Every man has a store of energy ("psychic energy") at his dis- posal for use through the exercise of the primary instincts; each such instinct has, as it were, its own "compartment" for its share of this energy. The experts do not completely agree as to the extent to which energy can be transferred from one com- partment to another, or what reserves of energy there may be over and above the energy so divided ; there seems, however, to be general agreement that to each instinct there belongs at least some supply of energy absolutely; and that such energy cannot be diverted into any other channel than that for which it exists; yet, at any rate, a considerable amount of energ}^ is transferable. For instance, a normal man or woman cannot be sexless, without sexual emotions or desires, but, at any rate, a large pro- portion of the energy at the disposal of the sex- instinct can, by man or woman, be diverted and ab- sorbed into activities prompted by the self -instinct or the social instinct. Again, a man may divert a large portion of energy belonging to the self- instinct and the social instinct and may use it through The Psychology of Sin 83 the channel of the sex-instinct. Yet again, a man may be so absorbed in selfish ambitions that he is indifferent to the claims of the community on him and allows barely any sex-interest in his life; his energy is diverted from the sex-instinct and the social instinct and finds its expression mostly through the self -instinct. (Many people through heredity or through the suggestion of their environment habitu- ally discharge a maximum of the energy at their disposal through one channel or the other. They live for self or for sexual gratification or for the herd; one or the other of these three becomes the dominant purpose of their lives. / It is not easy for anyone but the trained scientist to distinguish the action of one primary instinct from that of another; so many actions seem to spring from a blending of at least two. While this must be borne in mind, we shall continue to treat the instincts separately for the purpose of our analysis. Moral offences arising from a misuse of the social or herd-instinct are not so noticeable or so generally denounced as some others. They are often negative, though from a Christian point of view, no less serious. A typical illustration is provided by the man who delights in and always seeks the company of his fellow-men without any desire to make any contribution to their general welfare; 84 Psychology and the Christian Life or the woman, who exhausts the energy of her social instinct in what she refers to heavily as her "social duties," her "society engagements," but has no mind to spare for her social responsibilities. West-End Clubs and East-End "pubs" afford many examples of the prostitution of the social instinct. Such an indictment may or may not be justified from a purely ethical standpoint; it might be urged that "social engagements" in any class of life are harm- less occupations for spare time and energy. This is perfectly true, but for Christians an excess of them means a denial of the duty of service to the community which, from the Christian standpoint, should absorb most of the energy attached to the social instinct. Such service to the community does not apply simply to slum-work or missionary ac- tivities at home or abroad; it does not involve the necessity of cutting away all social engagements of a recreative kind. But it does mean that the social instinct should be exercised not merely as an indul- gence but as a prime responsibility. So it is often exercised in striking fashion in ordinary social ways. Neglect of this responsibility is morally worse when the energy proper to the social instinct is almost wholly diverted to the attainment of sexual grati- fication or of selfish ambition. Wrong actions which are positively harmful are also due to the social instinct, which, reinforced The Psychology of Sin 85 by the minor instinct of imitation, may dominate a man as completely as sex or self. The instinct of imitation is necessary in securing for us that power of adaptability required to meet the varying circum- stances of life, and in protecting the common in- terests of the herd. Deliberately or unconsciously we are always imitating. A path trodden by others through a wood will be the best route for anyone wishing to reach the other side of the wood as quickly or easily as possible; hence we follow it. The obvious uses of imitation tend to make us re- gard the herd in all matters as a guide. This tend- ency is enormously increased by the power of the social instinct within us. A man dominated by that instinct, to the exclusion of any moral consideration, will deliberately seek to be in all things with the majority, and to do as they do. However, the social instinct is found active in many useful departments of life which do not neces- sarily bear much or any moral complexion. The esprit de corps which is of considerable moral ad- vantage in school or athletic club, parish or political party or church is derived from this instinct, and may form an admirable channel for its expression. The danger of any such expression is that its sphere may become too narrow and exclusive. The spirit of patriotism is the biggest general expression of the social instinct and has prompted men and women 86 Psychology and the Christian Life to great nobility of life and death; but the sphere even of patriotism is smaller than the Christian conception of humanity itself realized as a bond be- tween all men. To this conception we can reach forward using lesser loyalties as the school for the development of the social instinct to this its high- est fulfilment. Sin in connection with the stronger instinct of self may be dealt with under the headings of its two commonest expressions. (a) There is the man (and he is perhaps the average man) who puts self, in peace time at any rate, before the claims of citizenship, largely con- ceived; yet he is anxious to render service to the community and to help forward the general welfare provided that his own economic conditions of life, his general habits, amusements, conventions are not sacrificed. He would be prepared, on grounds that it is not easy to contest except by means of religion, to maintain that he was a good citizen, paid his taxes, subscribed to charities "according to his means" and led a respectable existence. (b) Then there is the man who puts self first "regardless." Convention may restrain him in cer- tain directions, the law in others, but he acknowl- edges the claims of no one upon him and regards his energy, money and time as completely at his own disposal for his own selfish purposes. It is well The Psychology of Sin 87 to note that it is possible for even a sincerely re- ligious person to indulge the self-instinct almost ex- clusively; the search for personal salvation to the exclusion of all else may be, though less obviously baneful to society, at any rate, just as "selfish." The difference, for instance, in moral value between devoting one's life to saving one's soul Mrithout thought of others and devoting one's life to saving one's pocket and convenience has been not infre- quently exaggerated. Fortunately there is also another extreme. Some men will regard their "livelihood" simply as a means to an end. In order to serve the community they must themselves live and make proper provision for those dependent on them. Beyond this their object is not self-interest. Even their means of livelihood is regarded by them equally as a means of service. All the available energy at the disposal of the self-instinct, after securing the bare neces- sities of life, is placed at the disposal of the social instinct for the advantage of the community in the widest sense. Therefore sin by means of the self-instinct, i.e., "selfishness," may be variously defined. In effect it could be summed up as "The development of the self-instinct at the cost of the responsibilities at- taching to the possession of other instincts, especially of the 'social instinct,' or the diversion of the 88 Psychology and the Christian Life energy proper to other instincts towards the attain- ment of selfish ends." This may seem a cold, mechanical definition of wrong doing, but it is of practical significance in the sphere of morals and religion. The call to Christian living and Christian service seems to so many people a summons to them to deny their hu- man nature, to act contrary to their instincts; such a plea is often a mere argument or excuse, but equally often it is sincere. It can, however, be shown that side by side with sex and self there is a great social instinct, equipped with its appropriate energy, by means of which, as through a normal part of his human nature, man can respond to the call of the Divine. Once this is recognized it will be seen that the demand for service is not even *'humanly speaking" impossible; that the ability to serve, the function of service does not depend solely on inspiration and power miraculously supplied to believers alone. The Church through the ages has persevered in asserting that in man's natural endow- ment there was, latent perhaps, atrophied, starved or misapplied, that which was capable of responding to the divine call. I am not trying to identify the "religious instinct" with the social instinct, cer- tainly not on the Godward side of religion ; but I do maintain that the love of our fellow-men, the man- ward side of our religion has its driving-force in The Psychology of Sin 89 the social instinct, even as faith works in part through a law of the mind. The call to service is not a call to fight all our human nature, to beat ourselves down, to be, in that sense, unnatural ; it is a call to divert and apply rightly as much of our energy as possible, through a channel which already exists in our human nature and is actually a part of us. It is just because the two other instincts, sex and self, apart or combined, are so powerful and arrayed in such antagonism to any ideal develop- ment of the social instinct, so grudging in the energy which they will allow to be diverted from them- selves, that we need God's power to help us order ourselves aright. Just because the social instinct is not so dominant in us as either of the other two, we need faith in God to recognize it as the peculiar means for the attainment of God's purposes in the world. As long as the social instinct is abused or not fully used we lack that full development of the personality which might be ours. The cure for love of self is love of man; loVe of man is the best way in which we can express our love of God. That is the Christian Gospel. This description of temptation and sin through the channels of the self and social instincts seems inevitably to cast a moral slur upon what is called "personal ambition." But all our instincts are nec- essary to our life and general well-being in the go Psychology and the Christian Life world, the self -instinct most of all. Its strength in our nature is the primary incentive to work, to maintain our place in the swift current of life; our desire to get on in life is perfectly legitimate, and up to a certain point it is entirely beneficial to the community of which we are members, because it impels us to be producers and not merely consumers or parasites. If a man is robbed of his rightful sense of individuality he becomes less than a man; deprive him of personal ambition and you deprive his life of the mainspring with which he is naturally endowed and to which he is morally entitled. The redirection and proper use of the energy of the self -instinct need not involve any unnatural or harm- ful suppression of self; if the Christian disciple learns from his religion that he must be unselfish, he also learns from the same source the intimate sanctity of human personality, the supreme impor- tance of the individual to God, and God's need of him. Not only does God love him personally, but God has a part for him to play in service to the community. That part is to be played by the due development of his powers, and such development is the highest fulfilment of ambition. Influence and leadership, the aim and end of much human am- bition, are, from a Christian standpoint, legitimate and necessary motives for action. Am'bition is morally bad only when self -aggrandisement is the The Psychology of Sin 91 motive which prompts the attempt to exert influ- ence, and when leadership and power become ends in themselves. The jostling ambition that is un- scrupulous of the fate of rivals, that is prompted by unworthy motives and seeks purely selfish ends, is evidence of self-instinct run amok. The purpose of life, the motives for conducting life must then be reconsidered, the aim changed, and the energy re- directed accordingly. I do not propose to dwell in any detail on the sin incident to our possession of a sex-instinct. It is earlier and more precocious in its development, more insistent in its demands, more apparently involved in human activity than either of the other two in- stincts. Though in most people its period of domi- nation at a maximum may be confined to but a certain number of our three-score years and ten, it leaves its trail across practically the whole of life. For this very reason mankind bows down before it, recognizes and admits its sway, and exaggerates it. /while the last thing we should safely do is to belittle the importance and the force of the sex- instinct in human development, yet we should con- sider whether or not it is in fact as all-pervading and as unescapable in its demands as we make out. ] Generation after generation grows up into the idea that the word "instinct" itself means little else than sex, that human nature is exclusively concerned 92 Psychology and the Christian Life with reproduction. In school, in factory, in life as a whole, men and women, but chiefly men, de- liberately or carelessly instil into the minds of those younger than themselves that sex and all to do with it is the chief or only thing in life. Many of us long before we are conscious of sexual passion are expecting it; we are busy looking for sex in life, we are ready to be dominated by it. As young men this suggestion is strengthened in us by the ap- parent universality of sex-indulgence; we do not know that many men talk as if they lived immorally when as a matter of fact they do not; that many more, who do so indulge, fashion for themselves the falsehood that everybody's doing it. The power of this suggestion is incalculable. The prominence which is given to sex (meaning sexual passion) and its power, does not represent its true proportion and relation to other instincts; the early curiosity, the expectation, are not due solely to the power of the sex-instinct by itself; they are due in part to bad suggestion, enormously strengthened by the at- mosphere of mystery which cloaks the whole sub- ject. However that may be, we are approaching sex now not as a matter of education or of child- psychology, but as a fact in the lives of men and women of to-day. We must also regard it in no nar- row sense, but as the whole creative instinct and The Psychology of Sin 93 faculty in mankind. Christianity condemns, as sin- ful, fornication, adultery (its specialized form), homo-sexuality (in its physical expression), im- purity of heart. All these are positive sins. Psy- chologically considered they are wrong expressions of the sex-instinct which may or may not be in any particular individual baulked of its proper outlet. If the normal channel is blocked, much of the energy proper to the sex-instinct may be directed into the channels by which the energies of the other in- stincts discharge themselves; or, failing this, the energy will overflow like a river cutting new chan- nels for itself or flowing down