In
this lecture we have to finish the subject of Conversion, considering at first
those striking instantaneous instances of which Saint Paul's is the most eminent,
and in which, often amid tremendous emotional excitement or perturbation of the
senses, a complete division is established in the twinkling of an eye between
the old life and the new. Conversion of this type is an important phase of religious
experience, owing to the part which it has played in Protestant theology, and
it behooves us to study it conscientiously on that account. I think I had
better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized
account. One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor Agassiz used
to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one's
previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in. I will go back,
then, to the case of our friend Henry Alline, and quote his report of the 26th
of March, 1775, on which his poor divided mind became unified for good
"As
I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamenting my miserable lost and undone
condition, and almost ready to sink under my burden, I thought I was in such a
miserable case as never any man was before. I returned to the house, and when
I got to the door, just as I was stepping off the threshold, the following impressions
came into my mind like a powerful but small still voice. You have been seeking,
praying, reforming, laboring, reading, hearing, and meditating, and what have
you done by it towards your salvation? Are you any nearer to conversion now than
when you first began? Are you any more prepared for heaven, or fitter to appear
before the impartial bar of God, than when you first began to seek?
"It brought
such conviction on me that I was obliged to say that I did not think I was one
step nearer than at first, but as much condemned, as much exposed, and as miserable
as before. I cried out within myself, O Lord God, I am lost, and if thou, O Lord,
dost not find out some new way, I know nothing of, I shall never be saved, for
the ways and methods I have prescribed to myself have all failed me, and I am
willing they should fail. O Lord, have mercy! O Lord, have mercy!"
"These
discoveries continued until I went into the house and sat down. After I sat down,
being all in confusion, like a drowning man that was just giving up to sink, and
almost in an agony, I turned very suddenly round in my chair, and seeing part
of an old Bible lying in one of the chairs, I caught hold of it in great haste;
and opening it without any premeditation, cast my eyes on the 38th Psalm, which
was the first time I ever saw the word of God: it took hold of me with such power
that it seemed to go through my whole soul, so that it seemed as if God was praying
in, with, and for me. About this time my father called the family to attend prayers;
I attended, but paid no regard to what he said in his prayer, but continued praying
in those words of the Psalm. Oh, help me, help me! cried I, thou Redeemer of souls,
and save me, or I am gone forever; thou canst this night, if thou pleasest, with
one drop of thy blood atone for my sins, and appease the wrath of an angry God.
At that instant of time when I gave all up to him to do with me as he pleased,
and was willing that God should rule over me at his pleasure, redeeming love broke
into my soul with repeated scriptures, with such power that my whole soul seemed
to be melted down with love; the burden of guilt and condemnation was gone, darkness
was expelled, my heart humbled and filled with gratitude, and my whole soul, that
was a few minutes ago groaning under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown
God for help, was now filled with immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith,
freed from the chains of death and darkness, and crying out, My Lord and my God;
thou art my rock and my fortress, my shield and my high tower, my life, my joy,
my present and my everlasting portion. Looking up, I thought I saw that same light
[he had on more than one previous occasion seen subjectively a bright blaze of
light], though it appeared different; and as soon as I saw it, the design was
opened to me, according to his promise, and I was obliged to cry out: Enough,
enough, O blessed God! The work of conversion, the change, and the manifestations
of it are no more disputable than that light which I see, or anything that ever
I saw.
"In the midst of all my joys, in less than half an hour after my soul
was set at liberty, the Lord discovered to me my labor in the ministry and call
to preach the gospel. I cried out, Amen, Lord, I'll go; send me, send me. I spent
the greatest part of the night in ecstasies of joy, praising and adoring the Ancient
of Days for his free and unbounded grace. After I had been so long in this transport
and heavenly frame that my nature seemed to require sleep, I thought to close
my eyes for a few moments; then the devil stepped in, and told me that if I went
to sleep, I should lose it all, and when I should awake in the morning I would
find it to be nothing but a fancy and delusion. I immediately cried out, O Lord
God, if I am deceived, undeceive me.
"I then closed my eyes for a few minutes,
and seemed to be refreshed with sleep; and when I awoke, the first inquiry was,
Where is my God? And in an instant of time, my soul seemed awake in and with God,
and surrounded by the arms of everlasting love. About sunrise I arose with joy
to relate to my parents what God had done for my soul, and declared to them the
miracle of God's unbounded grace. I took a Bible to show them the words that were
impressed by God on my soul the evening before; but when I came to open the Bible,
it appeared all new to me.
"I so longed to be useful in the cause of Christ,
in preaching the gospel, that it seemed as if I could not rest any longer, but
go I must and tell the wonders of redeeming love. I lost all taste for carnal
pleasures, and carnal company, and was enabled to forsake them." *
* Life
and Journals, Boston, 1806, pp. 31-40, abridged.
Young Mr. Alline, after the
briefest of delays, and with no book-learning but his Bible, and no teaching save
that of his own experience, became a Christian minister, and thenceforward his
life was fit to rank, for its austerity and single-mindedness, with that of the
most devoted saints. But happy as he became in his strenuous way, he never got
his taste for even the most innocent carnal pleasures back. We must class him,
like Bunyan and Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron of melancholy
left a permanent imprint. His redemption was into another universe than this mere
natural world, and life remained for him a sad and patient trial. Years later
we can find him making such an entry as this in his diary: "On Wednesday the 12th
I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding
carnal mirth."
The next case I will give is that of a correspondent of Professor
Leuba, printed in the latter's article, already cited, in vol. vi. of the American
Journal of Psychology. This subject was an Oxford graduate, the son of a clergyman,
and the story resembles in many points the classic case of Colonel Gardiner, which
everybody may be supposed to know. Here it is, somewhat abridged:
"Between
the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I never darkened the door of my
father's church, although I lived with him for eight years, making what money
I wanted by journalism, and spending it in high carousal with any one who would
sit with me and drink it away. So I lived, sometimes drunk for a week together,
and then a terrible repentance, and would not touch a drop for a whole month.
"In all this period, that is, up to thirty-three years of age, I never had
a desire to reform on religious grounds. But all my pangs were due to some terrible
remorse I used to feel after a heavy carousal, the remorse taking the shape of
regret after my folly in wasting my life in such a way- a man of superior talents
and education. This terrible remorse turned me gray in one night, and whenever
it came upon me I was perceptibly grayer the next morning. What I suffered in
this way is beyond the expression of words. It was hell-fire in all its most dreadful
tortures. Often did I vow that if I got over 'this time' I would reform. Alas,
in about three days I fully recovered, and was as happy as ever. So it went on
for years, but, with a physique like a rhinoceros, I always recovered, and as
long as I let drink alone, no man was as capable of enjoying life as I was.
"I was converted in my own bedroom in my father's rectory house at precisely three
o'clock in the afternoon of a hot July day (July 18, 1886). I was in perfect health,
having been off from the drink for nearly a month. I was in no way troubled about
my soul. In fact, God was not in my thoughts that day. A young lady friend sent
me a copy of Professor Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World, asking me
my opinion of it as a literary work only. Being proud of my critical talents and
wishing to enhance myself in my new friend's esteem, I took the book to my bedroom
for quiet, intending to give it a thorough study, and then write her what I thought
of it. It was here that God met me face to face, and I shall never forget the
meeting. 'He that hath the Son hath life eternal, he that hath not the Son hath
not life.' I had read this scores of times before, but this made all the difference.
I was now in God's presence and my attention was absolutely 'soldered' on to this
verse, and I was not allowed to proceed with the book till I had fairly considered
what these words really involved. Only then was I allowed to proceed, feeling
all the while that there was another being in my bedroom, though not seen by me.
