ll take place all the more successfully if those rules be
exactly reversed. Official moralists advise us never to relax our
strenuousness. "Be vigilant, day and night," they adjure us; "hold
your passive tendencies in check; shrink from no effort; keep your will
like a bow always bent." But the persons I speak of find that all this
conscious effort leads to nothing but failure and vexation in their
hands, and only makes them twofold more the children of hell they were
before. The tense and voluntary attitude becomes in them an impossible
fever and torment. Their machinery refuses to run at all when the
bearings are made so hot and the belts so tight.

Under these circumstances the way to success, as vouched for by
innumerable authentic personal narrations, is by an anti-moralistic
method, by the "surrender" of which I spoke in my second lecture.
Passivity, not activity; relaxation, not intentness, should be now the
rule. Give up the feeling of responsibility, let go your hold, resign
the care of your destiny to higher powers, be genuinely indifferent as
to what becomes of it all, and you will find not only that you gain a
perfect inward relief, but often also, in addition, the particular
goods you sincerely thought you were renouncing. This is the salvation
through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology,
the passage into NOTHING of which Jacob Behmen writes. To get to it, a
critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one.
Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy;
and this event (as we shall abundantly see hereafter) is frequently
sudden and automatic, and leaves on the Subject an impression that he
has been wrought on by an external power.

Whatever its ultimate significance may prove to be, this is certainly
one fundamental form of human experience. Some say that the capacity or
incapacity for it is what divides the religious from the merely
moralistic character. With those who undergo it in its fullness, no
criticism avails to cast doubt on its reality. They KNOW; for they
have actually FELT the higher powers, in giving up the tension of their
personal will.

A story which revivalist preachers often tell is that of a man who
found himself at night slipping down the side of a precipice.

At last he caught a branch which stopped his fall, and remained
clinging to it in misery for hours. But finally his fingers had to
loose their hold, a