THE RELIGION OF HYSTERICS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4767, 3 July 1876, Page 3

THE RELIGION OF HYSTERICS.

(From the World.) The increase which, according to an official report published recently, there has_ been in the number o£ lunatics received into the asylums of Edinburgh, is attributed to the wave of Revivalism and the religious excitement which swept not long ago over that part of Scotland. The statement is at least suggestive. If religious feeling, carried to excess, can and does produce insanity, it becomes necessary to decide when the indulgence of it begins to be injurious. But a short time since, Messrs. Moody and Sankey nightly filled crowded halls with rapturous devotees, and the effect of these exciting performances was watched by psychological students with keen interest. Unfortunately the deductions they may have drawn have not yet been published to the world. What is it that attracts large audiences, and what are the results morally and physically ? Every one is aware of the electrical properties of an sssemblago of human beings ; there seems to run some subtle sympathy through the aggregate multitude which is utterly wanting to the solitary unit; the orator easily moves a crowd to sobs, tears, and frantic laughter by very simple means, though, using the same means, he would fail utterly with one lonely listener. When we talk of the audience being carried away by the speaker the expression is a just one ; they are carried away, and are thoroughly transported . out of themselves. Crowds do not reason ; they only feel. But because they do not reason is that therefore the best and truest sort of education which works through the emotions only ? Many writers have expatiated on the evils_ of an unlimited indulgence of the imagination ; some have compared it to a horse without a rider ; others to a devastating torrent; all have agreed to condemn it; yet Revivalist preachers, and the sacerdotalist who would fain graft an antiquated ceremonial upon the simplicity of the apostolic faith, rely for their success on such agencies alone. Bathetic descriptions of the sorrows of humanity ; harrowing narratives of sin and its eternal punishments ; voluptuous expatiations on the material rewards and the happiness of the blest ; sensual accompaniments of lights, music, and perfumes, the whole subtle influence of which on the brain is scarcely as yet fully recognised ; the aids of fasting, privations, and castigations, all combine to swell the long string of imaginative aids, and form the strains such people delight to harp on. An undue use of the emotions blunts the fine edge of the reasoning and intellectual powers, yet this is precisely the object aimed at. “Never mind what reason says ; only feel that you are saved/* is the dictum of the Evangelicals. “ By all means restore Church discipline,” is the watchword of the Ritualists. These latter aim indeed at very real power, yet the effect on their worshippers is but a phase of the emotions—nothing more —a sensational experience like any other “ intellectual dramdrinking,” as the Bishop of Manchester once aptly expressed it. Those who have seen the evils of revivals—the languor succeeding on such exhaustive sensations, the dulness and despondency as the glitter and glamour faded away ; people discovering they are in pretty much the same condition as before, only a few minds unhinged, a few families broken up from mistaken ideas of duty, as some of the shining converted lights have followed the preacher’s fortunes, otherwise the body of the population lying in the same state of ignorance and darkness as before, except for the additional effects of the reaction consequent on excitement; —those who have seen all this may well be tempted to share in the elder Mill’s hatred of everything that savored of enthusiasm. No doubt the enthusiasm of an apostle giving up his life and his energy to the .dissemination of what he believes to be the truth is a fine and stirring sight, but the enthusiasm of a crowd is mere bubble and froth. Our Lord to-day, Barrabas to-morrow, are equally the cry and the ijlol of