The stillness was very marvelous, and I felt supremely happy. It was most unquestionably
shown me, in one second of time, that I had never touched the Eternal: and that
if I died then, I must inevitably be lost. I was undone. I knew it as well as
I now know I am saved. The Spirit of God showed it me in ineffable love; there
was no terror in it; I felt God's love so powerfully upon me that only a mighty
sorrow crept over me that I had lost all through my own folly and what was I to
do? What could I do? I did not repent even; God never asked me to repent. All
I felt was 'I am undone,' and God cannot help it, although he loves me. No fault
on the part of the Almighty. All the time I was supremely happy: I felt like a
little child before his father. I had done wrong, but my Father did not scold
me, but loved me most wondrously. Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to a certainty,
and being naturally of a brave disposition I did not quail under it, but deep
sorrow for the past, mixed with regret for what I had lost, took hold upon me,
and my soul thrilled within me to think it was all over. Then there crept in upon
me so gently, so lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it after
all? The old, old story over again, told in the simplest way: 'There is no name
under heaven whereby ye can be saved except that of the Lord Jesus Christ.' No
words were spoken to me; my soul seemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from
that hour to this, nearly nine years now, there has never been in my life one
doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father both worked upon me that afternoon
in July, both differently, and both in the most perfect love conceivable, and
I rejoiced there and then in a conversion so astounding that the whole village
heard of it in less than twenty-four hours.
"But a time of trouble was yet
to come. The day after my conversion I went into the hay-field to lend a hand
with the harvest, and not having made any promise to God to abstain or drink in
moderation only, I took too much and came home drunk. My poor sister was heart-broken;
and I felt ashamed of myself and got to my bedroom at once, where she followed
me, weeping copiously. She said I had been converted and fallen away instantly.
But although I was quite full of drink (not muddled, however), I knew that God's
work begun in me was not going to be wasted. About midday I made on my knees the
first prayer before God for twenty years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt
that was no good, for I would be sure to fall again. Well what did I do? I committed
myself to him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was going to be
destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was willing. In such a surrender
lies the secret of a holy life. From that hour drink has had no terrors for me:
I never touch it, never want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe: after being
a regular smoker from my twelfth year the desire for it went at once, and has
never returned. So with every known sin, the deliverance in each case being permanent
and complete. I have had no temptation since conversion, God seemingly having
shut out Satan from that course with me. He gets a free hand in other ways, but
never on sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all ownership in my own life,
he has guided me in a thousand ways, and has opened my path in a way almost incredible
to those who do not enjoy the blessing of a truly surrendered life."
So much
for our graduate of Oxford, in whom you notice the complete abolition of an ancient
appetite as one of the conversion's fruits.
The most curious record of sudden
conversion with which I am acquainted is that of M. Alphonse Ratisbonne, a freethinking
French Jew, to Catholicism, at Rome in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend,
written a few months later, the convert gives a palpitating account of the circumstances.
* The predisposing conditions appear to have been slight. He had an elder brother
who had been converted and was a Catholic priest. He was himself irreligious,
and nourished an antipathy to the apostate brother and generally to his 'cloth.'
Finding himself at Rome in his twenty-ninth year, he fell in with a French gentleman
who tried to make a proselyte of him, but who succeeded no farther after two or
three conversations than to get him to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal
round his neck, and to accept and read a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin.
M. Ratisbonne represents his own part in the conversations as having been of a
light and chaffing order; but he notes the fact that for some days he was unable
to banish the words of the prayer from his mind, and that the night before the
crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in the imagery of which a black cross with
no Christ upon it figured. Nevertheless, until noon of the next day he was free
in mind and spent the time in trivial conversations. I now give his own words.
* My quotations are made from an Italian translation of this letter in the
Biografia del Sig. M.A. Ratisbonne, Ferrara, 1843, which I have to thank Monsignore
D. O'Connell of Rome for bringing to my notice. I abridge the original.
"If
at this time any one had accosted me, saying: 'Alphonse, in a quarter of an hour
you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God and Saviour; you shall lie prostrate
with your face upon the ground in a humble church; you shall be smiting your breast
at the foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of Jesuits to
prepare yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your life for the Catholic
faith; you shall renounce the world and its pomps and pleasures; renounce your
fortune, your hopes, and if need be, your betrothed; the affections of your family,
the esteem of your friends, and your attachment to the Jewish people; you shall
have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his cross till death;'-
if, I say a prophet had come to me with such a prediction, I should have judged
that only one person could be more mad than he,- whosoever, namely, might believe
in the possibility of such senseless folly becoming true. And yet that folly is
at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.
"Coming out of the cafe I met
the carriage of Monsieur B. [the proselyting friend]. He stopped and invited me
in for a drive, but first asked me to wait for a few minutes whilst he attended
to some duty at the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of waiting in the
carriage, I entered the church myself to look at it. The church of San Andres
was poor, small and empty; I believe that I found myself there almost alone. No
work of art attracted my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its
interior without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only remember
an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning before me as I mused. In
an instant the dog had disappeared, the whole church had vanished, I no longer
saw anything,... or more truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone.
"Heavens,
how can I speak of it? Oh no! human words cannot attain to expressing the inexpressible.
Any description, however sublime it might be, could be but a profanation of the
unspeakable truth.
"I was there prostrate on the ground, bathed in my tears,
with my heart beside itself, when M.B. called me back to life. I could not reply
to the questions which followed from him one upon the other. But finally I took
the medal which I had on my breast, and with all the effusion of my soul I kissed
the image of the Virgin, radiant with grace, which it bore. Oh, indeed, it was
She! It was indeed She! [What he had seen had been a vision of the Virgin.]
"I did not know where I was: I did not know whether I was Alphonse or another.
I only felt myself changed and believed myself another me; I looked for myself
in myself and did not find myself. In the bottom of my soul I felt an explosion
of the most ardent joy; I could not speak; I had no wish to reveal what had happened.
But I felt something solemn and sacred within me which made me ask for a priest.
I was led to one; and there, alone, after he had given me the positive order,
I spoke as best I could, kneeling, and with my heart still trembling. I could
give no account to myself of the truth of which I had acquired a knowledge and
a faith. All that I can say is that in an instant the bandage had fallen from
my eyes; and not one bandage only, but the whole manifold of bandages in which
I had been brought up. One after another they rapidly disappeared, even as the
mud and ice disappear under the rays of the burning sun.
"I came out as from
a sepulchre, from an abyss of darkness; and I was living, perfectly living. But
I wept, for at the bottom of that gulf I saw the extreme of misery from which
I had been saved by an infinite mercy; and I shuddered at the sight of my iniquities,
stupefied, melted, overwhelmed with wonder and with gratitude. You may ask me
how I came to this new insight, for truly I had never opened a book of religion
nor even read a single page of the Bible, and the dogma of original sin is either
entirely denied or forgotten by the Hebrews of to-day, so that I had thought so
little about it that I doubt whether I ever knew its name. But how came I, then,
to this perception of it? I can answer nothing save this, that on entering that
church I was in darkness altogether, and on coming out of it I saw the fullness
of the light. I can explain the change no better than by the simile of a profound
sleep or the analogy of one born blind who should suddenly open his eyes to the
day. He sees, but cannot define the light which bathes him and by means of which
he sees the objects which excite his wonder. If we cannot explain physical light,
how can we explain the light which is the truth itself? And I think I remain within
the limits of veracity when I say that without having any knowledge of the letter
of religious doctrine, I now intuitively perceived its sense and spirit. Better
than if I saw them, I felt those hidden things; I felt them by the inexplicable
effects they produced in me. It all happened in my interior mind and those impressions,
more rapid than thought, shook my soul, revolved and turned it, as it were, in
another direction, towards other aims, by other paths. I express myself badly.
