RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 August 1939, Page 6

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

AN AMERICAN'S OBSERVATIONS.

“The eyes of the soul are cleared by silence, by purity of heart, by personal humility, by self-discipline,” said Dr Elton Trueblood, an American Quaker, in delivering this year's Swarthmore lecture on the “Trustworthiness of Religious Experience." “Why should it be easier to know God than to understand the fine motions of a great composer,” he asked. “Why should we assume the need of careful discipline in order to understand Einstein and not assume an equally rigorous, though different, discipline in order to discern the mind responsible for the principle of which Einstein has had glimpses. Artistic creation is a matter of making visible or audible to others what the artist has already glimpsed in a non-sensory way. Physical things are known largely by sense perception, values by contemplation, and persons by sympathetic insight. Why make one the test of the others? Not only does the content of religious experience frequently run counter to what men have been taught to expect, but the experience itself sometimes comes to men when they least expect it. There is good reason to believe that congenital blindness does not occur in the life of the soirit.”