raction
of mankind is what gave force to those earlier gospels. Exactly the
same adequacy holds in the case of the mind-cure message, foolish as it
may sound upon its surface; and seeing its rapid growth in influence,
and its therapeutic triumphs, one is tempted to ask whether it may not
be destined (probably by very reason of the crudity and extravagance of
many of its manifestations[53]) to play a part almost as great in the
evolution of the popular religion of the future as did those earlier
movements in their day.

[53] It remains to be seen whether the school of Mr. Dresser, which
assumes more and more the form of mind-cure experience and academic
philosophy mutually impregnating each other, will score the practical
triumphs of the less critical and rational sects.

But I here fear that I may begin to "jar upon the nerves" of some of
the members of this academic audience. Such contemporary vagaries, you
may think, should hardly take so large a place in dignified Gifford
lectures. I can only beseech you to have patience. The whole outcome
of these lectures will, I imagine, be the emphasizing to your mind of
the enormous diversities which the spiritual lives of different men
exhibit. Their wants, their susceptibilities, and their capacities all
vary and must be classed under different heads. The result is that we
have really different types of religious experience; and, seeking in
these lectures closer acquaintance with the healthy-minded type, we
must take it where we find it in most radical form. The psychology of
individual types of character has hardly begun even to be sketched as
yet--our lectures may possibly serve as a crumb-like contribution to
the structure. The first thing to bear in mind (especially if we
ourselves belong to the clerico-academic-scientific type, the
officially and conventionally "correct" type, "the deadly respectable"
type, for which to ignore others is a besetting temptation) is that
nothing can be more stupid than to bar out phenomena from our notice,
merely because we are incapable of taking part in anything like them
ourselves.

Now the history of Lutheran salvation by faith, of methodistic
conversions, and of what I call the mind-cure movement seems to prove
the existence of numerous persons in whom--at any rate at a certain
stage in their development--a change of character for the better, so
far from being facilitated by the rules laid down by official
moralists, wi