Eight Lectures on Yoga

YOGA FOR YELLOWBELLIES. THIRD LECTURE. Dear Children, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. 1. You will remember that last week our study of Yoga had led us to the Fathers of the Church. We saw that their philosophy and science, in following an independent route, had brought us to the famous exclamation of Tertullian: "certum est quia ineptum!" How right the Church has been to deny the authority of Reason! 2. We are almost tempted to enquire for a moment what the Church means by 'faith.' St. Paul tells us that faith is 'the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.' I do not think, then, that we are to imagine this word faith to mean what that lecherous gross-bellied boor, Martin Luther, maintained. The faith of which he speaks is anything but a substance, and as for evidence, it is nothing but the power, as the schoolboy said, of believing that which we know to be untrue. To have any sensible meaning at all, faith must mean experience, and that view is in exact accord with the conclusion to which we were led in my last lecture. Nothing is any use to us unless it be a certainty unshakeable by criticism of any kind, and there is only one thing in the universe which complies with these conditions: the direct experience of spiritual truth. Here, and here only, do we find a position in which the great religious minds of all times and all climes coincide. It is necessarily above dogma, because dogma consists of a collection of intellectual statements, each of which, and also its contradictory, can easily be disputed and overthrown. 3. You are probably aware that in the Society of Jesus the postulants are trained to debate on all these highly controversial subjects. They put up a young man to prove any startling blasphemy that happens to occur to them. And the more shocked the young man is, the better the training for his mind, and the better service will he give to the Society in the end; but only if his mind has been completely disabused of its confidence in its own rightness, or even in the possibility of being right. 4. The rationalist, in his shallow fashion, always contends that this training is the abnegation of mental freedom. On the contrary, it is the only way to obtain that freedom. In the same Society the training in obedience is based on a similar principle. The priest has to do what his Superior orders him—perinde ac cadaver. Protestants always represent that this is the most outrageous and indefensible tyranny. 'The poor devil,' they say, 'is bludgeoned into having no will of his own.' That is