ith it, no matter how much their religious
enthusiasm declines."[142]

[142] Psychology of Religion, pp. 360, 357.

Lectures XI, XII, and XIII

SAINTLINESS

The last lecture left us in a state of expectancy. What may the
practical fruits for life have been, of such movingly happy conversions
as those we heard of? With this question the really important part of
our task opens, for you remember that we began all this empirical
inquiry not merely to open a curious chapter in the natural history of
human consciousness, but rather to attain a spiritual judgment as to
the total value and positive meaning of all the religious trouble and
happiness which we have seen. We must, therefore, first describe the
fruits of the religious life, and then we must judge them. This
divides our inquiry into two distinct parts. Let us without further
preamble proceed to the descriptive task.

It ought to be the pleasantest portion of our business in these
lectures. Some small pieces of it, it is true, may be painful, or may
show human nature in a pathetic light, but it will be mainly pleasant,
because the best fruits of religious experience are the best things
that history has to show. They have always been esteemed so; here if
anywhere is the genuinely strenuous life; and to call to mind a
succession of such examples as I have lately had to wander through,
though it has been only in the reading of them, is to feel encouraged
and uplifted and washed in better moral air.

The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to
which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown
for religious ideals. I can do no better than quote, as to this, some
remarks which Sainte-Beuve in his History of Port-Royal makes on the
results of conversion or the state of grace.

"Even from the purely human point of view," Sainte-Beuve says, "the
phenomenon of grace must still appear sufficiently extraordinary,
eminent, and rare, both in its nature and in its effects, to deserve a
closer study. For the soul arrives thereby at a certain fixed and
invincible state, a state which is genuinely heroic, and from out of
which the greatest deeds which it ever performs are executed. Through
all the different forms of communion, and all the diversity of the
means which help to produce this state, whether it be reached by a
jubilee, by a general confession, by a solitary prayer and effusion,
whatever in short to be the