The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experienceto be preceded by despair is shown by Edwards in another passage.“Surely it cannot be unreasonable,” he says, “that before God deliversus from a state of sin and liability to everlasting woe, he shouldgive us some considerable sense of the evil from which he deliversus, 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 dofor us. As those who are saved are successively in two extremelydifferent states—first in a state of condemnation and then in a stateof justification and blessedness—and as God, in the salvation ofmen, deals with them as rational and intelligent creatures, it appearsagreeable to this wisdom, that those who are saved should bemade sensible of their Being, in those two different states. In thefirst 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 doctrinalinterpretation of these changes. Whatever part suggestion andimitation may have played in producing them in men and womenin excited assemblies, they have at any rate been in countless individualinstances an original and unborrowed experience. Were wewriting the story of the mind from the purely natural-history pointof view, with no religious interest whatever, we should still have towrite down man’s liability to sudden and complete conversion asone of his most curious peculiarities.What, now, must we ourselves think of this question? Is an instantaneousconversion a miracle in which God is present as he ispresent in no change of heart less strikingly abrupt? Are there twoclasses of human beings, even among the apparently regenerate, ofwhich the one class really partakes of Christ’s nature while the othermerely seems to do so? Or, on the contrary, may the whole phenomenonof regeneration, even in these startling instantaneous examples,possibly be a strictly natural process, divine in its fruits, ofcourse, but in one case more and in another less so, and neithermore nor less divine in its mere causation and mechanism than anyother process, high or low, of man’s interior life?Before proceeding to answer this question, I must ask you to listento some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I ex-210