Conversion 
 
 Religious Experience 
 
tihravy of ^he theological ^tmimvy 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 •3^J> 
 
 BV 4915 .K74 IQn? 
 K^iebel, Oscar c^ 
 
 Conversion 
 experience 
 
 and religiou; 
 
 
 P 
 
•''^-*-' /:■'■ 
 
 vyyyc4i/t 
 
 ^ , 
 
 "t-.: ^1 
 
 >-'?> i' ',;;■■. 
 
^ SEP It 1% 
 
 Conversion 
 
 AND 
 
 Religious Experience 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. OSCAR S. KRIEBEL, A. M., 
 
 Author of " Sanctification versus Christian Perfection. " 
 
 Being the development of three Sermons preached by the 
 
 Pastor to his People and Published by Request. 
 
 Dedicated to the members and Friends 
 
 OF THE Congregation who listened 
 
 TO THE Spoken Discourses. 
 
 Pennsburg, Penna. 
 
 1907 
 
Copyright, 1907, by Rev. Oscar S. Kriebel. 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 This treatise on Conversion and Religious Experience is the 
 outgrowth of a special sermon preached about two years ago 
 to the members and friends of my congregation on the general 
 subject of salvation and religious experience. The request was 
 made at that time that the sermon be put in writing and published 
 for general distribution. An effort was made to carry out the 
 wishes of friends, but lack of time prevented the completion of 
 the task while the interest in the subject was fresh. Delays and 
 postponements have been frequent since then, and it is only recently 
 that time and strength seemed available to carry the unfinished 
 work through to completion. 
 
 During the last few months I have taken the opportunity of 
 preaching three different sermons on the following phases of the 
 subject under consideration : i. Conversion as a Radical Change ; 
 2. Conversion through Christian Culture; 3. The Varieties of 
 Religious Experience. In these discourses I endeavored to show 
 that for the confirmed sinner a radical transformation in con- 
 version was necessary, as shown by the Bible and human experi- 
 ence, but that for the child of Christian parentage and Christian 
 surroundings a process of gradual growth and development 
 through Christian culture was the normal one and the one to 
 be aimed at. I also endeavored to show why there is such a large 
 variety of religious experience during the process of moral re- 
 construction and to point out the essential and the non-essential 
 elements in Christian experience. The thoughts presented in the 
 spoken discourses are somewhat elaborated in this treatise and 
 reenforced and substantiated by frequent quotations from the 
 works of the best modem writers on the subject. The form of 
 the sermon has, therefore, largely given place to the method of 
 treatment found most convenient in the tract or the printed book. 
 
 3 
 
The Bible is the great text-book for information on these 
 vital subjects, and hence I have sought to establish my position 
 in many of these questions by frequent quotations from its pages. 
 In addition to the Bible and general reference works on religious 
 subjects, I have found "The Spiritual Life" and "The Religion 
 of a Mature Mind," by Prof. Geo. A. Coe of Northwestern Uni- 
 versity, "The Psychology of Religion," by Prof. E. D. Starbuck, 
 now of Leland Stanford University, and "The Varieties of Re- 
 ligious Experience," by Prof. William James, the well-known 
 psychologist and philosopher of Harvard University, most help- 
 ful and suggestive, and I have taken the liberty of quoting freely 
 from these authorities. Among other valuable books consulted 
 are these : "Jesus Christ and the Christian Character," by Prof. 
 Francis G. Peabody of Harvard University ; "God's Education of 
 Man," by President Hyde of Bowdoin College ; "The Immanence 
 of God," by Prof. Borden P. Bowne of Boston University ; "The 
 Philosophy of Christian Experience," by Henry W. Clarke; 
 "Typical New Testament Conversions," by Dr. Noble of the 
 Union Park Congregational Church, Chicago; "The Ascent of 
 the Soul," by Dr. Amory H. Bradford of the "Outlook" editorial 
 staff ; "The Children's Covenant," by Rev. C. V. Anthony of San 
 Francisco; "The Religious Affections," by Jonathan Edwards; 
 and others, all of which have been helpful to a thorough under- 
 standing of the subject. Pres. King's "Christian Training and 
 the Revival as Methods of Converting Men" is a most excellent 
 discussion, in brief form, of certain phases of the question. To 
 all these writers, and others not referred to above, I am under 
 obligations for valuable helps and suggestions and hereby make 
 public acknowledgment of my appreciation of their efforts for a 
 more intelligent understanding of these important religious 
 questions. 
 
 May our common Lord and Master bless the imperfect efforts 
 here put forth to the salvation and edification of His children. 
 
 The Author. 
 Pennsburg, Penna., February 7th, 1907. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART ONE 
 
 CONVERSION AS A RADICAL CHANGE 
 
 Introductory 7 
 
 I. The Necessity of Conversion Considered 8 
 
 II. The Scriptural Terms Used for Conversion 13 
 
 i. Cease to do Evil, Learn to do Well 13 
 
 2. Put off the " Old Man." Put on the "New Man" 14 
 
 3. Crucified with Christ. Risen with Him 18 
 
 4. The " New Birth." Born from Above 23 
 
 5. The Prodigal Son. A Typical Case of Sin and Repentance . 28 
 
 PART TWO 
 
 CONVERSION THROUGH CHRISTIAN CULTURE 
 
 I. Salvation through Christian Culture a Scriptural Doctrine 40 
 
 1.^ iThe Old Testament View of the Child's Religious State ... 43 
 
 2. The Attitude of Jesus toward Children 45 
 
 3. The Parables of Jesus on Salvation through Christian Culture 49 
 
 4. The Case of Timothy as a Product of Christian Culture ... 53 
 
 II. The Testimony of Experience for Salvation through Christian Culture 55 
 
 1. The Reality and Vividness of the Child's Religious Life ... 56 
 
 2. The Importance of Early Religious Training 57 
 
 3. The Possibility of a Gradual Growth into the Fulness of the 
 
 Religious Life without a Radical Change in Conversion . 59 
 
 III. The View of the Best Modern Religious Teachers 6i 
 
 1. Horace Bushnell on " Christian Culture " 63 
 
 2. Dr. Hibbard on " The Religion of Childhood " 66 
 
 3. Coe on " Salvation through Education " 68 
 
 4. Other Noted Religious Educators on Christian Culture .... 69 
 
 IV. The Spiritual Life as a Personal Relationship of the Soul to its 
 
 Heavenly Father 72 
 
 1. As Illustrated by Mature Christians 74 
 
 2. As Illustrated by the Growing Child 76 
 
 5 
 
O CONTENTS. 
 
 V. Some Practical Conclusions 81 
 
 1. Salvation through Christian Culture the " Normal" Process 81 
 
 2. Continual Necessity for Efforts to Save the Unconverted .... 82 
 
 3. Religious " Awakenings " not to be Considered Conversion 84 
 
 4. The Fundamental Thought, the One " Great Question" ... 85 
 
 PART THREE 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN CONVERSION 
 
 I. Varieties of Religious Experience 91 
 
 1. The Emotional Type of Conversion 92 
 
 2. The Volitional Type of Conversion 99 
 
 3. Room for Both Types of Experience 103 
 
 II. Some Reasons for the Large ^Variety of Religious Experience in 
 
 Conversion 105 
 
 1. The Character of the Life Led Previous to Conversion . . . 107 
 
 2. Differences of Temperament Affect Religious Experience in 
 
 Conversion 110 
 
 3. The Time of Adolescence is Significant for Religious Changes 115 
 
 4. The Religious Environment Affects the Character of Expe- 
 
 rience in Conversion 120 
 
 III. What is not Essential in Religious Experience 126 
 
 1. States of Feeling are not Essential 127 
 
 2. "Visions," "Voices," "Trances," and the Like not Essential 
 
 to Christian Experience . 132 
 
 3. The so-called "Power " and Religious " Ecstasy " not Essential 135 
 
 4. The Spirit of Over-Confidence and of Self-Satisfaction not Es- 
 
 sential 142 
 
 IV. What is Essential in Religious Experience , . . 147 
 
 1. The Right Attitude of the Will is Essential 147 
 
 2. A Reasonable Degree of Christian Assurance 153 
 
 3. The Fruits of the Spirit are All-Essential 159 
 
 V. Concluding Remarks 167 
 
PART ONE. 
 
 CONVERSION AS A RADICAL 
 CHANGE. 
 
 Introductory. 
 
 It will be the purpose of this treatise to discuss conversion as 
 a necessary and essential experience for the enjoyment of a true 
 spiritual life. There is a natural life and there is a spiritual 
 life. Conversion marks the point of transition from the natural 
 life to the spiritual life. It is the process of transformation or of 
 regeneration for the spiritual nature. Conversion will be consid- 
 ered in these pages as a radical change of heart and life for those 
 who have lived in conscious sin and disobedience. And it will 
 be considered as a gradual unfolding and development of the 
 religious nature for the child of Christian parents and Christian 
 training. For the confirmed sinner a radical change of heart and 
 life in conversion is an absolute necessity. For the growing child 
 of Christian parents and training a more quiet and gradual but 
 no less radical change of spiritual life may be, and under normal 
 conditions ought to be, experienced through proper Christian 
 culture and education. 
 
 The first part of our discussion will deal with conversion as 
 a radical change of heart and life for the sinner's entrance upon 
 his spiritual career. The necessity for such a radical change, the 
 terms used in Scripture to define conversion of this type and the 
 results involved in its processes will be taken up in order. This will 
 be followed by a discussion of conversion as a gradual process 
 of unfolding and development of the spiritual nature of the child 
 through Christian culture and education. The child is to be 
 
 7 
 
8 
 
 regarded as belonging to God's spiritual household. And the term 
 conversion will be used for this less radical kind of an experience 
 through Christian growth because the same results are obtained 
 and the same ends are reached and consequently the same spiritual 
 activities must be assumed as being at work as in the more radi- 
 cal and more striking kind of conversion. The end is the same — 
 the genuine spiritual life — the Kingdom of God on earth. And 
 whether we enter the Kingdom through a sudden and radical 
 experience or through a quiet, gradual process of growth and 
 training matters little. The all-important thing is that the human 
 soul should lead the life of the Spirit and should show forth the 
 fruits of the Spirit in a Hfe of unselfishness and true Christian 
 holiness. The true spiritual life, the unselfish Christian character, 
 this is "the one thing needful." The general term conversion with 
 its implied changes will serve to describe both types of experience 
 referred to as essential for admission to the spiritual Hfe. 
 
 L The Necessity of Conversion Considered. 
 
 That the average man needs a change of heart and a renew- 
 ing of his mind and spirit, with a resultant change of his whole life 
 and conduct, is the testimony of human life and human experi- 
 ence among Christian people everywhere. That man is prone to do 
 evil and live a life of selfishness and of sordid pleasure, indulging 
 his desires and passions and disregarding the needs and obligations 
 of his higher nature, is a fact of world-wide knowledge and 
 universal observation. Whatever our theories may be as to the 
 origin of sin and evil in the world, we must surely recognize the 
 terrible fact of its presence and the tremendous power of its in- 
 fluence, with its demoralizing and blasting effect upon human souls 
 in all states and conditions of their growth and development. 
 
 We live in a world of sin and sorrow. We are surrounded 
 by individuals and institutions which bear upon them the impress 
 of unrighteousness and the lack of moral harmony. We are con- 
 fronted in our own personal lives and experiences by forces and 
 tendencies which draw us away from the good that we would 
 do and ought to do and frequently lead us into a course of conduct 
 
altogether unworthy of our divine origin and spiritual antecedents. 
 We feel keenly indeed the presence in us and the existence around 
 about us of tendencies and influences which conspire to lead us 
 earthward rather than Heavenward, which seek to hold us in their 
 relentless grasp and to frustrate the beneficent influences and 
 saving forces in our lives and thus to make the grace and power 
 of God of no avail. Surely no man who takes his own life seri- 
 ously, or who observes carefully the lives and demeanor of his 
 fellowmen, or who studies profoundly the history of human en- 
 deavor and human progress in the world, will deny the fact that sin 
 is a matter of universal experience and of world-wide significance 
 and that, consequently, the absolute necessity of deliverance from 
 sin and redemption from its power and bHghting effect must be 
 recognized as equally universal and all-inclusive. As wide and as 
 universal as is the fact of sin and evil in the world, so extensive 
 and all-embracing must be the necessity for a radical change of 
 the moral nature and for a profound reconstruction of the entire 
 religious life, if man is to live his life here upon earth in constant 
 communion with his Heavenly Father and in loving service to his 
 fellowmen. 
 
 This view of life is abundantly illustrated in the teachings of 
 Holy Scripture. Man is under the power and influence of sin. 
 Although made in the image of God and fashioned by the hand 
 of the Almighty and endowed with spiritual powers and capacities 
 from on high, yet man is represented as having lost the divine 
 image through sin and of having come under the power and con- 
 demnation of God's holy displeasure, because of his unbelief and 
 disobedience. Our first parents forgot their Maker and yielded to 
 the blandishments and allurements of the Tempter and thus lost 
 their lofty estate. The children of Israel were continually tempt- 
 ing the Lord their God by forgetting the commandments and 
 ordinances of the Almighty, and by falling into gross idolatry 
 and corrupt and vicious personal practices. The Prophets were 
 burdened, and sometimes overwhelmed, with this discouraging 
 tendency in the children of Israel. A large proportion of their 
 message was to the effect that people should forsake their idols, 
 should abandon their life of forbidden association with the heathen 
 
lO 
 
 world, should turn away from their evil ways, and should remem- 
 ber the Lord their God and worship Him, and Him only, in 
 spirit and in truth. John the Baptist began his mission of prepara- 
 tion for the Kingdom of Christ by saying: "Repent, for the 
 kingdom of heaven is at hand." And Jesus himself began his 
 ministry by preaching "Repentance" from sin and obedience to 
 the Will of God. 
 
 The insufficiency of the old life of legalism and of self-right- 
 eousness is abundantly emphasized in the New Testament Scrip- 
 tures, especially by the teaching and example of our Master 
 Tiimself. Nothing less than a complete and unconditional sur- 
 render of the whole life of man to the saving and life-giving in- 
 fluences of the Gospel will be sufficient to meet the requirements 
 of the spiritual standards set by our Saviour. The law will not 
 suffice. The punctilious performance of external religious observ- 
 ances cannot and will not atone for a lack of God's purifying and 
 energizing spirit in the heart of man. There must be a new heart, 
 a new life, a reconstruction of the entire voluntary and emotional 
 state of the individual through the renewing influences of the 
 spirit. This is beautifully taught in that notable conversation 
 of Jesus with Nicodemus, in which Jesus used these striking 
 words : "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born 
 again (that is from above) he cannot enter into the kingdom of 
 God." "Marvel not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again." 
 "The wind bloweth where it listeth and thou canst hear the sound 
 thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth, so 
 is every one that is born of the Spirit." 
 
 Other passages of New Testament Scripture, both in the lan- 
 guage of Jesus and that of the Apostle Paul, are equally emphatic 
 on this point. Jesus said, in reply to the questioners concerning 
 the Galilaeans whose blood Pilot had mingled with their sacrifices, 
 that if they would not repent, they would all likewise perish. 
 Luke 13 : 3. So the Saviour also instructed his disciples, in reply 
 to the question "Who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven," by 
 placing a little child in the midst of them and thus honoring the 
 simple and guileless trust of children, with these immortal words : 
 "Except ye be converted and become as litttle children, ye shall 
 
II 
 
 not enter into the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 18:3. Paul 
 and the other apostles, as recorded in the Acts and Epistles, were 
 preaching "repentance and the forgiveness of sin" as requisites for 
 entrance into the spiritual brotherhood of the new life ; "For 
 in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncir- 
 cumcision, but a new creature." Galatians 6: 15. 
 
 It is not strange, therefore, that the doctrine of a new life, the 
 necessity of a radical change of heart and purpose in the unre- 
 generate man, was made one of the fundamental doctrines of all 
 systems of Christian theology. It is a recognized doctrine of the 
 Catholic church, though variously interpreted and applied. It is a 
 central doctrine of all Protestant theologians, though not equally 
 emphasized in practice by all of them. Some branches of the Prot- 
 estant church lay greater stress upon the subjective aspect of the 
 changed life. Others again emphasize more strongly the objective 
 side, as manifested in Christian life and conduct. Some denomina- 
 tions insist more urgently upon a certain, distinct kind of emo- 
 tional experience as an accompaniment and evidence of conversion, 
 while others again emphasize the practical effect of the new life 
 in demanding the requisite "fruits meet for repentance." But there 
 is absolutely no difference of opinion among the various branches 
 of the Christian church as to the fundamental necessity of a radi- 
 cal change of heart for every human soul in conscious sin before it 
 can enter fully into communion with the Father and enjoy the 
 blessed consciousness of His abiding presence. 
 