But do you wish, Lord, that I should inclose in poor and barren words sentiments
which the heart alone can understand?"
I might multiply cases almost indefinitely,
but these will suffice to show you how real, definite, and memorable an event
a sudden conversion may be to him who has the experience. Throughout the height
of it he undoubtedly seems to himself a passive spectator or undergoer of an astounding
process performed upon him from above. There is too much evidence of this for
any doubt of it to be possible. Theology, combining this fact with the doctrines
of election and grace, has concluded that the spirit of God is with us at these
dramatic moments in a peculiarly miraculous way, unlike what happens at any other
juncture of our lives. At that moment, it believes, an absolutely new nature is
breathed into us, and we become partakers of the very substance of the Deity.
That the conversion should be instantaneous seems called
for on this view, and the Moravian Protestants appear to have been the first to
see this logical consequence. The Methodists soon followed suit, practically if
not dogmatically, and a short time ere his death, John Wesley wrote:
"In London
alone I found 652 members of our Society who were exceeding clear in their experience,
and whose testimony I could see no reason to doubt. And every one of these (without
a single exception) has declared that his deliverance from sin was instantaneous;
that the change was wrought in a moment. Had half of these, or one third, or one
in twenty, declared it was gradually wrought in them, I should have believed this,
with regard to them, and thought that some were gradually sanctified and some
instantaneously. But as I have not found, in so long a space of time, a single
person speaking thus, I cannot but believe that sanctification is commonly, if
not always, an instantaneous work." Tyerman's Life of Wesley, i. 463.
All
this while the more usual sects of Protestantism have set no such store by instantaneous
conversion. For them as for the Catholic Church, Christ's blood, the sacraments,
and the individual's ordinary religious duties are practically supposed to suffice
to his salvation, even though no acute crisis of self-despair and surrender followed
by relief should be experienced. For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there
have been a crisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, not effectively received,
and Christ's sacrifice in so far forth is incomplete. Methodism surely here follows,
if not the healthier-minded, yet on the whole the profounder spiritual instinct.
The individual models which it has set up as typical and worthy of imitation are
not only the more interesting dramatically, but psychologically they have been
the more complete.
In the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain and America
we have, so to speak, the codified and stereotyped procedure to which this way
of thinking has led. In spite of the unquestionable fact that saints of the once-born
type exist, that there may be a gradual growth in holiness without a cataclysm;
in spite of the obvious leakage (as one may say) of much mere natural goodness
into the scheme of salvation; revivalism has always assumed that only its own
type of religious experience can be perfect; you must first be nailed on the cross
of natural despair and agony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be miraculously
released.
It is natural that those who personally have traversed such an experience
should carry away a feeling of its being a miracle rather than a natural process.
Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visions witnessed; automatic motor phenomena
occur; and it always seems, after the surrender of the personal will, as if an
extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense
of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant
as well to warrant one's belief in a radically new substantial nature.
"Conversion,"
writes the New England Puritan, Joseph Alleine," is not the putting in a patch
of holiness; but with the true convert holiness is woven into all his powers,
principles, and practice. The sincere Christian is quite a new fabric, from the
foundation to the top-stone. He is a new man, a new creature."
And Jonathan
Edwards says in the same strain: "Those gracious influences which are the effects
of the Spirit of God are altogether supernatural- are quite different from anything
that unregenerate men experience. They are what no improvement, or composition
of natural qualifications or principles will ever produce; because they not only
differ from what is natural, and from everything that natural men experience in
degree and circumstances, but also in kind, and are of a nature far more excellent.
From hence it follows that in gracious affections there are [also] new perceptions
and sensations entirely different in their nature and kind from anything experienced
by the [same] saints before they were sanctified.... The conceptions which the
saints have of the loveliness of God, and that kind of delight which they experience
in it, are quite peculiar, and entirely different from anything which a natural
man can possess, or of which he can form any proper notion."
And that such
a glorious transformation as this ought of necessity to be preceded by despair
is shown by Edwards in another passage.
"Surely it cannot be unreasonable,"
he says, "that before God delivers us from a state of sin and liability to everlasting
woe, he should give us some considerable sense of the evil from which he delivers
us, in order that we may know and feel the importance of salvation, and be enabled
to appreciate the value of what God is pleased to do for us. As those who are
saved are successively in two extremely different states first in a state of condemnation
and then in a state of justification and blessedness- and as God, in the salvation
of men, deals with them as rational and intelligent creatures, it appears agreeable
to this wisdom, that those who are saved should be made sensible of their Being,
in those two different states. In the first place, that they should be made sensible
of their state of condemnation; and afterwards, of their state of deliverance
and happiness."
Such quotations express sufficiently well for our purpose
the doctrinal interpretation of these changes. Whatever part suggestion and imitation
may have played in producing them in men and women in excited assemblies, they
have at any rate been in countless individual instances an original and unborrowed
experience. Were we writing the story of the mind from the purely natural-history
point of view, with no religious interest whatever, we should still have to write
down man's liability to sudden and complete conversion as one of his most curious
peculiarities.
What, now, must we ourselves think of this
question? Is an instantaneous conversion a miracle in which God is present as
he is present in no change of heart less strikingly abrupt? Are there two classes
of human beings, even among the apparently regenerate, of which the one class
really partakes of Christ's nature while the other merely seems to do so? Or,
on the contrary, may the whole phenomenon of regeneration; even in these startling
instantaneous examples, possibly be a strictly natural process, divine in its
fruits, of course, but in one case more and in another less so, and neither more
nor less divine in its mere causation and mechanism than any other process, high
or low, of man's interior life?
Before proceeding to answer this question,
I must ask you to listen to some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture,
I explained the shifting of men's centres of personal energy within them and the
lighting up of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomena as partly due
to explicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but as due largely also
to the subconscious incubation and maturing of motives deposited by the experiences
of life. When ripe, the results hatch out, or burst into flower. I have now to
speak of the subconscious region, in which such processes of flowering may occur,
in a somewhat less vague way. I only regret that my limits of time here force
me to be so short.
The expression 'field of consciousness' has but recently
come into vogue in the psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental
life which figured most was the single 'idea,' supposed to be a definitely outlined
thing. But at present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the actual
unit is more probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness
or field of objects present to the thought at any time; and, second, to see that
it is impossible to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness.
As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest, around
which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious fade to
a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are narrow fields
and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice, for we
then see masses of truth together, and often get glimpses of relations which we
divine rather than see, for they shoot beyond the field into still remoter regions
of objectivity, regions which we seem rather to be about to perceive than to perceive
actually. At other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue, our fields may narrow
almost to a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly oppressed and contracted.
Different individuals present constitutional differences in this matter of
width of field. Your great organizing geniuses are men with habitually vast fields
of mental vision, in which a whole programme of future operations will appear
dotted out at once, the rays shooting far ahead into definite directions of advance.
In common people there is never this magnificent inclusive view of a topic. They
stumble along, feeling their way, as it were, from point to point, and often stop
entirely. In certain diseased conditions consciousness is a mere spark, without
memory of the past or thought of the future, and with the present narrowed down
to some one simple emotion or sensation of the body.
