owerful, nor disease, no matter how
pronounced, can account for the religious idea. That has an entirely
separate and independent origin. This should be plain to anyone who has
but a merely casual acquaintance with the history of religion. It is,
however, a very different thing to enquire as to the part played in the
history of religion by morbid nervous states or perverted sexual
feeling. That is an enquiry both legitimate and desirable; and it is one
that promises to shed light on aspects of the subject otherwise very
obscure. And certainly, if so-called religious feelings do not admit of
explanation in terms of a scientific psychology, nothing remains but to
recognise religion as something quite apart from normal life, to hand
it over to the custody of word-spinning "Mystics," and so surrender all
possibility of a rational understanding of either its nature or its
history.

In saying what I have concerning the probability of misconception, I
have had specially in mind the attack made by the late Professor William
James on what he called the "medical materialists." In that remarkable
piece of religious yellow-journalism, _The Varieties of Religious
Experience_, Professor James says of those who take up the position that
a great deal of what has been accepted by the world as religious
inspiration or exaltation can be accounted for as the products of
disordered nervous states or perverted sexual feeling, "We are surely
all familiar in a general way with this method of discrediting states of
mind for which we have an antipathy. We all use it in some degree in
criticising persons whose states of mind we regard as overstrained. But
when other people criticise our own exalted soul-flights by calling them
'nothing but' expressions of our organic disposition, we feel outraged
and hurt, for we know that, whatever be our organism's peculiarities,
our mental states have their substantive value as revelations of the
living truth; and we wish that all this medical materialism could be
made to hold its tongue." Again, "Few conceptions are less instructive
than this re-interpretation of religion as perverted sexuality.... It is
true that in the vast collection of religious phenomena, some are
undisguisedly amatory--_e.g._ sex deities and obscene rites in
polytheism, and ecstatic feelings of union with the Saviour in a few
Christian Mystics. But then why not equally call religion an aberration
of the digestive functions, and prove on