This Enchantment

“This enchantment,” James observes, “coming as a gift when it does come – a gift of our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God’s grace, the theologians say – is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word of command. Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject’s range of life. It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outer world disowns him, it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste.”