 And it is eminently right and proper that this should be so. 
 It is so easy for man to build upon other foundations than that 
 which are laid, namely, Jesus Christ and Him crucified. It is so 
 easy for men to satisfy themselves with an outwardly correct life 
 and to pay too little attention to the attitude of the heart, from 
 which we are told really are "the issues of life." It is so natural 
 for men to delude themselves with the thought that a strict ob- 
 servance of the external requirements of the religious life is all 
 that is necessary and, consequently, to ignore the fundamental dis- 
 position of the human will, which really determines the rightness 
 or wrongness of all our acts. Man is so prone to consider the rigid 
 observance of forms and ceremonies, the punctilious performance 
 
12 
 
 of VOWS and sacrifices, the careful observance of times and 
 seasons, and the strict conformity to the outward standards of 
 a moral life, as the all-important things of life and to forget the 
 more exacting spiritual requirements as expressed by the Psalmist 
 "The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a con- 
 trite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise." Men are so likely to 
 forget that religion is not a thing of the outward act, but of the 
 heart, not of confession and deeds alone, nor even chiefly, but of 
 character ; that too much emphasis cannot be laid upon the neces- 
 sity of the benevolent will, which determines the quality of all 
 our acts and makes us either blame-worthy or acceptable in the 
 sight of God. Neither Christian ancestry, nor church member- 
 ship ; neither private devotions nor faithful attendance upon public 
 worship ; neither singing of Christian hymns, nor engaging in the 
 solemn process of sacred prayer; neither private benevolence, nor 
 public charity, will avail anything unless these spring from a 
 heart of Christian love, sanctified by the regenerating influences 
 of the spirit of God and wholly and unreservedly given over to the 
 service of God. As St. Paul tells us in Corinthians 13: "Though 
 I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity 
 T am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though 
 I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all 
 knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove 
 mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I be- 
 stow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to 
 be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." And the 
 charity here spoken of is true Christian benevolence. 
 
 Rev. George C. Lorimer, D. D., in his little treatise on con- 
 version puts the same thought succinctly and strikingly in this 
 way : 'Tt is not your baptism, however scriptural, nor your forms, 
 however churchly, nor your creed, however orthodox, thafc grants 
 the abundant entrance into the everlasting kingdom. God has 
 said that He will write His law upon the heart and enshrine His 
 spirit there; that He will take away the heart of stone and give 
 thee a heart of flesh. The old man, with his deeds, is to be put 
 off, and the new man, created in knowledge and holiness, is to take 
 his place." 
 
13 
 
 n. The Scriptural Terms Used for Conversion. 
 
 What is the nature of conversion ? What is impHed in a change 
 of heart? What is involved in the fundamental processes of re- 
 pentance and regeneration so indispensable to the Christian life 
 and to genuine Christian character ? Under what figures of speech 
 is it referred to in the Scriptures? What terms are employed in 
 designating the processes and states involved in the changed con- 
 dition of the moral life? How does the word of God conceive the 
 changes and experiences necessary to obtain entrance into the 
 spiritual life through the gates of conversion ? 
 
 i. Cease to do Evil, Learn to do Well. 
 
 One of the simplest conceptions under which the changed life 
 is described is that of the twofold act of turning away from the 
 evil and of following after that which is good and true and noble. 
 Sinners are urged to leave their life of sin and selfishness and to 
 take up a life of goodness and mercy, to forsake their wicked ways 
 and to return to the Lord their God from whom they had departed ; 
 to depart from evil and follow after that which is good ; to aban- 
 don their evil associations and their unrighteous manner of life, 
 and to cleave unto the Lord their God with all their strength and to 
 keep His Commandments and observe His laws. Thus, Isaiah 
 I : i6 and ly : "Wash you, make you clean ; put away the evil of 
 your doings from before mine eyes ; cease to do evil. Learn to do 
 well." And, again, we have these notable words in Isaiah 55 : 7 : 
 "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his 
 thoughts ; and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have 
 mercy upon him ; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon," 
 
 Christ himself in that most touching scene with the woman 
 who was a sinner and who was caught red-handed in the act of 
 her sin and disgrace, after bending over and writing with His finger 
 in the sand, thus giving her accusers an opportunity to withdraw, 
 looked at the woman and asked her: "Woman, where are those 
 thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?" "She said, no 
 man, Lord." ''Jesus said unto her, neither do I condemn thee ; go^ 
 
14 
 
 and sin no more." John 8:9, 11. The only request that our 
 Lord made of the woman was that she should turn away from 
 her evil course and from her wicked associations and abandon her 
 old life and sin no more. That, of course, would imply that she 
 should follow, on the positive side, a life of virtue and purity as 
 distinguished from a life of sin and degradation. 
 
 This conception of conversion seemingly regards the change 
 chiefly on the external side and might lead some to think that the 
 changes required were really too superficial to go to the root of 
 the matter. It is evident that the mere ceasing to do evil outwardly 
 would not be sufficient — nor the learning to do well from the 
 standpoint of conduct adequate to satisfy the more fundamental 
 conditions of a changed life. But these terms taken in their 
 deeper significance surely do imply an absolute change of heart 
 and purpose as the source of the changes enjoined. It is quite 
 possible that men may cease to do evil in word and deed and yet 
 be unchanged at heart. But it is manifestly impossible to "learn 
 to do well" in the true, spiritual sense of the term without the ante- 
 cedent fact of a changed attitude of heart and of a right purpose 
 of life from which all good deeds must flow to have any moral 
 value. If the wicked truly forsakes his way and the unrighteous 
 man truly forsakes his wicked thoughts and desires and if he turns 
 to the Lord his God, in sincerity and in truth, with a view to 
 pardon and forgiveness and with an earnest purpose to do the will 
 of God, then we' may feel assured that such a soul will truly find 
 pardon and peace and will enter upon a life of faith and trust, 
 of love and service. 
 
 2. Put off the "Old Man/^ Put on the "New Man/' 
 
 Another term that is used in the New Testament to express 
 the radical change of heart involved in conversion is the "New 
 Man." The process thus designated is somewhat similar to the 
 one just described, in which the unconverted man is enjoined to 
 abandon his life of sinfulness and follow after a life of righteous- 
 ness and well-doing. When we are told by the apostle Paul to 
 "put off the old man" with all his entanglements and worldly 
 
15 
 
 alliances, and to "put on the new man" with all his lovely attributes 
 of unselfishness and righteousness and true holiness, we are deal- 
 ing with a double process, namely, the putting away of one kind 
 or mode of life and the substituting in its place of another and 
 altogether different and better kind of life. The process involves 
 the renouncing of the life of the flesh and of appropriating the 
 life of the spirit, which is the new man. 
 
 The term "Old Man" for the unregenerate life and "New Man" 
 for the renewed life is defined by the Apostle Paul thus : "That 
 ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which 
 is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts ; and be renewed in the 
 spirit of your mind ; and that ye put on the new man, which 
 after God is created in righteousness and true holiness." Ephe- 
 sians 4:22-24. And again in Colossians Paul writes: "Seeing 
 that ye have put off the old man with his deeds ; and have put on 
 the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the image of 
 him that created him : where there is neither Greek nor Jew, 
 circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor 
 free ; but Christ is all, and in all." Colossians 3:9-11. In Ezekiel 
 we have somewhat similar terms used for the same thing : "And 
 I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you ; 
 and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give 
 them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes, and 
 keep mine ordinances, and do them. And they shall be my peo- 
 ple, and I will be their God." Ezekiel ii : 19, 20. And again, 
 Ezekiel 18:31: "Cast away from you all your transgressions, 
 whereby ye have transgressed ; and make you a new heart and a 
 new spirit ; for why will ye die, O house of Israel ?" Once again, 
 the idea of a new man, as expressed in the terms "new heart" and 
 "new spirit," is beautifully described in the justly celebrated thirty- 
 sixth chapter of Ezekiel: "Then will I sprinkle clean water 
 upon you, and ye shall be clean; from all your filthiness, and 
 from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I 
 give you, and a new spirit will I put within you ; and I will take 
 away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart 
 of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to 
 walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them. 
 
i6 
 
 And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers ; and ye 
 shall be my people, and I will be your God." Ezekiel 36 : 25-28. 
 
 The expression "Old Man" in these passages is used for the 
 old life of sin and, consequently, for the deeds of the old life, to 
 which the apostle refers in the fourth chapter of Ephesians and 
 also in the third chapter of Colossians. The deeds of the old 
 life are described in such terms as these : "Having the understand- 
 ing darkened," "being alienated from the life of God through 
 ignorance" and "blindness of their heart," being "given over unto 
 lasciviousness," having "corrupt communications proceeding out 
 of the mouth," being full of bitterness, "wrath," "malice," "blas- 
 phemy" and "filthy communications out of your mouth." All 
 these terms are included in the works or manifestations of the old 
 man and they are to be put away. And contrasted with these, we 
 have the terms that are used in connection with the life and deeds 
 of the "New Man." They are such as these : "Renewed in knowl- 
 edge after the image of him that created him," "bowels of mercies, 
 kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering;" and, 
 again, such terms, "forbearing one another" and "forgiving one 
 another, if any man have a quarrel against any," "let the peace of 
 God rule in your hearts," "let the words of Christ dwell in you 
 richly, in all wisdom," "be renewed in the spirit of your mind," 
 "put on the new man which, after God, is created in righteousness 
 and true holiness," "and above all things put on charity, which is 
 the bond of perfectness." These and many similar terms are used 
 to express the spirit and purpose of the "New Man" in all his 
 varied experiences and manifestations. 
 
 It is very evident, from these references to the works of the old 
 and the new man respectively, that more is involved in the process 
 of "putting off the old man and putting on the new man" than a 
 mere external change, as might be implied by a superficial con- 
 sideration of the language used. The old life is not something 
 that can be gotten rid of as easily and as conveniently as a suit 
 of clothes is discarded, nor is the new life something that can be 
 put on as mechanically and as superficially as a new garment can 
 be donned. As in the case of the expression, "cease to do evil, 
 learn to do well," more is required than to abstain outwardly from 
 
17 
 
 all forbidden acts of sin and to practice deeds of uprightness and 
 honesty, so more is implied in putting off the old man than in 
 merely abstaining from evil deeds and practices. And more is re- 
 quired in putting on the new man than to appropriate, ready-made, 
 as it were, a whole series of activities conventionally considered 
 correct and outwardly conforming to the requirements of a morally 
 upright life. To be sure, the putting off of the old man requires the 
 renunciation of the deeds of the old man, and putting on the new 
 man necessitates the showing forth the fruits of the new man as 
 the inevitable outgrowth of the spiritual change. But the old 
 man is more than deeds, so the new man is more than a morally 
 correct outward life. Both the old man and new man respec- 
 tively grow out of a disposition of the heart. The deeds of the 
 old man or of the new man respectively are only the outward 
 expressions of this spiritual attitude. A benevolent attitude of the 
 heart makes the actions which spring therefrom benevolent acts, 
 that is, acts of love and of mercy, of goodness and truth. And 
 all this deeper and more fundamental conception of what is in- 
 volved in the putting ofif the old man and putting on the new man 
 is not only implied in the words of the apostle, but is clearly ex- 
 pressed in many of the terms used. This is particularly true of the 
 positive side of the change required. It would manifestly be 
 impossible for the new man to show deeds of mercy, kindness, 
 humbleness of mind, meekness and love unless they originated in 
 a benevolent disposition of the heart, in a right attitude of the 
 will ; in other words, in a new heart and a new spirit. No man 
 can be truly humble unless he has the spirit of Christ. Neither 
 can any man be truly merciful or forgiving or charitable or un- 
 selfish unless he has the selfsame spirit. And all this deeper con- 
 ception involved in the change under discussion is clearly expressed 
 by the apostle in such terms as these: "Put on the new man 
 which, after God, is created in righteousness and true holiness." 
 "Put on the new man which is renewed in knowledge after the 
 image of him that created him." And, again, "Above all these 
 things, put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness. And let 
 the peace of God rule in your hearts, to the which also ye are called 
 in one body; and be ye thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell 
 
i8 
 
 in you richly in all wisdom ; teaching and admonishing one another 
 in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in 
 your hearts to the Lord. And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, 
 do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and 
 the Father by him," Colossians 3 : 15-17. 
 
 It is in the same line of thought and by a similar figure of 
 speech that Paul tells the Romans to "put on the armour of 
 light," and again, to "put on the Lord Jesus Christ," In the 
 celebrated chapter on Immortality, Paul tells the Corinthians, "this 
 corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on 
 immortality." To put off the old man, therefore, means not only 
 to put away the deeds of the old man, but also all the desires and 
 impulses, the motives and disposition of the heart from which these 
 flow. And to put on the new man means not only to show forth 
 the deeds of the new man, as described by the Apostle Paul, but 
 it means to really put on the spirit of the Christ himself, 
 from whom our acts must derive their state of rightness, and to 
 adopt His life and His teaching as the rule of our lives, and to 
 enthrone in our moral kingdom the spirit and mind of the Master 
 himself as the all-controlling and all-determining attitude of our 
 hearts. 
 
 3. Crucified with Christ. Risen with Him, 
 
 Another term which is frequently used for the act of regenera- 
 tion and which is very suggestive is, "to be crucified with Christ" 
 unto the world, and to "rise with Him" in the spirit. The figure 
 of the cross is here used as the symbolic process to which the 
 struggling soul is subjected. The cross is the symbol of suffering, 
 the ensign of tragedy, the expression of abject humiliation, as well 
 as of surpassing glory and victory in the supreme crisis of the life 
 of Jesus. It was preceded by a bitter agony in struggle, by drops 
 of blood, by heaviness of soul and by crushing burdens silently 
 borne. It was followed by the empty grave, by the spiritualized 
 body, by the glorified spirit emancipated from the limitations of its 
 incarnate life, by the triumphant ascension into heaven. In like 
 manner, the crucifixion has become the symbolic expression of the 
 
19 
 
 renewing- and regenerative experiences of the human soul in conver- 
 sion. Notice the expression used by the apostle in Romans 6:6: 
 "Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that 
 the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should 
 not serve sin." And, again, in the Epistle to the Galatians, 
 Paul uses these oft-quoted words: "I am crucified with 
 Christ; nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; 
 and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith 
 of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me." 
 Galatians 2 : 20. The same expressions are also used in Gal- 
 atians 5 : 24, when Paul says : "And they that are Christ's 
 have crucified the flesh with the aflfections and lusts." And 
 once again, in Galatians 6:14, 15, the apostle says: "But 
 God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto 
 the world. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth any- 
 thing, nor uncircumcision, but a new creature." 
 
 And so the cross stands for the supreme moral crisis of regen- 
 eration in a most suggestive manner. The old man, with his lusts 
 and desires, is to be crucified, to suffer anguish, sorrow and pain 
 in the act of death. The new man is to come forth out of the 
 grave of its crucified body, from the limitations and entangled alli- 
 ances of the life of the flesh, with larger powers, greater spiritual 
 capacity, and infinitely greater power for Christian service. The 
 crucifixion is the crisis which separates the old life from the new 
 life. It is the transforming and transfiguring process. To be cruci- 
 fied with Christ, therefore, means, figuratively speaking, to be 
 crushed with sorrow and defeat, to suffer pain and anguish, to be 
 nailed as to the old life on the cross, and to die. To be risen with 
 Christ means to come forth out of the grave, transfigured and regen- 
 erated, into the fuller and purer and ampler life of the spirit. For 
 the world to be "crucified unto me" and "I unto the world," as 
 Paul puts it, means that the spirit of the world, which is best 
 typified by the flesh, shall pass through the selfsame process of 
 suffering, anguish and death into the grave, so that the trans- 
 formed and renewed life of the new man may come forth and live. 
 For the world to be crucified unto me means that the spirit and 
 
20 
 
 life of the world shall be dead unto me, shall have no disturb- 
 ing influence over me, shall have no existence for me. That I 
 shall be crucified unto the world means that I shall be dead unto 
 the spirit and life of the world, that the world shall not exist for 
 me, so far as its baneful influence upon me is concerned. I am 
 dead to the world that I may live unto God and His spirit. The 
 world is dead unto me that the spirit of God may live in me. 
 The spirit of the world and the spirit of God cannot live together 
 in me side by side. The one must be dead to the other. Or, as 
 Paul expresses it : 'T am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I 
 live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." 
 
 The flesh and the spirit are here contrasted. The flesh refers 
 to the "Old Man" and typifies the old life of sin. The spirit 
 refers to the "New Man" and typifies the new life of the spirit, 
 "For they that are after the flesh do mind the things of the 
 flesh ; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit." 
 Romans 8 : 5. The flesh and the spirit are at enmity, the one sig- 
 nifying death, the other life, "For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall 
 die ; but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, 
 ye shall live." Romans 8 : 13. "For to be carnally minded is 
 death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace." "So then 
 they that are in the flesh cannot please God." "Because the 
 carnal mind is enmity against God." Romans 8:6, 7. And the 
 fruits of the flesh and of the spirit are evident and testify to the 
 perpetual and irreconcilable conflict between the two. "For the 
 flesh liisteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; 
 and these are contrary the one to the other." Galatians 5:17. 
 The works or the fruits of the flesh are described by Paul as 
 follows : "Now the works of the flesh are manifest^ which are 
 these : Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, 
 witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, 
 heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such 
 like; of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in 
 times past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the 
 kingdom of God." Then, again, the fruits of the spirit are also 
 described by Paul, as follows : "But the fruit of the spirit is love, 
 joy, peace, longsufifering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, 
 
21 
 
 temperance ; against such there is no law." Galatians 5 : 19-23. 
 In Galatians 6:7, 8, Paul writes these impressive words as 
 to the radical difference between the fruits of the flesh and the 
 fruits of the spirit : "Be not deceived ; God is not mocked ; for 
 whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. For he that 
 soweth to his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption ; but he that 
 soweth to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap life everlasting." 
 
