The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 238them, 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.

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 V second birth is to be found only in the disposition of V ^ the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated.

And this, it has to be ad- * 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."

p. 239' - mitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may | even be found outside of Christianity altogether.

" ^p^ Throughout Jonathan Edwards's admirably rich and ^ delicate description of the supernaturally infused condi- -^-x, tion, 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 i '^ hardly read a clearer argument than this book unwit- 3 ^ tingly offers in favor of the thesis that no chasm exists ^^'^^v^ between the orders of human excellence, but that here as i , elsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, and gen- 1 w <J eration 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 D./; "14 the extraordinary momentousness of the fact of his conversion to the individual himself who gets converted. (^c>uA*^jU. 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 wiU always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts for Imn, 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 ^tigginses, 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 bis native devils. True enough. Yet Crump

p. 240If we roughly arrange human beings m 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, Professor 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.

' 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 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. 1 In his book, The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900. 2 Op. cit., p. 112.