eking to discredit the
religious side of life.

Such a result is of course absolutely alien to my intention; and since
such a prejudice on your part would seriously obstruct the due effect
of much of what I have to relate, I will devote a few more words to the
point.

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life,
exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and
eccentric. I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who
follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be
Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammedan. His religion has been made for him
by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms
by imitation, and retained by habit. It would profit us little to
study this second-hand religious life. We must make search rather for
the original experiences which were the pattern-setters to all this
mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct. These experiences we
can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull
habit, but as an acute fever rather. But such individuals are
"geniuses" in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have
brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in the pages of
biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervous
instability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious
leaders have been subject to abnormal psychical visitations.
Invariably they have been creatures of exalted emotional sensibility.
Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during
a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to
obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into
trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of
peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. Often,
moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to
give them their religious authority and influence.

If you ask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is
furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he
founded is something which it is impossible to overpraise. In a day of
shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritual inwardness,
and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men
had ever known in England. So far as our Christian sects today are
evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the
position w