The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencepens at any other juncture of our lives. At that moment, it believes,an absolutely new nature is breathed into us, and we become partakersof the very substance of the Deity.That the conversion should be instantaneous seems called for onthis view, and the Moravian Protestants appear to have been thefirst to see this logical consequence. The Methodists soon followedsuit, 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 wereexceeding clear in their experience, and whose testimony I could seeno 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, orone third, or one in twenty, declared it was gradually wrought inthem, I should have believed this, with regard to them, and thoughtthat some were gradually sanctified and some instantaneously. Butas I have not found, in so long a space of time, a single personspeaking thus, I cannot but believe that sanctification is commonly,if not always, an instantaneous work.”122All this while the more usual sects of Protestantism have set nosuch store by instantaneous conversion. For them as for the CatholicChurch, Christ’s blood, the sacraments, and the individual’s ordinaryreligious duties are practically supposed to suffice to his salvation,even though no acute crisis of self-despair and surrender followedby 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 isincomplete. Methodism surely here follows, if not the healthierminded,yet on the whole the profounder spiritual instinct. The individualmodels which it has set up as typical and worthy of imitationare not only the more interesting dramatically, but psychologicallythey have been the more complete.In the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain and America wehave, so to speak, the codified and stereotyped procedure to whichthis way of thinking has led. In spite of the unquestionable fact that122 Tyerman’s Life of Wesley, i. 463.208