creative and ideals that are but pinings and regrets,
thus depends solely either on the amount of steam-pressure chronically
driving the character in the ideal direction, or on the amount of ideal
excitement transiently acquired. Given a certain amount of love,
indignation, generosity, magnanimity, admiration, loyalty, or
enthusiasm of self-surrender, the result is always the same. That
whole raft of cowardly obstructions, which in tame persons and dull
moods are sovereign impediments to action, sinks away at once. Our
conventionality,[147] our shyness, laziness, and stinginess, our
demands for precedent and permission, for guarantee and surety, our
small suspicions, timidities, despairs, where are they now? Severed
like cobwebs, broken like bubbles in the sun--

"Wo sind die Sorge nun und Noth
Die mich noch gestern wollt' erschlaffen?
Ich scham' mich dess' im Morgenroth."

The flood we are borne on rolls them so lightly under that their very
contact is unfelt. Set free of them, we float and soar and sing. This
auroral openness and uplift gives to all creative ideal levels a bright
and caroling quality, which is nowhere more marked than where the
controlling emotion is religious. "The true monk," writes an Italian
mystic, "takes nothing with him but his lyre."

[147] See the case on p. 69, above, where the writer describes his
experiences of communion with the Divine as consisting "merely in the
TEMPORARY OBLITERATION OF THE CONVENTIONALITIES which usually cover my
life."

We may now turn from these psychological generalities to those fruits
of the religious state which form the special subject of our present
lecture. The man who lives in his religious centre of personal energy,
and is actuated by spiritual enthusiasms, differs from his previous
carnal self in perfectly definite ways.

The new ardor which burns in his breast consumes in its glow the lower
"noes" which formerly beset him, and keeps him immune against infection
from the entire groveling portion of his nature. Magnanimities once
impossible are now easy; paltry conventionalities and mean incentives
once tyrannical hold no sway. The stone wall inside of him has fallen,
the hardness in his heart has broken down. The rest of us can, I
think, imagine this by recalling our state of feeling in those
temporary "melting moods" into which either the trials of real life, or
the theatre, or a novel sometimes throws us. Especially