some channel carved out years before by suggestion or circumstance and since disused. Hence unnatural vice, self-abuse, fornication, delusion, obsession. The advice of the religious teacher and of the physician strangely agree; the former besides urging the need for true repentance and forgiveness, which will be consid- ered in the next chapter, says: "To cure impurity of heart cultivate thoughts that are positively good; occupy the mind positively; pray for the positive virtues and believe in God's power to make you clean. To cure fornication find other and creative channels for surplus physical energy. Consider your duty to the community ; you must not degrade your- self and others. Other people are involved in your sin." The psycho-therapist, apart from courses of 94 Psychology and the Christian Life psycho-analytic, hypnotic or other treatment, says: "Interest yourself in people unselfishly; get out of yourself; find new occupations for spare time and energy. Apply your creative instinct in some other direction positively. Take plenty of exercise, have a cold bath, etc." It is surely almost unnecessary to fit these two counsels together^ if only all re- ligious teachers would learn from the new psychol- ogy how sexual vice works in the human personality, and if all psycho-therapists believe'd in the power of God and not merely in the power of instincts, both penitent and patient alike would receive even bet- ter advice. / Man is endowed by God with sexual instinct for the consummation of love in marriage and the re- production of his kind; the instinct is equipped with its proper energy, varying in degree according to the individual's temperament and past life. The activities resulting from this instinct are pliable to suggestion and can be formed into habits good or bad. The instinct has enlarged its sphere of action during human development because the advance of civilization with its houses and police, its gas-stoves and its motor-lorries, has lessened the demands made upon the human energy needed for keeping alive, defending and feeding a family. The more that comfort, convenience, organization come into hu- man affairs, the more human energy is freed for The Psychology of Sin 95 sexual or other diversion. But side by side with this material evolution has come a development of the arts of living. Forms of recreation have been multiplied a millionfold; these and educational op- portunities, countless hobbies, the call to invent and explore, the arts and crafts, a thousand and one outlets for the spirit of adventure and romance, have grown up and are used deliberately as channels for the surplus energy which our forefathers did not have to spare; often enough these outlets are ignored. Happy the man or woman, who, baulked of the legitimate outlet for sexual energy, knows how to divert it into some such channel. The baulked sex-instinct in its bad development is merely lustful; in its better application it is the most creative force in the life of the world. It has produced glories of music, sculpture, painting and literature to enrich human life. In the channel provided by the social instinct, through the arts or in any form of daily work or in more particular service to mankind at large, the sex-instinct in man or woman serves to promote the greater glory of God. Its adjunct, the parental instinct, applied in other ways can benefit mankind at large, particu- larly the weak and sick, the lonely and fallen, by the tenderness and love which have been denied their natural outlet. In all people all surplus sex-energy cannot be so 96 Psychology and the Christian Life diverted. They would be less disheartened, they would live purer lives, if they realized the scientific fact that much more of that energy than they sup- posed can be unselfishly and happily employed. For what is left God alone can help them, and only those who believe in Him will win through. But in view of what science can teach us, it is, as in other things we have considered, cruel, unwise and unfair that in this matter the power of God should be invoked di- rectly, in total disregard of aids revealed to us equally by God through the mind of man. After what has been already said in these pages, it should be hardly necessary to repeat here that in dealing with sin faith in the resistless power of God, as revealed in Jesus Christ, is the first and final requi- site. This book is a plea for that truth. It is also a plea for sincerity and common sense. In considering how the primary instincts, being the channels of all human action, are necessarily the channels of sinful action, we are bound to refer, as once in this chapter already, to what is called the religious instinct. This is variously regarded as another primary instinct, or as another more fun- damental than the three primaries, or as inherent in all three and working chiefly along the channel of the social and sex instincts. We should be very slow to accept any such definition or to reach any final conclusion on the subject. The relation of The Psychology of Sin 97 instinct to instinct, the tabulation of instincts as primary or secondary, are matters of different opin- ion amongst psychologists; even the three primary instincts taken in this book as the basis of human action are not so acknowledged, as they have been here treated, by all psychologists. The exact place of a religious instinct, indeed its very existence, would be hotly disputed. While we do not admit any question of the real existence of the religious- faculty in human nature, and though we may be certain that man's search for God is an instinctive movement to satisfy an instinctive craving, yet the exact place given to this element in a scientific analy- sis of human nature need not occupy us. It is the fact of it which concerns us ; and in a subject which, even apart from religion, is still so debatable it would be unwise to take up any further position too definitely. Nor, as has been said, is it necessary to do so. We do, however, claim this: that man's need for God is deep-rooted in his nature, that an instinct for God is as much a part of his nature as any other attribute; it is fundamental and God alone can sat- isfy it. But the religious instinct is not so insistent in its demands as any of the three instincts that we have called primary; deliberately or through ig- norance it can be more easily suppressed than the primary instincts and than many other lesser in- 98 Psychology and the Christian Life stincts; inevitably so. Except in rare instances the religious instinct does not dominate men, as sex or self can dominate; religion is not so easy, and that is why we should hesitate to name that in- stinct as primary together with the others. ('At the same time we claim also that the satisfaction of any or all of the three main instincts will not satisfy man completely apart from God; in this way it can be said that religion is inherent in the primary in- stincts. ' This connection has' already been observed ; man's -highest form of self-interest is displayed in the care of that in him which is immortal, of God; that interest again is best served by the man who rates even that supreme gift, his soul, as less to him than the interests of his fellow-men; in seeking the best interests of society at large, at whatever sacrifice of his own, he is exercising his social in- stinct in its highest form; again the man most con- stantly and continuously so lives and acts who be- lieves that in so doing he is serving God. The ac- tion of a religious sense in the activities of the sex- instinct is not at first so obvious, but it is there. Many people know by experience within themselves the close connection between religious and sexual emotion. Sex, in its broadest sense, is the instinct to life, the creative instinct ; there is no channel more satisfying for the absorption of superfluous sex- energy than creative service religiously inspired. The Psychology of Sin 99 Sexual intercourse in its narrow sense, regarded as a divinely appointed means of expressing human love and reproducing life, becomes a sacrament; but even that sacrament will not fully satisfy, nor will all the other forms of human love, many of them, though not consciously sexual, deriving their force from the sex-instinct, satisfy man or woman; sex is too big to find final satisfaction anywhere but in God Himself. Chapter V: Christianity and Psycho-Analysis We have seen that faith is not the only requisite for the perfection of the Christian's personal char- acter. The Christian religion is also a call to re- pentance, and the Christian faith itself implies a complete surrender of the will to the will of God. Absolute trust in Him implies absolute willingness to perform His will. If I have reserves and limita- tions on this point, my faith in Him is necessarily limited as well ; I shall be unwilling to trust myself to Him in respect of those matters in which I wish to follow my way, not His. Most men's past life is full of such reserves; in the sphere of those re- serves have their sins been committed. No fresh start can be satisfactorily made, no unencumbered channel for the working of faith can be found, until those sins are frankly acknowledged, recognized in their true significance and done away. The Chris- tian duty of repentance involves a sincere desire to reform; the penitent must sincerely determine not to repeat the sin in question; in return the Christian 100 Christianity and Psycho- Analysis 101 religion promises forgiveness, i.e., a realization of harmony with God, or reconciliation with Him. The doctrine of Christian forgiveness, the At- Onement, is not vaguely theological or merely emo- tional; it is intensely practical. The sinner has crucified Christ afresh, has inflicted pain on the love of God Himself; thus sin must be realized as in- gratitude treating love with disdain, as selfishness trading on eternal patience and pity; such an aspect of sin is drawn from the Christian teaching that the love of God is the love of man — that as a man treats his fellow-man or woman in the world, so he is treating Christ. This, again, depends on our belief in the Incarnation, and is also derived directly from the words of Christ. Such a view of sin properly appreciated stimulates shame and re- morse and leads to that state called penitence, in which the assurance of forgiveness is passionately desired. This sounds a matter of the emotions only, but the Church in all ages has always recognized the intense practical significance of that emotion; penitence has been urged and stimulated not only as a duty owed to a loving and injured friend, but as necessary to enable the penitent to secure, through a sense of forgiveness, power and freedom of action for the future. Granted that a believer is trying to live rightly, the fact of unacknowledged sin con- stitutes a conflict within him, impeding his good 102 Psychology and the Christian Life intent though he may not be conscious of the impedi- ment or its cause; the fact of sin acknowledged and repented, but not felt to be forgiven, results in a conscious lack of harmony, and fills the penitent with a sense of powerlessness. The burden must roll from Pilgrim's back at the foot of the Cross before he can be free and strong to serve. However successful we may be in discovering the source in ourselves from which a sinful action springs, and however clear we may be as to the means we must take in redirecting the energies of our instincts aright, the guilt of sin remains. People who believe in God can never be satisfied simply to explain to themselves how temptation works; they recognize that they must do more than lay the charge of sin at the door of their instincts. God gave them their instincts and the power to regulate their energies. Those instincts are not in themselves sinful, but divine. Therefore a sense of moral guilt attaches to the person of a sinner for the perversion of powers divinely given. This sense of moral guilt is not to be confused merely with sense of failure, loss of confidence. Possible remedies for that have already been in- dicated. Sense of moral guilt implies more than loss of faith; it involves lack of harmony. As the worker, studied in our first chapter, could not put in his best work if there was an internal dis- Christianity and Psycho-Analysis 103 traction or questioning, so the repentant sinner can- not make his best amendment of life if he is handi- capped by sense of guilt. The loss of harmony ex- perienced through repented but un forgiven sin con- sists of this : the sinner is not sure whether he is ap- proved; he thinks his past sin, having spoilt his record, makes further effort hardly worth while ; he has helped to put Christ on the Cross and cannot now take Him down ; he no longer deserves the love of God; he is living under a cloud of disapproval. Such feelings of guilt, if they become tiresome, may be repressed, detached from conscious thinking, isolated and finally forgotten. But the memories remain in the subconscious mind and emerge into the conscious unexpectedly and disastrously from time to time. Even if they do not assert their pres- ence in the conscious mind at all, they constitute a conflict, which saps the man's best powers. He is not fully at peace. He thinks perhaps that he is living at his best, whereas he has no real con- ception of what his best might be. Or, again, he may experience a sense of impotence in his en- deavours to follow after righteousness and not know to what such impotence is due. It is not our purpose to consider here in detail the means by which assurance of forgiveness can be obtained. It is a matter of personal experience that is uniquely difficult to describe. Forgiveness 104 Psychology ^^^ ^^^ Christian Life is promised to those who truly repent; the assur- ance may come through prayer and personal com- munion with God ; it may come from an understand- ing of its reality to other men who have won it, such understanding conveyed through sermon, book or conversation. It may come through the convinced statement of the friend or spiritual adviser speak- ing with authority; it may come through a belief in the authority of the priest to pronounce absolu- tion in God's name. Those who have sought for and secured in one way or another the certainty of forgiveness testify to the sense of renewed power that it brings, the freedom from internal conflict, worry and depression. There is no immorality in the past life that now need be repressed into ob- livion, for God Himself will "remember our sins no more." We need no longer be ashamed at any- thing that we have done, so ashamed that we try to pretend to ourselves that we never did it at all; we have faced it and acknowledged it, and Christ loves us still. We can hold up our heads and look God and man in the face. We know that God has so forgiven us that we can have a fair start again, and that we are fit to be companions of Jesus and to have His full power in our lives. This is har- mony and peace. After all, the Christian Church has been right. Self-examination, penitence and Christianity and Psycho- Analysis 105 forgiveness are the first requisites in the Christian way of life. With many people the conflict cannot be fought out, or the pressure eased simply by a solitary search for forgiveness. They seek it in prayer and are not sure that the prayer has been answered; they try to "feel forgiven," and think that they have not yet actually had that experience. They need help from someone else. I am not referring simply to the practice of auricular confession and absolution. Apart even from the particular grace of such ab- solution to those who believe in it, there is special value very often in the confession of one man to another; such confession, I mean, as is often made by a member of any religious communion to his