It was natural that with those who, after inward struggles and long strivings, had obtained strength for a godly life, the delivery of man from sin should become the main point; and as they were yearning, above all, for the direct working of God on their own life, it followed that they ascribed this awakening to the special grace of God; that they sought earnestly in prayer for the moment when this special illumination and sanctification should take place by a manifestation of the divinity; and that when, after severe tension of the soul, they reached a state of exaltation, they considered this as the beginning of a new life to which the grace of God was assured. Luther, also, had striven for this illumination; he also had experienced the transports of exaltation, inward peace, repose, certainty, and a feeling of superiority to the world; but it had been with him, as with the strong-minded among his contemporaries, an ever-enduring struggle, a frequently-repeated victory, a powerful mental process which appeared sometimes, indeed, wonderful to himself, but in which with his sound, strong nature, there was nothing morbid, and of which the special form, the struggles with the devil, were the natural consequences of the _naive_, simple-hearted popular faith, which had changed the old household spirits and hobgoblins of our heathen ancestors into Christian angels and the devil. The Pietists, on the other hand, lived in a time when the life both of nature and man was more rationally viewed as to cause and effect, when a multitude of scientific conceptions were popular, when a practical worldly mind prevailed which made itself few illusions; and when the hearts of men were seldom elevated by enthusiasm and great ideas. Already we begin to trace the beginnings of rationalism. In such a time this regeneration, this moment of awakening, was not a frame of mind easily produced--not a condition in which, with a sound mental constitution, one could place oneself without a certain degree of violence. It was necessary to wait for it--to prepare oneself strenuously, and constrain body and soul to it, by a self-contemplation, in which there was something unsound; one must watch anxiously one's own soul, to discover when the moment of awakening was nigh. And this moment of awakening itself was to be entirely different from every other frame of mind. In order to arrive at the conviction of its presence, that was not sufficient for them, which, after severe struggles, had given a happiness to the great reformers that rested on their countenances like a reflection of the Godhead; the peace and serenity which come after the victorious end of a struggle betwixt duty and inclination. This outpouring of grace with the Pietists was frequently accompanied by ecstasies, visions, and similar pathological phenomena, which at no period have been wanting, but which were then sought after as the highest moments of human life and recounted with admiration.