 It appears, therefore, that this conception of regeneration as- 
 sumes some sort of relationship between the life of the flesh and 
 the life of the spirit. The two are not entirely and absolutely 
 distinct, in that they have no relation to each other or no refer- 
 ence to a common origin. As in the case of Jesus, the divine life 
 of the risen Christ was not different in quality from the divine 
 life of the incarnate Christ, crowded and cramped and impris- 
 oned into the limitations of the human body before the crucifixion. 
 The crucifixion was not only a dying process, according to the 
 physical state of his incarnate life, but it was also and chiefly a 
 process by which the earth-bound and humanity-limited life of 
 the cross became once more the unconditioned and unhampered life 
 of the spirit. In like manner, the spiritual life of the new birth 
 has its roots and germs in the life of the flesh. What is earthly, 
 perishable, sinful, carnal, is crucified and must die; but out of 
 the grave of the old crucified life of the flesh comes forth the germ 
 of the new life, as the germ of the new! plant comes forth out of 
 the death and corruption of the old grain of wheat. Without 
 death, as it were, there can be no life. "Except a corn of wheat 
 fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it 
 bringeth forth much fruit." 
 
 The same intimate connection of the new life with the old life 
 is suggested in Isaiah, when he writes : "Come now, and let us 
 reason together, saith the Lord : though your sins be as scarlet, 
 they shall be as white as snow : though they be red like crimson, 
 they shall be as wool." Isaiah i : 18. This sounds somewhat 
 strange. Is it possible that sin can be turned to righteousness, 
 that the scarlet of the sinful life can be converted into the white 
 purity of the life of righteousness? How can these things be? 
 Can sin be anything but sin ? Can there be any connection 
 
22 
 
 between life and death, between light and darkness, between right- 
 eousness and sin? In ordinary language and in much of the 
 biblical phraseology the thought is conveyed that sin and right- 
 eousness have no connection at all with each other and no rela- 
 tion to each other except that of enmity ; and this of course is 
 true in the sense that all sin must die. The old life of the 
 flesh must perish, and the old man must be crucified. And yet, 
 considered more profoundly and more fundamentally, do not 
 sin and righteousness flow from the same original source? Do 
 they not both have their root and origin in the common impulses 
 and passions, desires and affections of our human natures? Is it 
 not, after all, a matter of will and a disposition of the heart whether 
 our native instincts and impulses, which are really the motive 
 forces of our lives, shall lead us to life or to death, shall bring 
 forth acts of sin and selfishness or deeds of love and purity? 
 For instance, the sin of covetousness has its root in the natural, 
 useful impulse of the soul to acquire, to possess ; and this impulse 
 is surely of the utmost importance in the struggle for existence; 
 but it needs to be regulated and controlled, and if turned to use- 
 ful and beneficent directions serves a most valuable purpose. We 
 are to seek and to seek earnestly, but only the best things. We 
 are to desire things and to acquire them, not for selfish 
 enjoyment, but for wise and benevolent purposes. The same is 
 true of the sin of gluttony. The natural desire for food is a 
 normal and necessary one and, discreetly and temperately in- 
 dulged, serves a very useful purpose. A natural, instinctive crav- 
 ing for physical sustenance may, therefore, lead us to an act of 
 sin in gluttony or to an act of usefulness and virtue in the 
 moderate enjoyment of nourishment, depending altogether upon 
 the controlling and directing purpose back of it. And is not this 
 practically true of all our sins? Is it not possible to convert the 
 crude and fundamental impulses, desires and passions of our 
 natures, out of which so many of our sins of self-indulgence and 
 self-gratification spring, because of a lack of temperate control, 
 to the higher and more unselfish uses of life ? Is it not true, there- 
 fore, that the fundamental impelling and propelling forces of 
 our natures, our instincts and impulses, our passions and desires, 
 
23 
 
 which are not only innocent in themselves, but absolutely essen- 
 tial to life and self-preservation, may be harnessed and wisely 
 directed by the steadying hand of a benevolent will and made to 
 serve the highest and most beneficent uses of life? 
 
 It is well to distinguish, therefore, between sin and virtue, be- 
 tween selfishness and unselfishness, as not two entirely different 
 manifestations as to their source, but as having really a common 
 origin in the affective side of our nature. To control, there- 
 fore, our manifold desires, to subject our impulses and passions 
 to the sway of reason, to be guided in our affections and longings 
 by the law of love and mercy, to turn these elemental forces 
 of our natures to the highest and noblest uses of personal, social 
 and religious service ; this is the great problem of life, this is the 
 supreme requirement of the divided, struggling self for a life 
 of true benevolence and Christian charity. 
 
 4. The** New Birth/' Bom from Above. 
 
 One of the most suggestive expressions found in the New Testa- 
 ment for the change involved in true conversion from a state of 
 conscious sin is the "New Birth." There is a natural birth, so 
 there is a spiritual birth. The natural man has the beginning 
 of his physical life in the natural birth. The spiritual man has his 
 origin and beginning in the spiritual birth. The natural phe- 
 nomenon of physical birth is the fact seized upon to suggest some of 
 the most fundamental and most radical and most mysterious ex- 
 periences in the life of the human soul. 
 
 The newness of this new life is one of the things emphasized. 
 Jesus said to Nicodemus : "Verily, verily, I say unto you, ex- 
 cept a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of 
 God." Nicodemus saith : "How can a man be born when he is 
 old?" showing he mistook the force of our Saviour's remarks 
 entirely. Jesus said in reply: "Verily, verily I say unto thee, 
 except a man be born of water and of the spirit, he cannot 
 enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh 
 is flesh, and that which is born of the spirit is spirit." "Marvel 
 not that I said unto thee, ye must be born again." John 3 : 5-7. 
 
24 
 
 The same term is used by Peter : "Being born again, not of cor- 
 ruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word of God, which 
 liveth and abideth forever." I Peter i : 23. And, again : "Who 
 hath begotten us again to a lively hope by the resurrection of 
 Jesus Christ from the dead." I Peter i : 3. Just as in the physical 
 birth a new life is brought into the world, so in the spiritual birth 
 there are new moral and spiritual powers brought into life and 
 activity. It is in line with the expression, "Dead in trespasses 
 and sins," "dead to sin," "dead to the law," so frequently used in 
 the Epistles. The soul that is dead in trespasses and sins needs 
 a new life, a spiritual birth. As Paul says : "And you hath he 
 quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins." Ephesians 
 2:1. And again: "And you being dead in your sins and the 
 uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened (or made alive)." 
 Colossians 2: 13. The newness of the spiritual life, though not 
 under the same figure, is emphasized by Paul in II Cor- 
 inthians : "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new crea- 
 ture ; old things are passed away ; behold, all things are become 
 new." II Corinthians 5:17. Also in Galatians 6:15, "For 
 in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, nor uncir- 
 cumcision, but a new creature." The spiritual life is a new life 
 and calls for new powers and activities, new associations and 
 new interests. The newness of the spiritual life is everywhere 
 emphasized and made important. 
 
 The new life is also spoken of as "coming from above." It 
 is a creation of the spirit of God in its operations upon the human 
 soul. As physical life is necessary to beget physical life, so spir- 
 itual life is necessary to beget spiritual life. God is the source 
 of all spiritual life. Through faith in Him and through the vital- 
 izing operations of His spirit upon our spirits, either creating new 
 powers or awakening to life the innate spiritual capacities of the 
 soul, we are born of God and enter into the life of the New 
 Birth. "Which were bom not of blood, nor of the will of the 
 flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God," as we find it in John 
 I :i3. "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God. 
 And every one that loveth is born of God." I John 4 : 7. 
 
 This new spiritual life is begotten not only by contact of the 
 
25 
 
 divine life with the human Hfe through direct and immediate 
 touch, it may also be brought forth by the contact of the spiritual 
 life of one soul with the spiritual life of another soul. Like 
 begets like. Spirit begets spirit. Paul says in Philemon con- 
 cerning Onesimus : "Whom I have begotten in my bonds." Also 
 in writing to the Corinthians, he says : "For though ye have ten 
 thousand instructors in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers : for 
 in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel." I Co- 
 rinthians 4: 15. This makes the work of a truly spiritual man a 
 life-giving and a spiritually creative work. What a blessed thing 
 it is that a spirit-filled life may convey of its fullness to another 
 soul. What a glorious opportunity that he whom God has 
 touched from above with His spirit may beget others, as Paul did, 
 unto a lively hope in Jesus Christ through the Gospels. 
 
 Nicodemus in his amazement at the greatness and vastness of 
 the idea of the new birth here announced said : "How can these 
 things be?" And well he might have asked that question, for 
 all these spiritual processes are full of mystery and difficult of 
 comprehension. But the facts of the natural life and of the 
 natural birth are just as wonderful and just as difficult of com- 
 prehension. Life in any and in all of its forms is a mysterious 
 and incomprehensible something, whose manifestations we can 
 observe, whose growth and decay we can discern, but whose real 
 essence and nature we must always remain ignorant of. The 
 spiritual life is no exception. It is no more and no less wonder- 
 ful than life in any of its diverse forms. As Drummond tells 
 us in his "Natural Law in the Spiritual World": "Even science 
 has its mysteries, none more inscrutable than around the science of 
 Life. We have seen that the spiritual life is an endowment 
 from the spiritual world and that the Living Spirit of Christ 
 dwells in the Christian. The breath of God blowing where it 
 listeth, touches with its mystery of life the dead souls of 
 men, bears them across the bridgeless gulf between the natural and 
 the spiritual, between the spiritually inorganic and the spiritually 
 organic, endows them with its own high qualities and develops 
 within them these new and secret faculties, by which those who 
 are born again are said to see the Kingdom of God. But what 
 
26 
 
 more does science know of life? Nothing. It knows nothing 
 further about its origin in detail. It knows nothing about its ulti- 
 mate nature. It cannot ever define it. Where there is excep- 
 tional mystery in the spiritual world it will generally be found 
 that there is a corresponding mystery in the natural world." 
 
 Two facts concerning the spiritual life are evident and they 
 are very precious, namely, that we can experience and observe 
 its presence and that we can assist in its promulgation. As in the 
 natural world, the evidences of life and growth are manifest 
 everywhere. We cannot be mistaken about that. So in the spir- 
 itual life. Jesus said to Nicodemus : "The wind bloweth where it 
 listeth and thou hearest the sound thereof but canst not tell 
 whence it cometh or whither it goeth : so is every one that is born 
 of the Spirit." The movements and operations of the spirit may 
 not be discernible to the natural eye, but the presence of the 
 spirit may be experienced in the heart and observed in the lives 
 of others. The movements of the spirit are not limited by set 
 bounds nor circumscribed by arbitrary conditions. It does not 
 reveal itself alike to all souls. Its manner of operation is varied. 
 As in the case of the wind, it may come with mighty power 
 and shake the towering giants of the forests to the very roots, 
 or it may come as the evening zephyrs come, so quietly, so 
 calmly and so gently, that its refreshing coolness will be felt as a 
 gladsome presence without sign or token of excitement. 
 
 And even if the operation of the spirit upon our souls in the 
 new birth should, perchance, be so faint in its presence and so 
 gentle in its influence as to preclude, seemingly, all thought of 
 supernatural interference and divine presence in the process, shall 
 we, on this account, call its reality into question or doubt its 
 presence altogether? "By their fruits ye shall know them." If 
 the real fruits of the new birth are present, surely the spirit 
 itself must be present too. If we know ourselves as belonging 
 to God, by a voluntary and complete surrender to His influence, 
 if we have perceived the gracious operations of God's spirit upon 
 our hearts in a warmer love for His word and in a deeper interest 
 in His kingdom, if we are conscious of a strong and unfaltering 
 trust in God's eternal goodness and infinite mercy for forgiveness 
 
27 
 
 of sin and for help in the hfe that now is, and for hope and 
 confidence in the life that is to come, then we may rest con- 
 tented. The Divine Presence is in all gracious operations of the 
 spirit upon the soul, whether with power or with gentleness and 
 peace. Over the portals of St. Paul's Cathedral in London are 
 the words of the famous epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren, the 
 architect of that massive temple of God : "If you are looking 
 for his monument, look about you." So we may say, if you 
 ask, where is the Divine Hand manifested in a life whose funda- 
 mental preference is Christlike, "Look about you." The evi- 
 dence of divine workmanship and the assurance of divine 
 presence is on every hand. God is love and he who dwells in love 
 dwells in God. 
 
 Whether we regard the New Birth as an entirely new creation 
 begotten by the spirit of God in the moral life of man, or whether 
 we consider the New Birth as an awakening and a breaking forth 
 into fuller life of the spiritual nature of man, by the vitalizing 
 operations of the Holy Spirit, is immaterial. As long as men are 
 not agreed as to the origin of the human soul in the natural 
 birth, some holding to the theory of transmission of life and some 
 to that of a new creation, so long we may consider the spiritual 
 phase of this question in the same light. The older theologians 
 have usually held to the theory that the spiritual life in man is 
 really created in the New Birth, that the spiritual life had really 
 no existence in man until it was begotten in the soul by the 
 power of the Holy Spirit in conversion. Thus Drummond 
 stoutly maintains this view by quoting the words of the Saviour as 
 proof: He that "hath the Son hath life and he that hath not 
 the Son hath not life." Others again maintain that every soul 
 has spiritual capacities at birth, which develop with the other 
 powers of the soul, and through the influence of the Holy Spirit 
 are brought into full consciousness at a certain period in the 
 soul's growth and development, and that this awakening of the 
 new-bom powers of the soul to its full conscious existence consti- 
 tutes the New Birth. Be that as it may. To all intents and pur- 
 poses, the full conscious power of the spiritual life has its origin 
 and beginning in the regenerative experiences of conversion or 
 
28 
 
 in the soul's conscious awakening through gradual growth and 
 development to new spiritual powers and capacities. And what 
 is a most striking and impressive fact, the awakened soul under 
 the influence of the spirit may be the instrument of awakening 
 other souls into full consciousness' of divine power, and thus in a 
 sense be the bearers or creators of spiritual life in others. If Paul 
 could say of Onesimus, "I have begotten you through the Gospel," 
 and of the Corinthians, "For in Jesus Christ I have begotten 
 you through the Gospel," then surely our mission is no less fruitful 
 of life-creative influences, and no less potent with spirit-awaken- 
 ing powers, provided we allow ourselves to be used as instruments 
 of the Lord Jesus Christ through the word of the living truth, 
 to bring spiritual life and health to a dead and dying world. 
 This is indeed a glorious mission. 
 
 The Evangelist Torrey describes the process of the New Birth 
 as follows : "In the New Birth, the Word of God is the seed ; 
 the human heart is the soil ; the preacher of the word is the sower, 
 and drops the seed into the soil. God by his spirit opens the 
 heart to receive the seed ; the hearer believes. The spirit quickens 
 the seed into life in the receptive heart ; the new divine nature 
 springs up out of the divine Word ; the believer is born again, 
 created anew, made alive, passed out of death into life." 
 
 5. The Prodig-al Son. A Typical Case of Sin and Repentance* 
 
 We now come to a typical case of sin and redemption. The 
 story of the Prodigal Son is a story of simple human life and 
 also of divine love and compassion. In the terms for conver- 
 sion previously considered, no account has been taken of God's part 
 in the changes brought about. God's love and God's forgive- 
 ness were not considered. Emphasis was intentionally placed 
 upon the sinner's part in the transaction. The divine willing- 
 I ness to forgive sin and to forgive the sinner was merely assumed 
 as a matter which needed no proof. 
 
 Neither was anything said of the origin of sin nor of the 
 influences and circumstances which usually lead to sin and guilt. 
 The fact of sin was assumed. The universal existence of moral 
 
29 
 
 disorder was recog^nized as something which needed attention and 
 which called for serious consideration. Conversion was, there- 
 fore, considered from the sinner's standpoint as a turning away 
 from evil to the good or as putting off the old man and putting 
 on the new man, a crucifying the old life, 'with its consequent 
 renewal of the new life, and as a New Birth or a New Life 
 with its attendant consequences. These are the essential things, 
 because they affect the sinner himself and because without these 
 subjective changes, there can be no real conversion. As Prof. 
 Coe says in his "Religion of a Mature Mind" : "Conversion is 
 the act of the sinner himself. No one can doubt this who reads 
 the New Testament in the Greek. Whoever turns away from a 
 life of sin to a life of obedience to Christian principle is a con- 
 verted man. Saying this does not deny, but merely leaves out of 
 consideration, the part that God plays in cooperation with the 
 repentant sinner. It merely insists upon the plain fact that to 
 be converted is to adopt the Christian principle of life, and that 
 this is an act of the sinner's own will, and that his status in the 
 kingdom can, therefore, be determined by what he chooses to be 
 and to do." 
 
