and sacraments. One
may say that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has
consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached
to this crisis of self-surrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and
then to Calvinism; from that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of
technical Christianity altogether, to pure "liberalism" or
transcendental idealism, whether or not of the mind-cure type, taking
in the mediaeval mystics, the quietists, the pietists, and quakers by
the way, we can trace the stages of progress towards the idea of an
immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his
forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal apparatus or
propitiatory machinery.

Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point,
since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the
conscious individual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless
psychology, defining these forces as "subconscious," and speaking of
their effects, as due to "incubation," or "cerebration," implies that
they do not transcend the individual's personality; and herein she
diverges from Christian theology, which insists that they are direct
supernatural operations of the Deity. I propose to you that we do not
yet consider this divergence final, but leave the question for a while
in abeyance--continued inquiry may enable us to get rid of some of the
apparent discord.

Revert, then, for a moment more to the psychology of self-surrender.

When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness,
pent in to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently
inconsolable, and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that
he must stop his worry, break with his discontent, and give up his
anxiety, you seem to him to come with pure absurdities. The only
positive consciousness he has tells him that all is NOT well, and the
better way you offer sounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert
cold-blooded falsehoods. "The will to believe" cannot be stretched as
far as that. We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which
we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth
when our perception actively assures us of its opposite. The better
mind proposed to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation
of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation.

There are only two ways in which it is pos