nsion of the
soul in laughter is, to however slight an extent, a religious
exercise.... Whenever an impulse from the world strikes against the
organism, and the resultant is not discomfort or pain, not even the
muscular contraction of strenuous manhood, but a joyous expansion or
aspiration of the whole soul--there is religion. It is the infinite for
which we hunger, and we ride gladly on every little wave that promises
to bear us towards it."[19]

[19] The New Spirit, p. 232.

But such a straight identification of religion with any and every form
of happiness leaves the essential peculiarity of religious happiness
out. The more commonplace happinesses which we get are "reliefs,"
occasioned by our momentary escapes from evils either experienced or
threatened. But in its most characteristic embodiments, religious
happiness is no mere feeling of escape. It cares no longer to escape.
It consents to the evil outwardly as a form of sacrifice--inwardly it
knows it to be permanently overcome. If you ask HOW religion thus falls
on the thorns and faces death, and in the very act annuls annihilation,
I cannot explain the matter, for it is religion's secret, and to
understand it you must yourself have been a religious man of the
extremer type. In our future examples, even of the simplest and
healthiest-minded type of religious consciousness, we shall find this
complex sacrificial constitution, in which a higher happiness holds a
lower unhappiness in check. In the Louvre there is a picture, by Guido
Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan's neck. The richness of
the picture is in large part due to the fiend's figure being there.
The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being
there--that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it,
SO LONG AS WE KEEP OUR FOOT UPON HIS NECK. In the religious
consciousness, that is just the position in which the fiend, the
negative or tragic principle, is found; and for that very reason the
religious consciousness is so rich from the emotional point of
view.[20] We shall see how in certain men and women it takes on a
monstrously ascetic form. There are saints who have literally fed on
the negative principle, on humiliation and privation, and the thought
of suffering and death--their souls growing in happiness just in
proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable. No other
emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass.
A