obscurest the loneliest sufferer, with one proviso--that I know
it is His agency. I will love Him though He shed frost and
darkness on every way of mine." R. W. Emerson: Lectures and
Biographical Sketches, p. 188.



It is a good rule in physiology, when we are studying the meaning
of an organ, to ask after its most peculiar and characteristic
sort of performance, and to seek its office in that one of its
functions which no other organ can possibly exert. Surely the
same maxim holds good in our present quest. The essence of
religious experiences, the thing by which we finally must judge
them, must be that element or quality in them which we can meet
nowhere else. And such a quality will be of course most
prominent and easy to notice in those religious experiences which
are most one-sided, exaggerated, and intense.

Now when we compare these intenser experiences with the
experiences of tamer minds, so cool and reasonable that we are
tempted to call them philosophical rather than religious, we find
a character that is perfectly distinct. That character, it seems
to me, should be regarded as the practically important
differentia of religion for our purpose; and just what it is can
easily be brought out by comparing the mind of an abstractly
conceived Christian with that of a moralist similarly conceived.

A life is manly, stoical, moral, or philosophical, we say, in
proportion as it is less swayed by paltry personal considerations
and more by objective ends that call for energy, even though that