The important fact which
this 'field' formula commemorates is the indetermination of the margin. Inattentively
realized as is the matter which the margin contains, it is nevertheless there,
and helps both to guide our behavior and to determine the next movement of our
attention. It lies around us like a 'magnetic field,' inside of which our centre
of energy turns like a compass-needle, as the present phase of consciousness alters
into its successor. Our whole past store of memories floats beyond this margin,
ready at a touch to come in; and the entire mass of residual powers, impulses,
and knowledges that constitute our empirical self stretches continuously beyond
it. So vaguely drawn are the outlines between what is actual and what is only
potential at any moment of our conscious life, that it is always hard to say of
certain mental elements whether we are conscious of them or not.
The ordinary
psychology, admitting fully the difficulty of tracing the marginal outline, has
nevertheless taken for granted, first, that all the consciousness the person now
has, be the same focal or marginal, inattentive or attentive, is there in the
'field' of the moment, all dim and impossible to assign as the latter's outline
may be; and, second, that what is absolutely extra-marginal is absolutely non-existent,
and cannot be a fact of consciousness at all.
And having reached this point,
I must now ask you to recall what I said in my last lecture about the subconscious
life. I said, as you may recollect, that those who first laid stress upon these
phenomena could not know the facts as we now know them. My first duty now is to
tell you what I meant by such a statement.
I cannot but
think that the most important step forward that has occurred
in psychology since I have been a student of that science is the discovery, first
made in 1886, that, in certain subjects at least, there is not only the consciousness
of the ordinary field, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition thereto
in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts, and feelings which are extra-marginal
and outside of the primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed as
conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their presence by unmistakable signs.
I call this the most important step forward because, unlike the other advances
which psychology has made, this discovery has revealed to us an entirely unsuspected
peculiarity in the constitution of human nature. No other step forward which psychology
has made can proffer any such claim as this.
In particular this discovery
of a consciousness existing beyond the field, or subliminally as Mr. Myers terms
it, casts light on many phenomena of religious biography. That is why I have to
advert to it now, although it is naturally impossible for me in this place to
give you any account of the evidence on which the admission of such a consciousness
is based. You will find it set forth in many recent books, Binet's Alterations
of Personality * being perhaps as good a one as any to recommend.
* Published
in the International Scientific Series.
The human material on which the demonstration
has been made has so far been rather limited and, in part at least, eccentric,
consisting of unusually suggestible hypnotic subjects, and of hysteric patients.
Yet the elementary mechanisms of our life are presumably so uniform that what
is shown to be true in a marked degree of some persons is probably true in some
degree of all, and may in a few be true in an extraordinarily high degree.
The most important consequence of having a strongly developed ultra-marginal life
of this sort is that one's ordinary fields of consciousness are liable to incursions
from it of which the subject does not guess the source, and which, therefore,
take for him the form of unaccountable impulses to act, or inhibitions of action,
of obsessive ideas, or even of hallucinations of sight or hearing. The impulses
may take the direction of automatic speech or writing, the meaning of which the
subject himself may not understand even while he utters it; and generalizing this
phenomenon, Mr. Myers has given the name of automatism, sensory or motor, emotional
or intellectual, to this whole sphere of effects due to 'uprushes' into the ordinary
consciousness of energies originating in the subliminal parts of the mind.
The simplest instance of an automatism is the phenomenon of post-hypnotic suggestion,
so-called. You give to a hypnotized subject, adequately susceptible, an order
to perform some designated act- usual or eccentric, it makes no difference- after
he wakes from his hypnotic sleep. Punctually, when the signal comes or the time
elapses upon which you have told him that the act must ensue, he performs it;
- but in so doing he has no recollection of your suggestion, and he always trumps
up an improvised pretext for his behavior if the act be of an eccentric kind.
It may even be suggested to a subject to have a vision or to hear a voice at a
certain interval after waking, and when the time comes the vision is seen or the
voice heard, with no inkling on the subject's part of its source. In the wonderful
explorations by Binet, Janet, Breuer, Freud, Mason, Prince, and others, of the
subliminal consciousness of patients with hysteria, we have revealed to us whole
systems of underground life, in the shape of memories of a painful sort which
lead a parasitic existence, buried outside of the primary field of consciousness,
and making irruptions thereinto with hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses
of feeling and of motion, and the whole procession of symptoms of hysteric disease
of body and of mind. Alter or abolish by suggestion these subconscious memories,
and the patient immediately gets well. His symptoms were automatisms, in Mr. Myers's
sense of the word. These clinical records sound like fairy-tales when one first
reads them, yet it is impossible to doubt their accuracy; and, the path having
been once opened by these first observers, similar observations have been made
elsewhere. They throw, as I said, a wholly new light upon our natural constitution.
And it seems to me that they make a farther step inevitable. Interpreting
the unknown after the analogy of the known, it seems to me that hereafter, wherever
we meet with a phenomenon of automatism, be it motor impulses, or obsessive idea,
or unaccountable caprice, or delusion, or hallucination, we are bound first of
all to make search whether it be not an explosion, into the fields of ordinary
consciousness, of ideas elaborated outside of those fields in subliminal regions
of the mind. We should look, therefore, for its source in the Subject's subconscious
life. In the hypnotic cases, we ourselves create the source by our suggestion,
so we know it directly. In the hysteric cases, the lost memories which are the
source have to be extracted from the patient's Subliminal by a number of ingenious
methods, for an account of which you must consult the books. In other pathological
cases, insane delusions, for example, or psychopathic obsessions, the source is
yet to seek, but by analogy it also should be in subliminal regions which improvements
in our methods may yet conceivably put on tap. There lies the mechanism logically
to be assumed,- but the assumption involves a vast program of work to be done
in the way of verification, in which the religious experiences of man must play
their part. *
* The reader will here please notice that in my exclusive reliance
in the last lecture on the subconscious 'incubation' of motives deposited by a
growing experience, I followed the method of employing accepted principles of
explanation as far as one can. The subliminal region, whatever else it may be,
is at any rate a place now admitted by psychologists to exist for the accumulation
of vestiges of sensible experience (whether inattentively or attentively registered),
and for their elaboration according to ordinary psychological or logical laws
into results that end by attaining such a 'tension' that they may at times enter
consciousness with something like a burst. It thus is 'scientific' to interpret
all otherwise unaccountable invasive alterations of consciousness as results of
the tension of subliminal memories reaching the bursting-point. But candor obliges
me to confess that there are occasional bursts into consciousness of results of
which it is not easy to demonstrate any prolonged subconscious incubation. Some
of the cages I used to illustrate the sense of presence of the unseen in Lecture
III were of this order; and we shall see other experiences of the kind when we
come to the subject of mysticism. The case of Mr. Bradley, that of M. Ratisbonne,
possibly that of Colonel Gardiner, possibly that of Saint Paul, might not be so
easily explained in this simple way. The result, then, would have to be ascribed
either to a merely physiological nerve storm, a 'discharging lesion' like that
of epilepsy; or, in case it were useful and rational, as in the two latter cases
named, to some more mystical or theological hypothesis. I make this remark in
order that the reader may realize that the subject is really complex. But I shall
keep myself as far as possible at present to the more 'scientific' view; and only
as the plot thickens in subsequent lectures shall I consider the question of its
absolute sufficiency as an explanation of all the facts. That subconscious incubation
explains a great number of them, there can be no doubt.
And
thus I return to our own specific subject of instantaneous conversions. You
remember the cases of Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and the graduate of Oxford converted
at three in the afternoon. Similar occurrences abound, some with and some without
luminous visions, all with a sense of astonished happiness, and of being wrought
on by a higher control. If, abstracting altogether from the question of their
value for the future spiritual life of the individual, we take them on their psychological
side exclusively, so many peculiarities in them remind us of what we find outside
of conversion that we are tempted to class them along with other automatisms,
and to suspect that what makes the difference between a sudden and a gradual convert
is not necessarily the presence of divine miracle in the care of one and of something
less divine in that of the other, but rather a simple psychological peculiarity,
the fact, namely, that in the recipient of the more instantaneous grace we have
one of those Subjects who are in possession of a large region in which mental
work can go on subliminally, and from which invasive experiences, abruptly upsetting
the equilibrium of the primary consciousness, may come.