 In the parable of the Prodigal Son, however, which has been 
 called the "Pearl" and "Crown" of all the parables, the various 
 elements that enter into the processes of sin, remorse, repentance, 
 forgiveness and restoration are given with an unerring hand and 
 with a vivid touch of reality. This parable shows very vividly 
 and impressively the course of sin and the necessary steps of 
 conversion on the sinner's side. But it also shows, as very few 
 passages of Scripture, the supreme and all-important part of God 
 in the sinner's regeneration and restoration. The parable is an 
 epitome of human sin and of divine love. No touch is omitted. 
 The picture is complete. The Prodigal's sin and alienation 
 from his father, his life of self-indulgence and debauchery "in 
 a far country," the coming of the prodigal to himself and the 
 full realization of his lost and pitiful condition, the firm resolu- 
 tion on his part to return to his father and throw himself upon 
 the father's mercy and forgiveness, the son's welcome recep- 
 tion by his father and his complete restoration and forgiveness, 
 
30 
 
 all these steps in the prodigal's sin, redemption and salvation 
 are portrayed with a simplicity but with a directness and an 
 impressiveness which go straight to the heart. The prodigal is 
 a type and hence represents hosts of others in their experiences 
 of sin and salvation. And because the prodigal is a type of 
 thousands of other wayward sons, and because such numbers of 
 human souls have followed in the prodigal's footsteps and have 
 tasted, with the prodigal, the cup of bitterness and the dregs 
 of remorse, and because countless thousands of others have ex- 
 perienced, like the prodigal, the utter hollowness and emptiness 
 of a life of sin and sordid enjoyment and have resolved in 
 their moments of reason, when they "came to themselves," to 
 "arise and to go to my father" and have there found forgive- 
 ness and peace in the loving arms of a father's mercy, I say 
 because of all these considerations the case of the prodigal son 
 serves, perhaps, as the most perfect and the most complete 
 epitome of the terrible tragedy of human sin and divine redemp- 
 tion from sin through suffering and love. Here we have a pic- 
 ture of sin in its secret inception and open manifestation, of 
 consequent guilt and shame in its most attractive guise of good- 
 fellowship and of unsatisfying pleasure, of keen remorse over 
 wasted powers and opportunities and of bitter anguish at the 
 remembrance of a father's unrequited love and unappreciated 
 goodness, of a heroic resolution to atone for past remissness 
 and to implore an undeserving forgiveness at his father's hands, 
 and of such an unexpected and an overpowering outburst of 
 a father's pent-up love in ample forgiveness and joyous restora- 
 tion, that the world has been moved to tears of pity, of re- 
 pentance and rejoicing in all ages by its contemplation. A closer 
 study of this incomparable story of human weakness and of 
 divine mercy and strength will surely be especially helpful in 
 the light of what we have already considered. 
 
 The Prodigal's Sin and Estrangement from his Father. 
 The prodigal's sin consisted chiefly in his unfilial attitude of 
 disobedience and disloyalty in asking for himself what did not 
 belong to him. "Father give me the portion of goods that falletb 
 to me." This was his bold and shameless request. But, as a 
 
31 
 
 matter of fact, he had no claim on his father as was implied in 
 his request. As long as the father lived all his goods belonged 
 to him and were his own possessions. The son had no right, 
 either legal or moral, to request any for himself. It was insub- 
 ordination on the part of the son, asking for what did not be- 
 long to him, requesting for his own personal selfish enjoyment 
 what was unlawful to him. This is really at the root of all sin, 
 a desire on the part of the sinner to have for himself and to 
 use in self-gratification what really does not belong to him and 
 what is unlawful and, therefore, sinful for him to have. All sin 
 is selfishness and all selfishness is sin, and consists largely, if not 
 entirely, in the attitude of the prodigal, when he asked for him- 
 self the portion of the goods which really did not belong to him, 
 but which he desired to spend upon himself in sinful pleasure 
 and shameful debauchery. Our impulses and passions are con- 
 tinually urging us on to ask for self-indulgence and self-grati- 
 fication in the things which are unlawful for us to have. "Sin 
 is the transgression of the law," we are told. It consists in doing 
 the things which are forbidden or of leaving undone the things 
 which are required. In the last analysis our sins very largely 
 grow out of our secret desire or our open demand for what 
 does not belong to us by way of enjoyment or indulgence, or in 
 failing to render filial obedience to the will of the kind father in 
 loving service. The prodigal was guilty of both. We, as sin- 
 ners, share the prodigal's attitude, consequently partake of his 
 guilt. To be sure, the father was under no obligation to grant 
 the son's request. But because of our freedom of choice, God 
 allows us our way and makes us take the consequences of our 
 acts. 
 
 The prodigal's departure from home and his estrangement from 
 his father in a far country was but an incident or a consequence 
 of his rebellious attitude. Sin always separates. Selfishness and 
 love cannot dwell together in peace. The journeying to a far 
 country and the spending of his substance in riotous living were 
 but the natural and logical consequences of an unfilial attitude and 
 of selfish requests for indulgence in the things which did not be- 
 long to him. The first step of this lamentable downfall was a 
 3 
 
32 
 
 secret desire in the heart of the younger son for what was not 
 lawful for him to have. The secret desire brought forth the for- 
 bidden act and that involved the foolish son in a long train of 
 evil consequences, with separation, estrangement, self-gratifica- 
 tion and utter abandonment of the noblest that was in him. Sin 
 seeks a hiding place. Adam sought to get away from God by 
 hiding. His descendants have followed his example in sin and 
 in seeking to hide and get away from God. The estrangement 
 is always on the part of the sinner, not on the part of God. The 
 prodigal's father was not estranged. He had nothing but sorrow 
 and compassion for his wayward son. And this is true of our 
 Heavenly Father. He grieves for His wayward and rebellious 
 children. He sought Adam in the garden and called, "Adam, 
 where art thou?" He has sought His disobedient children ever 
 since. He has come to seek and to save, in Jesus Christ, that which 
 was lost. The estrangement of the human soul from God is always 
 on the part of the soul itself, in that it voluntarily and deliber- 
 ately refuses to yield obedience and service to its Heavenly Father ; 
 and in requesting for itself "goods" and pleasures and self-grati- 
 fication which are unlawful for the soul to have. And in seek- 
 ing forbidden pleasures the soul removes itself from the happy 
 associations of the Father's house to a "far country" of sin and 
 forbidden pleasure. 
 
 The Prodigal's Remorse and Sorrow for Sin. A life 
 of self-indulgence and dissolution did not satisfy the foolish 
 young man. Forbidden pleasures last but for a season. They 
 always leave the heart hungry and the spirit unsatisfied and 
 the higher wants unmet. With his substance wasted in riotous 
 living, and his merry-making friends abandoning him after he 
 was unable to minister to their pleasure and with the pangs of 
 an unsatisfied hunger gnawing at him while he himself was 
 seeking to satisfy his physical wants with the "husks which the 
 swine did eat," the prodigal began to reflect over his pitiful 
 condition and to come to his senses. He "came to himself." His 
 reason reasserted itself. The remembrance of his father's house, 
 with its servants in comfort and plenty and the realization of 
 his own poor miserable condition, made him say to himself. 
 
33 
 
 "How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough 
 and to spare and I suffer with hunger." That was a physical 
 pang. The remembrance of his father's loving kindness and 
 how he spurned it and abused it by his unfilial conduct, causing 
 his father sorrow and pain, together with the solemn conscious- 
 ness of his own unworthiness and sinfulness, must have given him 
 a keener pang. Alone, and in solitude, needy and unsatisfied, 
 with the blackness and worthlessness of his own life ever pres- 
 ent before him, with sorrow and remorse for his past conduct, 
 he turned in his hopelessness and remorse to the thought of his 
 father's house and his father's plenty. Might he not there find 
 a refuge, and on bended knee, beg for the privilege of humble 
 service? "I will arise and go to my father and will say, father 
 I have sinned against heaven and before thee and am no more 
 worthy to be called thy son; make me as one of thy hired 
 servants." Such penitence and genuine humility and utter 
 self-abasement ! Surely there was nothing wanting on the 
 prodigal's part to make the cup of his bitterness full to overflow- 
 ing. Such humility is precious in the sight of God. Such 
 emptiness of self God can fill with joy and gladness. Such 
 gnawing spiritual hunger God delights to satisfy with bounteous 
 plenty. 
 
 What an impressive fact of the disappointing and unsatisfying 
 results of a life of sin. To enjoy the "pleasures of sin for a 
 season" is usually followed by loathing and by an unsatisfied 
 hunger. Sin is disappointing and its punishment usually stands 
 in intimate relation to the sin. So with the prodigal. "He, who 
 would not, as a son, be treated liberally by his father, is com- 
 pelled to be the servant and bondslave of a foreign master; he 
 who would not be ruled by God, is compelled to serve the devil ; 
 he who would not abide in his father's royal palace is sent to 
 the fields among swine; he who would not dwell among breth- 
 ren and princes, is obliged to be the servant and companion of 
 brutes; he who would not feed on the bread of angels, petitions 
 in his hunger for the husks of the swine." Sin never satisfies 
 the higher demands of the soul. It leaves hunger, a desire 
 for husks. It awakens recollections of better things. Its 
 
34 
 
 unsatisfying character was the prodigal's salvation. It left him 
 impoverished physically and morally and this was a mighty help 
 to his regeneration. 
 
 His Resolution to Return to His Father's House. The 
 prodigal was not content to remain in his state of poverty 
 and estrangement. He was not only sincerely sick of his past 
 life and thoroughly penitent for his past sins, but he was also 
 exceedingly anxious to get back to his father's house and make 
 amends, as far as possible, for what he had done. So he re- 
 solved within himself: "I will arise and go to my father and I 
 will say unto him, father I have sinned against heaven and be- 
 fore thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son. Make 
 me as one of thy hired servants." This was the turning point 
 in his life that carried with it the power of change. Sorrow 
 for past sin, a desire to return to the father's house and to enjoy 
 the father's bounty was not sufficient, though it was a necessary 
 condition which led to his saving resolution. 'T will arise." This 
 was an act of will on his part, a deliberate attitude of the soul 
 which led him into sin and guilt in the first place and which now 
 in his extremity will be the immediate cause of his redemption 
 and reformation. This cannot be too strongly emphasized. It 
 is the most vital and the most important and the most potential 
 element in all the processes of conversion. It is the crucial test 
 of conversion. When the prodigal said to himself in the full 
 strength of his sin-sick soul, "I will arise and go to my father 
 and I will say unto him, father I have sinned," and then when he 
 followed up his resolution by the necessary course of action in- 
 volved in the resolution, then the battle was won, the tide was 
 turned, the course was now backward to the father and upward 
 to the light. To have resolved mightily in his heart to leave 
 his old life, to throw himself upon his father's mercy and to ask 
 his father's forgiveness and restoration, was all that the young 
 man could do so far as his subjective attitude was concerned. 
 But this was much. And then to follow up his noble resolution 
 with honest, earnest and sincere effort, in the right direction, 
 was what made his resolution effective. The supreme moment 
 is always when the soul resolves within itself, and solemnly and 
 
35 
 
 firmly draws its full strength together for the decisive and fate- 
 ful moment of decision and consequent action. These are the 
 moments in the life of individuals which completely change and 
 entirely revolutionize their lives. 
 
 The Father's Treatment of the Prodigal. The prodi- 
 gal had done his part. He had made his solemn reso- 
 lution. He had retraced his steps without hesitancy. He 
 had thrown himself upon his father's mercy, with the confes- 
 sion : "Father I have sinned, I am no more worthy to be called 
 thy son. But do not cast me away in anger, but have mercy 
 upon me in thy pity and find a place for me, however humble and 
 lowly, in thy spiritual household." His rebellion was gone. His 
 self-sufficiency and pride were humbled. He made no plea of 
 extenuating circumstances and showed no disposition to lay the 
 blame on some one else. It was his rebellious heart that had done 
 it. It was his fault that was the cause of it. He knew it only too 
 well. He would simply make a full and complete acknowledg- 
 ment and trust his father's love and mercy for the rest. It was 
 this attitude which made it possible for his father to receive him 
 graciously. It is such an attitude of heart in the sinner which 
 makes forgiveness and restoration at the hands of God always 
 possible. 
 
 And surely the penitent son was not long in doubt. What a 
 picture we have of the father's unbounded love. "When he was 
 yet a great way oflF his father saw him and had compassion and 
 ran on his neck and kissed him." Before the repentant son had 
 ever uttered a word or opened his mouth to speak in confession, 
 or framed his petition for pardon, his long-suffering father had 
 seen him in the distance, and had already pronounced the words 
 of forgiveness in his own heart. The father's love anticipated 
 the request of the son for forgiveness. Yea, he had been pa- 
 tiently waiting for the son's return. He had suffered untold 
 anguish over his son's waywardness and was grieved beyond 
 measure over his son's absence from home. The heart of God 
 is always more grieved over the sinner's waywardness than human 
 tongue can tell. John G. Paton in his autobiography tells of a 
 praying old mother in Scotland whose son had left home to be 
 
36 
 
 lost in the larger world of the British Empire. But the mother's 
 heart clung to the hope of a return. "Every night she prayed 
 for that event, and before closing the door, threw it wide open 
 and peered into the darkness with a cry, 'come home, my boy 
 Walter, your mother wearies sair.' And every morning, at early 
 break of day, for a period of more than twenty years, she tod- 
 dled up from her cottage door at Johnsfield, Lockerbie, to a 
 little round hill called the 'Corbie Dykes' and gazing with tear- 
 filled eyes towards the south, for the form of her returning 
 boy, praying the Lord God to keep him safe and restore him to 
 her yet again." What a picture of a Heavenly Father's untiring 
 love and passionate yearning for the return of His wandering 
 children. 
 
 The son's forgiveness and restoration was complete and past 
 all expectation. There was not one element lacking. He had 
 framed a form of confession to be made to his father, but the 
 words died on his lips unexpressed in the father's assuring act 
 of welcome. He had hoped to take his place among his father's 
 servants who had "bread enough and to spare," but instead he was 
 received in princely fashion and restored to his rightful place 
 of sonship in his father's family. He had longed to eat of the 
 humble fare which fell to the lot of his father's hired servants, 
 but instead the father ordered a bountiful feast to be prepared for 
 him and to be served in the presence of rejoicing friends with 
 royal splendor, in his special honor. The prodigal hoped he might 
 lay aside his tattered garments — fit emblems of his wasted life 
 — and be clothed in the plain and simple garb of self-respect and 
 decency; but instead his father had him arrayed in the best 
 garments of his princely wardrobe, with shoes on his travel-stained 
 feet and a ring on his finger, clothed with all the emblems of a 
 royal welcome and reception. And there was great rejoicing. 
 "Let us eat and be merry for this my son was dead, and is 
 alive again ; he was lost and is found." 
 
 What an impressive picture this is of God's loving attitude 
 towards his wayward children. Whatever our theories may be 
 about the forgiveness of sin theologically, there can be not a 
 particle of doubt in the mind of anyone as to God's attitude 
 
37 
 
 towards the repentant sinner and His willingness and readiness 
 to forgive sin. He does not only wait for the return of the 
 prodigal and see him in the distance and run out with out- 
 stretched arms to meet him and welcome him and forgive him; 
 he is tireless in his efforts to seek and to find the lost children 
 of men, as is shown by the parable of the lost sheep and the 
 lost coin. God has been seeking his children ever since the first 
 recorded prodigal alienated himself from his Maker by his own 
 sin and hid himself in the garden, to be startled by the words, 
 "Adam, where art thou?" The prophets, as God's messengers, 
 sought to bring back the children of Israel to the worship of 
 Jehovah, by urgent and repeated invitations. Jesus himself came 
 as unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel "to seek and to 
 save that which was lost." And He represents himself as the 
 Good Shepherd, seeking the lost sheep, carrying them home in 
 his bosom, gently caring for them and gathering them into his 
 fold. It is a beautiful and touching thought, that God in all 
 the ages has been endeavoring, through all the saving influences 
 at His command, to bring back His wandering children to Him- 
 self and restore them to their full prerogative of sonship in His 
 own spiritual Kingdom. 
 
 There can surely be no doubt in the mind of any of God's 
 children as to His attitude in the matter of forgiveness. His love 
 is boundless and envelops all. His hand is ever stretched forth 
 to raise from the dust any truly penitent sinner and make him 
 stand on his feet in self-respect and confidence. His ear is ever 
 open to listen to the cry of His suffering children and come to 
 their rescue. God is not slow to forgive nor sparing with His 
 mercy. No, God is slow to anger and "plenteous in mercy.'' 
 It is not necessary for the penitent soul to storm the courts of 
 heaven with agonizing prayers and with long-continued petitions 
 before the portals open and peace and assurance is spoken to 
 the trembling soul. The sinner's submission and surrender must 
 be complete. This is the condition. To such souls the acceptance 
 is complete. Why should the sin-sick soul not take courage 
 and come. Let no one doubt, but take God at His word and 
 come. 
 
38 
 
 Just as I am, without one plea 
 But that Thy blood was shed for me 
 And that Thou bidst me come to Thee, 
 O Lamb of God, I come. 
 
 Just as I am, though tossed about 
 With many a conflict, many a doubt, 
 Fightings within and fears without, 
 O Lamb of God, I come. 
 