minister, by girl to teacher, by young to old, by friend to friend. There is a class of person, of course, who is constantly pouring out his woes to all and sundry, who is continually making fresh confidants, who reveals what he considers his in- most feelings to an acquaintance in order to pro- voke an intimacy. He or she is not to be encour- aged. Such self-revelation kills any proper sense of shame, stimulates self-conceit or morbid in- trospection, strengthens the grip of bad suggestion, and is often grossly insincere. But there are many people suffering from the effects of some repres- sion, which needs relief of the kind; and here we 106 Psychology and the Christian Life shall include states which have not any strong moral tone, where penitence and forgiveness are not necessarily in question. The laws of mind and behaviour, which lie at the base of the practice of psycho-analysis are, as we have seen, applicable to normal people, that is to people who are not sick enough in mind or body to need psycho-therapeutic treatment or to be classi- fied as "cases in mental pathology." For the ab- normal in such things is merely an extension of the normal. The "Psychology of Insanity,"^ by Bernard Hart, whose book hardly receives justice from its title, shows this quite clearly. The woman who tells herself on insufficient or no evidence that Thursday, whenever it falls on the thirteenth of the month, is her unlucky day will never regard any evidence that would contradict her theory ; the idea that she has got hold of is put into a special corner of her mind and into that corner she will only admit evidence which she can argue into support of her theory. Such superstitions or delusions are so common and so typical of ordinary mentality that they count as normal. The inmate of an asylum, who wrongly asserts that he is a millionaire, is not unsimilar; he proves his wealth by indicating the spacious nature of his park, the paid attendants in his employ; he is little less patient of contradiction * Cambridge University Press. Christianity and Psycho-Analysis 107 and little more plausible in disposing of contra- dictory evidence than the lady who thinks Thurs- day is unlucky. Only his delusion has an even stronger hold on him; also its effects are injurious to society; he is classed as abnormal. So the neurasthenic, who, from some internal conflict or repression, becomes entirely sleepless, or loses the use of an arm, or ceases to make any effort in life and becomes listless and dirty, is abnormal, and a fit case for skilled psycho-therapy. The cause of the sickness is revealed through psycho-analysis and the sickness is cured largely by suggestion; in degree only, but not in general character, is such sickness different from the irritability, the lack of energy, the hesitation or other sign of ineffective- ness displayed by the normal person suffering from a less serious repression or conflict. This man can be helped by a sympathetic and observant friend. Let us take the simplest possible illustration : the man has been provoked by someone to great anger ; a sense of injury is being harboured; the anger is severely controlled and repressed ; the minor instinct of pugnacity is curbed. The man would describe himself as "boiling over inside" ; if he succeeds in dissociating the whole incident from his conscious thought, several innocent people will probably suffer from his irritability during the process, and even after the repression is achieved. He may not know 108 Psychology and the Christian Life that he is being irritable or, knowing that, may not recognize the cause. Someone else with or without knowledge of the original incident would be able to tell him what was wrong with him, and could help him to find, from cause to effect, some of the links which the man himself had driven into the sub-con- scious. An illustration will shortly be given show- ing how it is possible for another person to help in rediscovering these links when the very fact of the repression would prevent the man himself from doing so unaided. But, further than this, the re- cital of the grievance, revealed to the sufferer by such means, or acutely realized by him already as a conflict, will relieve a pressure which has become intolerable, "Now I've told someone about it, I feel better" — is a common remark under such cir- cumstances. It is not only that, once the barrier of reserve has been broken down, useful and sen- sible advice can be obtained; but the actual break- down of that barrier has itself brought the neces- sary relief. The woman who nurses the grief of her widowhood, is unapproachable on the subject, faces the world smiling and then finds herself "nervy," sleepless, restless, would save herself much suffering and enormously increase her power to take up life again, if she would even to one person unburden herself, and with someone's help acknowl- edge the conflict within her and face it out. So in Christianity and Psycho-Analysis 109 certain cases of what is commonly termed "shell- shock," professionally treated, the patient is en- couraged to speak of and describe the horrors that he is trying to forget ; the pressure of pent-up emo- tions is relieved; the trouble is no longer repressed, but is admitted and faced and gradually assumes its normal and proper proportion in the realm of things that are past and over.^ Again, two of the primary instincts may be in conflict; a man is ambitious to develop his powers in life for his own personal distinction (self-in- stinct) or for the sake of the community (social in- stinct) ; he is devoted to his wife and children (sex instinct) ; and that devotion makes great demands on him; his wife is not interested in his ambitions, or doesn't believe in them, and does all she can to claim as much as possible of her husband's atten- tion. He is torn between the claims of two funda- mental instincts; he becomes distracted at his work by thoughts that his married life is unsatisfactory and is continually resenting the work which keeps him away from home; yet, as soon as he is settled happily at his home he wants to get away and work. He does not recognize what is wrong with him. He gradually starts failing in his life outside his home, missing opportunities, making mistakes; at home * "Psychology and Psychotherapy." W. Brown, M.D., D.Sc Arnold. no Psychology and the Christian Life he becomes irritable or worse. It is no good forcibly stopping down the impulses of one instinct or the other. The conflict must be faced conscious- ly and deliberately ; the facts of life must be recog- nized and a compromise effected whereby internal peace can be secured. Many other illustrations could be given of such conflicts between instincts. Their relief and solution often enough is the province neither of sympathetic friend nor neces- sarily of psychotherapist, but of minister of relig- ion. Something further on such cure of souls will be said in the concluding chapter of this book. To return to the subject of forgiveness — repres- sions and conflict due to a sense of moral guilt can often only be relieved through the help of a confi- dant of some kind. There is no conviction of for- giveness sometimes because there has been no sense of certainty about the reality of confession; con- fession to God may seem merely like confession to oneself. Praying under such circumstances may just be "thinking and arguing on one's knees" — further self-torture and self-reproaich. To tell someone else about it all, to endure the shame and humiliation, and then feel that "it has been told and the worst is over," this constitutes in itself an enor- mous relief from strain. Things begin to assume their right proportion. Devout thankfulness to God that "at last someone else knows," that, human- Christianity and Psycho-Analysis ill ly speaking, first discovery (one of the most painful consequences of sin) is a thing of the past helps to make the penitent feel reconciled to God and to be- lieve in the possibility of His forgiveness. Again, a feeling of failure about life, worry in life, unsettlement or ineffectiveness is often due not to sin, acknowledged and unforgiven, but to sin never honestly faced and now "forgotten," repres- sed into the unconscious. The man himself can- not without help discover what is wrong with him. Someone else hearing from hin. his other troubles and considering his difficulties with a detachment impossible to the man himself will see that some- where behind, in some underlying circumstance, some sphere of his past life shut off from God be- cause he dare not "let God see," lies the root of his trouble. The friend can help the man to rediscover the connecting links which will prove to him the connection between past sin and present infirmity of purpose. During the past fortnight the follow- ing example has become known to me (and I have leave to repeat it) of the ease with which one person, by the application of sympathetic common sense, may help another to establish forgotten links be- tween past cause and present effect : A. "I wanted to remember a girl's name this morning and it's only just come back to me. I re- membered it began with an A and had three syl- 112 Psychology and the Christian Life lables. It was the name of a book I wanted, and now I've got it. It's 'Allegra.' I wondered why I shouldn't have remembered it at once." B. "Whom have you ever known of that name?" A. "No one." B. "What cause might you have for dishking it?" A. "None, I rather Hke the name." B. "Did you like the book?" A. "Yes." B. "You must have some unpleasant connection with the name. What else, what first does Allegra now suggest to your mind?" A. "Only some lines of Longfellow: 'Grave Alice and laughing Allegra And Edith with golden hair,' " B. "Now we are getting at it. What unpleasant associations have you with those lines?" A. "None, I rather like them." B. "When did you last hear or read them?" A. "I don't know," B. "When did you first hear them?" A. "Oh, ages ago, when I was quite young" — (then suddenly) — "I remember; for a long time they used to keep running in my head and were a Christianity and Psycho-Analysis 1 13 nuisance. I had difficulty in stopping them, and in making myself forget them." The lines were deliberately dissociated and re- pressed. Later what some psychologists call the censor or sentinel forbad that memory "Allegra" to pass from the sub-conscious to the conscious, and that is why the book of the same name was not easily recalled. This incident seems trivial enough, and so it is, but it illustrates fairly and accurately a law of the mind. Though much discoverable in such a way is accessible only to those who practise psycho-analysis proper, the general method, as shown above, can be employed to advantage by any man in self-analysis, or often more profitably by someone else for him. In the example quoted above the analysis was de- liberate; the person was helped in his search for the links of thought that were missing. A less 'deliberate method of recovering lost connections is recommended by some psychologists, and it is called "Free Association." By this method I should not try and trace back one idea from another step by step, but more or less relaxing my attention, should repeat to myself one of the link words or let my imagination play on the link-idea ; many other words or pictures will then pass through the mind, and one of those, perhaps the one which at its first appear- ance seems most irrelevant, will supply me with the 114 Psychology ^^^ ^^^ Christian Life clue. Some people have so practised this free-as- sociation leading to self-knowledge, that they have acquired a habit of it. Spontaneously a man will himself the question, "Where have I met that man before, or someone like him?" or, "Why should walking down this particular street give me an in- definable sense of discomfort or oppression?" A day, or even just an hour, later he has found the links and fitted them together, without much effort or conscious intention, because he has been in the habit of closely associating his ideas and his memor- ies and of seeking associations where they are not at first obvious. Before leaving the subject of moral guilt and re- pression in general, it is well to note two factors which loom large in human life, namely fear and worry. Worry is the popular name by which could be described the conscious effects of most internal conflicts or repressions. Irritability and fatigue, restlessness, sleeplessness, minor obsessions are often attributable to what is called worrying. Worry of all kinds cramps a man's style and dim- inishes his power. As Dr. William Brown points out in "Psychology and Psychotherapy" ^ the main- tenance of the censor by the sub-conscious mind in any serious repression constitutes a drain on power; to maintain a repression, even unconsciously, involves * Arnold, 1921. Christianity and Psycho- Analysis 115 the diversion of energy for that purpose — energy which might be applied usefully and positively else- where. The worst form of worry to endure and to relieve and, therefore, the greatest drain on energy is that which is due wholly or in part to a sense of moral guilt, or the stifling of the moral conscience. I know of no adequate remedy that psychologists advance for the cure of worry that arises from remorse, nor is there any remedy ex- cept that provided in a doctrine of forgiveness. For other worry, once the original cause has been discovered, and salutary counter-suggestion estab- lished, doctors frequently recommend "something that will take you out of yourself." As Head of a Settlement engaged in a variety of social, educa- tional, and religious activities I have often been asked to recommend a form of such occupation for men who have just finished a course of psycho- analytic treatment. Indeed, the patients and their doctors seem to regard it almost as a moral question. The work must be "something unselfish," something that will do good "to someone else." Thus again, admitting it or not, do the latest scientific healers of the mind turn to one of the oldest Christian remedies for worry. And as to fear, it is ranked by some psychologists as a primary instinct, so universal and inevitable is it in human nature. Here we find ourselves back ii6 Psychology and the Christian Life where we started out in our examination of the Christian way of Hfe. Faith is ultimately the only remedy for fear. We admit that some of the gravest mental disorders have been aggravated by fear of punishment for sin, fear religiously inspired, selfish fear; but it is doubtful whether such fear has in itself ever been the prime cause of mental disorders. On the other hand often, even when the worst horrors of fear and of the fear of fear have been removed through psycho-analysis with its frank discussion and healthy suggestiveness, no per- manent remedy for fear in life remains but faith, faith in a God Who loves and will forgive. Who loves and will protect, Whose everlasting arms are underneath. Christians learn that love and derive that faith from Jesus of Nazareth, and to His ex- ample and teaching we will now turn. We have tried to see how faith might still work wonders, when first self-examination, penitence, forgiveness, have brought relief; how freedom from worry and fear would release our own energies and make avail* able more fully the driving-power of God Himself. I have tried to show how a sane and sensible atten- tion to the results of psychological research can help and not hinder our moral anad religious life. And I believe that this connection can be further established by a reverent study of the psychology of our Lord. Chapter VI : The Psychology of Jesus — His Teaching In considering the life and example of Jesus we shall follow the general line pursued in this book so far. For instance, the question