I do
not see why Methodists need object to such a view. Pray go back and recollect
one of the conclusions to which I sought to lead you in my very first lecture.
You may remember how I there argued against the notion that the worth of a thing
can be decided by its origin. Our spiritual judgment, I said, our opinion of the
significance and value of a human event or condition, must be decided on empirical
grounds exclusively. If the fruits for life of the state of conversion are good,
we ought to idealize and venerate it, even though it be a piece of natural psychology;
if not, we ought to make short work with it, no matter what supernatural being
may have infused it.
Well, how is it with these fruits? If we except the class
of preeminent saints of whom the names illumine history, and consider only the
usual run of 'saints,' the shopkeeping church-members and ordinary youthful or
middle-aged recipients of instantaneous conversion, whether at revivals or in
the spontaneous course of methodistic, growth, you will probably agree that no
splendor worthy of a wholly supernatural creature fulgurates from them, or sets
them apart from the mortals who have never experienced that favor. Were it true
that a suddenly converted man as such is, as Edwards says, * of an entirely different
kind from a natural man, partaking as he does directly of Christ's substance,
there surely ought to be some exquisite class-mark, some distinctive radiance
attaching even to the lowliest specimen of this genus, to which no one of us could
remain insensible, and which, so far as it went, would prove him more excellent
than ever the most highly gifted among mere natural men. But notoriously there
is no such radiance. Converted men as a class are indistinguishable from natural
men; some natural men even excel some converted men in their fruits; and no one
ignorant of doctrinal theology could guess by mere every-day inspection of the
'accidents' of the two groups of persons before him, that their substance differed
as much as divine differs from human substance.
* Edwards says elsewhere:
"I am bold to say that the work of God in the conversion of one soul, considered
together with the source, foundation, and purchase of it, and also the benefit,
end, and eternal issue of it, is a more glorious work of God than the creation
of the whole material universe."
The believers in the non-natural
character of sudden conversion have had practically to admit that there is no
unmistakable class-mark distinctive of all true converts. The super-normal incidents,
such as voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly
presented scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected
with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be counterfeited
by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only
in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart,
the love of self eradicated. And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in
those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity altogether.
Throughout Jonathan Edwards's admirably rich and delicate description of the
supernaturally infused condition, in his Treatise on Religious Affections, there
is not one decisive trait, not one mark, that unmistakably parts it off from what
may possibly be only an exceptionally high degree of natural goodness. In fact,
one could hardly read a clearer argument than this book unwittingly offers in
favor of the thesis that no chasm exists between the orders of human excellence,
but that here as elsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, and generation
and regeneration are matters of degree.
All which denial of two objective
classes of human beings separated by a chasm must not leave us blind to the extraordinary
momentousness of the fact of his conversion to the individual himself who gets
converted. There are higher and lower limits of possibility set to each personal
life. If a flood but goes above one's head, its absolute elevation becomes a matter
of small importance; and when we touch our own upper limit and live in our own
highest centre of energy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how much higher
some one else's centre may be. A small man's salvation will always be a great
salvation and the greatest of all facts for him, and we should remember this when
the fruits of our ordinary evangelicism look discouraging. Who knows how much
less ideal still the lives of these spiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps
and Stigginses, might have been, if such poor grace as they have received had
never touched them at all? *
* Emerson writes: "When we see a soul whose acts
are regal, graceful, and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things
can be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say: Crump is a better man,
with his grunting resistance to all his native devils." True enough. Yet Crump
may really be the better Crump, for his inner discords and second birth; and your
once-born 'regal' character, though indeed always better than poor Crump, may
fall far short of what he individually might be had he only some Crump-like capacity
for compunction over his own peculiar diabolisms, graceful and pleasant and invariably
gentlemanly as these may be.
If we roughly arrange human
beings in classes, each class standing for a grade of spiritual excellence, I
believe we shall find natural men and converts both sudden and gradual in all
the classes. The forms which regenerative change effects have, then, no general
spiritual significance, but only a psychological significance. We have seen how
Starbuck's laborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinary
spiritual growth. Another American psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe, * has analyzed
the cases of seventy-seven converts or ex-candidates for conversion, known to
him, and the results strikingly confirm the view that sudden conversion is connected
with the possession of an active subliminal self. Examining his subjects with
reference to their hypnotic sensibility and to such automatisms as hypnagogic
hallucinations, odd impulses, religious dreams about the time of their conversion,
etc., he found these relatively much more frequent in the group of converts whose
transformation had been 'striking,' 'striking' transformation being defined as
a change which, though not necessarily instantaneous, seems to the subject of
it to be distinctly different from a process of growth, however rapid." *(2) Candidates
for conversion at revivals are, as you know, often disappointed: they experience
nothing striking. Professor Coe had a number of persons of this class among his
seventy-seven subjects, and they almost all, when tested by hypnotism, proved
to belong to a subclass which he calls 'spontaneous,' that is, fertile in self-suggestions,
as distinguished from a 'passive' subclass, to which most of the subjects of striking
transformation belonged. His inference is that self-suggestion of impossibility
had prevented the influence upon these persons of an environment which, on the
more 'passive' subjects, had easily brought forth the effects they looked for.
Sharp distinctions are difficult in these regions, and Professor Coe's numbers
are small. But his methods were careful and the results tally with what one might
expect; and they seem, on the whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which
is that if you should expose to a converting influence a subject in whom three
factors unite: first, pronounced emotional sensibility; second, tendency to automatisms;
and third, suggestibility of the passive type; you might then safely predict the
result: there would be a sudden conversion, a transformation of the striking kind.
* In his book, The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900.
*(2) Op. cit., p. 112.
Does this temperamental origin diminish the significance of the sudden conversion
when it has occurred? Not in the least, as Professor Coe well says; for "the ultimate
test of religious values is nothing psychological, nothing definable in terms
of how it happens, but something ethical, definable only in terms of what is attained."
*
* Op. cit., p. 144.
As we proceed farther in our inquiry
we shall see that what is attained is often an altogether new level of spiritual
vitality, a relatively heroic level, in which impossible things have become possible,
and new energies and endurances are shown. The personality is changed, the man
is born anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the
particular shape to his metamorphosis. 'Sanctification' is the technical name
of this result; and erelong examples of it shall be brought before you. In this
lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on the assurance and peace which
fill the hour of change itself.
One word more, though, before
proceeding to that point, lest the final purpose of my explanation of suddenness
by subliminal activity be misunderstood. I do indeed believe that if the Subject
have no liability to such subconscious activity, or if his conscious fields have
a hard rind of a margin that resists incursions from beyond it, his conversion
must be gradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growth into new habits.
His possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or pervious margin,
is thus a conditio sine qua non of the Subject's becoming converted in the instantaneous
way. But if you, being orthodox Christians, ask me as a psychologist whether the
reference of a phenomenon to a subliminal self does not exclude the notion of
the direct presence of the Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist
I do not see why it necessarily should. The lower manifestations of the Subliminal,
indeed, fall within the resources of the personal subject: his ordinary sense-material,
inattentively taken in and subconsciously remembered and combined, will account
for all his usual automatisms. But just as our primary wide-awake consciousness
throws open our senses to the touch of things material, so it is logically conceivable
that if there be higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological
condition of their doing so might be our possession of a subconscious region which
alone should yield access to them. The hubbub of the waking life might close a
door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.