 Just as I am. Thou wilt receive 
 Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve ; 
 Because Thy promise I believe, 
 O Lamb of God, I come. 
 
PART TWO. 
 
 CONVERSION THROUGH CHRISTIAN 
 CULTURE. 
 
 That the confirmed and hardened sinner should need a radi- 
 cal change of heart and life in conversion is self-evident. It is 
 the teaching of Scripture and the testimony of experience. On 
 the other hand, that children of Christian parents and surrounded 
 by Christian influences should be able to enter into their spiritual 
 inheritance without any striking radical change in their conscious 
 moral life ought to be equally self-evident. It, too, is clearly 
 taught in Scripture and attested by experience. One is the proc- 
 ess of conversion through moral revolution, the other through 
 moral evolution. By the one method the spiritual nature is 
 "transformed" from a state of moral unworthiness to one of 
 moral worthiness. By the other process the spiritual nature is 
 "conformed" in its growth and development to the life and char- 
 acter of Jesus Christ, who is not only the author, but also the 
 finisher of our faith. 
 
 And yet there is no agreement on the part of Christian teachers 
 and professors on this point. Some stoutly maintain that every 
 soul must pass through a more or less radical change of heart 
 before it can be considered in a state of salvation. Some would 
 even go so far as to claim that unless time, place and circum- 
 stances of conversion are distinctly remembered there is something 
 essential lacking in one's spiritual state. Others again believe with 
 Dwight L. Moody that children may be so carefully trained in 
 Christian families that they may never be conscious of a strik- 
 ing change in their lives. Yet such a change must be assumed as 
 having taken place, whether they are conscious of it or not, or 
 
 39 
 
40 
 
 else they cannot be considered genuinely converted. That some 
 of the most beautiful Christians have never known a negative 
 period in their lives must be admitted by all earnest and sin- 
 cere Christian believers who place character above profession. 
 Whether we assume an unconscious process of conversion for the 
 Christians of the gradual-growth type or regard them as the 
 product of careful Christian training is a matter of small moment. 
 The result is the same. It cannot be denied that the Bible makes 
 ample provision for just such cases. And that many earnest, 
 lovable Christian spirits have come into the kingdom by the 
 gradual process of being "conformed to the image" of Jesus Christ 
 through Christian growth and development is richly illustrated by 
 the spiritual experience of some of the world's most beautiful 
 Christian characters. 
 
 L Salvation through Christian Culture a Scriptural 
 
 Doctrine. 
 
 That the language of the church currently used with refer- 
 ence to conversion, has been largely in terms implying a radical 
 change cannot be denied. Such terms as "Repent ye," "Regen- 
 eration," "the New Birth," "Putting off the Old Man and Put- 
 ting on the New Man," "Crucified with Christ," and similar 
 expressions do most assuredly imply a radical process of 
 transformation. 
 
 This was the language used by the apostles and their succes- 
 sors in converting heathen and non-Christian peoples to Chris- 
 tianity. And these are the terms which have been used by the 
 church ever since its aggressive work of bringing the world 
 to Christ. But the mission of bringing the whole world 
 to Christ is a broad and comprehensive one. There are 
 at least four distinguishable duties included under the single 
 notion of "converting the world'' and of making disciples of 
 all nations : "First, heathen or non-Christian peoples must be 
 made Christian ; second, non-Christian persons in Christian com- 
 munities must be led to Christ ; third, children bom in Christian 
 
41 
 
 families must be kept for Christ and prevented from becoming- 
 hostile or indifferent ; fourth, Christian believers must be built up 
 in the faith and in the application of Christian principles to all 
 parts of individual and social life." It is very evident that 
 the terms for conversion implying a radical change are appli- 
 cable to the first two duties referred to. But to use the same 
 terms for conversion when the last two duties are under consid- 
 eration is manifestly improper and unfair. The conversion of 
 the heathen and the ungodly requires one kind of language, be- 
 cause a radical transformation must be emphasized in such work, 
 but the training up of children in the Christian faith requires 
 another kind of language, or else the use of one set of terms 
 with a changed meaning. 
 
 When Jesus said to Nicodemus, "Ye must be bom again," 
 He was talking to an adult member of the Jewish faith. To 
 make the term "New Birth" applicable, therefore, to the devel- 
 opment of the child's spiritual nature would manifestly be doing 
 violence to the import of the Master's words. When Paul wrote 
 to the Ephesians and to the Colossians about "putting off the 
 old man" and "putting on the new man," he was addressing men 
 and women who had come out of heathen darkness into the pure 
 light of the Christian faith, and hence the appropriateness of the 
 language used under the circumstances. But to make this lan- 
 guage of Paul's universally applicable to the spiritual experi- 
 ence of children reared in Christian homes and under Christian 
 influences would be both unjust and unscriptural. To have used 
 the language intended for the regeneration of the hardened sin- 
 ner, requiring a radical transformation, for all types of religious 
 experience indiscriminately, has wrought confusion and havoc 
 in the minds of thousands of earnest, struggling souls who were 
 not able to discriminate properly in the matter. To claim, for 
 instance, that children of Christian parentage and training must 
 be "born again" in the sense that the immoral and the ungodly must 
 be born again is to misinterpret the meaning of Christ's words 
 and to ignore the fundamental character of the child's spiritual 
 nature. 
 
 There is an appropriate language implying a radical trans- 
 
42 
 
 formation for the conversion of the worldly, the indifferent, the 
 immoral. Let it be used, therefore, in accordance with its his- 
 torical origin and for its intended purpose. In this connection 
 such terms as the "New Birth," "Regeneration," the "Old Man," 
 and the "New Man," "Crucified with Christ," "Born again" and 
 others of similar character are not only appropriate but neces- 
 sary and indispensable. But when it comes to the matter of 
 salvation for the growing Christian child, then such terms are 
 inappropriate and misguiding and frequently lead to intellectual 
 confusion and to spiritual hardship. When the Bible speaks of 
 the process of conversion through Christian culture and education, 
 it uses such terms as imply life, growth, development, nurture, 
 good soil, good seed, fruit. Or the child's spiritual relationship 
 to God is conceived of under the figure of a Son in the Father's 
 house, or of a Lamb in the care of a Good Shepherd, or else 
 in the language of trustfulness and childlike dependence upon 
 God. The same Jesus who spoke to Nicodemus concerning the 
 "New Birth" also spoke to the loving mothers who brought their 
 children to Him that He might bless them ; "Suffer the little chil- 
 dren to come to me and forbid them not, for of such is the 
 Kingdom of Heaven." For the adult and hardened sinner, trans- 
 formation ; for the growing child of religious parentage and train- 
 ing, "formation" of character by a positive process of building 
 up the right spiritual activities and forces in the child's growing 
 personality. It will be instructive to consider the more positive 
 process of spiritual culture and character-formation and to dis- 
 cover what a wealth of material there is, both in the language of 
 Scripture and in the testimony of human experience, as bear- 
 ing on this phase of the question. The importance of the child's 
 spiritual life and the necessity and supreme value of wise Chris- 
 tian training for children have never been recognized at their 
 full value. The Bible furnishes rich material for the contention 
 that the child of Christian parents and of careful Christian train- 
 ing may, by a process of gradual growth and unfolding of his 
 spiritual nature, enter into the full possession of his spiritual in- 
 heritance without any radical break or conflict or strain in his 
 spiritual experience. 
 
43 
 
 J. The Old Testament View of the Child's Religious State. 
 
 The Jews regarded their children as members of the theo- 
 cratic kingdom by virtue of their birth. Great stress was laid 
 upon the training of children so that the special revelation to 
 the fathers might be carefully handed down to the children. 
 There was no theory of conversion for those born into the old 
 dispensation. They were already children of Abraham, and they 
 were to be reared in the faith of the fathers, with special ref- 
 erence to the promises which were not only to the fathers but 
 also to their children and children's children. Thus Abraham 
 was made the friend of God and taken into the counsels of the 
 Most High, because he would do his duty by his children and 
 bring them up in the ways of the Lord : ''For I know him, that 
 he will command his children and his household after him, and 
 they shall keep the ways of the Lord, to do justice and judg- 
 ment, that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he 
 hath spoken concerning him." Genesis i8: 19. Moses, the great 
 lawgiver, was a remarkable illustration of what may be done in 
 childhood to determine the character of a man in mature years. 
 The teaching of his pious mother made such an impression upon 
 his youthful mind that "all the learning of the Egyptians" could 
 not eradicate it. He chose to suffer with his own people rather 
 than enjoy the "treasures of Egypt." When the law of the Pass- 
 over was fixed it was provided that the fathers should instruct 
 their children properly in the deeper significance of the observ- 
 ance in such words as these : "And ye shall observe this thing 
 for an ordinance to thee and to thy sons forever. And it shall 
 come to pass when your children shall say unto you. What mean 
 ye by this service? that ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the 
 Lord's Passover, who passed over the houses of the children of 
 Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians and delivered our 
 houses." Exodus 12:25, 2^/. The duty of religious instruction 
 is enjoined still more emphatically upon the children of Israel 
 in the words of Deuteronomy : "And these words which I com- 
 mand thee this day shall be in thine heart; and thou shalt teach 
 
44 
 
 them diligently unto thy children and shalt talk of them when 
 thou sittest down in thine house and when thou walkest by the 
 way and when thou liest down and when thou risest up." Deu- 
 teronomy 6:6, 7. And again : "I will make them hear my words 
 that they may learn to fear me all the days that they shall 
 live upon the earth, and that they teach them to their children." 
 Deuteronomy 4: 10. 
 
 The peculiar rite for Jewish children was circumcision. All 
 male children had to be circumcised; also all male children of 
 strangers living within their borders were expected to be cir- 
 cumcised. Every child of Jewish parents was supposed to be 
 a member of the Jewish faith. The rite of circumcision was the 
 seal of his adoption. He was to be reared in this faith. He 
 was to be taught the accepted doctrines and the special dispensa- 
 tions of Providence peculiar to this people from his youth up 
 by his parents. Arrived at years of discretion, he was to be- 
 come a full member of the Jewish religion by virtue of his vol- 
 untary acceptance of his father's God as his own personal God, 
 and by a voluntary acceptance of the faith and practices of 
 the fathers as his own personal faith and practice. No proc- 
 ess of conversion to the faith was required for the normal 
 Jewish child. It was only through voluntary apostasy or through 
 gross idolatry that separation from the Abrahamic covenant 
 resulted and that consequently a process of conversion and res- 
 toration became necessary. The normal Jewish child, under the 
 covenant made with Abraham, was to be regarded as a member 
 of the household of faith by virtue of his birth. He was to be 
 educated and trained as a member of the Jewish faith and he 
 was to continue a member as long as he lived by virtue of his 
 voluntary acceptance of all which membership in the Abrahamic 
 covenant implied. Membership was not gained by conver- 
 sion, but by birth and adoption, by training and culture. Con- 
 version was the prerogative of those who were renegades or of 
 those who wanted to be taken into the covenant from outside 
 the pale of promise. The normal process was training and cul- 
 ture within the kingdom; and at no time was the Jewish child 
 to be considered as a stranger to the covenant promises or as 
 
45 
 
 unfitted by age and experience to participate in the spiritual 
 privileges of the kingdom. 
 
 2, The Attitude of Jesus toward Children. 
 
 The attitude of Jesus toward children with reference to their 
 membership in the kingdom was the same as that of the pious 
 Jew of His time. Jesus regarded the children as belonging to 
 the kingdom, and only through voluntary apostasy could they 
 lose their covenant rights and privileges. Jesus himself was 
 brought to the temple by his parents soon after his birth and 
 presented to the Lord with thank-oflferings of praise and rejoicing, 
 in accordance with the custom of his time. As a child, he grew 
 up in the fear of the Lord, carefully instructed in all the require- 
 ments of the Jewish faith and faithfully taught in all the ac- 
 cepted standards of tradition and revelation. At twelve he 
 astonished the doctors in the temple by the character of the ques- 
 tions he asked and answered. Under the conscientious instruc- 
 tion of his pious parents and guided by the spirit of his Father 
 the boy "grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God 
 and man." Jesus was not converted into the kingdom. He 
 was born into the kingdom. And he was raised and nurtured 
 in the kingdom. And when He came into the full consciousness 
 of His divine mission. He was already in the kingdom by birth, 
 by education and by conscious choice. The full realization of 
 His divine origin and mission dawned upon Him, not by way 
 of a radical change of conversion into the kingdom, but by a special 
 process of inner illumination and self-realization within the king- 
 dom itself. This is significant and worthy of careful consider- 
 ation. As the Jewish child was within the Abrahamic covenant 
 by virtue of his physical and spiritual descent from Abraham, 
 so the child of Christian parents and Christian training is by 
 virtue of the divine life, operative in children as in grown peo- 
 ple, a member of God's spiritual kingdom and needs no strik- 
 ing conversion to be brought into the kingdom. This was 
 evidently the view of Jesus and it was beautifully illustrated both 
 hy His teaching and by His example. 
 
46 
 
 In answer to the question, Who is greatest in the kingdom of 
 heaven, Jesus pointed to a little child and said : "Verily I say 
 unto you, except ye be converted and become as little children, 
 ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever, there- 
 fore, shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest 
 in the kingdom of heaven." Matthew i8 : 3, 4. They, the am- 
 bitious and self-satisfied Jews, were to be converted and become 
 lowly in spirit and meek in disposition as the children. The chil- 
 dren under consideration needed no conversion. They were already 
 members of the kingdom of heaven. Those were to become great 
 in the kingdom of heaven only as they appropriated the spirit of 
 childhood unto themselves. The children were not only mem- 
 bers of the kingdom by virtue of their childhood, innocence and 
 trustfulness, but they were really the greatest in the kingdom of 
 heaven. And only as the Jews would appropriate the lowly child- 
 like faith of God's little children could they expect to be great 
 in the kingdom of heaven. The child-spirit holds the first place 
 in heaven. "For," says Jesus, 'T say unto you, that in heaven 
 their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in 
 heaven." Matthew 18 : 10. What an impressive thought. "Take 
 heed that ye despise not one of these little ones." Matthew 18 : 10. 
 Can we despise them more effectually than by considering them 
 children of wrath and by expecting them to grow up in sin and 
 disobedience that we might later convert them by a powerful 
 demonstration of saving grace? "To deny them a place in the 
 church, to neglect their spiritual and moral culture, to under- 
 estimate the value of their early aspirations toward God, can any 
 form of despising be more effectual than this?" "Whoso shall 
 offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better 
 for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that 
 he were drowned in the depth of the sea." Matthew 18:6. Jesus 
 came to seek and to save that which was lost. He desires that 
 not one of His own spiritual children should perish. He would 
 save the children from becoming lost. He would throw all the 
 saving influences around the growing child to keep it as much 
 from the contamination of the world as possible. He would 
 gather the lambs in His bosom and protect them from the 
 
47 
 
 ravages of wild beasts. No, He wants them all kept. Each one 
 is precious in His sight. "Even so it is not the will of your 
 Father in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." 
 Matthew i8 : 14. 
 
 And what could be more touchingly beautiful than the pic- 
 ture of Jesus blessing the little children ? Mark tells us that some 
 mothers "brought young children to Christ that He should touch 
 them." That was the utmost they had hoped. If the blessed 
 Master would only lay His hands upon them and touch them, 
 they would be so grateful. But his disciples, no doubt, thought 
 they were too young to understand, and that therefore the Mas- 
 ter should not be hindered in His great work by such trifles. 
 And so they "rebuked those that brought them" for their bold- 
 ness and their presumption. But Jesus was displeased, or, as the 
 Revised Version has it. He "was moved with indignation" and 
 said : "Suffer the little children to come unto me and forbid 
 them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 10 : 14. 
 Forbid them not. Do not keep them back or think them too 
 insignificant or too unimportant. For "of such" is the kingdom 
 of heaven. "Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God 
 as a little child, he shall not enter therein. And he took them up 
 in his arms, put his hands upon them and blessed them," Matthew 
 10: 1-5, 16. And the mothers' hearts must have leaped with joy, 
 and the disciples must have been deeply pained and humiliated 
 by their rashness and their lack of appreciation of the Master's 
 attitude. The spirit of the children thus brought was an emblem 
 of true Christian humility and simple, childlike trustfulness. 
 Pious mothers still desire to bring their children to Jesus. And 
 they bring them in secret prayer or they bring them through 
 baptismal consecration or they bring them as Hannah brought 
 the little Samuel to be consecrated by public prayer to His service. 
 And Jesus now, as then, "takes them up in His arms, puts his 
 hands upon them and blesses them" by His spiritual presence and 
 benediction. "A little child shall lead them." Isaiah 11:6. It 
 is still the same. The child-spirit is still the dominant power. 
 The kingdom of heaven is still for such as have the spirit of 
 little children. They still teach us humility and guilelessness 
 4 
 
48 
 
 and implicit faith and simple trust in God. Well could the 
 poet say of them : 
 
 "They are idols of hearts and of household, 
 They are angels of God in disguise; 
 His sunlight still sleeps in their tresses 
 His glory still gleams in their eyes ! 
 
 "Oh, these truants from home and from heaven, 
 They have made me more manly and mild ; 
 And I know how Jesus could liken 
 The kingdom of God to a child." 
 