of Christ's Divinity and the value (or not) of His example to ordinary- men by reason of that Divinity will not be fully dis- cussed. Existing theological literature deals suffi- ciently with that subject. Again, no attempt will be made to distinguish strictly the supernatural in His life from what is psychologically possible for ordinary men. The chief "miracle" in the life of Jesus for which I stand and from which I approach the present study of His life, is His complete sin- lessness. That, if accepted as true, must always be the greatest miracle, the final test of His Divinity., In the light of it much else in His life, including many other miracles, can be psychologically under- stood and even, in certain cases, explained. What then, psychologically considered, does such sinlessness imply ? Any man who has never sinned, any man who is perfect (let us consider this for a moment as a human possibility) has been brought 117 ii8 Psychology and the Christian Life through childhood with consummate tenderness and wisdom. That is the first thing. The Spirit of God flowing through the heart and mind of the perfect child is hindered by no unwise suggestion coming from the best of mothers. Wrong sug- gestions from other lips there must needs be, and the miracle of Christ's sinlessness is in part this, that the Holy Spirit robbed such suggestions of their power to injure Him in infancy and earliest years. But, short of superstitious adoration, no reverence of the Mother of Jesus can be too great; specially chosen not only to bring to birth the Son of God, but to form His mind and order His en- vironment at the most impressionable time of His life — blessed indeed among women! If we further consider sinlessness in a man, we shall notice, in view of what has been said in previous chapters, that entire control of the instinct- ive impulses is implied. No primary instinct is al- lowed to exercise its energies wrongly; yet the en- ergy of no instinct is blocked; it is redirected and used. No sin means no waste of energy. The in- stinctive powers exercised through mind and body are unimpaired. Our imagination can barely grasp the driving-force of such a human personality, un- marred by the wastefulness of sin; that power of mind and will was at the disposal of Jesus and was shown forth in His life. There was no sense of Psychology of Jesus — His Teaching 1 19 moral guilt, no burden of past sin and bitter mem- ories. "Why callest thou me good?" was the re- buke to the formalist and the flatterer. "There is none good save one" was not a confession of sin; nor did any other proceed from His lips. Those whose consciousness of power is impaired by sense of sinfulness and failure can form some idea of the latent forces available for one who knew no moral failure and no need of forgiveness, whose inner life was not a conflict but a harmony, who was at one with God. Yet Jesus was tempted, and tempted as we all are through the great instincts inherent in His human nature. The temptation in the wilderness has al- ways been taken, not only as an actual experience during a particular and stated period of days, but as typical of the kind of temptation to which Jesus was liable as man. "Command that these stones be made bread" — He was tempted through the other natural appetites of the body, as in this instance through hunger. "Cast Thyself down" — He was tempted to self-aggrandisement, to the ambition of a leadership to be cheaply and popularly acquired. "Fall down and worship me" — He was tempted to exercise His social instinct wrongly, to win the king- doms of the world for God in some manner ob- viously contrary to God's will and involving a de- 120 Psychology and the Christian Life nial of God's supremacy.^ When Peter or others tempted Him, in any other trial of the soul that you can trace in the account of His life, you will find the temptation coming through one or other of the primary instincts, as we have seen that all tempta- tion comes. Further He met temptation at its first charge. He challenged the weakening or sinful suggestion at its first entry to His mind. This is actually recorded of Him in one or two incidents of His life; a word was spoken lacking true faith or anticipating failure or meeting trouble half way, and He put the suggestion from Him and paid no heed to it. The method of His thought in face of such temptation is exactly illustrated in the twelfth chapter of St. John's Gospel.- Dr. James Moffat's translation gives it most clearly: "My soul is now disquieted. What am I to say?" In the first sen- tence, probably a quotation from His Scriptures, Jesus gives expression to a sense of foreboding or ^ The above summary of the temptation in the wilderness is obviously incomplete. When referring to this or any other incident in the New Testament I do not mean to imply that the . slight treatment and brief comments given in this book are in the least degree adequate to their subjects. In the present instance I am concerned just to illustrate, what I truly believe, that the temptation in the wilderness was an indication of the fact that our Lord was subjected to temptation through all three primary instincts. "In all points tempted like as we are. yet without sin," He could be and was tempted even to ambition in the less worthy use of that word. On "Ambition" see p. 89. ^ "A new translation of the New Testament" — Hodder and Stoughton. Psychology of Jesus — His Teaching 121 depression; this idea is in the second sentence im- mediately challenged; it is not allowed to become part of Himself. "What am I to say?" "Father save me from this hour?" i.e., "Shall I say — Father save me?" "Shall I in so doing regard the prospect as unbearable? Shall I contemplate the future as something that I have not the strength to endure?" And then He gives His answer, thereby fixing His mind and will in the right direction: "Nay, it is something else that has brought me to this hour. I will say, 'Father glorify thy name.' " He rejects His own disquietude as a dominant idea in His mind and puts in its place the thought of the majesty and power of God the Father. The next thing to notice in the life of Jesus, and it is remarkably significant, is the apparent effort- lessness of His life. I am not seeking corrobora- tion for what has been said in this book about the relation of faith to effort; the facts do not require special pleading. The relation of faith to effort in the life of Jesus has always been obvious and ap- pears on every page of the Gospel, and men have thought that they could not live His way. We have perhaps explained things away by saying, "His faith was greater ; He was the Son of God. I am called on to make efforts which faith rendered unneces- sary for Him." This represents an attempt, with which we cannot now compete, to lessen the value 122 Psychology and the Christian Life of Jesus' example on the grounds of His Divinity; we need not so readily seek that refuge from our own failujes. His way can be and should be our way. We know that Jesus agonized in prayer; we can see that again and again the outward circumstances of His earthly life demanded deliberate endurance, the conscious exercise of great will-power, continu- ous efforts against evil in the world. But, how- ever much be made of such admissions, it remains equally clear that the normal experience of His mind and soul was not one of effort and struggle. He did not worry or fuss; He was always unhurried; He displayed the dignity of complete assurance. He had no doubts or the distraction that doubts bring with them. When wleakening suggestions were made to Him He did not accept them. His attitude to the whole of life was calm and confident and could be summed up in the words, "I can be- cause God can." This was the faith of Jesus, and it bears small resemblance to the Christian's faith with its minimum of convinced belief in the effective power of God and its maximum of self-dependent and self-conscious effort. If ever a state of mind could be fairly deduced from a man's behaviour, then this deduction about the mind of Jesus can be made from His behaviour as described to us. This is further shown by His actual teaching and Psychology of Jesus — His Teaching 123 the method He prescribed for other men. The em- phasis laid by many people on all the miracles of Jesus as proofs of His Divine Sonship is really un- faithful, though it springs from reverence, Jesus stated clearly and frequently that religious faith could achieve wonders through any man. The pas- sage in which above all others He insists on this is in the eleventh chapter of St. Mark's Gospel, where the apparently impossible result of such faith is compared to the removal of a mountain. It is fol- lowed by the remarkable words (R.V.) : "All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them and ye shall have them." In the training of personal character and the formation of habit this is exactly the attitude of mind already recommended after detailed explanation In the second chapter of this book. For instance, "I have prayed for strength to take me through this day's work without undue fatigue. I have already re- ceived that strength. I shall do more than before I prayed seemed possible. It will not tire me un- duly. With God's help I'can do it easily. With Him all things are possible. I have nothing what- ever to worry about," Such a point of view goes far towards ensuring success. The psychological explanation of its success in the treatment of fatigue is shown clearly in "Mind and Work," where along lines we have already considered Mr. Myers estab- 124 Psychology ^^^ ^^^ Christian Life lishes the fact that a great deal of fatigue of all kinds starts in the mind.^ In the realm of the per- sonal life at any rate Jesus was recommending an attitude of mind which has been proved effective and according to natural law; in the illustration given above we can and should frankly recognize so much of the method of that law's working. It does not diminish, but should increase our rever- ence for One who two thousand years ago not merely recommended that attitude of mind, but demonstrated its effectiveness in the character which He exhibited to men. Nor, as we have seen already, is this to reduce religious faith to a mere mechani- cal process, however wonderful; there remains the power of God, available through the mechanism of nature, but at the disposal of God Himself, bound by no law save that laid on men that they seek Him in prayer and trust Him. "You shall receive — yes, but you should ask, and ask believing that you have received. You shall find, — yes, but you must seek. The door of God's powerhouse shall be opened to you — ^yes, but you must knock." That is His law for men. Striking as are those words in St. Mark, they are characteristic of the whole of Jesus' teaching. In- deed, such is the reiteration of the words "Faith" and "Believe" that we allow them to pass almost un- ^ This is also shown in Dr. Hadfield's essay in "The Spirit." Psychology of Jesus — His Teaching 125 noticed. We have heard them read so constantly in Church or Chapel that they cease to have any vital significance for us. Yet they figure in the message of Jesus as second not even to His teaching on love. He seemed surprised at the continual failure of His disciples to appreciate what could be achieved through faith: "Why are ye so fearful? Where- fore didst thou doubt? Only believe; it's quite simple. Just trust in God. Let not your heart be troubled. Your cure is no marvel ; your own faith has done it. Don't you yet understand? Don't you remember what faith achieved only the other day? All things are possible to him that believes. ^Where is your faith? Don't be so anxious and don't be of doubtful mind. Fear not, little flock. Increase your faith. You ought always to pray and not to faint. Don't worry. Come unto Me and I will give you rest, and you shall find rest unto your souls," The question we must ask ourselves, and it is fundamentally important, is this: "Was that teaching of Jesus about faith and fear simply so much talk? Is it or is it not relevant to Christ- ian practice in the twentieth century? Can men who profess and call themselves Christians continue to use so little that which Jesus used so much?" The teaching of Jesus on the prayer of faith can- not be properly understood without reference to one further condition laid down by Him for its success- 126 Psychology and the Christian Life f ul undertaking : "When ye stand praying, forgive." The Church of Christ in its exhortations and cate- chisms and other formularies has always under- lined this command; in order that faith may exer- cise its power in a man's life he must repent of sin and seek forgiveness, and he must also be in charity with all men. If he has not himself forgiven, he cannot claim forgiveness from God for himself; if he has not forgiven he cannot expect to pray effec- tively. We accept this as a command of the first im- portance, as an essential part of the Gospel of love; it seems natural and right that Jesus, the great for- giver, should demand in us the forgiving spirit. It is a Christian duty, but it is also psychologically necessary. Of the internal conflicts which dissi- pate men's energies and inhibit the power of their wills malice is one of the most serious. I would ap- peal here directly to the experience of the reader. Has anything else such power to distract your thoughts and hinder concentration as a rankling sense of injury? Hate and revenge are huge ab- sorbents of mental and nervous energy.