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
“I had been clearly converted twenty‐three years before, or rather
reclaimed. My experience in regeneration was then clear and
spiritual, and I had not backslidden. But I experienced entire
sanctification on the 15th day of March, 1893, about eleven
o’clock in the morning. The particular accompaniments of the
experience were entirely unexpected. I was quietly sitting at home
singing selections out of Pentecostal Hymns. Suddenly there seemed
to be a something sweeping into me and inflating my entire
being—such a sensation as I had never experienced before. When
this experience came, I seemed to be conducted around a large,
capacious, well‐lighted room. As I walked with my invisible
conductor and looked around, a clear thought was coined in my
mind, ‘They are not here, they are gone.’ As soon as the thought
was definitely formed in my mind, though no word was spoken, the
Holy Spirit impressed me that I was surveying my own soul. Then,
for the first time in all my life, did I know that I was cleansed
from all sin, and filled with the fullness of God.”
Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds
one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds
called mescal by the Mexicans:—
“When I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of
God appeared in all his visible creation. I well remember we
reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as
it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may
so express it, in the glory of God.”(139)
The most characteristic of all the elements of the conversion crisis, and
the last one of which I shall speak, is the ecstasy of happiness produced.
We have already heard several accounts of it, but I will add a couple
more. President Finney’s is so vivid that I give it at length:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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