e bloody city! For though
the parliament had the minister one while, and the king another, and
much blood had been shed in the town during the wars between them, yet
there was no more than had befallen many other places. But afterwards
I came to understand, that in the Emperor Diocletian's time a thousand
Christians were martyr'd in Lichfield. So I was to go, without my
shoes, through the channel of their blood, and into the pool of their
blood in the market-place, that I might raise up the memorial of the
blood of those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years
before, and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was
upon me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord."

Bent as we are on studying religion's existential conditions, we cannot
possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject.

We must describe and name them just as if they occurred in
non-religious men. It is true that we instinctively recoil from seeing
an object to which our emotions and affections are committed handled by
the intellect as any other object is handled. The first thing the
intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else.
But any object that is infinitely important to us and awakens our
devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique.
Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it
could hear us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus
dispose of it. "I am no such thing, it would say; I am MYSELF, MYSELF
alone.

The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in which
the thing originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the actions and
appetites of men as if it were a question of lines, of planes, and of
solids." And elsewhere he remarks that he will consider our passions
and their properties with the same eye with which he looks on all other
natural things, since the consequences of our affections flow from
their nature with the same necessity as it results from the nature of a
triangle that its three angles should be equal to two right angles.
Similarly M. Taine, in the introduction to his history of English
literature, has written: "Whether facts be moral or physical, it makes
no matter. They always have their causes. There are causes for
ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular
movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and
sugar." When we read such procl