^ If a grudge is harboured against someone else, prayer for my own forgiveness must be insincere; I am shutting off a sphere of my mind's activities *If they reign supreme their impulse will, of course, produce feats of mental ingenuity and physical endurance; but such a condition, confessedly pagan, is from the Christian standpoint a misapplication of energy. Psychology of Jesus — His Teaching 127 from the presence of God, and am maintaining a reserve in my life. Such a habit of reserve may- have gone so far that the sense of injury, the desire for revenge has been entirely dissociated and repres- sed. I have so practised the art of "forgetting" the injury, of disregarding the fact that I have never forgiven it, that I do not realize that anything stands between me and God; yet I wonder why my faith is often weak and also my sense of commun- ion with Him. The conflict has never been re- solved; the decision has been shirked and the con- flict itself dismissed from the mind, but the channel for the full activity of the Holy Spirit in me is blocked by it. So, too, apart from any such re- ligious question, are the energies of my whole per- sonality hampered by this repression; I am not at harmony. It should not be difficult for most people by careful self-examination to rediscover the now forgotten injury which has never been forgiven and to face it out. It is as difficult to describe and define an act of human forgiveness as to explain the conviction of divine forgiveness. People often talk much too glibly about Christian forgiveness. A real injury is not easy to forgive; it takes time. This is no excuse for nursing a sense of injury, but it should be remembered by those (and they are many) who 1 28 Psychology and the Christian Life have never had anything serious to forgive, and who preach forgiveness glibly to others who have suffer- ed much. Only an indication can here be given of the method of forgiveness : a man must first re- cognize that the act is past; to nurse the grievance, as to nurse any long-past sorrow, is foolish, un- economic, a wasteful expenditure of energy needed elsewhere. The act must be accepted; it cannot be avoided; it is done. To dwell on it is simply to magnify the suffering caused by the injury out of proportion to its original significance. Next, al- lowances should be made for the person against whom the grievance is felt; this is not impossible. "Judge not; be merciful; condemn not; do unto others as you would that they should do unto you." Self-examination will reveal many acts of one's own that might seem to others unforgivable, yet which do not (from one's own point of view) deserve con- tinual malice. We know perfectly well that the people who hate us or bear us malice would be more charitably disposed to us if they really understood. In our time, most of us are intensely disliked and are blamed for acts thoughtlessly committed or words carelessly spoken. The unforgiving spirit of undying hate is a very severe penalty for us to bear for any injury we have ever done to any man; then why inflict it on another ? More than this, we Psychology of Jesus — His Teaching 129 must accept the injury in the spirit of Jesus Him- self ; we must seek to turn an injury done to us into a sacrifice voluntarily accepted for the love we would bear to all men. Jesus so accepted the Cross, and so He still accepts the injuries we do Him. This is not easy, and I do not wish to pretend that it is. Its application may in extreme cases de- pend on the desire of the offender to be forgiven or on his recognition that he has done something that requires our forgiveness. About that only one thing shall be said : just as God's readiness to for- give us, the sacrifices Jesus made to assure us that forgiveness is waiting for us, predisposes us to need it, seek it and claim it, so a man's forgiving spirit will actually affect the man who has offended him. This cannot be wholly explained in terms of psy- chology, but it is true. It is clearly established that we can affect the minds and thoughts of other people by our own, though exactly how we do so is not certain. It may happen like this : by some word or action or some line of conduct in another man I am provoked into hostility ; spontaneously I make to myself the suggestion that "I dislike him," "I will get even with him." The more acutely I have been injured, the more deliberately and insistently do I make this sort of suggestion to myself. But if I make it only once and do not deliberately reject it. 130 Psychology and the Christian Life it will work powerfully in me. An act of forgive- ness would involve a complete change of mind and the setting up of an equally strong counter-sug- gestion. Until I do this I am, much more than I realize, the victim of the bad suggestion I have made to myself ; later I may forcibly dissociate the whole incident and decide to forget it, but the bad sug- gestion will continue transforming itself into action. My dislike of the man will be obvious to observant friends of mine long after I have ceased to be con- scious of it. My original prejudice, still jealously developed in my sub-conscious mind, will affect de- cisions that I make about any dealings with which the man is remotely connected ; it may even influence me in such trivial matters as refusing or accepting invitations, or in my words and in my behaviour down to the smallest details. The effect on the man himself will be quite definite. I have never checked the original suggestion made to myself that only evil is to be expected of him and that expecta- tion will produce the worst from him. He will start disliking me even if he did not dislike me al- ready; he will read into my conduct offences that were never deliberately meant. He will become less and less likely to regret the original harm he did me, and may even regard himself as the injured person. The hostility is mutual. How far this Psychology of Jesus — His Teaching 131 interaction of mind on mind can be explained is not clear, but I have often tested its truth. ^ The right development of the forgiving spirit can be tested and assisted by the performance of some kindness for the offender at some sacrifice to one- self ; the kindness and sacrifice need never be known; they would not be performed in order to curry favour, but it is true that to try to serve someone is to begin to love him. There is a real psychological as well as a moral value in the command of Jesus : "Pray for them which despitefully use you." Thus we return to His teaching which many of us have always accepted on His word alone in our anxiety to be like Him. This digression on forgiveness is, however, useful as helping further to show (be it said with all reverence) the practical common sense of His teaching. We ought to try to understand why the greatest expert in human nature insisted on complete charity as an absolute necessity in those who would pray effectively and in the strength of that prayer remove mountains. * Constantly when with a number of people I have noticed someone I knew well to be talking or behaving in a silly or disagreeable way, so unlike himself as to attract my special notice; and I have felt certain that the worst in him was being "drawn out" by someone else present. Then I have discovered later that someone had been in the room whom he intensely disliked or who intensely disliked him. I cannot prove this explanation, and I admit that there might be a variety of other causes of the behaviour I noticed. Even so, I maintain that such examples can be fairly quoted of the creative power of love and forgiveness and the degrading and destructive effects of man's hatred on other people. 132 Psychology and the Christian Life Another thing upon which He insisted was single- mindedness. His teaching as recorded in St. Matthew vi. 24, is the shortest and almost com- pletest summary of all the psychological advice we have been considering — "No man can serve two masters." Internal discord, lack of harmony, di- vided interest — these are the enemies of power ; and this is true, no matter what be the character of the dispute. Most fatal of all to power is the contest in a man's soul between the rival claims of God and Mammon. Bishop Paget, of Oxford gave psy- chological point to this truth in "The Spirit of Disci- pline" •} "Surely half-heartedness, wavering and faltering faith, or love or purpose, the hopeless toil of living two lives — this is one chief source, at least, of much of the unhappiness and unrest, the weari- ness and overstrain and breaking-down in modern life." Or again, as the same thought was expressed by a great French teacher, "Do you know what it is which makes man the most suffering of all crea- tures? It is that he has one foot in the finite and the other in the infinite, and that he is torn between two worlds." Those who profess and call them- selves Christians are often accused, if not to their face, then freely behind their backs, of gloominess; this appearance is variously explained. It is thought, naturally enough, that to follow the way of * Longmans. Psychology of Jesus — His Teaching 133 the Cross is a gloomy business ; or that fear of fu- ture damnation weighs heavily on believers ; or that their religion consists entirely of denying themselves what they want to do. In rebutting the charge by asserting that the service of Christ is the greatest joy, we need to remember that this can only be true of whole-hearted service. It is not easy or, perhaps, possible to contradict with any conviction the man who says, "I'm much happier without re- ligion." He probably is ; that is to say he is likely to be considerably happier than the man who for ever halts between two opinions — with one eye on this world, one eye looking for the next, part of his life given to God, part of it withheld, backing two horses at once and never knowing quite which he wants to win. This is a condition of heart not peculiar to hypocrites, but common to many sin- cerely professing Christians, who do not realize that they are trying to serve two masters. They may think themselves happy enough, but the claim of the blatant pleasure-seeker to be more free from worry and to be having a better time altogether is probably true. At any rate he is more effective in his life's purpose (because he gives to that occupation all his energies), than the man of divided interest who means to give all to the service of God and then withholds all that he thinks he decently can. In- deed the advice of Jesus in this matter coincides yet 134 Psychology ^^^ ^^^ Christian Life again with what many modern psychologists de- clare. They lay great emphasis, as we have noticed, on the need of internal harmony, and to secure this they urge the necessity of a unifying purpose in life, some idea that shall be so largely conceived, so in- clusive, so dominant that it will steady and absorb a man. Constantly and in varying language, in meta- phors or paraMes, the evangelists and St. Paul record the claim of Jesus to have provided, and of the early Christians to have found, such a dominant motive for the conduct of human life. We speak of this motive to-day as the service of the Kingdom of God, and claim that the religion of Jesus which calls us to that service is in this, as in other respects, psychologically the only complete satisfaction that man can find. Chapter VII: The Psychology of Jesus — His Practice We have in the last chapter tried to understand how in the teaching of Jesus we can find, for ac- quiring and exercising power in life, practical re- commendations deserving our close attention even apart from the divine authority with which they come to us. He had a faith in the power of God, and its availability for Himself that was absolute. His own energies were unfettered and unimpaired. His prayer was never impeded by uncharitableness of any kind; His faith was never fettered by any sense of moral guilt. He knew no fear, and was free from its inhibitions. He was single-minded. We are actually unlike Him chiefly by reason of our sinfulness. For this He has directed us to a double remedy; the power of God through faith can re- direct our energies and enable us to select good habits in the place of bad habits; the forgiveness of God — again through faith in the promises of Jesus — can free us from the fetters of moral guilt and the impotence that belongs to it. How then did the power of God, working through the personality of 135 136 Psychology an'd the Christian Life the perfect Man, e;chibit itself? We shall try to answer this question too from the standpoint of psychology. , Some faith-healers and mar^ psycho-therapists use a form of herd suggestion in working their cures. The patient, who is under treatment, was attracted originally by the fame of the doctor or of the method employed. He makes his first visit with some expectation, if only slight, that he may get better. The doctor by sympathetic yet firm handling of the patient, and perhaps by what might be called dodges, further establishes in his mind the beginnings of confidence, and the treatment starts. Soon the patient, on visiting the doctor, will await his turn in the room in which, or next to which other patients are being treated. He will hear from them of the wonderful progress that they have made ; he will actually see the marvellous effects of hetero- suggestion on -some other person being treated. By the time the doctor reaches him his confidence has enormously increased; he is expecting to he cured. Often he is ready to believe that what the doctor says will happen, will actually happen. The records of cures depending to a large extent on such complete confidence are considerable. A man so inspired, who for months before had be- lieved himself incapable and had therefore been actually incapable of moving his hand from the wrist Psychology of Jesus — His Practice 137 downwards, will be cured by degrees or at once. At what is the psychological moment of his treat- ment he will be told, for instance, to put his arm on to a table, on which it will be connected by wires to some impressive-looking apparatus, which, so he is told, will discharge into his body the healing cur- rents. The doctoF takes out his watch, machinery is set going — "After ninety seconds you will feel strength returning to your forefinger and at the end of two minutes you will raise it — (pause). Now you can lift your forefinger; lift it." And he does so, for the first time for months. His faith has cured him. No currents that had in themselves any curative value passed into him; but the apparatus was no mere toy ; it was a scientific means of secur- ing in the patient that attitude of mind that made recovery possible. Again a psycho-analyst con- vinces a patient that her continual buzzings in the head are simply a memory of an otherwise long- forgotten shock and that she will in future not be bothered with them; nor is she. It is clear that, whether He needed to do so or not, Jesus cured partly by the same means. Very early in His ministry He acquired a great name. Read St. Mark's Gospel again and notice the great prominence given in that account to crowds. Wherever Jesus went, people flocked to Him, run- ning around the lakeside to catch Him, collecting 138 Psychology and the Christian Life sick people on the way, pushing through the crowd with stretchers, trying just to touch His clothes. Little Palestine, Eastern enough to spread news quicker than we westerners could by word of mouth, rang with His fame; roadside beggars heard about Him from travellers ; the cry was simply /'J^^us of Nazareth passeth by" ; they knew well enough who Jesus of Nazareth was. The four Gospels leave no doubt whatever that Jesus soon became known up and down the countryside and that as a result of His fame many people "believed on Him" ; where they did not, we are told. He could do no great work except for laying His hand on and healing a few sick folk. Very rarely can we suppose from the accounts of His ministry that He healed all who needed it in any one crowd or in any one place; those who were not healed were not themselves in the state of mind which would put recovery within their reach. So much for the atmosphere in which most of His cures were effected. Now let us turn to the method of Jesus with individuals. In connection with al- most all the healing-works of Jesus little preliminary conversations are recorded. I take the intention of these to have been not to test faith but rather to stimulate, steady, focus it. Given the atmosphere already described, the mental attitude of the patient would be something like this — "This is actually Psychology of Jesus — His Practice 139 Jesus. What a stroke of good fortune for me! This is the best chance I've ever had. There's no doubt He cured that leper the other day. I know his family, and I've seen the man since. My case is not as bad as leprosy; this Jesus ought to be able to help me." Then the incident of the cure is described ; we may well suppose the preliminary con- versations to be not fully reported by the evangel- ists; but short as they are they would all help to crystallize the hope of the patient into conviction. To two blind men — "Believe ye that I am able to do this?" "Yea, Lord." Bartimaeus, blindly wonder- ing whether Jesus is walking or has walked right past him, whether his last chance has gone, suddenly hears the crowd stop in front of him, and that voice full of tenderness and absolute consciousness of power strikes on his ear: "Call ye him." "Cheer up," they say to him. "It's all right; get up and come along; He calleth thee," and he is led out into the middle of the road where in dead silence and in utter darkness he stands, expectant, before the Light of the world. "What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?" Anything could be done by Him; it was only a question of what exactly was wanted. Certainty was the suggestion conveyed by that ques- tion. "Rabboni," he answered, "that I may receive my sight." "Go thy way; thy faith had made thee whole." 