Thus that perception
of external control which is so essential a feature in conversion might, in some
cases at any rate, be interpreted as the orthodox interpret it: forces transcending
the finite individual might impress him, on condition of his being what we may
call a subliminal human specimen. But in any case the value of these forces would
have to be determined by their effects, and the mere fact of their transcendency
would of itself establish no presumption that they were more divine than diabolical.
I confess that this is the way in which I should rather see the topic left
lying in your minds until I come to a much later lecture, when I hope once more
to gather these dropped threads together into more definitive conclusions. The
notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not at this point of our inquiry
to be held to exclude all notion of a higher penetration. If there be higher powers
able to impress us, they may get access to us only through the subliminal door.
Let us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the
hour of the conversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this sense
of higher control. It is not always, but it is very often present. We saw examples
of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. The need of such a higher controlling
agency is well expressed in the short reference which the eminent French Protestant
Adolphe Monod makes to the crisis of his own conversion. It was at Naples in his
early manhood, in the summer of 1827.
"My sadness," he says, "was without
limit, and having got entire possession of me, it filled my life from the most
indifferent external acts to the most secret thoughts, and corrupted at their
source my feelings, my judgment, and my happiness. It was then that I saw that
to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my reason and my will, which were
themselves diseased, would be to act like a blind man who should pretend to correct
one of his eyes by the aid of the other equally blind one. I had then no resource
save in some influence from without. I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost;
and what the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing
home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the first time
in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs
of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action, capable of
giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and exerted on me by a God as
truly master of my heart as he is of the rest of nature. Renouncing then all merit,
all strength, abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other
title to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw myself on my
knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life. From this day onwards a new
interior life began for me: not that my melancholy had disappeared, but it had
lost its sting. Hope had entered into my heart, and once entered on the path.
the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little
by little did the rest." *
* I piece together a quotation made by W. Monod,
in his book la Vie, and a letter printed in the work: Adolphe Monod: I., Souvenirs
de sa Vie, 1885, p. 433.
It is needless to remind you once more of the admirable
congruity of Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such
experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously is can do
absolutely nothing. It is completely bankrupt and without resource, and no works
it can accomplish will avail. Redemption from such subjective conditions must
be a free gift or nothing, and grace through Christ's accomplished sacrifice is
such a gift.
"God," says Luther, "is the God of the humble, the miserable,
the oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to nothing;
and his nature is to give sight to the blind, to comfort the broken-hearted, to
justify sinners, to save the very desperate and damned. Now that pernicious and
pestilent opinion of man's own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean,
miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come to
his own natural and proper work. Therefore God must take this maul in hand (the
law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence,
that she may so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn
and damned. But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and cast
down, he is so little able to raise himself up again and say, 'Now I am bruised
and afflicted enough; now is the time of grace; now is the time to hear Christ.'
The foolishness of man's heart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself
more laws to satisfy his conscience. 'If I live,' saith he, 'I will amend my life:
I will do this, I will do that.' But here, except thou do the quite contrary,
except thou send Moses away with his law, and in these terrors and this anguish
lay hold upon Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation. Thy cowl, thy
shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works, thy merits?
what shall all these do? what shall the law of Moses avail? If I, wretched and
damnable sinner, through works or merits could have loved the Son of God, and
so come to him, what needed be to deliver himself for me? If I, being a wretch
and damned sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son of
God to be given? But because there was no other price, therefore he delivered
neither sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but even God himself, entirely and wholly
'for me,' even 'for me,' I say, a miserable, wretched sinner. Now, therefore,
I take comfort and apply this to myself. And this manner of applying is the very
true force and power of faith. For he died not to justify the righteous, but the
un-righteous, and to make them the children of God." *
* Commentary on Galatians,
ch. iii. verse 19, and ch. ii. verse 20, abridged.
That is,
the more literally lost you are, the more literally you are the very being
whom Christ's sacrifice has already saved. Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine,
has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as this message from Luther's personal
experience. As Protestants are not all sick souls, of course reliance on what
Luther exults in calling the dung of one's merits, the filthy puddle of one's
own righteousness, has come to the front again in their religion; but the adequacy
of his view of Christianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure
is shown by its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and quickening thing.
Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luther meant
by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually conceived of. But this
is only one part of Luther's faith, the other part being far more vital. This
other part is something not intellectual but immediate and intuitive, the assurance,
namely, that I, this individual I, just as I stand, without one plea, etc., am
saved now and forever. *
* In some conversions, both steps are distinct; in
this one, for example:
"Whilst I was reading the evangelical treaties, I was
soon struck by an expression: 'the finished work of Christ.' 'Why,' I asked of
myself, 'does the author use these terms? Why does he not say "the atoning work"?
Then these words, 'It is finished,' presented themselves to my mind. 'What is
it that is finished?' I asked, and in an instant my mind replied: 'A perfect expiation
for sin; entire satisfaction has been given; the debt has been paid by the Substitute.
Christ has died for our sins; not for ours only, but for those of all men. If,
then, the entire work is finished, all the debt paid, what remains for me to do?'
In another instant the light was shed through my mind by the Holy Ghost, and the
joyous conviction was given me that nothing more was to be done, save to fall
on my knees, to accept this Saviour and his love, to praise God forever." Autobiography
of Hudson Taylor. I translate back into English from the French translation of
Challand (Geneva, no date), the original not being accessible.
Professor
Leuba is undoubtedly right in contending that the conceptual belief about
Christ's work, although so often efficacious and antecedent, is really accessory
and nonessential, and that the 'joyous conviction' can also come by far other
channels than this conception. It is to the joyous conviction itself, the assurance
that all is well with one, that he would give the name of faith par excellence.
"When the sense of estrangement," he writes, "fencing man about in a narrowly
limited ego, breaks down, the individual finds himself 'at one with all creation.'
He lives in the universal life; he and man, he and nature, he and God, are one.
That state of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement
of moral unity, is the Faith-state. Various dogmatic beliefs suddenly, on the
advent of the faith-state, acquire a character of certainty, assume a new reality,
become an object of faith. As the ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation
is irrelevant. But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state,
it is a gross error to imagine that the chief practical value of the faith-state
is its power to stamp with the seal of reality certain particular theological
conceptions. * On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the
psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending desires to one direction;
a growth which expresses itself in new affective states and new reactions; in
larger, nobler, more Christ-like activities. The ground of the specific assurance
in religious dogmas is then an affective experience. The objects of faith may
even be preposterous; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them
with unshakable certitude. The more startling the affective experience, the less
explicable it seems, the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated
notions." *(2)
* Tolstoy's case was a good comment on those words. There was
almost no theology in his conversion. His faith-state was the sense come back
that life was infinite in its moral significance.
*(2) American Journal of
Psychology, vii. 345-347, abridged.
The characteristics
of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be called
the state of assurance rather than the faith-state, can be easily enumerated,
though it is probably difficult to realize their intensity, unless one have been
through the experience one's self.
The central one is the loss of all the
worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony,
the willingness to be, even though the outer conditions should remain the same.
The certainty of God's 'grace,' of 'justification,' 'salvation,' is an objective
belief that usually accompanies the change in Christians; but this may be entirely
lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same- you will recollect the case
of the Oxford graduate: and many might be given where the assurance of personal
salvation was only a later result. A passion of willingness, of acquiescence,
of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state of mind.
The second feature
is the sense of perceiving truths not known before. The mysteries of life become
lucid, as Professor Leuba says; and often, nay usually, the solution is more or
less unutterable in words. But these more intellectual phenomena may be postponed
until we treat of mysticism.
