As I write I have before me several hundred personal records which I have been accumulating for years and others made for me by members of other faculties, showing the acuteness of these struggles, 1 Methods of Manifesting the Instinct for Certainty. Fed. Sem., January, 1898, THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE which have led some, including three of my own students, to suicide, and upset more for years, which they count as lost or as years of mental obsession with permanent impairment of soul. In over seven hundred returns from young men religiously reared and in Protestant colleges, there were very few who had not wrestled with serious doubts of one or more of these or kindred religious inculcations of their parents. In healthy souls these struggles are in secret. Sometimes they are mild, and sometimes almost desperate. Often skepticism is ex- pressed and aggressive, but in the majority of cases the doubts are silent and often half-unconscious, even in men who outwardly conform to influences about them and perhaps actively cooperate in religious work. Sometimes protestations of faith are thus made vehement, and even attempted proof of a somewhat strident or falsetto nature may be a weapon against one's own doubts. The heinousness with which such scruples are still regarded in many academic and church centers has begotten a strange psychosis, and unpedagogic treatment of this has driven many of the best youth from religious associations and affixed a certain stigma to men of exceptional sincerity and candor. Happily this state of things is now steadily improving and, we may trust, will soon be past.
The Catholic Church at its best, with its voluminous pic- torial and ceremonial expressions of the religious sentiment, has certain advantage over the less objective Protestant cults at this stage, and our own returns amply prove that the re- ligious imagery of young Protestant children is more crude and pagan in form than that of Catholics..The rate and degree of progress from Rome toward reason, which fits the needs or measures the vigor of each soul, would with proper care and surroundings be no harder to insure than from the more fetishistic point of departure commonly found outside Catholicism. \\The ideal education of the religious nature, if we ever attain it, will involve as one important fac- tor much saturation of the juvenile fancy with the best cre- ations of the mythopeic imagination, coarse at first, but with increasing refinement with age, and progressive inferences from what each symbol, picture, tale, image, rite, or dogma says, to what it means, until the expanding mind has advanced just as far toward complete enfranchisement from all supersti- tion and doctrine, and in the substitution, point by point, of immanence for transcendence, as its own mental powers justify.^ I/ Children's religious conceptions should at least not be sys- ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 3J9 tematized or stereotyped, or growth will be checked. The Bible for childhood should be pure literature, with no trace of dogma. It is simply bad Bible pedagogy that makes children precocious and strident skeptics about the grand stories and miracles of Scripture, while tales from Homer, Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, and Dante maintain their sway over the heart, unchallenged by the callow intellect. The Bible moves, edifies, and shapes the soul, and we are content to leave it to expert scholars to inquire how much or how little historical validity it has; and, whatever their verdict, it will have little effect on our feelings or practical reaction to Scripture. The havoc that dogma has wrought in the religious nature and nurture of the young by regarding the Bible as a text-book of the- ology rather than a guide to life, as itself literally inspired rather than the most inspiring of books, is none the less dis- astrous because well meant. The very idea of orthodoxy of belief in this field or of formulated creed is ominous for youth. Theology at its best is an attempt to describe religious expe- riences, especially feelings and intuitions. The need of it arises when the latter are past and lapse into the domain of memory. When they are most vividly present they need no explanation, for they are not symbols of something else, but intrinsic and essential reality themselves. True religion cul- minates in youth, and doctrine is its substitute and memorial in maturity and old age. Youth has far more to teach in this field, if it only knew how, than it can learn from age. The sins of orthodoxy against youth were relatively unknown in ancient Greece or in ancient India, but are a peculiarity of Christian lands and centuries. But for this, youth has great facility in changing its ideas. Indeed, the reality and the rapture of growth and progress owe no small part of their vital heat to the combustion of wide acreages of errors and false beliefs that attend every step on the upward way of mental development, for mental health and longevity consist in a never-ending working over of the contents of conscious- ness.