140 Psychology and the Christian Life A leper shows the same faith, and gives proof of the necessary attitude of mind — "If thou wilt, thou canst make me clean." "I will; be thou made clean." On a Sabbath day there was a man in the synagogue with a withered hand; conjectures were made whether or not Jesus would heal on the Sab- bath day. The argument of Jesus has a double point; apparently He is teaching what we now call the Christian view of Sunday observance; in effect He was also turning the cripple's hope into absolute conviction. Here was a healer apparently not con- cerned as to whether he, the patient, could be cured, but merely arguing in favour of curing him to-day rather than to-morrow! To the man: "Come and stand out here;" then to His critics, while the man stands by and waits : "Is it lawful on the Sabbath day to go good or to do harm? To save life or to kill?" Anyone can study this kind of circumstance in a very large number of Jesus' works of healing; to quote further examples would be superfluous. It is important to note that here no attempt is being made to reduce His cures simply to a mechanical process and to rob them of divine power. The power of God, however, did apparently work in a particular kind of way; that is the present point, and nearly equally important is the fact, as in this book I have tried to establish it, that there are much Psychology of Jesus — His Practice 141 larger reserves of power than is commonly sup- posed, at the disposal of any man, who will lead a holy life, study the method of Jesus, jealously guard his communion with God and develop his faith in Him. It is neither necessary nor practicable now to discuss whether or not man again could ever da exactly what Jesus did. There is still more in the method of Jesus to notice. A large number of His cures were accom- panied by some outward gesture on His own part or on the part of the sick, chiefly the former. The patient was ordered to stretch out his hand, or to go and show himself to the priest, or to wash in the pool of Siloam. We are continually told that Jesus laid His hand on the sick or touched them. He made spit or clay on the eyes of the blind or on the tongue of the stammerer; He put His fingers into the ears of the deaf. Such physical actions were not simply outward signs ; they had a psychological value. Jesus Himself used physical sensation as necessary to procure for the patient the climax of faith ; to the patient it brought the actual conscious conviction, "Now it's going to happen. I am mov- ing my arm. He is touching me, and power and cleansing are mine again." H we are right in this supposition, would that the Church had used and taught the application of its holy oil with anything like the conviction with which the psycho-therapist 142 Psychology and the Christian Life uses he material methods of reassurance already mentioned. Not only did Jesus strengthen the faith and in- crease the assurance of the sick themselves, but He used the faith of their friends. It is for such cures as that of the centurion's servant and certain others that there is no psychological equivalent that we can establish. The patient was not present, but the power of God was available for him through the faith of his friends and of Jesus. It is well to re- member that faith is at least as contagious as de- spair. The confidence of one man can inspire another ; so may it have been with the soldier and his servant. The faith of the former — greater than which none had been found — would undoubtedly have that effect on the man who waited on him daily. But in addition to that kind of atmosphere created by other men's faith, there is still room to suppose that from burning conviction — such as that of Jesus and the centurion — could issue, under God, a force able to achieve for another man what he him- self could not obtain through faith of his own. Such a cure would be beyond the range of psycho- logical explanation; that does not necessarily mean that it would be beyond our own achievement. We must believe in the effective power of faith exer- cised on behalf of others. Here let us note that no psycho-therapist has done all that Jesus did, and that Psychology of Jesus — His Practice 143 at least some aires wrought by Him will never be repeated, certainly by no faith that is not faith in God. We have His own word for it: "This kind can come out by nothing, save by prayer." Of all features of His healing works one occa- sional feature is of the greatest significance, namely the declaration beforehand of forgiveness of sins. It is not necessary to suppose that the illness was directly due to the patient's own past sinfulness; that may or may not have been so. The point is that sin in the sufferer was unrepented or unfor- given; whether repressed or in open conflict, such sin prevented the exercise of faith required for the cure, the sense of moral guilt and past failure must be removed. The consciousness of being forgiven, the realization of acquiring forgiveness from One speaking with authority, removed obstacles and gave the assurance that One who could bring this in- stant relief to a tortured conscience, could also heal the body. Of hardly less importance for us, if we would be like Jesus, is the tender compassion felt by Him for the suffering. This is constantly mentioned. It seems not only to have been the motive for the cure, but, as described in the Gospels, actually to have formed part of the power exercised by Jesus, the power of His love. It was as if the energy of His whole personality were suddenly concentrated on the 144 Psychology ^^^ the Christian Life act of healing. The mind, dulled by no sin of care- lessness, sloth, or impurity; the will weakened by no failure of His own, by no compromise with evil ; a passionate love of the purest intensity with which He took the sinner or the sufferer right into His heart; the intensest desire to heal and to save, be- cause He loved so much, a perfect instrument through which to work, and an unbounded belief in the powers which were His — this was Jesus. The perfection of Jesus is noticeable chiefly in His miracles of healing and in His teaching ; we can hardly study the behaviour of Jesus apart from one or other of these two. In the former, power, we are told, came forth from Him, and in the latter the same power was obvious. The common people recognized that He taught with an authority not common to religious teachers of the day ; the Jewish leaders mainly responsible for His prosecution and death recognized, resented and feared that decisive- ness in Him which could only spring from His con- scious right to behave as He did. "By what au- thority?" they asked. Thus His entire freedom from doubt and fear enabled Him to speak with a complete conviction that gave every utterance of His a unique authority, recognized not only by His followers but by His enemies as well. But beyond the sphere of miracle, sermon or lesson, He was equally supreme. The power of His personality Psychology of Jesus — His Practice 145 is shown in the wonderful attractiveness of which we feel the pull even from the Gospel story of two thousand years ago. He drew men to Him. He had so much vital energy to spare that He could afford for each individual a force of love and a degree of interest that the ordinary man can usually be- stow on none ; such love was magnetic in its power. Further, He is always in complete command of every situation in which He figures, not least on Calvary ; His is the dominating figure in every scene in which He appears. Yet this pre-eminence never seems studied or artificial. Apart from the attention which character can always without effort command, there belonged to Him a power of adaptability un- usual in ordinary people. To recognize the power of habit, its advantage when the habit is good, its chains when the habit is bad or stupid and meaning- less, and to act on that recognition through life, and to act faultlessly in choice of habits — this means real freedom; such freedom to behave as the mo- ment required, such instinctive readiness to react aright to each fresh situation, to adjust Himself quickly and easily to circumstances and people, con- stituted the adaptability of Jesus. Quick-minded and yet perfectly wise, infinitely tender because He always understood, with a judgment that had no possibility of bias, He never made mistakes; He 146 Psychology and the Christian Life could not, deceive or be deceived. He was com- plete — the ideal leader and the ideal friend. We cannot leave this study of His personality without dwelling in greater detail on one element in it which is noticeable in all His dealings with in- dividuals, namely, His "instinctive knowledge" of them. The phrase is incorrect. That Jesus had special powers of insight and comprehension be- longing to His Divine nature, we may admit, though the "self-emptying" involved in the taking of our manhood upon Him might well have included the refusal of this or any form of omniscience. Let us at any rate consider it psychologically. There is no such thing as "instinctive knowledge"; what is meant by these words is more properly named "intuition." People have this faculty in varying de- grees; it may be a question of temperament (which will be further mentioned in the last chapter), or of education. It is commonly found in people who are called sympathetic; that derivation implies that the man of great intuition naturally takes a great interest in other people, is keenly obseryant of them, and is really anxious to understand them because he cares about them. But intuition is more than this, just because it is less deliberate and (in its strict meaning) entirely unself conscious. It is like an extra sense; it warns, it directs, it reveals "instinctively" as we say. Psychology of Jesus — His Practice 147 Psychologists have attempted to explain it as the remains of the experiences of life. We have noticed that most events and experiences in a man's life remain "somewhere" in his mind, though not, except a very small proportion of them, in his conscious memory nor easily available for him. Every word spoken to me, every sight seen evokes some response or reaction in myself, it makes some impression, however slight. My reaction to such a stimulus is generally at least a mental comment or observation, deliberately thought out or spontaneously evoked. Of all such observations made, by far the largest number are not for long remembered, but most of them are recorded, and provide that accumulation of life-experience which acts in me and influences me as intuition. Obviously what we call intuition may be often at fault, but in so far as our innumerable observations of life and people are sound in the main, so intuition will be generally a safe guide. For One Who grew up in wisdom. Whose judgment was never biased by malice or caprice. Whose mind was perfectly developed and trained, Whose sensitive- ness to any impression was unimpaired. Whose heart was pure. Who loved men as none other has loved, the collective experience of His past years would provide an unfailing intuition, an unerring insight into the hearts and minds of men. This was the insight of Jesus. 1 48 Psychology and the Christian Life We must now turn for the last time from the prac- tice of Jesus to His teaching. We have not at- tempted to deal with either exhaustively. They will both be found in detail to correspond generally to principles of action laid down in this book. We accept such principles first and foremost because they are His, next because their method can to some ex- tent be understood, copied and applied. In the seventh chapter of St. Mark's Gospel it is recorded that Jesus said that a man is defiled by what proceeds out of him; "for from within, out of the heart of men, evil thoughts proceed, fornications, thefts, murders, etc." We have seen cause to make much of the influence of environment upon men's thought, habit and character ; but we have also noted that men can, once they understand it, control the influence of their surroundings on themselves, and that sug- gestion from outside only becomes effective and is translated into action when a man accepts it or lets it pass unchallenged. The words of Jesus here recorded are a reassurance on this point coming from Him Who, of all, is best qualified to speak. We need not be the victims of evil suggestion around us or the slaves of our environment, nor on the other hand can we honestly make either our excuse for sin. Temptation comes often enough from without and takes quick and easy root in the instincts; there, in the heart of man, is the seat of sin. To be tempted Psychology of Jesus — His Practice 149 through the instincts is no sin ; sin is sin, temptation is not. Jesus was tempted, tempted through His instincts, yet sinned not. We can reject evil sugges- tion and prove conclusively that evil only becomes evil for us when we accept it and re-express it, when temptation enters the heart and there becomes sin. "Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." But simply to be concerned with rejecting evil will not make us safe. This is illustrated by Jesus in a short parable, which is pre-eminent among the parables for vivid exhortation and warning.^ The unclean spirit returns to the heart of man from which he had been driven, and finds nothing there, no evil at all, less indeed than when he was there before, but equally no good. With seven other spirits more evil than himself he returns into the man's heart, whose last state is worse than his first. This is horribly exact psychology. We have already explored the ground it covers, but it is mentioned here as the last example of the similarity of the ad- vice of Jesus to the advice of lesser men. Evil sug- gestions from environment will inevitably enter the mind of man; they may be ejected at first, but the invasion will be overwhelming unless he has coun- tered them with suggestions which are positively good and inspired by the Holy Spirit. He must en- * St, Matthew xii, which is full of psychology. 