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WILLIAM JAMES, The Varieties of Religious Experience. V 247 seventh heaven " and saw visions. Herein lies apparently for Prof. James the main interest of his " case ". He is quite justified in treating St. Paul from this point of view as one of a numerous class of religious enthusiasts, and yet in pleading that that fact does not necessarily prevent our regarding those visions of St. Paul as sources of real " revelation " for the world. But he hardly seems to contemplate the possibility of a point of view from which the highest religious importance and significance of St. Paul may be held to lie, not in the fact that he saw visions, but in the fact that he was so very unlike the majority of persons who at various periods of the world's history have seen visions. Those visions, however we explain them, were no doubt, at that time and place, a condition of St. Paul's exceptional religious influence, and yet St. Paul the thinker, the spiritualiser of Jewish Theology and the rationaliser of Jewish Ethics, may be much more important than St. Paul the ecstatic visionary. Without denying the religious value of the vision which formed the turning-point in St. Paul's life, the most remarkable thing about St. Paul was not so much that he spake with tongues more than his converts, but that (unlike them) he attributed comparatively little importance to them in comparison with the higher and more rational gift of " prophecy ". Prof. James's preoccupation with the marvellous and the abnormal almost inevitably conducts him to, if indeed it is not inspired by, a determination to find the essence of religion in feeling and emotion, and to belittle its rational or intellectual side. But it is with Prof. James's metaphysical or philosophical conclusions that we are chiefly concerned here. He puts to 1 himself the following questions : " First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously ? " And, second, ought we to consider the testimony true? " I will take up the first question first, and answer it in the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various reli- gions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It of two parts : "1. An uneasiness ; and "2. Its solution. " 1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. " 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrong- ness by making proper connexion with the higher powers." " The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better point of view, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage