The Varieties of Religious Experience · Character

David Brainerd

The young missionary to the Delaware whose diary of self-laceration and longing became, for James, a pure specimen of religious melancholy and devotion.

supporting

Also known as David Brainerd, Brainerd, David

First appearance: lectures vi and vii the sick soul

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Brainerd's journal records a life consumed by longing for holiness and haunted by the sense of his own unworthiness — a man who could neither enjoy the world nor fully possess his God. James cites him as evidence that the most intense religious feeling often arrives through suffering rather than despite it, and that such a temperament, however painful, produces a devotion of unusual purity. His early death and the diary he left behind made him, for generations of evangelicals, the model of a soul wholly given over to invisible things.

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See David Brainerd in lectures vi and vii the sick soul