 It is very evident that the doctrine of "infant damnation" or 
 "total depravity" for children has no justification either in 
 the words or in the example of Jesus. For Him the child was 
 not an object of divine wrath, but of infinite love and com- 
 passion. For Him the best qualification for spiritual sonship 
 was the possession of the child-spirit. If the spirit of the child 
 was the finest type of Christian discipleship, then surely the pos- 
 sessor of the child-spirit — the child itself — must be a member of 
 Christ's spiritual kingdom. Christ's view manifestly is that the 
 child of Christian parents is born into the kingdom, that he is a 
 member of the kingdom in childhood by virtue of his descent 
 from his spiritual ancestry, that the youth is to remain in the 
 kingdom by voluntarily accepting the spiritual requirements of 
 adult membership and that he is to remain always in the king- 
 dom as the sheep are to remain with the shepherd and not to 
 depart from the fold. He does not need to be converted into 
 the kingdom. That is the essential requirement of the renegades 
 and the wanderers and the prodigals. It is the blessed preroga- 
 tive of the Christian child to grow up in the kingdom and 
 never know any prolonged period of apostasy or of alienation 
 from God, and consequently, never be under the painful necessity 
 of being ushered into the kingdom through any process of radi- 
 cal conversion. 
 
49 
 
 3. The Parables of Jesus on Salvation througfh Christian Culture. 
 
 A number of parables convey the same conception of the Chris- 
 tian Hfe. The Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin and the Prodigal Son 
 all assume that the normal condition is not a lost one. The 
 lost had to be sought and found. Many of the parables about 
 the kingdom of heaven in Matthew 13 contain the same under- 
 lying thought. The sower sows seed and it germinates and 
 brings forth fruit. But the life principle is in the seed and it 
 needs only the proper conditions of soil and moisture to grow 
 and develop. In all the various parables of the sower with his 
 seed as illustrating the principles of the kingdom of heaven, there 
 is either tacitly implied or definitely expressed the idea of a 
 life-principle in the seed which is capable of germinating, the 
 possibility of growth and development under favorable condi- 
 tions and the expectation of fruit of the same kind as was po- 
 tentially held in the seed. Nothing could be more suggestive of 
 the child's spiritual nature and growth than the parables which 
 speak of seed and germination, of growth and development, of 
 joy in expected fruit and of disappointment in a harvest of 
 tares and weeds. The soil is the human soul. The seed is the 
 word of truth which germinates under the vivifying influences 
 of the spirit. With the hindrance of choking tares removed 
 and under the energizing influences of God's Holy Spirit the 
 budding seed will grow and bring forth fruit, "first the blade, 
 then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear." 
 
 "The parable of the Lost Sheep teaches most explicitly that the 
 normal condition is to be in the fold, not away in the 
 mountains and lost to the shepherd. Jesus compares him- 
 self to a Good Shepherd, who knows his sheep and who 
 is known of them. "The sheep hear his voice and he call- 
 eth his own sheep by name and leadeth them out. And 
 when he putteth forth his own sheep he goeth before them and 
 the sheep follow him : for they know his voice." John 10 : 3, 4. 
 The Shepherd Psalm conveys the same beautiful thought. "The 
 Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie 
 
50 
 
 down in green pastures ; He leadeth me beside the still waters. 
 He restoreth my soul : He leadeth me in the paths of righteous- 
 ness for his name's sake." And what the Good Shepherd is 
 pleased to do for His sheep He will most assuredly do for His 
 lambs. As He provides pasture and refreshing waters for His 
 sheep so He does for the lambs of His flock. And as His protec- 
 tion extends to all the grown members of His flock, so in like 
 manner it is extended to the helpless little lambs which really 
 need His protection and care more than the grown sheep do. 
 Yea, "he gathereth the lambs in his bosom," and carries them to 
 safety and rest. The picture of Jesus as a shepherd, with His 
 shepherd's crook in His hands, with His trustful flock around Him 
 and with some helpless little lamb resting in His bosom, is strik- 
 ingly emblematic of Christ's attitude. Occasionally a careless 
 or wilful sheep will wander away and become lost, and then the 
 good shepherd will leave the ninety and nine in safety "in the 
 shelter of the fold," and hunt for the lost sheep until he has 
 found it and returned it to the flock with rejoicing. The normal 
 place for the sheep is with the flock, under the personal care and 
 direction of the shepherd. And this is peculiarly true of the 
 lambs. They belong to the flock. They are to grow up with the 
 flock. They are to remain under the careful oversight of the 
 shepherd. This is their normal and rightful place. And it is 
 only through an act of carelessness or wilfulness that an erring 
 little lamb would stray away from the flock and become lost. 
 To stray away is the act of becoming lost. To stay with the 
 flock and with the shepherd is the rightful attitude for the grow- 
 ing little lamb as it is for the full-grown sheep. 
 
 The growing lambs are in special need of the shepherd's care 
 and oversight. They are growing and full of life. They lack 
 experience and wisdom. They are often wilful and thoughtless 
 in their actions, guided more by impulse and less by judgment. 
 And so the lambs of God's kingdom are to be regarded as the 
 special object of love and oversight on the part of the shepherds 
 who have them in charge — parents, teachers, pastors and friends. 
 And this is why Jesus enjoined upon Peter, as one of his last 
 requests, that he should feed His lambs. "Simon, son of Jonas, 
 
51 
 
 lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord 
 thou knowest that I love thee ; He saith unto him, Feed my lambs." 
 John 21 : 15. Oh, how we should endeavor to "feed the lambs" 
 by proper care and instruction, by precept and example, by all 
 the influences God has given into our hands, so that they may 
 not only grow up as faithful and dutiful members of God's 
 spiritual flock, but that they may always remain within the spir- 
 itual fold in the presence of and under the loving care of Jesus 
 himself as the Good Shepherd ! 
 
 The parable of the Prodigal Son is perhaps the most typical 
 case of sin and redemption to be found throughout the Bible. 
 The prodigal was in his father's household from his youth up. 
 He enjoyed the advantages of home training and beautiful sur- 
 roundings. He was a son by birth and by adoption as well as 
 by choice and election. He was not "converted" to sonship from 
 without. He was "converted" to rebellion and prodigality from 
 within the kingdom. His rightful and normal place was under 
 his father's roof, subject to his father's care and authority and 
 obedient to his father's will. Through a deliberate act on his 
 part he conceived the thought and committed the deed which re- 
 moved him from his father's house and presence and made him 
 an alien and a rebel "in a far country." 
 
 The "elder son" remained at home. This was his rightful and 
 proper place. He enjoyed uninterruptedly his father's presence 
 and benediction. He may have had moments of temporary dis- 
 obedience in thought, or word or deed, but those were transient. 
 His fixed and unalterable purpose was one of filial regard and 
 of ungrudging service. He enjoyed to the fullest measure, from 
 his youth up, all the wealth of affection and all the unbroken 
 confidence and approval of personal regard which a loving father 
 could bestow upon a dutiful son. The younger son's return was 
 the occasion of calling forth into tangible expression the father's 
 unbounded love and affection. The elder son mistook this as 
 an act of partiality. But he was mistaken. He may have been 
 tinappreciative of his father's less demonstrative, but no less af- 
 fectionate treatment of him during his unbroken intercourse with 
 him at home. This was perhaps natural. We are all liable to 
 
52 
 
 lack appreciation of God's goodness and mercy to the fullest ex- 
 tent because they are so all-pervading in their presence and so 
 unbroken in their beneficent ministrations. But the father re- 
 minded the elder son of his superior position and assured him 
 of his personal favor and appreciation by saying: "Son, thou 
 art ever with me and all that I have is thine." His portion was 
 the greater of the two, his position the more to be envied 
 and his uninterrupted loyalty the more to be commended. 
 
 We are too frequently inclined to commend the course of the 
 younger in his act of complete self-surrender upon his return 
 home and forget the more praiseworthy act of unbroken loyalty on 
 the part of the elder brother. The career of the younger son 
 was more spectacular, but the career of the older son more com- 
 mendable. The expression of unbounded love on the part of the 
 father only threw into bolder relief the utter unworthiness of the 
 prodigal's course. The younger son was restored to his father's 
 favor and confidence, but he had squandered much of his God- 
 given powers and opportunities beyond the hope of recovery. He 
 was poorer in every way for his painful experience. The elder 
 son was richer in every way because of his loyalty and service to 
 his father. Sin is always a prodigal. It wastes and dissipates 
 material and spiritual "goods" with lavish prodigality. The 
 younger son never again could enjoy to the full the possession of 
 his once undiminished powers because he had squandered them. 
 The elder son had always been with his father and all his father's 
 possessions were his for legitimate use and enjoyment. The one 
 important fact to remember is that both sons were raised in the 
 father's house through a process of Christian growth and edu- 
 cation and that both had the opportunity of enjoying a father's 
 continual presence and abiding love and care without the neces- 
 sity of being first brought into the blessed estate of sonship by a 
 radical change through conversion. One only needed such a 
 radical change because of voluntary disobedience. Both were 
 sons through Christian growth and training and might have re- 
 mained such to the end of life. 
 
 And is it not pathetic to think that some prefer a state of 
 rebellion and alienation to one of sonship and filial loyalty? The 
 
53 
 
 church deserves the greatest praise for its unselfish efforts to 
 redeem the prodigals of the world and restore them to their 
 rightful places in God's spiritual household. But are we sure 
 we are putting forth our best efforts to bring up our children 
 in such a manner that they may be spared the necessity of a 
 prodigal's experience? To save a prodigal is noble. To keep 
 a son from becoming a prodigal is nobler. Dr. Anthony in 
 his "Children's Covenant" puts this thought admirably thus: "We 
 ought to do all we can for all sorts of sinners, but we ought 
 to do more than we ever thought of doing for the children, 
 'whose angels do always behold the face of our Father in heaven.' 
 To go after hardened sinners to the neglect of children is the 
 worst possible policy. The drum, the tambourine, the f^ag, the 
 march on the street, the song and testimony, have done great 
 good. When we shall enlist a like zeal in saving the children 
 we shall do a much greater good." 
 
 4. The Case of Timothy as a Product of Christian Culture. 
 
 Timothy is a striking illustration of the possibilities of careful 
 home training for discipleship and for service. In many of the 
 cases of New Testament conversion which might be profitably 
 considered, the motives and influences at work are usually indi- 
 cated and the manner of the spirit's operation is usually sug- 
 gested. But in the case of Timothy we are introduced to one, 
 not as an opposer of Jesus nor as an indifferent spectator, nor as 
 an inquirer after truth and the way of life, but as a Christian 
 with opinions more or less clear and with convictions more or less 
 pronounced. He had evidently reached his position through 
 a process of gradual growth and development under the influences 
 of wise and loving home training. 
 
 Timothy was born at Lystra or possibly at Derbe. His mother 
 was named Eunice and his grandmother Lois. His father was 
 a Greek. He was early instructed in the sacred writings of 
 his mother's religion, she having been a daughter of Israel. A 
 beautiful tribute is given to pious home training by Paul in his 
 letter to Timothy: "But abide thou in the things which thou 
 
54 
 
 hast learned and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou 
 hast learned them ; and that from a babe thou hast known the Holy 
 Scriptures which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through 
 faith which is in Christ Jesus." II Timothy 3:15. And again: 
 "Having been reminded of the unfeigned faith that is in thee, 
 which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois and thy mother Eunice 
 and I am persuaded in thee also." II Timothy i : 5. These pas- 
 sages and others like them give us a picture of a home in which 
 God was magnified and honored ; in which the Scriptures were 
 given first place in religious culture and in which the inter- 
 ests of the inner life were exalted above the interests of the outer 
 life. Reverence for holiness, belief in prayer and love for God's 
 word were inculcated from childhood up. Paul, in writing to 
 Timothy, calls him : "My true child in the faith." And in writ- 
 ing the Corinthians he uses these words concerning his faith- 
 ful and influential coworker in the Gospel : "My beloved and 
 faithful child in the Lord." It is universally held that this whole 
 family received the glad tidings with "unfeigned faith" on the 
 occasion of Paul's first visit to Lystra and Derbe, and that the 
 young Timothy thus became in reality Paul's "true child in the 
 faith." Timothy is evidently a product of careful Christian home 
 training and of intelligent acceptance of God's gracious influences 
 without any negative period of waywardness or any striking radi- 
 cal change in conversion. He was familiar with the Scriptures 
 from his youth up. He was open and receptive and gladly and 
 cheerfully came into the full consciousness of his spiritual life 
 by voluntarily accepting Jesus Christ! as his personal Saviour and 
 friend. And with more mothers and grandmothers like Eunice 
 and Lois and with more careful and loving home training in 
 moral and spiritual things, such as Timothy received, there would 
 be still larger numbers to come into the kingdom by the gradual 
 but no less effective process of Salvation through Christian cul- 
 ture and Christian education. 
 
 In this connection, Dr. Noble, in his "New Testament Con- 
 versions," has these appropriate remarks to offer: "It is both in 
 accordance with the facts and philosophy of faith and in line 
 with the evident purpose of God, that children in Christian homes 
 
55 
 
 should be so trained in the nurture and admonition of the Lord 
 that when the time comes for confessing Christ before the world 
 there shall be no central truths to be learned and no gross sins 
 to be thrown off, but only a simple, easy, forward step along 
 the path on which they have already been moving, into the 
 open fellowship of all who love the Son of God and are trying 
 to do His will in the world. It is because Timothy came into 
 discipleship in this way that his example is so full of meaning. 
 There are homes in these modern times which are doing the same 
 work in the same beautiful spirit, which was done in that ancient 
 home by Lois and Eunice. And when there are more of these 
 homes, then there will be more members in all of our churches, 
 who shall have come into the faith as blossoms come in fulness 
 of beauty, under the genial breath of the spring, or fruit comes 
 to the vine under the ripening warmth of summer." 
 
 n. The Testimony of Experience for Salvation 
 through Christian Culture. 
 
 Not only are there abundant Scriptural warrants for belief in 
 the doctrine of conversion through gradual growth and develop- 
 ment but the testimony of youthful Christian experience is 
 unmistakable along the same lines. Prof. Starbuck in his 
 "Psychology of Religion" has gathered together a vast amount 
 of valuable material bearing on this subject. He sent out letters 
 of inquiry to men and women of all nationalities and of practically 
 all types of religious belief, asking specific questions concerning 
 their religious beliefs and experiences during childhood and youth. 
 Two hundred and thirty-seven responded. Among this number 
 were representatives of the following religious bodies : Methodists, 
 Friends, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, German 
 Reformed, Lutheran, Baptist, Moravian, Catholic, Unitarian, Uni- 
 versalist and others. 
 
 The list is certainly representative. Many of the respondents 
 were students in American institutions of learning. The age of 
 the persons replying varied from sixteen to forty years and over. 
 
56 
 
 These replies clearly proved, if further proof than individual 
 experience were necessary, that the careful training of children 
 in childhood and youth do have an important bearing upon the 
 type of religion experienced later in life. Most of the respondents 
 report careful religious teaching at home and in Sunday School 
 during the period of childhood and youth, with considerable regu- 
 larity of habit in attending church services, prayer meetings, 
 family prayers and other like religious observances. One of the 
 impressive facts brought out in these representative replies is that 
 religious feelings develop very early in the conscious life of the 
 child and that the earlier types of religious feeling are extremely 
 simple and realistic. The idea of God is usually vivid but rather 
 crude in form. God is regarded as having human form but of 
 larger size and hovering above the clouds or seated in an 
 imaginable heaven, always ready and willing to answer the most 
 trivial requests in prayer. He is pictured very distinctly as a 
 personal God. The sense of right and wrong also develops early 
 and is one of the most potent facts in childhood religion. In fact, 
 the child-conscience is very sensitive and indicates a lively moral 
 activity on the part of the growing religious consciousness. 
 Among the facts brought out very clearly in these numerous 
 replies are: (i) The reality and vividness of the religious life 
 of the child; (2) The importance and value of early Christian 
 training; (3) The possibility of religious growth and develop- 
 ment on the part of the growing child without any marked 
 crisis or transition and without any noticeable element of strain 
 and conflict. 
 
 i* The Reality and Vividness of the Child's Religious Life. 
 
 The child's religious life is real and vivid. His imagination 
 is most active, and hence his religious conceptions are extremely 
 vivid and distinct. Such expressions occur frequently in the re- 
 plies : 'T told God many things I would not tell my parents." 
 "I loved Jesus with all the fervor of a child's heart." "The sense 
 that God was watching over me frightened me in the night. I 
 prayed, and repeated, T am Jesus' little lamb,' and felt secure." 
 
57 
 
 "I remember a sense of duty influencing my childhood before I 
 was four years old." Another one wrote relative to the time 
 when religious feelings first develop : "I do not remember the 
 time when I wasn't vitally concerned in religion. I think re- 
 ligion began with my birth." One writes thus : "I could not 
 sleep until I had said my evening prayers." And still another one 
 wrote concerning a sensitive conscience : "When seven I stole 
 some cookies. I worried over it for three days. I confessed 
 to God and wept and prayed, but felt that something more was 
 necessary. Finally I confessed to mother and was forgiven." 
 In this connection it might be in place to refer to John Fiske's 
 youthful conception of God as a big man sitting on a little 
 platform up in the sky with an open book before him in which 
 he recorded the good and evil acts of all his people. For his 
 youthful mind God kept a faithful record of everything said and 
 done. This was to be used in the day of judgment. Who will 
 say that the normal child is not intensely religious ? And who will 
 want to despise the simplicity and reality and intensity of the 
 child's religious life? To the child it means infinitely much. 
 
