The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

William Jamessaints of the once-born type exist, that there may be a gradual growthin holiness without a cataclysm; in spite of the obvious leakage (asone may say) of much mere natural goodness into the scheme ofsalvation; revivalism has always assumed that only its own type ofreligious experience can be perfect; you must first be nailed on thecross of natural despair and agony, and then in the twinkling of aneye be miraculously released.It is natural that those who personally have traversed such an experienceshould carry away a feeling of its being a miracle ratherthan a natural process. Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visionswitnessed; automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems,after the surrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous higherpower had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense ofrenovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous andjubilant as well to warrant one’s belief in a radically new substantialnature.“Conversion,” writes the New England Puritan, Joseph Alleine,“is not the putting in a patch of holiness; but with the true convertholiness is woven into all his powers, principles, and practice. Thesincere Christian is quite a new fabric, from the foundation to thetop-stone. He is a new man, a new creature.”And Jonathan Edwards says in the same strain: “Those graciousinfluences which are the effects of the Spirit of God are altogethersupernatural—are quite different from anything that unregeneratemen experience. They are what no improvement, or composition ofnatural qualifications or principles will ever produce; because theynot only differ from what is natural, and from everything that naturalmen experience in degree and circumstances, but also in kind,and are of a nature far more excellent. From hence it follows that ingracious affections there are [also] new perceptions and sensationsentirely different in their nature and kind from anything experiencedby the [same] saints before they were sanctified… . The conceptionswhich the saints have of the loveliness of God, and thatkind of delight which they experience in it, are quite peculiar, andentirely 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 necessity209