A third peculiarity of the assurance state is
the objective change which the world often appears to undergo. 'An appearance
of newness beautifies every object,' the precise opposite of that other sort of
newness, that dreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world,
which is experienced by melancholy patients, and of which you may recall my relating
some examples. * This sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without
is one of the commonest entries in conversion records. Jonathan Edwards thus describes
it in himself:
* Above, Lecture VI and VII.
"After this my sense of divine
things gradually increased and became more and more lively, and had more of that
inward sweetness. The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be,
as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything.
God's excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything;
in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers,
and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. And
scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder
and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to
be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw
a thunderstorm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me." *
* DWIGHT:
Life of Edwards, New York, 1830, p. 61, abridged.
Billy Bray, an excellent
little illiterate English evangelist, records his sense of newness thus:
"I
said to the Lord: 'Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive, they that seek
shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened, and I have faith
to believe it.' In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I cannot express
what I felt. I shouted for joy. I praised God with my whole heart.... I think
this was in November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know. I remember
this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the
trees. I was like a new man in a new world. I spent the greater part of my time
in praising the Lord." *
* W.F. BOURNE: The King's Son, a Memoir of Billy
Bray, London Hamilton, Adams & Co., 1887, p. 9.
Starbuck and Leuba both illustrate
this sense of newness by quotations. I take the two following from Starbuck's
manuscript collection. One, a woman, says:
"I was taken to a camp-meeting,
mother and religious friends seeking and praying for my conversion. My emotional
nature was stirred to its depths; confessions of depravity and pleading with God
for salvation from sin made me oblivious of all surroundings. I plead for mercy,
and had a vivid realization of forgiveness and renewal of my nature. When rising
from my knees I exclaimed, 'Old things have passed away, all things have become
new.' It was like entering another world, a new state of existence. Natural objects
were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every
material object in the universe, the woods were vocal with heavenly music; my
soul exulted in the love of God, and I wanted everybody to share in my joy."
The next case is that of a man:
"I know not how I got back into the encampment,
but found myself staggering up to Rev. __'s Holiness tent- and as it was full
of seekers and a terrible noise inside, some groaning, some laughing, and some
shouting, and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, I fell on my face by a bench,
and tried to pray, and every time I would call on God, something like a man's
hand would strangle me by choking. I don't know whether there were any one around
or near me or not. I thought I should surely die if I did not get help, but just
as often as I would pray, that unseen hand was felt on my throat and my breath
squeezed off. Finally something said: 'Venture on the atonement, for you will
die anyway if you don't.' So I made one final struggle to call on God for mercy,
with the same choking and strangling, determined to finish the sentence of prayer
for Mercy, if I did strangle and die, and the last I remember that time was falling
back on the ground with the same unseen hand on my throat. I don't know how long
I lay there or what was going on. None of my folks were present. When I came to
myself, there were a crowd around me praising God. The very heavens seemed to
open and pour down rays of light and glory. Not for a moment only, but all day
and night, floods of light and glory seemed to pour through my soul, and oh, how
I was changed, and everything became new. My horses and hogs and even everybody
seemed changed."
This man's case introduces the feature
of automatisms, which in suggestible subjects have been so startling a feature
at revivals since, in Edwards's, Wesley's, and Whitfield's time, these became
a regular means of gospel-propagation. They were at first supposed to be semi-miraculous
proofs of 'power' on the part of the Holy Ghost; but great divergence of opinion
quickly arose concerning them. Edwards, in his Thoughts on the Revival of Religion
in New England, has to defend them against their critics; and their value has
long been matter of debate even within the revivalistic denominations. * They
undoubtedly have no essential spiritual significance, and although their presence
makes his conversion more memorable to the convert, it has never been proved that
converts who show them are more persevering or fertile in good fruits than those
whose change of heart has had less violent accompaniments. On the whole, unconsciousness,
convulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utterances, and suffocation, must be simply
ascribed to the subject's having a large subliminal region, involving nervous
instability. This is often the subject's own view of the matter afterwards. One
of Starbuck's correspondents writes, for instance:
* Consult WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE:
Lectures on Revivals of Religion, New York, 1832, in the long Appendix to which
the opinions of a large number of ministers are given.
"I have been through
the experience which is known as conversion. My explanation of it is this: the
subject works his emotions up to the breaking point, at the same time resisting
their physical manifestations, such as quickened pulse, etc., and then suddenly
lets them have their full sway over his body. The relief is something wonderful,
and the pleasurable effects of the emotions are experienced to the highest degree."
There is one form of sensory automatism which possibly deserves special notice
on account of its frequency. I refer to hallucinatory or pseudo-hallucinatory
luminous phenomena, photisms, to use the term of the psychologists. Saint Paul's
blinding heavenly vision seems to have been a phenomen of this sort; so does Constantine's
cross in the sky. The last case but one which I quoted mentions floods of light
and glory. Henry Alline mentions a light, about whose externality he seems uncertain.
Colonel Gardiner sees a blazing light. President Finney writes:
"All at once
the glory of God shone upon and round about me in a manner almost marvelous....
A light perfectly ineffable shone in my soul, that almost prostrated me on the
ground. This light seemed like the brightness of the sun in every direction. It
was too intense for the eyes.... I think I knew something then, by actual experience,
of that light that prostrated Paul on the way to Damascus. It was surely a light
such as I could not have endured long." *
* Memoirs, p. 34.
Such reports
of photisms are indeed far from uncommon. Here is another from Starbuck's collection,
where the light appeared evidently external:
"I had attended a series of revival
services for about two weeks off and on. Had been invited to the altar several
times, all the time becoming more deeply impressed, when finally I decided I must
do this, or I should be lost. Realization of conversion was very vivid, like a
ton's weight being lifted from my heart; a strange light which seemed to light
up the whole room (for it was dark); a conscious supreme bliss which caused me
to repeat 'Glory to God' for a long time. Decided to be God's child for life,
and to give up my pet ambition, wealth and social position. My former habits of
life hindered my growth somewhat, but I set about overcoming these systematically,
and in one year my whole nature was changed, i. e., my ambitions were of a different
order."
Here is another one of Starbuck's cases, involving a luminous element:
"I had been clearly converted twenty-three years before, or rather reclaimed.
My experience in regeneration was then clear and spiritual, and I had not backslidden.
But I experienced entire sanctification on the 15th day of March, 1893, about
eleven o'clock in the morning. The particular accompaniments of the experience
were entirely unexpected. I was quietly sitting at home singing selections out
of Pentecostal Hymns. Suddenly there seemed to be a something sweeping into me
and inflating my entire being- such a sensation as I had never experienced before.
When this experience came, I seemed to be conducted around a large, capacious,
well-lighted room. As I walked with my invisible conductor and looked around,
a clear thought was coined in my mind, 'They are not here, they are gone.' As
soon as the thought was definitely formed in my mind, though no word was spoken,
the Holy Spirit impressed me that I was surveying my own soul. Then, for the first
time in all my life, did I know that I was cleansed from all sin, and filled with
the fullness of God."
Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peck, where the luminous
affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant
cactus buds called mescal by the Mexicans:
"When I went in the morning into
the fields to work, the glory of God appeared in all his visible creation. I well
remember we reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as it
were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may so express it,
in the glory of God." *
* These reports of sensorial photism shade off into
what are evidently only metaphorical accounts of the sense of new spiritual illumination,
as, for instance, in Brainerd's statement: "As I was walking in a thick grove,
unspeakable glory seemed to open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean
any external brightness, for I saw no such thing, nor any imagination of a body
of light in the third heavens, or anything of that nature, but it was a new inward
apprehension or view that I had of God."