1 50 Psychology and the Christian Life gage the energies of his instincts, the interest of his mind, the will and desire of his heart, with that which is positively good. It all sounds so simple, and it is so very hard. It means opening the heart without re- serve to the presence of Christ; where there is any re- serve, any comer into which we do not admit Him, evil suggestions will find a home and start their ac- tivities. To open the heart wholly to Christ will mean sacrifice, self-denial, isolation, poverty, loss of friends — any of these. It will also mean joy, power such as we have never known, and peace. Chapter VIII: General Con- clusions Emphasis has been so far laid upon the fact that much of psychological discovery and method is available for the use of the ordinary man and is ap* plicable in particular to the life of the Christian be- liever. Yet again and again in the foregoing pages it has been necessary to refer to Faith-Healing or Psycho-Therapy as a thing apart. Beyond a certain line the relief of moral disorder, mental strain or physical infirmity in himself or others cannot fall within the compass of the ordinary man's achieve- ment. While he can apply common sense and analy- tic method further than he does, refuse to accept so many limitations, and draw on reserves of psychic energy and spiritual power hitherto unused by him, yet at some point or other he may reach a limit, which can only be passed by the expert. Of such experts we need a much larger number in all re- ligious bodies. The cure of souls, as Dr. Hadfield implies in his essay in "The Spirit," is an art much neglected in the Christian Church, yet it is an art 151 152 Psychology and the Christian Life in which the Christian ministry should be pre- eminent. First, every man called to the ministry of any religious body should have, as an inevitable part of his training, a real grounding in practical psychol- ogy. The general principles which govern human behaviour should be learnt, and he should have a course in "moral pathology,'' as a medical student has his hospital course. The results of such uni- versal training would be considerable. The Angli- can confessor would become more efficient in help- ing the penitent to unburden himself; his counsel and advice would be given less by rule of thumb and more by real understanding of the complexities of human nature. Anglican priests who do not hear confessions, and ministers of the Free Churches also would become more truly shepherds of their flock; many may become so in middle or later life as a result of accumulated observation and experience, but they might be more effective much earlier. Their dealings with individual sinners and sufferers would be more informed; they would understand more quickly what was wrong and how it came to be wrong; they would know how to counter and defeat evil suggestion, how to train and develop their friend's confidence in God. But even if such train- ing of clergy and ministers became much more gen- General Conclusions 153 eral than it is now, it would not be nearly sufficient to meet the need and the opportunity. In each diocese, rural deanery, or district, there should be available an expert much more fully trained. At present a few individual people of unique religious faculty, who have a great interest in the subject, specialize and become faith-healers on their own initiative; the Guild of Health exists for those who are particularly interested. But the Christian Church as a whole must cease to regard the psychological application of its faith as a mere by-way to be followed by a few exceptional people. The Christian Faith is a unity; certain groups tend almost to exaggerate its therapeutic side, as if the cure of disease were the only reason for which Christ became man; meanwhile the main body of professing Christians entirely ignore that aspect of their faith. As there are Diocesan Missioners and other such officials, special preachers and so forth, as a normal and necessary part of the administrative system of the Church of England,^ let there be also psycho-therapeutic experts. They need not, at any rate at first, be set apart solely for this work ; they would be in ordinary parish work, but would be known to the neighbouring parishes for their special qualifications. They would advise their brother- * Inevitably I speak and think of this proposal in terms of the Church of England. Members of other Churches will be able to apply it to their own organizations. 154 Psychology and the Christian Life clergy in the cure of souls, and they would treat par- ticular cases of abnormal mental or moral disorder in the district. It should become the ordinary cus- tom for those in charge of ordination candidates at Universities or Theological Colleges to select the right men for this work; in addition to the usual course in theology and psychology such candidates would take a short medical course, specializing in physiology and neurology. They would also spend some time studying the method of a psycho-analyst of repute. At ordination they would go to a parish in a district where there was no expert of the kind, or they might form part of a Bishop's Diocesan Mission stafif. This will happen some day, and the number will include many women, admitted to the diaconate for the purpose. Even before this comes about there is a great deal that laymen and women could do for them- selves. It would be well if we could eradicate from conversation the words "striking personality," when- ever they are used to mean "the kind of person I could never be like." Many statements in these pages will be questioned, but none perhaps more than the following: "Personality is not the monopoly of the few; it can be acquired." It can indeed be ac- quired in a certain degree even by the least talented. The method of its acquisition in its first stages has been outlined in this book. A "striking personality" General Conclusions 155 is no more, but no less, than a channel for power. To be quite clear, let such power be defined under two heads; first there is the power of our instinctive energies. It has been often pointed out that in moments of crisis or of great emergency a man will suddenly become endowed with abnormal powers of mental or physical endurance, and yet when the crisis is past, he will often suffer from no undue con- sciousness of fatigue. Countless illustrations could be gfiven of the existence in our natural inheritance of immense reserves of energy, by most of us un- used, if not actually abused and misapplied. The amount in which different men and women possess such energy varies of course enormously; this is a matter of what is called "temperament," and is largely governed by the physical tendencies which we inherit or by the bodily habits and conditions developed by our environment or by our own ac- tions. It must be admitted, too, that the willingness or ability to find and apply that natural energy will again be a matter of temperament, for which no man is entirely responsible, and which no man can entirely change. Even so there is hope for us all. We are too much inclined to accept limitations that need not exist for us and to live far below our maximum. It is desperate work to listen to anyone, particularly those on the threshold of life, making some such 156 Psychology and the Christian Life remark as this (and it is my fate constantly to hear it) : "Yes I wish I could do it; but, you see, it re- quires a man with real personality." The implica- tion is that the speaker feels he has no personality to speak of and never could have. There is no more damaging suggestion that a man can make to him- self. He will get what he expects; he deserves to be for life the dull and ineffective creature that he plans to become. If such an attitude of mind is humility, then such humility is vice rather than virtue. The man must learn that his natural endow- ment equips him with wonderful powers and, if he will take the trouble to develop them, he is half-way towards achieving the "personality" of which before he had despaired. In going the rest of the way he will need to learn true humility. For the other factor in personality, that is within his reach, is simply the power of God. We will for clearness' sake distinguish this abso- lutely from our natural endowment. We may be- ilieve that the Holy Spirit works through our nature, or that our natural faculties are themselves divine. But let us also quite clearly maintain a belief in the spiritual power which, though outside ourselves, is available for our use. This is the two- fold secret of personality; it may not reap earthly honours and rewards ; it may not bring a great name, but it will wield an influence, no less actual because un- General Conclusions 157 acknowledged, and it will get things done in life that need doing. It is within the reach of all of us in varying degrees and it is life-power. The accusation may be made that I am making life appear too easy. That it will never be, but I would utter a cry of protest in a world that needs hope and jfinds little. The present generation is stepping out into a world that is baffling in the prob- lems that it presents. No problem offers any ap- parent solution. Moral standards, never of any great nobility at least in this century, are toppling down; religion, the newcomer is told, has failed. Every man then for himself to make the best for himself of a world that is bound to be pretty bad ! Psychol- ogists tell us that hope of some kind is a factor in all human conduct; all conduct is purposeful; there can be no purpose in life without hope. But we need a hope that will become self-conscious and dy- namic, and this hope, if it is to be universal, can be found in Christ alone. It is necessary also to consider the application of psychological principles to society at large and not only to the individual. The individual is the im- portant factor in what we call "public opinion." Public opinion is simply the collective opinion of individuals, with the added strength of conviction which comes from common agreement, influenced by the social instinct. The only practical way for a 158 Psychology and the Christian Life man to regard public opinion is as himself. For all practical purposes he is public opinion. We have been mainly concerned with the effect of environ- ment on a man ; of equal importance is the influence of the man on his environment. To affect my environment rightly I must neces- sarily first ensure that as far as possible my own opinions are right ; I must not adopt opinions with- out examining them. There are certain matters on which I must accept the advice of other people; and the examination here recommended does not imply the need or possibility of proving an opinion absolutely right before I accept it. Where no proof is possible and yet I must hold one opinion or an- other, I shall accept the opinions of those whose judgment I most respect; the opinions of other men I shall examine before I adopt them, particularly those opinions which are casually expressed and heard by me with comparative indifference. In such circumstances a man is most "suggestible," i.e., most susceptible to suggestion. It is often fatal to listen to an expression of opinion about things that matter and then to adopt a negative or delaying attitude towards them. I think at the time that later on I will go into the matter. In point of fact I never do, and the suggestion put into my mind will remain there, unknown to me, and later it will become my own and when I express it I shall find myself General Conclusions 159 equipped with ready-made reasons in support of it. In exactly the same way the man who entered the picture-gallery ^ accepted without examination the suggestion that came to his mind at the sight of the crowd in front of one picture ; their opinion rapidly became his own and he then sought reasons for that opinion. This is an instance of the commonest of all mental habits. A man will argue himself hoarse in a discussion in favour of an opinion that he originally accepted like a sheep from the words or conventions of those around him. This con- stitutes the great chance of the propagandist press, as we have already seen. Once a man has schooled his mind against the invasion of undigested popular opinion from the crowd, and has cultivated the habit of deliberate and independent choice in the opinions which he will adopt about art, politics or moral questions, he can then reflect on the contribution to public opinion that he himself will make. It must be also re- membered that in ordinary social life people fre- quently turn a suggestion into its opposite; for instance, you may not take to a man on first meet- ing him, but judge him to be officious or self- opinionated. He remarks that London is obviously the finest city in the world ; you immediately become conscious that it is not the finest city, merely because 'p. 55. i6o Psychology and the Christian Life he has said it is. The opinion you start forming is as unconsidered as it would have been if you had agreed with him. In dealings with other people it is well to look out for the type of person who will always go against any statement made and accept the contrary as the suggestion he makes to himself, not out of any desire to examine it and discover what is right, but out of sheer pigheadedness ; allow- ances must be made also for this tendency in all people, if one's own expression of opinions is apt to be too judicial or dictatorial. Further, as I have said, people's minds are affected unconsciously but vastly by the casual remark. The people who have, I think, apart from my parents and a few others, influenced me most for good or ill by their words or example, have been people who were not at the moment intending any such influ- ence; they would not now even remember the occa- sions. Anyone looking back over a year or two will find instances of this great influence exercised by trifling events. It is "the idle word" that builds up or destroys. The moral of this is not that we should ponderously attempt to speak at all times with studied deliberation and to improve every occasion; all our suggestions will then be taken, and deservedly so, in their contrary application; we shall be pomp- ous and priggish, horrible examples of the complete bore. There is no one more oppressive than the General Conclusions 161 man who is hardly ever natural or spontaneous; he is the perfect kill-joy. Rather it is out of the abun- dance of the heart that the mouth speaketh. If God reigns in a man's heart, if he is positively seeking that which is good in his life and thought, he will not be found even in his most casual conversation expressing opinions which could do harm by acting as weakening suggestions in the minds of other people. The man who goes about saying that the League of Nations will fail is quite definitely making his contribution to the faithlessness of public opinion which will go far to securing the failure of that or of any other attempt to put ideals into practice. The man who is wholly given to the service of the will of God will never be found pronouncing an ideal impossible of achievement, though he has prob- ably given much more serious consideration to its practical difficulties than has the man who lightly dismisses the whole affair as impracticable. We owe more than we can estimate to the men and women who, without preaching or adopting a heavy manner, without disregarding practical difficulties, yet believe in the possibility of the best in themselves, in others and in the world. But public opinion will never be healthy and strong until there are very many more such people. Public worship is another department of life which 1 62 Psychology and the Christian Life needs reform on psychological lines. We saw in the first chapter that a man will concentrate his at- tention on any matter in proportion to the amount of vital importance which it has for himself. This is particularly true in intellectual pursuits, in any- thing, that is to say, which engages the mind only and not the body. A religious service is not exactly an intellectual pursuit, but it is similar in that it seeks to engage the mind and emotions while em- ploying no physical activity. It deals with the things that are not seen. To those for whom the unseen is vividly real, to the mystics and the devout, the length of a service does not much matter; they can concentrate their attention for a considerable time because the object of their attention is intensely real and of the first importance to them. I speak, therefore, of the services intended originally for the devout, but in practice serving for all and sun- dry; again I speak necessarily from inside knowl- edge of the Church of England only. The ordinary man and woman goes to church with no intense desire to worship or to hold com- munion with' God. He is often a believer, no doubt; he wants to live rightly, he is ready and anxious to be helped, but as he enters the church door he is fired by no burning conviction ; his Sunday morn- ing service is not a matter of life and death to him. He is therefore in no state of mind that will make General Conclusions 163 concentration and attention easy for him.