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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: York and Chicago, 1899, pp. 26, 36, abridged.
The older medicine used to speak of two ways, lysis and crisis,
one gradual, the other abrupt, in which one might recover from a
bodily disease. In the spiritual realm there are also two ways,
one gradual, the other sudden, in which inner unification may
occur. Tolstoy and Bunyan may again serve us as examples,
examples, as it happens, of the gradual way, though it must be
confessed at the outset that it is hard to follow these windings
of the hearts of others, and one feels that their words do not
reveal their total secret.
Howe'er this be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending questioning,
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