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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: you, I feel sure, knowing that numerous backslidings and relapses
take place, make of these their apperceiving mass for
interpreting the whole subject, and dismiss it with a pitying
smile at so much "hysterics." Psychologically, as well as
religiously, however, this is shallow. It misses the point of
serious interest, which is not so much the duration as the nature
and quality of these shiftings of character to higher levels.
Men lapse from every level--we need no statistics to tell us
that. Love is, for instance, well known not to be irrevocable,
yet, constant or inconstant, it reveals new flights and reaches
of ideality while it lasts. These revelations form its
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