though the parliament had the minister one while, and the king
another, and much blood had been shed in the town during the wars
between them, yet there was no more than had befallen many other
places. But afterwards I came to understand, that in the Emperor
Diocletian's time a thousand Christians were martyr'd in
Lichfield. So I was to go, without my shoes, through the
channel of their blood, and into the pool of their blood in the
market-place, that I might raise up the memorial of the blood of
those martyrs, which had been shed above a thousand years before,
and lay cold in their streets. So the sense of this blood was
upon me, and I obeyed the word of the Lord."

Bent as we are on studying religion's existential conditions, we
cannot possibly ignore these pathological aspects of the subject.

We must describe and name them just as if they occurred in
non-religious men. It is true that we instinctively recoil from
seeing an object to which our emotions and affections are
committed handled by the intellect as any other object is
handled. The first thing the intellect does with an object is to
class it along with something else. But any object that is
infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us
also as if it must be sui generis and unique. Probably a crab
would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear
us class it without ado or apology as a crustacean, and thus
dispose of it. "I am no such thing, it would say; I am MYSELF,
MYSELF alone.

The next thing the intellect does is to lay bare the causes in
which the thing originates. Spinoza says: "I will analyze the