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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
in ethical conflicts. Many people are strongly governed by the
ethical consciousness and take pleasure in wrestling with
ethical problems. Doubt assails them, as it does the intellectual
type, when living religion turns out to be something that eludes
their categories and formulations.
A characteristic form of religious doubt occurs in connection
with periods of emotional debility or lack of feeling that adults
experience from time to time, and most young people pass
through at certain stages of growth. These periods occur because
of psycho-physical disturbances probably due to structural
changes in the body; but the general lack of emotional tone
affects religious attitudes and interests as it does all others, and
when its causes are not recognised may produce undue distress
or anxiety.
Divergent emotions or tendencies whose presence is
experienced as inner disharmony can also occasion painful and
disturbing states of religious doubt. For example, when the
sexual impulses first become active their importunity makes
them seem more real than feelings attending religious experience,
with the result that young people think of themselves as sexual
beings and become embarrassed and ashamed at the apparent
unreality of their religious attitudes, accusing themselves
sometimes of hypocrisy, and suspecting their own sincerity.
More firmly grounded mental disharmonies are of course
fertile soil for the weeds of doubt to thrive in. Most young
people struggle painfully with their inability to overcome their
impulses and desires by the exercise of the moral will; and the
effect of these struggles often is to fix the sufferer’s attention on
his own ego and its deficiencies, with the consequence that the
validity of his religious experience is seriously questioned.
Complex-grounded Doubts
More mature religious people may also suffer from
complexgrounded doubt. The effect of psychological repressions is to
establish the individual in faulty and unhealthy attitudes
towards himself and other human beings. The bottled-up
energy of these affect-systems can drive the sufferer to forms of
behaviour that his conscious ego condemns. His peace of mind
is thus disturbed by a painful sense of hypocrisy and inward
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