The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 188appear within their sphere to have remained unmodified. His later works show him implacable to the whole system of official values : the ignobility of fashionable life ; the infamies of empire ; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the professions ; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and every other pompous crime and lying institution of this world.

To all patience with such things his experience has been for him a permanent ministry of death. Bunyan also leaves this world to the enemy.

" I must first pass a sentence of death," he says, "upon everything that can properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyments, and all, as dead to me, and myself as dead to them ; to trust in God through Christ, as touching the world to come ; and as touching this world, to count the grave my house, to make my bed in darkness, and to say to corruption.

Thou art my father, and to the worm. Thou art my mother and sister. . . . The parting with my wife and my poor children hath often been to me as the pulling of my flesh from my bones, especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart than all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou like to have for thy portion in this world !

Thou must be beaten, must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand calamities, though I cannot now endure that the wind should blow upon thee. But yet I must venture you all with God, though it goeth to the quick to leave you." ^ The * hue of resolution ' is there, but the full flood of ecstatic liberation seems never to have poured over poor John Bunyan's soul.

These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general way with the phenomenon technically called * Conversion. In the next lecture I shall invite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some detail. 1 In my quotations from Bunyan I Lave omitted certain intervening poiv tions of the text.

LECTURE IX CONVERSION TO be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes .unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities.

This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms, whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to bring sifch a moral change about. Before entering upon a minuter study of the process, let me enliven our understanding of the definition by a concrete example. I choose the quaint case of an unlettered man, Stephen H.

Bradley, whose experience is related in a scarce American pamphlet.^ I select this case because it shows how in these inner alterations one may find one unsuspected depth below another, as if the possibilities of character ky disposed in a series of layers or shells, of whose existence we have no premonitory knowledge. Bradley thought that he had been already fully converted at the age of fourteen.

" I thought I saw the Saviour, by faith, in human shape, for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing ^ A sketch of the life of Stephen H. Bradley, from the age of five to twenty-four years, including his remarkable experience of the power of the Holy Spirit on the second evening of November, 1829. Madison, Connecticut, 1830.

p. 190to say to me, Come. The next day I rejoiced with trembling ; soon after, my happiness was so great that I said that I wanted to die ; this world had no place in my affections, as I knew of, and every day appeared as solemn to me as the Sabbath. I had an ardent desire that all mankind migl;it feel as I did ; I wanted to have them all love God supremely.

Previous to this time I was very selfish and self-righteous ; but now I desired the welfare of all mankind, and could with a feeling heart forgive my worst enemies, and I felt as if I should be willing to bear the scoffs and sneers of any person, and suffer anything for His sake, if I could be the means in the hands of God, of the conversion of one soul.

Nine years later, in 1829, Mr. Bradley heard of a revival of religion that had begun in his neighborhood. " Many of the young converts," he says, " would come to me when in meeting and ask me if I had religion, and my reply generally was, I hope I have. This did not appear to satisfy them ; they said they hnew they had it.

I requested them to pray for me, thinking with myself, that if I had not got religion now, after so long a time professing to be a Christian, that it was time I had, and hoped their prayers would be answered in my behalf. " One Sabbath, I went to hear the Methodist at the Academy. He spoke of the ushering in of the day of general judgment ; and he set it forth in such a solemn and terrible manner as I never heard before.

The scene of that day appeared to be taking place, and so awakened were all the powers of my mind that, like Felix, I trembled involuntarily on the bench where I was sitting, though I felt nothing at heart. The next day evening I went to hear him again. He took his text from Revelation : ' And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God.

And he represented the terrors of that day in such a manner that it appeared as if it would melt the heart of stone. When he finished his discourse, an old gentleman turned to me and said, ' This is what I call preaching. I thought the same ; but my feelings were still unmoved by what he said, and I did not enjoy religion, but I believe he did. " I will now relate my experience of the power of the Holy Spirit which took place on the same night. Had any person