the hour. The sensation is passing, and the effects of it are not less transitory. With regard to revivals, it would appear to have escaped the notice of those worthy clergymen, both High and Low Church, who encourage them, that these religious manifestations plainly show how little need, as regards the masses, there is for a State Church. Followers of Moody and Sankey prefer to worship where there is a Spartan absence of luxury. Their luxury is spiritual, not material '. a music-hall or a barn is the same to them ; their preachers need not he consecrated ; their temples do not require to be set apart for sacred uses ; where two or three are gathered together they conduct their religious rites. Siinplicity is always pleasing, and possibly this is one reason why revivals and Methodist services find favor. But this is a matter distinct from the exuberant growth of the religion of emotion in the present day. The most poor and unlearned occasionally feel within them a longing for something better, a yearning for enjoyment superior to the material indulgences of a hard and grinding life. The rich, again, in this age of enervating luxury, demand that even religion should be highly spiced ; and many amongst educated women go out of their minds from a stimulating course of religion, just as the Turk dm® from an unlimited use of the “ hasheesh ! Mad doctors will tell you that almost all thenfemale patients are crazed on the subject of love or religion, the preponderance being on the side of the latter. Surely, if religion is indeed o valuable and a sacred thing, it ought not to be used to unhinge the splendid mechanism of the mind, and leave the little gray matter —that source of wonder even to Plato and the philosophers of old—to perform no better functions than a rabbit’s brain ? But, then, these religious enthusiasts, of whom there have been plenty ever since the world began, say men must be awakened from the sleep of death at any price. What ! is religious lunacy a more admirable thing than reason and sanity ? Minus perpetually worked on by a particular train of thought, perpetually stimulated and perpetually at high pressure, trying constantly to feel a degree of emotion of which our imperfect faculties are not capable, must lose the equilibrium which constitutes a well-regulated mind. Our Lord’s teachings were of a very different order. When people made to Him violent demonstrations of attachment or unworldliness, He calmly tested them by such sayings as, “ Sell all that thou hast, and give to the poor.” His own enthusiasm was the perfect serenity of faith and a good life. To sum up, no religion can be good that leads to lunacy, reason being the sole interlude between ourselves and the brute beasts. Far too much stress is laid in the present day upon a man’s feelings. Jeremy Taylor says, ,- A good life is the best way to understand wisdom and religion.” Religion being the science of God, what we feel is not the important part, but what is the truth. If religion is a science it must be governed by the laws of progress and enlightenment, and sustained by the fundamental principles of truth and order. The fact is true religion is of so subtle and delicate a nature that the ordinary vulgar mind cannot conceive it in its purity, and clothes it in the fleshly fancies of a grovelling mind. Madame de Montespan confessed and communicated regularly, conceiving that by thus, as it were, compounding for other sins she was free to follow the desires of her heart. How many converted sinners, whose reception has been matter of talk and congratulation in religious circles, have really persevered in good ways, and have not, while adopting the special phrases and cant expressions or observances of their own particular religious set, carried on their business or their pleasure exactly as they did before? Religion founded on mere impulses or states of feeling of necessity evaporates when brought into rude contact with the evils and the hardships of human existence; honest minds are apt to relapse into sheer negation, while indifferent and ill-balanced natures retain a veneer of sentiments which their whole life and modes of action belie. The sole use of religion is to give men a rational object of being better and higher than mere money-getting, and to point out the best way of attaining that object. The greater number of emotional enthusiasts care not to reason thus calmly; they usually surrender themselves, their thoughts and their free-will, to some spiritual guide whom it pleases them to erect into a demigod, and to whose dictates, whether right or wrong, they unquestioniugly bow. Especially is this the fact with women ; and in their case, being the weakest, the most sensitive, and by education the least logical, the results are naturally the most deplorable. The longing of the present day for inquiryrooms on the one hand, and the confessional on the other, is nothing but a very natural expression of weakness on the part of mankind, and of the easy desire to shift moral responsibility on to self-chosen monitors, warranted to govern their actions and decide for them those questions which ought fitly to be settled between God and a man’s soul alone. But the whole subject is well worthy of consideration. The influence of emotional religion in destroying the balance of reason ; the apparent craving entertained by the nation for more racy teaching than is supplied by the Church, and the implied uselessness of that institution herself, if she fail to carry out the purposes she was evidently instituted for ; the spread of luxury and self-indulgence even into the ordinances and principles of religion ; —all these are questions pregnant with meaning, and fraught with interest not only to this but to future generations. In the words of a great living writer, to whom such hysteric enthusiasm is hateful, religion “is a meek and blessed influence, stealing in as it were upon the heart; it comes quietly and without excitement ; it has no terror, no gloom in its approaches ; it does not rouse up the passions ; it is untrammelled by the creeds and unshadowed by the superstitions of man; . . it uplifts the spirit within us, until it is strong enough to overlook the shadows of our place of probation, and breaks, link after link, the chain that binds us to materiality.”