^ I am as- suming that if his attention is not properly en- gaged, he is neither giving nor receiving anything of particular value. For such (I maintain, the average church-goer) and still more for the eighty per cent, or so whom we try in vain to get into any place of public worship at all, an hour is about the longest that the service should last. I challenge the clergy themselves to assert that, except in the Sacra- ment of Holy Communion, they can concentrate on holy things even for so long. Yet they expect that concentration of those less adequately trained than themselves for religious exercises. Before engaging this subject further, let us admit that very slowly, much too slowly at present to make its organized Christianity of any real use to the present generation, the Church of England is reforming its services; also individual vicars, here and there, by careful arrangement of the Sunday, are doing their duty to the Prayer Book as loyal priests and are yet managing to provide large con- gregations of different types with what they most need; the majority, however, are not doing this. In most churches the congregation, which comes in *I am not here referring to the Holy Eucharist; but the growing idea amongst a section of Anglican clergy that a celebration, when part of a long service, has any particular power to hold the attention of any but the devout, is, I am sure, largely mistaken. 164 Psychology and the Christian Life fresh and alert enough, does not expect to be in- terested ; the whole thing is bound to be perfunctory, as far as they are concerned. This certainly not only keeps many outside altogether — they or their friends have been there and they know — but on those who do come it acts as a weakening suggestion in their minds and makes it actually hard, if not im- possible, for them to give their full and undivided attention to the service. Yet they enter the building alert enough, and the Church has Sunday after Sunday a great op- portunity. In the first half-hour of a service which lasts eighty or ninety minutes or even more that opportunity has been thrown away. At the end of the first half -hour the congregation is lethargic and absent-minded ; nothing has so far been said or done which has any apparent relation to their own lives. By the time the preacher mounts the pulpit they are exhausted or at least bored ; they are so accustomed to this sensation jn church that they do not realize it, far less worry about it. The announcement of the text and the opening sentences of the sermon stimulate a flicker of interest, but the energies are already spent, and unless the preacher is exception- ally good ("good" does not necessarily mean either eloquent or clever), he might as well not trouble to preach at all. The sermon is perhaps in the wrong place; earlier it might stimulate a desire for wor- General Conclusions 165 ship, it might be designed to give point and meaning to our beautiful prayers; it comes too late, and to an audience that can still hear, but has little enough energy with which to listen. We are sleepy and en- feebled ; we want our lunch. It is no good blaming the congregation; they have their faults ; they must share the blame for what is wrong with the Church of England, but in this matter very little of it can be attributed to them. The Free Churches are tied to no form of service, they do not need to rearrange Sunday services which are obligatory on them, but often, I am told, their services are, to say the least of it, no more enlivening. There is, I truly believe, a real search for God going on in the hearts and minds of the English people. Organized religion does not help them much. There is a spirit abroad which is truly religious; we in the Church of England give it, as the main channel of expression, Matins or an elaborate Sung Euchar- ist beyond the understanding or devotional capacity of an uninstructed and uninterested public. Com- pare this method with the religious expression of Jesus, iconoclastic in His denunciation of formalism, elaboration and unreality. We are not helping men in a simple way to reach God through Him. I plead for real common sense based on a sympathetic observation and understanding of human nature and its needs, in the ordering of Divine worship in all 1 66 Psychology and the Christian Life churches.^ The illustration given has been in refer- ence to the length of the service; this is merely one, not necessarily the most important, illustration of the application of psychological principles to public religious observances. The whole subject needs to be explored very much further. The last illustration I would give of the need of the application of the psychological method to so- ciety is from the life of the common people. Many examples could be given of the lack of any such method in the treatment of the people by employers or government. It must be sufficient here to remind ourselves that the moral and psychological element is at least as primary a cause of present political and industrial unrest as any economic factor. But there cannot be here any digression into the general field of industrial economics; it must suffice to observe * The application of such understanding exists notably in the services held in the church of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. I mention this church without the vicar's knowledge or per- mission. He is perfectly right in maintaining that much of the method of those services could be adopted anj^vhere. Clergy who know or know of St. Martin's, dismiss it far too lightly on the score of its vicar. The true religion purveyed in Trafalgar Square does not and need not depend exclusively on the personality of any one man. Many people, of both sexes, of all ages and classes, never mention the vicar when alluding to the church. If questioned, they would probably say that they prefer to hear him preaching, but the reason they give for going to the church may be summed up in the words : "Religion really means something to me there. All the service seems to have a point and does not go on too long. There is an atmosphere of true worship in the place; it is easy to pray." General Conclusions 167 that between one section of the community and another, as between nation and nation, fear and sus- picion based on mutual misunderstanding are the most prolific causes of aggression and of war. Properly educated people are in an infinitely bet- ter position than are the masses for analysing the grounds of this misunderstanding and for seeking to remove them; yet educated minds will insist on considering this matter mainly as a political or economic problem, when chiefly it is a human prob- lem. Nor do the large percentage of educated citi- zens seem yet to realize that no ideal political or economic system can be founded in ignorance of psychological facts; further, that these facts, be- cause they relate to human nature and habits of mind, cannot be adequately understood theoretically or by books alone. In the long run we can only hope to understand the working-man by knowing him, and knowing him not merely as we know (or don't know) our gardener or the waiter at our favourite table in the restaurant, but knowing him as we know our friend on level terms, as far as that is possible. Until such knowledge and understanding becomes the usual instead of the exceptional thing, so long will the wheels of social reconstruction creak and jar. It is folly to suppose it could be otherwise. Ultimately this is more a strictly moral question than a psychological one. If people cared more about 1 68 Psychology and the Christian Life their country and their fellow-countrymen, they would endeavour, at whatever inconvenience, to ac- quire some firsthand understanding of their point of view. Ignorance alone can no longer be pleaded ; selfishness helps to preserve the ignorance intact. It is too much trouble to find out, and what we dis- cover might lead us to make further and more ma- terial sacrifices, which we do not propose to con- template. There is, however, one purely psychological con- sideration which I would urge. Apart from ab- normal periods of acute unemployment, the labourer and artisan, speaking generally, are gradually gain- ing better wages for shorter hours. This opens up many subjects of discussion, for instance the rela- tion of such improvements to the rate of industrial production and to the national health. One point alone we will consider and it is this : every improve- ment in a man's hours and wages or working con- ditions releases more of his energy from the struggle for existence. We have seen that instinctive energy, not called into play for self-preservation or repro- duction, seeks an outlet; the masses of the people year by year have more and more of such energy set free without any accompanying development of channels around them for the expenditure of spare energy usefully or even harmlessly. Loafing, drink- ing, sexual immorality, gambling are for many men General Conclusions 169 and women the only channels available, and all such channels represent abuse of one or another of the primary instincts. One of the most wasteful uses of spare time and money is the enormously increased interest of men in the fortunes of horses which they have never seen and are never likely to see. It is pathetic that the chief or, at any rate, the most ob- vious result of shorter hours and better wages should be more pence to spend on the "early and late edi- tions," more time to study them and more shillings to lose by means of them. Is this sort of amuse- ment or diversion the best that can be provided ? We have already noticed that the advance of what we have always been pleased to call civilization has lightened the struggle for existence and has also brought in its train a variety of means for the useful or harmless diversion of surplus energy; but these means are chiefly at the disposal of the governing classes who have so many such opportunities that, as we have seen, they are tempted to enjoy them at the expense of their duties to the community. But in our big cities there are not even sufficient open spaces to provide facilities for the physical recrea- tion of half the boys and men of the working-classes. The joys of art, music, literature and learning are beyond their reach; even if an appreciation of such were developed, the local facilities provided are hopelessly inadequate to meet any large demand so 1 70 Psychology and the Christian Life stimulated. The devil of sweating and industrial slavery is being slowly, but, I believe, surely, ex- orcized, but thinking people are doing next to noth- ing to fill the gap, and other devils are slowly but just as firmly establishing themselves. What will the last state be ? The need is pressing and urgent; the shallowest argument by which to make reply is that "the pro- vision of these things needs money." What is lack- ing even more than the money is any real interest on the part of many of the men and women who might be doing something, and any intention of sacrificing their own time in order to put at the dis- posal of others their own advantages. The provision of opportunities for culture and recreation for the masses is regarded as a matter for expert social workers or charitably-disposed cranks ; people do not realize the cruel unfairness and the mad danger involved in leaving the solution of this problem for ever to, comparatively speaking, a handful of en- thusiasts. It is the concern of everyone who has a moment or a penny to spare, but, with our golf- courses, our dancing and social engagements, many men and women have neither available; and, in fairness be it said, they do not realize the tragedy of the pent-up energies, the unsatisfied cravings of the people of England, nor the horror of those energies bursting their banks and spreading waste- General Conclusions 171 fully if not viciously wherever is presented the easiest or most attractive outlet. You will say, if you accept the statements just made, that after all this is a question, partly, of mere common sense. Exactly so. All the psychol- ogy that most of us are likely to understand is mainly applied common sense. It can be acquired by a careful study of oneself and a sympathetic ob- servation of other people in the light of what that study has revealed about human nature and be- haviour. If a book or two can be read on the sub- ject so much the better; such knowledge has been put within our reach and we are meant to apply it. Nor shall we trust in that alone. Our strength Cometh of God. For Further Readin The following books are recommended : Tlie Psychology of Insanity, Bernard Hart. A Textbook of Psychology, William James. The New Psychology, A. G. Tansley. Christian Experience and Psychological Processes^ Rouse & Miller. Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion, Charles Bau- DOUIN. Psychology and Psychotherapy, W. Brown, M.D., D.Sc. Mind and Work, C. S. Myers. The Spirit, Ed. B. H. Streeter. The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James. Some Principles of Moral Theology, The Rev. K. Kirk. 172 Index Act of Faith, dj, 71 Day-dream, 65, 70 Adaptability (and Habit), Dissociations, 23, 31, 107, 22, 31, 37, 85, 145 113, 127 Ambition, 28, 79, 9°, 109 Dream, 32, 73 Association of ideas, 27, 32, Education, 38, 56, 78, 92 Ato/ement; loi Effort, 26 46, 57, 61, 121 Attention, '17, 54, 59, 63, 69, Amotion, 33, 41, 56, 76, loi, AuTh^orJ^y! .44 ^'^.^^S: ^ ''' "'' Baudouin, Charles (and Environment, 35, 45, 83, Coue), ix, 43, 45, 55. 61, ^^^^^ ^f ^^^^^^ g^ ' Ethics (see Morals) Censor (and Sentinel), 21, Failure, 26, 46, 50, 62, 64, 25, 113 102, III, 161 Childhood, 39, 56, 71, 76, Faith, 36, 48, 56, 96, 115, 118 123, 142 Christian Science, 40 Faith-healing, 40, 78, 151 Church, 36, 40, 51, 88, 104, Fatigue, 36, 42, 114, 123, 126, 141, 151 164 Common sense, 18, 30, 38, Fear, 29, 32, 44, 56, 79, 116, 42, 95, III, 151, 165, 167 171 o . X Forgiveness, lOi, 103, 1 10, Community (see Society) 126, 128, 143 Complex, vii Freewill, 35 Confession, 40, 105, no Conflict, 24, 32, loi, 103, Habit (see Adaptability) 107, no, 127, 132 Harmony, 25, loi, 132, 134 Coue, Emile (see Bau- Hate, 33, 126 douin) Herd (see Instinct) Crowds, 55, 137, 159 Heredity, 35, 83, 131 Cure of Souls, no, 151 Holy Spirit, 36, 58, 69, n8. Curiosity, 29, 32 127, 149, 156 173 174 Index Homo-sexuality, 76, 93 Hope, 157 Hypnosis, 43, 64 Imagination, 61, 65 Imitation. 33, t,7, 55, 61, 85 Industry, 36, 166 Instinct, primary, ix, 29, 32, 75, 80, 83, 96, 109 religious, 88, 96 Self, 29, 32, 86, 90 Sex, 29, 2,2, 75- 80, 91 Social or herd, 2>2» 2>7, 45, 49, 80, 83, 157 Intuition, 42, 146 Irritability, 61, 66, 77, 107, 114 Jealousy, 33 Leadership, 29, 90 Liar, 77 Limitations, 42, 100, 151, 155 Lourdes, 40 Love, 29, 3i, 44, 88, 94, loi, 143 Luck, 65, 106 Lust, 33, 95 Mascot, 58 Meditation, 64, 67 Miracle, 117 Morals, morality, 42, 76, 157 Motive, 20, 26, 32, 91, 143 Nerves, nervous illness, etc., 25, 32, 56, 75, 107 New Nancy School, vii, 42 Observation, 17, 42, 54, 146, 165, 171 Parental Instinct, 95 Patriotism, 85 Penitence (see Repent- ance) Personality, 90, 144, 154 Physiology, 39, 154 Pig-headedness, 160 Politics, 37, 85 Power, 31, 35, 48, 71, 114, 143, 150, 155 Prayer, 53, 67, 105, no, 123, 126, 131, 143 Press, 37, 159, 169 Pride, 33, 80 Psycho-analysis, 31, 75, 81, 106, 107 Psycho-therapy, 39, 45, 78, 93, 136 Public opinion, 55, 74, 157, 159, 161 Public worship, 161 Pugnacity, 107 Purpose, 27, 29, 33, 83, 91, III, 133, 158 Recreation, 95, 170 Re-direction of energfy, 76, 82, 89, 93, 102, 169 Remorse, loi, 115 Repentance, 40, 82, 100 Repression, 23, 32, 75, 103, 105, 109, 127 Self-examination, 81, 104, 128 Selfishness, 49, 79, 86, 168 Sense of guilt, 102, 114, 143 Sentinel (see Censor) Service, 49, 84, 87, 133 Sex, 73 and see Instinct Shell-shock, 109 Sin, 72, 81, 149 Sinlessness, 117 Index 175 Society (and Community), Temperament, 25, 94, 146, 49, 84, 87, 98 155 Sub-conscious mind, 21, 27, Temptation, 76, 81, 119, 149 30, 36, 43, 64, 103 Sublimate, vii Suggestion, 20, 31, 42, 45, Will, 20, 33, 43, 60, 70, 76, 63, 120, 148, 158 100, 150 auto, 45, 59, 130 Worry, 57, 62, 105, in, hetero, 44, 136 1 14 Date Due ^ 1439 An 1 6 Mn :t4 . - . 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