 2. The Importance of Early Religious Training, 
 
 The supreme importance of early religious training and sur- 
 roundings is impressively taught by a large number of these re- 
 plies. The child Samuel was dedicated to God by his pious mother 
 before he was born, and early brought to the service of the temple. 
 Need we wonder that the Lord called him early and that the old 
 prophet Eli perceived at last that the Lord had indeed called the 
 child? The early religious training of the young Timothy by 
 his saintly mother and grandmother made his religious life one 
 of normal growth and development with the steady growth and 
 development of his other unfolding powers. One person writes : 
 "Mother taught me to pray at her knee and I always had a 
 whispered prayer that none but God could understand. When 
 I did anything wrong, mother required me to seek forgiveness. 
 The change from careless, indifferent childhood to earnest, warm 
 interest in God's work was very gradual and very natural, after 
 
58 
 
 the good training I received." One young man writes thus : 
 ^'Mother was patient and gentle with me. I had church and 
 Sunday School associations of the pleasantest kind. I was not 
 taught anything about hell and satan. I have not changed my 
 childhood phrase, Our Father in Heaven, except to widen the 
 term." And still another one writes of his beautiful home in- 
 fluences : "I had God-fearing parents and was surrounded by all 
 the influences which go to make Godly character. From infancy 
 I was taught to believe that I belonged to the Saviour and that He 
 loved me. My delight in Christian thought has changed with the 
 passing years only to become intensified." Who can estimate the 
 value of such surroundings to the development of a normal Chris- 
 tian character? Prof. Starbuck says: "It often happens that 
 the religion of a child is an atmosphere which it breathes, so 
 wholesome and so enlivening, that he takes it up and works it over 
 into his very being." And this sort of religious life is the most 
 vital and the most desirable because so all-pervading and 
 genuine. 
 
 The reason that some children of Christian families and with 
 Christian training do not develop normally and healthily is due 
 to the fact of foolish and unwise religious teaching. Thus a 
 sensitive nature in youth was unduly disturbed and made ex- 
 tremely unhappy by the following incident: "A Sunday School 
 teacher tried to impress my unworthiness and sin upon me and 
 told me that I would be lost forever if I was not converted. 
 For three years I waited in misery of mind for the expected con- 
 version. Fortunately a dear friend explained that unless I had 
 done something very wrong or had some heathen beliefs to cast 
 aside, all I needed was to make a public avowal of my faith and 
 purpose. I was tremendously relieved and joined the church in 
 a month." An unpardonable mental anguish was caused in this 
 sensitive soul by the foolish and one-sided conceptions of the re- 
 'ligious life on the part of the Sunday School teacher, which was 
 presented to this delicate young soul. An abnormal and unnatural 
 experience was prescribed for this young child of faith, and when 
 it refused to come it brought unhappiness and misery and even 
 despair. Another one had this unhappy experience : "My parents 
 
59 
 
 and teachers impressed upon me that I must believe all or nothing. 
 It did not take me long to decide which." This insistence on the 
 unqualified acceptance of articles of belief led to unbelief. Still 
 another one was made very unhappy by extreme strictness in the 
 observance of the Sabbath. He writes after this fashion : "On 
 Sundays we could not whittle, nor go faster than a walk, nor 
 go down to the river, nor laugh or play in any way. No one 
 who has not passed through it can imagine how I felt as Satur- 
 day night drew on. In addition to the torture of church and 
 Sunday School we were obliged to commit to memory whole 
 psalms, chapters of the Bible and hymns ; and the thing I worst of 
 all detested was the reading of certain so-called religious books." 
 Such unwise and unlovely treatment of childhood is almost as 
 bad, or possibly even worse, than absolute neglect in the matter 
 of religious training. It invariably leads to revolt and hatred of 
 all things religious and not infrequently blights the growing re- 
 ligious consciousness of the child for life, as in the case of Robert 
 Ingersoll. 
 
 3. The Possibility of a. Gradual Growth into the Fulness of the 
 Religious Life without a Radical Change in Conversion. 
 
 The possibility of a gradual growth and development from 
 childhood religion to maturity of faith in adults has been im- 
 pressively demonstrated by some of the testimony given in the 
 previous paragraphs. The child's religious life may and frequently 
 does dawn at a very early age. Under proper environments and 
 with wise direction such spiritual activities may grow and develop 
 without any abrupt or sudden change into the clearer and more 
 thoughtful form of the mature Christian's faith. That there are 
 periods of intensified religious activity, and not unfrequently times 
 of doubt and uncertainty and seasons of unrest and strain in 
 the religious development of a considerable number of earnest 
 natures, cannot be doubted. There are sometimes assignable 
 reasons for such uneven and spasmodic religious development 
 due to temperament, unwise religious teaching or extremes of reli- 
 gious surroundings. As in the natural world, so in the spiritual 
 
6o 
 
 world, there are sometimes seasons of more rapid growth and 
 expansion. But that does not alter the fact that many evenly bal- 
 anced natures pass, by slow and almost imperceptible changes, 
 from the simple, childlike faith of childhood to the intelligent 
 and reasoned faith of maturer years. One correspondent of Prof. 
 Starbuck's puts this thought in this way: "As I grew older, and 
 read more and was guided and strengthened by parents and 
 teachers, I gradually came to understand what Christianity means 
 and to trust it. I had religious convictions from childhood. Their 
 influence on me grew as my love and Qiristian surroundings grew, 
 and gradually shaped my spiritual life." And another one writes 
 thus : "Always since my early years I have felt myself a child 
 of God. My grozvth has been even from childhood." 
 
 The harmonious development of the religious life of the gradual- 
 growth type, in which a high degree of spiritual perfection is 
 attained as naturally and easily as a plant unfolds, is beautifully 
 illustrated in the case of Dr. Edward Everett Hale. His strength 
 and symmetry of character need no emphasis at the hands of 
 any one. He writes concerning his own spiritual experience as 
 follows : "I observe with profound regret the religious struggles 
 which come into many biographies as if almost essential to the 
 formation of a hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any 
 man has an advantage not to be estimated, who is born, as I 
 was, into a family where the religion is simple and rational ; who 
 is trained in the theory of such a religion so that he never knows, 
 for an hour, what these religious or irreligious struggles are. I 
 always knew God loved me, and I was always grateful to Him for 
 the world He placed me in. I always liked to tell Him so, and was 
 always glad to receive His suggestions to me." This is sane 
 Christian living. This is a beautiful example of salvation by 
 Christian culture. 
 
 And that many children are thus brought into the kingdom is 
 abundantly proved by statistics. It is said that not one in ten 
 members of the Moravian communion can fix on any precise point 
 of time when he became a Christian. Of thirty-four candidates 
 for the ministry of the English Wesleyan church who were re- 
 'cently called upon to relate their religious experience, considerably 
 
6i 
 
 less than half could mention any definite time or place of conver- 
 sion, while many distinctly testified that their religious life had 
 been a gradual growth from childhood. Probably the large 
 majority of members in the non-revival churches, especially in 
 German countries and in German-speaking churches, have never 
 known any special time of crisis in their spiritual lives and can 
 point to no special place or time of any radical change and yet 
 they know themselves to be members of Christ's spiritual kingdom 
 by the witness of the spirit which he has given them in a life of 
 simple faith and childlike trust in their heavenly Father. And 
 some of the sweetest and rarest Christians whom it has ever 
 been my lot to know came into the church in this way. What 
 a tender thought to think that the gracious influences of the Holy 
 Spirit may be present in the unfolding processes of the child's 
 moral nature from the first glimpses of consciousness and be con- 
 tinued through all the changing scenes! of life to its closing hour. 
 "Lo, I am with you alway, even to the end of the world," were 
 the comforting words of the risen Saviour. 
 
 What a blessed assurance this is for large numbers of earnest 
 disciples of the Master, who have no consciousness of any sudden 
 or radical change in their Christian development, but who know 
 themselves nevertheless here and now as belonging to the Lord, 
 that their quiet uneventful life of simple faith and trust in God, 
 from childhood up, is just as pleasing and acceptable to God as 
 those of a more radical experience. There are thousands who 
 know of no strain in their lives, who have no remembrance of any 
 continued state of disobedience, who always sought to do the right, 
 as they understood it, and who always gladly accepted new duties 
 and new responsibilities with increased light, and who thus simply 
 grew gradually but surely and unmistakably into the full stature 
 of their Christian manhood. 
 
 ni. The View of the Best Modern Religious Teachers, 
 
 The view of conversion as a process of gradual growth and de- 
 velopment along the lines of the child's normal religious activities 
 best meets the requirements of modem religious education and 
 
62 
 
 modern religious thought. It opens the way for the wisest 
 methods of Christian culture and education by laying great stress 
 upon the necessity of proper religious training for the growing 
 Christian child. A ssumi ng on the one hand the existence in the 
 child of an imiat£_religious nature, implanted at birth as part of 
 his spiritual inheritance, and, on the other hand, the continual 
 presence and activity of the divine spirit in the growth and develop- 
 ment of the child's spiritual nature through wise and sympathetic 
 Christian training, this view of the child's salvation lays due stress 
 upon the supreme value of proper religious influences in the 
 family, in the school, in the church and in the child's social 
 surroundings as "saving agencies," to keep the child in the paths 
 of uprightness and virtue by helping him to become established 
 in good moral habits and in strong, positive Christian principles, 
 and thus save him from the necessity of a radical moral change 
 in conversion. 
 
 That large portions of the Christian church should have been 
 somewhat slow to accept this view of the child's spiritual develop- 
 ment is perhaps natural and easily explained. The aggressive 
 campaign against the corruption and moral filth of the Roman 
 Empire by the Apostolic church made it necessary to use the 
 terms of conversion which imply a radical transformation of life 
 and character. Surely the Roman Empire needed a "new birth" 
 in the most radical sense of the term. The surrounding nations 
 needed a complete moral transformation no less urgently. The 
 language of Scripture specially intended for the conversion of the 
 adult members of non-Christian peoples to Christianity thus came 
 to be used by the church for all classes and conditions of people 
 indiscriminately. Elementar}^ catechisms were prepared and sys- 
 tems of Christian thought developed which laid great stress upon 
 the necessity of a radical moral transformation for membership in 
 the brotherhood of Christian believers. The terms thus used and 
 the view of conversion thus advocated, so necessary and so 
 appropriate under the conditions as they then existed, gradually 
 came to be applied indiscriminately to the spiritual requirements 
 of all classes and conditions of people. There was no effort made 
 to any extent to distinguish between the spiritual conditions of 
 
63 
 
 the heathen or the non-Christian population and the carefully 
 trained children in Christian families. All were under the equal 
 necessity of a moral regeneration and only one type of experience 
 was considered acceptable. There was supposed to be only one 
 process of salvation, and that was the process of the "new birth," 
 and the hardened sinner and the tender child alike were expected 
 to conform to this prescribed method. However carefully chil- 
 dren might be trained in religious matters and however gracious 
 they might appear in disposition or lovable in Christian traits, 
 they were nevertheless usually regarded by the Christian church 
 as incapable of any good moral acts or of being pleasing and 
 acceptable in the sight of God until they were converted and had 
 passed through the transforming experiences of the "new birth." 
 This altogether too widely accepted view of the child's spiritual 
 requirements regarded his normal condition as one of wayward- 
 ness and alienation from God, imposed arbitrary and abnormal 
 conditions for his spiritual growth and development, ignored the 
 inherent impulses and aspirations of the child to faith and trust- 
 fulness in God, so clearly taught by Scripture and experience, 
 and therefore frequently wrought untold moral suffering and 
 confusion for sensitive and serious-minded children and parents as 
 well. This has been particularly true in those Protestant denomina- 
 tions which have always emphasized strongly the revival or emo- 
 tional type of conversion as necessary for entrance to the Christian 
 life. 
 
 J. Horace Bushnell on ''Christian Culture/* 
 
 Horace Bushnell was the first modem Christian preacher and 
 educator of any prominence who recognized the natural and in- 
 herent religiousness of the average Christian child and who sought 
 to uphold the proposition that children could be trained and edu- 
 cated in the spirit and teachings of the Christian religion without 
 knowing any negative period of conscious waywardness and sin- 
 fulness. In his epoch-making volume on "Christian Culture" he 
 contended "that the child is to grow up a Christian and never 
 know himself as being otherwise." This proposition embodied 
 
64 
 
 what he considered the true idea of Christian education. Says 
 Bushnell : "The aim, effort and expectation should be not, as 
 is commonly assumed, that the child is to grow up in sin, to be 
 converted after he comes to mature age ; but that he is to open 
 on the world as one that is spiritually renewed, not remember- 
 ing the time when he went through a technical experience, but 
 seemingly rather to have loved what is good from his earliest 
 years." This surely seems a reasonable proposition ; and to us 
 who were taught to know and love the Lord from childhood up 
 there is nothing new or disturbing in it. And yet Dr. Bushnell 
 was harshly and even bitterly criticised for the views set forth 
 in his book because many good Christian people thought his con- 
 tention made altogether too little of the terrible fact of the child's 
 sinful and depraved nature and, therefore, underestimated the 
 supreme importance of the Holy Spirit's work in the transform- 
 ing processes of the "new birth." The possibility of gradual 
 growth and development in the child's spiritual life seemed to 
 many earnest people dangerous because this would make the 
 process of salvation too natural and human and rob it of its 
 supernatural significance. Conversion, as viewed by many peo- 
 ple, is a supernatural interposition on the part of God's spirit 
 for the regeneration of the spiritual nature in the "new birth," 
 and therefore just as necessary for children as for adult 
 members of the Christian community. The contention that for 
 children of Christian parents and with Christian training there 
 could be salvation through the slower and less striking processes 
 of growth and development, seemed to many in the days of Dr. 
 Bushnell, as it does to many people in our own day, to minimize 
 the importance of God's intervention in the redemption of sin 
 and to magnify, on the other hand, the importance of Christian 
 training in the salvation and spiritual redemption of children. 
 
 But Dr. Bushnell was careful not to ignore the terrible fact 
 of sin nor the absolute necessity of God's spirit in the Christian 
 training of children. He was fully aware of the inherent evil in 
 children. He recognized the presence in them of many sinful 
 and conflicting impulses and tendencies. Whether these are to be 
 regarded as original sin or as inherited tendencies to sin is 
 
65 
 
 immaterial for the views under consideration. Dr. Bushnell gave 
 full recognition to the inherent tendencies to waywardness and 
 depravity in children, but he also recognized, as very few Christian 
 educators had done before him, the strong, inherent impulses to 
 goodness and generosity in the normal child. He was fully 
 aware of the fact that the child is not all good and not all evil ; 
 that the child has many tendencies to evil and also many impulses 
 to good, but that in the normal child of Christian parents the 
 noble and worthy impulses predominate. Dr. Bushnell was one 
 of the first modern Christian teachers and educators to seize upon 
 the important fact that the normal child has a religious nature, 
 as he has an intellectual and a social nature. This is a part 
 of his natural birthright. It is God-given, as his other faculties 
 are God-given. His religious nature grows and develops through 
 proper training and culture, as his other faculties grow and de- 
 velop through training and education. The operation of the Holy 
 Spirit, in this process of growth and development of the child's 
 spiritual nature, is assumed as just as necessary and just as 
 indispensable as it is in the process of the "new birth" through 
 supernatural interposition. And is it any less wonderful or any 
 less divine that the Holy Spirit should direct and guide the 
 growing activities of the child's spiritual nature to high and 
 holy uses through careful Christian training than that it should be 
 able to transform a confirmed sinner to a child of God by a 
 sudden act of conversion? According to the contentions of 
 Bushnell the presence and power of the Holy Spirit were assumed 
 as absolutely indispensable in the proper training and develop- 
 ment of the child's spiritual nature. But with the assistance and 
 cooperation of the Holy Spirit in the careful training of the 
 child's religious nature through Christian culture it was claimed 
 that the inherent tendencies to waywardness and sin on the part 
 of the child could be overcome and that the child could be so 
 trained that it would "grow up a Christian and never know himself 
 as having been otherwise." 
 
