Some Cognitive Elements of Religious Experience

Boston: Gorham Press, 1917. First Edition (presumed; no prior editions or printings cited). Octavo in offwhite printed jacket and grey titled cloth Fine in very good(-) to good(+) jacket with edge chipping, now in archival mylar. . Hardcover.

Uncommon in jacket. Library of Religious Thought (series). A study in the psychology of religion by the Reverend Samuel Henry Forrer (1874–1972), a Presbyterian minister born in Luray, Virginia. Forrer trained at Transylvania College and graduated from its affiliated seminary, the College of the Bible in Lexington, in 1898. He went on to postgraduate work at Boston University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Princeton University, then served for ten years as pastor of Park Presbyterian Church in Erie, Pennsylvania, and for thirty years at Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church in Detroit. Written in the years after William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) had made religious experience a subject for empirical psychology, the work takes up its cognitive rather than emotional side. Forrer later became a benefactor of colleges in Kentucky and Florida, among them the Forrer Language Center he and his wife funded at a St. Petersburg college. His diaries and sermons are held by the University of South Florida Libraries