The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human NatureJames, William
ReligionComparative
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature
James, William
Conversion; Experience (Religion); Philosophy and religion; Psychology, Religious; Religion
ineffable love; there was no terror in it; I felt God’s love so
powerfully upon me that only a mighty sorrow crept over me that I
had lost all through my own folly; and what was I to do? What
could I do? I did not repent even; God never asked me to repent.
All I felt was ‘I am undone,’ and God cannot help it, although he
loves me. No fault on the part of the Almighty. All the time I was
supremely happy: I felt like a little child before his father. I
had done wrong, but my Father did not scold me, but loved me most
wondrously. Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to a certainty,
and being naturally of a brave disposition I did not quail under
it, but deep sorrow for the past, mixed with regret for what I had
lost, took hold upon me, and my soul thrilled within me to think
it was all over. Then there crept in upon me so gently, so
lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it after
all? The old, old story over again, told in the simplest way:
‘There is no name under heaven whereby ye can be saved except that
of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ No words were spoken to me; my soul
seemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from that hour to
this, nearly nine years now, there has never been in my life one
doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father both worked
upon me that afternoon in July, both differently, and both in the
most perfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced there and then in a
conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in
less than twenty‐four hours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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