We may dream of intuitive natures, like Schiller's " es- thetic souls," so ideally endowed and environed that they have acquired nothing they later need to abandon; but such a being is as much a psychological impossibility as the ideal 320 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE savage of Rousseau or St. Pierre. Natural selection among thought-forms, choosing the best and rejecting the worst, hold- ing at the same time many heterogeneous and even incon- sistent ideas with degrees of conviction differing up and down the long and complex scale of certainty, is most natural with girls, who rarely ever regret outgrown concepts, but leave them to slowly lapse down the scale; while it is chiefly boys who feel called to evict all they can not use, and sometimes to doubt their own doubts. This is the normal working of the mental mill at this age, and the grain will all be ground and bolted in whatever way best meets the needs of the individual life, if no admixture of the scrap-metal of dogma impair the machinery. Dead knowledge is simply useless and does not putrefy, but only desiccates and needs no scavenger, and, as long as it is not in the way, does not need ostentatious burial or cremation. Teachings that are likely to remain perma- nently alien and heteronomous, resting on externals, need not interfere with the development of a sphere of internal author- ity, unless the soul is very small. Probably all of us, even the dogmatist, is at once, despite himself, pagan, pantheist, agnos- tic, fetishist, and heretic generally, as well as Christian and believer. Like rudimentary organs, these views, while rep- resenting a lower stage, are the indispensable conditions of the unfoldment of the next higher. At best, it is all a question of prepotency and a safe working majority in the soul. MThus doubt is perhaps never exclusion or extinction of a belief, but a phenomenon of changing predominance and leadership among the psychic elements, and that often only for a certain function. Some of our many faculties are converted, and some are unreclaimed. The worst are good, perhaps exquisitely so in spots, and the best are unregenerate and depraved in part. We believe, but pray for help for our unbelief. More trouble here is due to inadequate ideas of what the soul really is than to meagerness of soul life, and hence is removable by appro- priating what psychology now has to teach.
But not only our ideas of soul but those0 of Bible need vast enlargement and radical reconstruction if we would know and serve youth aright. An ethnic and indigenous Bible is a product of the folk-soul as now studied by the higher an- thropology which seeks for primitive notions about funda- ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 321 mental problems. It originates in rules of organization and worship, traditions of the past, genealogies, songs, prophecies, and other expressions of what St. John calls the logos, Plato the muthos, Grote the nomos, and Maurice the etlws of a race. When this material shoots together, the psychic basis for a period of culture is laid and a spiritual cosmos begins, and of this same mother-lye theology is a crude intellectual formula- tion, and a truly natural philosophy is only a yet broader and more scientific expansion of it. No race ever flourished with- out its classics or Bible as the pabulum for its higher humanis- tic life. The people of modern Christendom have received their Bible from an alien stock, and are, therefore, peculiarly prone to bibliolatry and parasitic literalism, for the conception of an entirely ab-extra revelation only reflects its exogamous derivation. As it did not spring out of their own life and grow with their growth, its very grandeur predisposes to a superstitious reverence of it. It is a graft, and its intussuscep- tion requires a special and transpeciating act of mind and heart. Its position is therefore ethnologically unique, and it has long been and still is more or less encysted and unappro- priated.
It is, however, our great good fortune to live in an age when our Bible is being slowly re-revealed as the best utter- ance and reflex of the nature and needs of the soul of man, as his great text-book in psychology, dealing with him as a whole, body, mind, heart, and will, and all in the largest and deepest relation to nature and to his fellow man, which has been so misunderstood simply because it was so deeply divine. Now that its study is not confined to the Sunday-school and pulpit, but archeology, philosophy, comparative religion, criticism, and anthropology have shown it, part by part, myth, history, prophecy, song, and, above all, Christology, which is the heart of all, in a new and majestic light, there is a new hope that when all these studies have done their work and their results are duly certified and organized, we shall at last be able to minister to the religious needs of academic adolescence in a way that opens the door to a higher type of education and of man.
Our need is practical, perfectly plain in its general fea- tures, and indeed has already its historic prototypes. The 322 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Veda, e. g., is the Bible of India, and the Vedanta,1 or phi- losophy of India, means the end of the Veda, as metaphysics was for Aristotle the end of physics. All must pass the stage of discipleship to the Vedas before the higher Vedanta could be entered upon. Those who remained in the lower stage of apprenticeship were not scorned, nor were those who admired and devoted themselves to deeper study to purify faith from superstition and to develop its freest and deepest thought deemed heretics, or obliged to conceal their ideas in esoteric or in mystic guise. " It was recognized in India from very early times that the religion of a man can not be the same as that of a child." Yet the Upanishads, in which the Vedanta philosophy is embodied, although they do not recognize the gods of the Veda, and ignore and even reject parts of it, are regarded " as perfectly orthodox, nay, as the highest con- summation of the Brahmanic religion." It is in these that the needs of the well-trained and intellectually elite adolescent were provided for in this motherland of speculative philosophy thus blossomed and ripened naturally into science, and in- stead of conflict between them they were only different ex- pressions of essentially the same content. " There are still Brahmanic families," says Max Miiller, " in which the son, learns by heart the ancient hymns, and the father performs day by day his sacred duties and sacrifices, while the grand- father, even though remaining in the village, looks upon all ceremonies and sacrifices as vanity, sees even in the Vedic gods nothing but names of what he knows to be beyond all names, and seeks rest in the highest knowledge only, which has become to him the highest religion, viz., the Vedanta, the end and fulfilment of the whole Veda."
