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PASTORAL PSYCHOLOGY
condition depends upon the nature of the situation to which it
is a response.
For example, depression may be the outcrop of a false
religious attitude: the reaction of an essentially healthy personality
to a religiously morbid environment or conviction. Thus,
desire for completeness or perfection which, as a religious
aspiration, has constructive meaning, is very commonly
harnessed in the service of egotism and becomes a desire for
personal infallibility or self-sufficiency, expressing itself as
ambition; and just as there are people over-ambitious in
secular pursuits, there are many who are so in a religious sense.
They always stretch their bow too far and aim too high. They
think of perfection as a static condition of faultlessness which
they should be able to attain, but never can.
Religious depression is often a reaction to the failures that
people of this kind invite by their attempts to be more devout
or nobl: than they really are. The consciously pious often suffer
in this way. They estimate the value of the spiritual life by the
degree of strain or effort it entails rather than by its victories.
They believe that they continually fail, but they cannot bring
themselves to accept failure, and their refusal to acknowledge
their own limitations produces the depressions that assail them.
The best way to assist such people is to help them to live on
their own level and, by drawing their attention to the ambitions
concealed in their over-zealousness, to persuade them not to take
themselves so seriously. They must begin by being what they
truly are; only from this point of departure can they hope to
become—using that word in its strictest sense—what they want
to be.
Another form of religious depression that can be described as
normal is that which occurs as a reaction against the
overemphasis or over-stimulation of religious emotion. Many
religious people live altogether too intensively on their
sentiments. In some religious bodies this disposition is far too much
encouraged. Emotional fervour is deliberately stimulated both
in their forms of corporate worship and in the individual life of
their adherents. This is to be deplored. It is both artificial and
dangerous. A strong emotional release depletes the personality
and prepares the way for apathy and indifference. This is a
normal reaction in all realms of experience. After the shock of a
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