In a case like this next one from
Starbuck's manuscript collection, the lighting up of the darkness is probably
also metaphorical:
"One Sunday night, I resolved that when I got home to the
ranch where I was working, I would offer myself with my faculties and all to God
to be used only by and for him. It was raining and the roads were muddy; but this
desire grew so strong that I kneeled down by the side of the road and told God
all about it, intending then to get up and go on. Such a thing as any special
answer to my prayer never entered my mind, having been converted by faith, but
still being most undoubtedly saved. Well, while I was praying, I remember holding
out my hands to God and telling him they should work for him, my feet walk for
him, my tongue speak for him, etc., etc., if he would only use me as his instrument
and give me a satisfying experience- when suddenly the darkness of the night seemed
lit up- I felt, realized, knew, that God heard and answered my prayer. Deep happiness
came over me; I felt I was accepted into the inner circle of God's loved ones."
In the following case also the flash of light is metaphorical:
"A prayer
meeting had been called for at close of evening service. The minister supposed
me impressed by his discourse (a mistake- he was dull). He came and, placing his
hand upon my shoulder, said: 'Do you not want to give your heart to God?' I replied
in the affirmative. Then said he, 'Come to the front seat.' They sang and prayed
and talked with me. I experienced nothing but unaccountable wretchedness. They
declared that the reason why I did not 'obtain peace' was because I was not willing
to give up all to God. After about two hours the minister said we would go home.
As usual, on retiring, I prayed. In great distress, I at this time simply said,
I Lord, I have done all I can, I leave the whole matter with thee.' Immediately,
like a flash of light, there came to me a great peace, and I arose and went into
my parents' bedroom and said, 'I do feel so wonderfully happy.' This I regard
as the hour of conversion. It was the hour in which I became assured of divine
acceptance and favor. So far as my life was concerned, it made little immediate
change."
The most characteristic of all the elements of the conversion crisis,
and the last one of which I shall speak, is the ecstasy of happiness produced.
We have already heard several accounts of it, but I will add a couple more. President
Finney's is so vivid that I give it at length:
"All my feelings seemed to
rise and flow out; and the utterance of my heart was, 'I want to pour my whole
soul out to God.' The rising of my soul was so great that I rushed into the back
room of the front office, to pray. There was no fire and no light in the room;
nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly light. As I went in and
shut the door after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face.
It did not occur to me then, nor did it for some time afterwards, that it was
wholly a mental state. On the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him as I would
see any other man. He said nothing, but looked at me in such a manner as to break
me right down at his feet. I have always since regarded this as a most remarkable
state of mind; for it seemed to me a reality that he stood before me, and I fell
down at his feet and poured out my soul to him. I wept aloud like a child, and
made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance. It seemed to me that
I bathed his feet with my tears; and yet I had no distinct impression that I touched
him, that I recollect. I must have continued in this state for a good while; but
my mind was too much absorbed with the interview to recollect anything that I
said. But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to break off from the
interview, I returned to the front office, and found that the fire that I had
made of large wood was nearly burned out. But as I turned and was about to take
a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any
expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was any
such thing for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned
by any person in the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that
seemed to go through me, body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave
of electricity, going through and through me. Indeed, it seemed to come in waves
and waves of liquid love; for I could not express it in any other way. It seemed
like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan
me, like immense wings.
"No words can express the wonderful love that was
shed abroad in my heart. I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but
I should say I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart. These
waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the other, until I recollect
I cried out, 'I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.' I said, 'Lord,
I cannot bear any more;' yet I had no fear of death.
"How long I continued
in this state, with this baptism continuing to roll over me and go through me,
I do not know. But I know it was late in the evening when a member of my choir-
for I was the leader of the choir- came into the office to see me. He was a member
of the church. He found me in this state of loud weeping, and said to me, 'Mr.
Finney, what ails you?' I could make him no answer for some time. He then said,
'Are you in pain?' I gathered myself up as best I could, and replied, 'No, but
so happy that I cannot live.'"
I just now quoted Billy Bray; I cannot do better
than give his own brief account of his post-conversion feelings:
"I can't
help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift up one foot, and it seems
to say 'Glory'; and I lift up the other, and it seems to say 'Amen'; and so they
keep up like that all the time I am walking." *
* I add in a note a few more
records:
"One morning, being in deep distress, fearing every moment I should
drop into hell, I was constrained to cry in earnest for mercy, and the Lord came
to my relief, and delivered my soul from the burden and guilt of sin. My whole
frame was in a tremor from head to foot, and my soul enjoyed sweet peace. The
pleasure I then felt was indescribable, The happiness lasted about three days,
during which time I never spoke to any person about my feelings." Autobiography
of DAN YOUNG, edited by W.P. STRICKLAND, New York, 1860.
"In an instant there
rose up in me such a sense of God's taking care of those who put their trust in
him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and
I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh." H.W. BEECHER, quoted by LEUBA.
"My tears of sorrow changed to joy, and I lay there praising God in such ecstasy
of joy as only the soul who experiences it can realize."- "I cannot express how
I felt. It was as if I had been in a dark dungeon and lifted into the light of
the sun. I shouted and I sang praise unto him who loved me and washed me from
my sins. I was forced to retire into a secret place, for the tears did flow, and
I did not wish my shopmates to see me, and yet I could not keep it a secret."-
"I experienced joy almost to weeping."- "I felt my face must have shone like that
of Moses. I had a general feeling of buoyancy. It was the greatest joy it was
ever my lot to experience."- "I wept and laughed alternately. I was as light as
if walking on air. I felt as if I had gained greater peace and happiness than
I had ever expected to experience." STARBUCK'S correspondents.
One
word, before I close this lecture, on the question of the transiency or permanence
of these abrupt conversions. Some of 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 significance to
men and women, whatever be its duration. So with the conversion experience: that
it should for even a short time show a human being what the highwater mark of
his spiritual capacity is, this is what constitutes its importance,- an importance
which backsliding cannot diminish, although persistence might increase it. As
a matter of fact, all the more striking instances of conversion, all those, for
instance, which I have quoted, have been permanent. The case of which there might
be most doubt, on account of its suggesting so strongly an epileptoid seizure,
was the case of M. Ratisbonne. Yet I am informed that Ratisbonne's whole future
was shaped by those few minutes. He gave up his project of marriage, became a
priest, founded at Jerusalem, where he went to dwell, a mission of nuns for the
conversion of the Jews, showed no tendency to use for egotistic purposes the notoriety
given him by the peculiar circumstances of his conversion,- which, for the rest,
he could seldom refer to without tears,- and in short remained an exemplary son
of the Church until he died, late in the 80's, if I remember rightly.
The
only statistics I know of, on the subject of the duration of conversions, are
those collected for Professor Starbuck by Miss Johnston. They embrace only a hundred
persons, evangelical church-members, more than half being Methodists. According
to the statement of the subjects themselves, there had been backsliding of some
sort in nearly all the cases, 93 per cent. of the women, 77 per cent. of the men.
Discussing the returns more minutely, Starbuck finds that only 6 per cent. are
relapses from the religious faith which the conversion confirmed, and that the
backsliding complained of is in most only a fluctuation in the ardor of sentiment.
Only six of the hundred cases report a change of faith. Starbuck's conclusion
is that the effect of conversion is to bring with it "a changed attitude towards
life, which is fairly constant and permanent, although the feelings fluctuate....
In other words, the persons who have passed through conversion, having once taken
a stand for the religious life, tend to feel themselves identified with it, no
matter how much their religious enthusiasm declines." *
* Psychology of Religion,
pp. 360, 357.