Despite its democratic character, which disfavors esoteric views, Christianity abounds in analogous tendencies. The very establishment of a ministry and priesthood, the ideals of all types and perfectionists and special consecrationists, sug- gests progressive stages of adeptness. " The Eternal Gospel," which described a third religious state to succeed the gospel as the definite law of humanity, which some regard as the most daring attempt at religious creation in the modern age, 1 The Vedanta Philosophy, by F. Max Miiller, p. 13 et seq.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 323 and which, though now lost in the original form, was em- bodied, Renan tells us, in the spirit of Assisi, whose life was a perpetual intoxication of divine love, " a prodigy of holiness, who made it a carnival, and was a genius of devotion/' was meant for a third dispensation of the spirit and to originate a higher religious life of both faith and practise.
Desjardins's Companions of the New Life represented a move- ment among French students which also pointed toward the realiza- tion of a kindred idea, and spread to Germany under the lead of Count Engedi. The Church must be converted and become as of old, a nurs- ery of love and liberty; the moral consciousness must become universal; an inner Christianity must be worked out with absolutely no dogma, at least at first, not even with theories, for then the whole catechism will creep in, nor yet with Atheism, which is often a faith held with passionate unction. About immortality we may feel as when " watching a diver — sure he will cotne up, but uncertain just when, where, and how." There are things more important than the divinity of Christ, or even the personality of God. Men must become true Jews, true Cath- olics, true Protestants, yes, true Buddhists, Confucians, etc., and that will bring to a deep sympathetic unity which will be the true Church universal. Starting with no creed but with an appeal to the natural du- ties of man, which are well-nigh forgotten in the declamation concern- ing his natural rights, the true faith must be slowly worked out by obedience to duty, and then religion, which began among savages as a cult quite apart from morals, will assume its rightful place as an unique form of the moral life, and not a form of science. Be pure in thought and life, be self-sacrificing, helpful to every nascent moral impulse around you, and doing good works with ardor, as the voca- tion of life, will reveal the doctrine. Be positive, not negative; re- nounce individualism, which is a cul-de-sac, always a means and never an end; be disinterested if not ascetic, in order to better culti- vate associations and solidarity; if we feel that while duty is noble, the chance is that it is not the most valid thing in the world, we shall, like too many gilded collegiate youth, combine sadness with badness, and the gloom will not be the romantic melancholy of Ober- mann, born of doubt about metaphysical reality, but the dim and perhaps unconscious sense that, so far as we are concerned, the development of the human race has ceased. If we are to escape this racial arrest and paralysis we must feel deeply that the future may be more than the past, but that it is not a " gift but a conquest." While Lotze was quite right that it was a doubtful service to seek to confer upon God the honor of demonstrating his existence rather than to leave him to that deeper region where not only reason but the whole soul clings to him as its supreme postulate, and while we may, with Mr. Fiske, almost imagine him praying to be saved from his friends, still the rational needs of academic youth are not finally met by the 324 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Neo-Christian movement, which having done a great service is now declining and its fine ethical spirit is giving way to new and refined forms of nature-worship in Austria, while the need of academic youth for gnosis as well as pistis is seen in the contemporary zest for re- ligious philosophy, and especially for psychology, which is slowly taking the place once held by theology as the intellectual expression of the religious instinct.
Thus the second religious need of academic adolescence could now be met by a concise, inspiring, and pedagogic use of the results of what may -perhaps best be termed the historical school of Bible study as founded by F. C. Baur. This move- ment, unlike English deism, French atheism, and German ra- tionalism, was originated by mature professors of theology and men of deep personal piety, Baur's own profoundly re- ligious and pastoral character making him the idol of his stu- dents and his sermons strangely edifying to all. This method simply applies to Scripture the same canons of criticism that are applied to all the other writings of antiquity. Arrested as the movement was by the death of its founder, discredited by the extreme and essentially unscholarly works of Strauss, Bruno Bauer, etc., and by the orthodox reaction which fol- lowed, it has nevertheless, Zeller tells us, convinced every impartial person under forty-five who has thoroughly studied it, and still points out the direction religious studies must take if Protestant theology is to hold a respectable place among other departments in universities. The religious life and be- lief of the young men here considered does not in fact, and never can, rest on miracles considered as interference with Nature's laws by a personal ab-extra deity; and the fear that either Testament would be less edifying if the supernatural elements were " allowed to quietly lapse from the Christian consciousness/' as Schleiermacher suggested, is as groundless as that of the Emperor Julian, that classical literature would be discredited if faith in ancient mythology were destroyed. Youth, most of all, needs this greatest of human documents, and needs to read it with absolute freedom and honesty of mind; and there is no danger but that the new light, already shining from it and yet to be revealed by their methods, will make the new to the old as astronomy to astrology, and will make young men not skeptics but apologists.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 325 The historic-critical school is now comparative, as almost every scientific department that deals with life must be (anatomy, physiology, psychology, philology, etc., as well as religion in some sense, for to know one is to know none). All the great religious themes, sin, sacrifice and atonement, regeneration, the soul, ideas of a future life, of a golden age past or future, theophany and revelation, the God-man, re- ligious duties, rites, ceremonies, etc., are found in most natural religions and can be traced through various stages of development, and when sympathetically presented from a copious storehouse of knowledge all this awakes an interest at the proper age, the depth of which nothing can surpass. When we see, too, what has been done in France since 1876 by M. Guimet with his now generously subsidized museum, with its library, two reviews, extensive collections and corre- spondence, and not only French but also indigenous pro- fessors expounding and illustrating in full regalia all their respective ceremonials, and when we see what a judicious pre- scription of the higher criticism in all its pleroma of new light and life can do and has done in many cases for a certain class of college men, every intelligent and sympathetic friend of youth will wish it a hearty, ungrudging, and reiterated God- speed. Heber Newton thought all the Bible should never have been translated, and no doubt many may be injured by this critical reillumination of it; but I can not say too earnestly that he who doubts its beneficence for those souls in need both lacks faith in the Word and has yet to learn the working of the divine pedagogos, as Clement of Alexandria was wont to call the Holy Ghost, that highest of all muses, in one of its most important ministrations.
Then comes the need of some religious philosophy. We may agree with Hatch and Arnold that this is an Hellenic rather than a Semitic element, but we must ask, with Renan, if we are not born to philosophize, for what are we born? The religious life and growth of thought might be almost said to consist in gradually transforming theological into psycho- logical ideas, as Greek transcendence is gradually replaced by the original Hebrew immanence. Thiel well says, " The sci- ence of religion is not a natural but a mental science," and it should be written over the door of every institution for 3^6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE higher religious education: " Let no one enter here who does not know psychology." Instead of the injunction of Neo- Christian ethics, " Judge with all your might," for what ought to be is more and higher than what is, we must philosophize with all our might. Ever since, in some remote age, psychic changes became more important than physical for evolution, the life of the soul has been more than that of the body, and man has been relatively more and more wretched if he failed to grasp the higher meaning of life, to give it a psychical exegesis, and to rise thereby to a loftier consciousness of the world.
No one has ever yet realized this so adequately as Schleiermacher, the greatest of all modern religious thinkers, who urged that religion was the highest expression of man's subjective states and the best hall-mark of their legitimacy. Even theology to him was not constitutive but regulative, and dogmas were but ancient shore-lines left by the tides of the many sounding seas of human instinct and feelings. Not the consciousness of freedom, which Hegel intellectually made the sole criterion by which to measure all human progress, but the feeling of absolute dependence upon the power at the heart of the universe was for him the psychic principle that strug- gles to expression in all myths, ceremonials, and doctrines, that made not only natural religion but Christianity natural, and was the only possible basis of complete and world- wide religious unity. He cared little to prove the facts of religion, but only the legitimacy of the psychic states they rep- resented. Theologies are forms of interpreting pious feelings, and religion is not theology nor yet ethics, but personal and experimental. Its forms are to it as the world to God. In- deed, to deny the objective truth of religious doctrine and history may bring religious feeling to purer expression. His deep Moravian fervor impelled him beyond even Plato to wor- ship the fathomless infinite with Spinoza, and to suspect that the entire universe of consciousness might be a mere allegory. We must follow only the most universal human interest. The different religions are only the one universal religion divested of its infinity, and all are one if regarded sub specie cetcr- nitatis. Every advance in science is increase of God's glory, and all things, when reduced to their last ground, end in the ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 327 sense of dependence, and help on man's spirit in its deep propulsive struggle toward the infinite. In fine, he says: " If man does not become one with the eternal in the immediate unity of his intuitive feelings, he remains forever separated from it in the derived unity of consciousness." This is the monism that is in philosophy what monotheism was of old, which asserts its supremacy above all dualism.
This movement, too, declined. Even its author reacted, as did the Zeitgeist, and neither psychology nor the religious consciousness of the age was sufficiently developed for it. Part of it went into Feuerbach's shallow reiterations that the- ology was only anthropology; part went into the affirmation of Theodore Parker, who was withal too predominantly negative and deficient in sympathy; and the rest went to seed in sterile and sentimental mysticism, so that Schleiermacher's early work seemed doomed to remain an unfinished window in Aladdin's tower. But with the new birth of psychology and sociology and the critical historical movement, many more special workers have lately resumed it. The psycho- logical basis of faith, of immortality, of sin, of inspiration, of prophecy, of conversion, many broader conceptions of the affectional nature that show not only the baser forms but the higher relations of the Platonic eros, with the Pauline charity and Jesus's profound postulate of love, and many others, al- ready give promise that in place of the too-Docetically appre- hended Christ, we shall before very long have a psychology of Jesus which will restore his sublime figure from the degrada- tion to which patristic metaphysics has so long banished him,