 This is surely not an unreasonable proposition. Nor does it 
 ignore the supreme, importance of God's part in the operation, or 
 the terrible fact oi sin and depravity in the child. It simply 
 
66 
 
 magnifies the presence and power of God's spirit to the glory of 
 His name and the redemption of souls. However depraved and 
 sinful the child's tendencies and impulses may be, the vivifying 
 and energizing power of God's Holy Spirit in the careful training 
 of the youthful mind is abundantly able to overcome the inherent 
 evil tendencies and to "renew" and "transform" the child's moral 
 nature through the slow but no less wonderful and mysterious 
 processes of gradual growth and development so that he will need 
 no "new birth" by sudden transformation in later years. We 
 are dealing with spiritual things. We are just beginning to 
 recognize the significance of the child's spiritual nature in its 
 beautiful exhibitions of Christian traits. The child's spiritual 
 nature, whether a part of its original birthright or imparted to 
 it by the Holy Spirit, is capable of responding to the moulding 
 influences of the Spirit at a very early age. And why should it not 
 be the normal way, to have the child develop and grow into 
 spiritual manhood under the Spirit's guidance rather than be 
 abandoned by the Spirit to the world and the devil until the 
 day of its redemption in sudden conversion? As Prof. Coe says 
 in his "Education in Religion and Morals" : "Many children of 
 Christian parents do, as a matter of fact, reach Christian man- 
 hood in this way ; taught from the start to count themselves 
 children of God, from stage to stage of their growth they exercise 
 a faith that is proportional to their powers. These represent the 
 normal development of a child under Christian influences. The 
 fact that many children who are brought up in Christian homes 
 go away from God does not indicate that Jesus wis hi error 
 in his view of the child and his development." 
 
 2. Dr. Hibbard on " The Religion of Childhood.*' 
 
 Another modem writer on religious education, who has strongly 
 advocated the same views of Christian development through train- 
 ing and culture, is Dr. J. G. Hibbard. He was a Methodist 
 minister and educator and, in his book on "The Religion of Child- 
 hood," pointed out that the doctrine of Scripture with reference 
 to children was that they were in a state of regeneration. This 
 
67 
 
 state, he claimed, consisted not merely in the remission of the 
 penalty due to original sin but to a positive gift actually im- 
 parted by the Divine Spirit and constituting the "new life." This 
 gift, Hibbard maintained, every child retains until by his own 
 evil choice he suflfers a personal fall from grace. Such a fall 
 is not necessary, and the aim of Christian nurture should be to 
 prevent the choice for the evil life and to develop the germinal life 
 planted in the soul at the beginning. The old view in the Metho- 
 dist church was that a man could not be religious until he was 
 converted from Satan to God through a radical change of heart. 
 Hibbard taught that one could not be irreligious until he had 
 been "converted from God to Satan" by a deliberate act of the will. 
 He supported his contention by referring to the teaching of his 
 own church relative to universal infant regeneration and to the 
 generally accepted belief that all persons who die in infancy are 
 saved. But, says Hibbard : "If dying infants are saved, it must 
 be through divine grace. But why should such grace be given 
 to those who die but withheld from those who need it for liv- 
 ing." This was the central thought of his entire book. If divine 
 grace is vouchsafed to dying infants why should it be denied 
 to the living? And hence his contention that all children are 
 in a state of regeneration through the grace of God. The proper 
 training of children, therefore, consists in developing and strength- 
 ing the germinal principles of the spiritual life implanted in 
 the soul at the beginning, that the growing child may have its 
 character formed on the positive side by the establishing of right 
 principles and right conduct and practically never know a pro- 
 tracted negative period of wilfulness and sin. 
 
 And this view, so well expressed by a Methodist leader of reli- 
 gious thought on the religion of childhood, is becoming widely 
 accepted in all the Christian denominations of the revival type of 
 church activity. Even the conservative Presbyterian church, by 
 a practically unanimous expression of opinion on the part of the 
 ministers and laymen alike, not long since struck out the article on 
 "Infant Damnation" for unbaptized children from the pages of 
 its revised prayer book, as alike offensive to Christian ethics and 
 opposed to biblical teaching. In fact, there is scarcely a Protestant 
 
68 
 
 denomination anywhere who would still hold strictly to the view 
 of the unregenerate condition of unbaptized infants, as formerly 
 taught so widely by Catholic and Protestant bodies alike. With 
 the passing away in our Protestant churches of the view of the 
 unregenerate state of the child's moral condition, there has come 
 to be accepted in its place the more rational and more Christian 
 view, so ably advanced by such religious leaders and educators as 
 Horace Bushnell and Dr. J. G. Hibbard. With the more gener- 
 ally accepted view that a kind, merciful heavenly Father would 
 surely not withhold His grace from living children if it would 
 save unbaptized dying children from eternal loss and abandon- 
 ment, there goes the other view just as widely accepted in 
 practically all the Protestant religious bodies of the world that chil- 
 dren of Christian parents should be expected to grow up in a state 
 of grace and practically always remain in a state of grace through 
 life without knowing any prolonged negative period of sin. 
 
 3» Coe on ** Salvation through Education/' 
 
 Perhaps the most widely known writer on religious education in 
 our country at the present time is Prof. Geo. A. Coe of the North- 
 western University, from whose books "The Spiritual Life" and 
 the "Religion of a Mature Mind" I have had frequent occasion 
 to quote in this pamphlet. Prof. Coe's latest book is on the 
 subject, "Education in Religion and Morals." It is a significant 
 fact that Prof. Coe is professor in one of the most influential 
 Methodist institutions of learning in this country and evidently 
 the harbinger of a new and better day for religious training in 
 the Methodist church. This church has been perhaps the most 
 insistent and most emphatic of all the great Protestant denomina- 
 tions in the country, in claiming that a radical process of conver- 
 sion is necessary for salvation and that children, however carefully 
 trained from childhood up in religious matters, cannot be regarded 
 as in a state of regeneration until they have had some kind of radical 
 transformation of the spiritual life in conversion. Prof. Coe 
 does not underestimate the importance of the "new birth" for 
 confirmed sinners, but he advocates a process of careful religious 
 
69 
 
 training for the child of rehgious parents so that there may be a 
 gradual unfolding of the child's religious nature from within 
 by normal processes of growth and development, rather than a 
 sudden, radical transformation of the child's moral nature from 
 without, through sudden conversion, after a period of moral neglect 
 and disorder. In a chapter on "Salvation by Education" he 
 points out the important fact, already referred to in this treatise, 
 that the Christian life is to be regarded as an "incarnation," a 
 realization of the divine purpose and plan in our every day 
 spiritual activities. The Divine Spirit is to be regarded as being 
 present in all the normal processes of the soul's activities. This 
 is the same view which Prof. Bowne, also a professor in a large 
 Methodist university, advances, when he says that "the sense of 
 a divine presence in our lives is not dying out but it is taking 
 on a new form in accordance with a more careful psychology 
 and a greater precision of thought. Along with this has come 
 the insight that it is preeminently in the conscience, the pure heart, 
 the surrendered zmll, the holy activities, that God makes His abode 
 with us." The view advanced in the chapter on "Salvation by 
 Education" is that the child is to grow up a Christian in a positive 
 sense and "that the life of every child is a life in God and that 
 development of the mind should be growth in the God-conscious- 
 ness." With Coe education is to be regarded as self-expression. 
 He says : "When education is taken in the profound sense of 
 bringing to expression that which is deepest and most real in 
 man, then it becomes a means of making him conscious of the 
 God in whom he lives and moves and has his being. Such 
 training can begin with infancy and it can continue to old age. 
 It can and does bring men to the obedient recognition of God 
 as the supreme reality and of Christ as the Way, the Truth 
 and the Life. This is salvation by education." With this broader 
 and more comprehensive view of Christian education we would 
 probably all agree. 
 
 4. Other Noted Religious Educators on Christian Culture. 
 
 In England, both among Anglicans and among Nonconformists, 
 and in the United States among all classes of religious leaders and 
 
70 
 
 educators, the best educational and religious thought is along 
 similar lines. Thus Rev. R. J. Campbell of the City Temple, 
 London, successor to Joseph Parker, writes : "I believe that 
 many thousand children grow up within the kingdom without being 
 consciously alienated from God. Their spiritual history is a de- 
 velopment rather than a revolution." Rev. John Watson, D. D., the 
 author of "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush," writes : "I believe that 
 a child may be born into the Kingdom of God when it is born 
 into the world and grow up within God's family, as did Jeremiah 
 and John the Baptist. I also hold that the conscious crisis 
 called conversion is not necessary to regeneration, for the opposite 
 would mean that every one had to go astray and be brought back 
 to God at a distinct point in his life, which is not the case." 
 Dr. De Garmo, formerly president of Swarthmore College and 
 now professor at Cornell writes as an educator and also as a 
 member of the Society of Friends : 'Tn the earlier years of reli- 
 gious instruction it ought to be assumed that every child is a 
 child of God ; that by virtue of this fact he belongs in the 
 Christian family. Children ought not to be allowed to drift on 
 and on with the general assumption that they are lost, and the 
 vague hope that sometime they will be redeemed ; but direct 
 conscious effort should be made to initiate them into a distinctively 
 religious life." H. Clay Trumbull, of the "Sunday School Times" 
 and for many years one of the foremost Sunday-school leaders 
 in the country, writes about mistaken conceptions of the child's 
 religious life as follows : "Members of many a Sunday-school 
 class, who might be desirous of being received into full church 
 membership would be inquired of, not so much on the point 
 whether they now love and trust the Lord Jesus, as on the point 
 when they were converted; not so much concerning the evidence 
 which their present course furnishes of their fidelity to their Divine 
 Master, as concerning the evidence they can supply that their con- 
 version was a sound and a thorough one. In this way many young 
 disciples are taught to look within at themselves, rather than out- 
 ward and upward at their Saviour." 
 
 Bishop Neely of the Methodist church, in an introduction to 
 a book on "The Child's Religious Life," being "A Study of the 
 
71 
 
 Child's Religious Nature and the Best Methods for its Training 
 and Development," by Rev. W. G. Koons, A. M., makes these 
 pertinent remarks on the subject : "The best period for religious 
 work is childhood. Then the parent, the teacher, the preacher 
 and the church may do the best work, do it most easily and secure 
 the best and most permanent results. Very often the religious life 
 of the little child is superior to the religious life of many adults, 
 because it is simpler and sweeter." It is the view of practically 
 all wise and rational religious teachers and educators of our time, 
 to regard the religious life of the child as a continuous one, which 
 has its roots in its inborn religious nature and which is to be trained 
 and developed as all the other sides of the child's conscious mental 
 life. It is the great problem of modern religious educators and 
 teachers to train the child's nature as a whole, not only on its 
 intellectual and physical side, but also on its moral and spiritual 
 side, through a careful process of cultivation which begins with 
 childhood and which must continue until the child's intellectual 
 and moral character is pretty well formed and right habits of 
 thinking and right states of will pretty well established. The 
 growing nature of the child is a unity, endowed with infinite 
 capacities and possibilities which are to be developed by careful 
 sympathetic training on the part of parents, teachers and religious 
 leaders, so that the child's spiritual life, like his intellectual and his 
 physical life, is to unfold and develop normally and by gradual 
 processes from within, in accordance with the laws of its own 
 spiritual nature, and not by spasmodic and super-normal influences 
 from without, through radical conversion. And there is no greater 
 educational problem before the teachers and educators of the 
 country to-day than the one of Christian education. All true edu- 
 cation must be religious education. The intellectual training in 
 our public schools should be carried on continually with the 
 thought in the background of the child's moral and religious 
 needs and capacities. All true education should bring the child 
 face to face with the thought of God as embodied in the facts 
 and truths taught in ever>' branch of human knowledge, and 
 with the truth of human responsibility to God as revealed in 
 the human conscience and in the revealed Word of God. It is 
 
72 
 
 the urgent duty of all true instructors of the young — the parent,, 
 the teacher and the religious leader — to assist the growing 
 child in the formation of his Christian life and character so that 
 he may grow gradually, but none the less strongly and positively, 
 into the full possession of his spiritual inheritance through a vital 
 faith in the ever-present and ever-living God, the Father and Maker 
 of us all. 
 
 IV* The Spiritual Life as a Personal Relationship of 
 the Soul to its Heavenly Father, 
 
 The spiritual life is represented under a large variety of figures 
 of speech in the Bible. It is conceived of as a close, inner 
 union between the soul and its Maker in the figure of the vine 
 and the branches. "I am the vine, ye are the branches. He 
 that abideth in me and I in him the same bringeth forth much 
 fruit; for without me ye can do nothing." John 15:5. Or it 
 is represented as a structure, whose "foundation" and "corner- 
 stone" is Jesus Christ. "Other foundation can no man lay than 
 that is laid, which is Jesus Christ." I Corinthians 3: 11. And 
 again the Christian life is spoken of under the figure of an 
 indwelling spirit in a physical temple. "Know ye not that ye 
 are the temple of God and the spirit of God dwelleth in you?" 
 I Corinthians 3 : 16. Or the figure of the growing plant, with 
 its need of good soil, of proper nourishment and freedom from 
 choking weeds, is taken to express the fundamental thought of 
 the Christian life. The life-principle of the plant is in the germ 
 of the seed which simply germinates and grows under proper 
 conditions and brings forth fruit. And again, the spiritual king- 
 dom is compared to an invisible life-principle, implanted into the 
 soul and permeating its entire conscious activities, under the figure 
 of "leaven" which is "hid in three measures of meal" and which 
 eventually leavens the whole lump. And for none of these repre- 
 sentations of the spiritual life is a supernatural process of a "new 
 birth" required to carry out the thought consistently and harmoni- 
 ously, but they may all be made applicable to the normal, gradual 
 
7Z 
 
 processes of the child's unfolding spiritual life. To be sure, a 
 spiritual agency is assumed in all these conceptions of the Christian 
 life, but it is the agency which works in accordance with estab- 
 lished spiritual laws and which may be continually operative in 
 the normal processes of the child's religious growth and develop- 
 ment. The close, intimate relationship between the soul and God 
 as represented under the figure of the vine and the branches is 
 not only possible, but desirable and practicable, from the tenderest 
 age of childhood through the entire stretch of the Christian's life 
 here upon earth. The pure and uncontaminated body of the young 
 Christian child may be just as fitting and worthy a temple of the 
 Holy Ghost as the full grown body of the mature man, too often 
 rendered impure and unclean by the contamination of sin. If 
 Jesus Christ is to be the "foundation" and cornerstone" of our 
 Christian characters, then surely the impressionable age of child- 
 hood and youth is the most appropriate time for the right spiritual 
 foundation to be laid. Or if the Christian spirit is to be repre- 
 sented by the hidden and mysterious principle of the "leaven" in 
 the dough, or of the "germ" in the seed, to be developed and to 
 grow under favorable conditions and with proper surroundings, 
 then most assuredly the tender age of childhood and youth is the 
 most favorable time for these gracious and life-giving forces to 
 begin their processes of growth and development. There must be 
 a beginning of all these spiritual activities of Christian growth 
 and of character-formation, but they may be laid early in life 
 or implanted at birth. And a divine agency must be assumed as 
 the origin of all these gracious spiritual activities, but there is 
 nothing in the nature of the child's soul or in the teaching of 
 Sacred Scripture to prevent us from conceiving of this divine 
 agency as operative continuously and uninterruptedly, in all the 
 various processes and stages of the child's spiritual development, 
 for the perfecting of its Christian life and character. As Prof. 
 Bowne says : "We must discern the divine presence and agency 
 in life as a zvhole, and work with Him along the natural lines 
 which He has established, in the full faith that thus we are co- 
 workers with God and that results thus reached are as divine as 
 they would be if reached by some miraculous fiat." 
 
74 
 
 t. As Illustrated by Mature Christians. 
 
 But perhaps the most beautiful and most expressive representa- 
 tion of the nature of the Christian Hfe is that of a personal relch 
 lationship of the soul to Christ. This is expressed in such thoughts 
 as "following" the Master and becoming a personal disciple of 
 His. "If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and 
 take up his cross and follow me." Matthew i6 : 24. "If any man 
 serve me, let him follow me; and where I am there shall also 
 my servant be." John 12 : 26. Or it is expressed in the language 
 of sonship in the father's household, with all that this implies of 
 obedience and trust, of service and loyalty, of supreme love and 
 affection. God is not only the Creator and Preserver of the uni- 
 verse, but He is our kind and merciful "Heavenly Father." Thus 
 Jesus taught His disciples to pray, "Our Father which art in 
 heaven." Jesus referred repeatedly to God as His heavenly 
 Father: "Herein is my Father glorified that ye bear much fruit; 
 so shall ye be my disciples." John 15:8. "The cup which my 
 Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?" John 18: 11. This 
 assumes complete submission to the Father's will. "I ascend to 
 my Father and to your Father and to my God and to your 
 God." John 20: 17. "I and my Father are one." John 10:30. 
 Jesus told his disciples with reference to prayer that they should 
 not make vain repetitions as the heathen do : "For your Father 
 knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him." 
 Matthew 6 : 8. The disciples are told to be forgiving : "For if 
 ye forgive men their trespasses your heavenly Father will also 
 forgive you." Matthew 6 : 14. The Father will hear prayer in 
 secret and reward openly : "But thou, when thou prayest, enter into 
 thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father 
 which is in secret ; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall 
 reward thee openly." Matthew 6 : 6. And again, Jesus says : 
 "Be ye merciful as your Father in heaven is merciful." Luke 
 6 : 36. And again : "It is your Father's good pleasure to give 
 you the kingdom." Luke 12 : 32. A right attitude towards ene- 
 mies is made a condition of sonship. Jesus says in Matthew 
 
75 
 
 5 : 44. 45 • "But I say, love your enemies, bless them that curse 
 you, do good to them that hate you and pray for them that 
 despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye may be the chilren 
 of your Father in heaven.'' God is our Father and as such. He 
 is loving, kind, merciful, forgiving, ready to answer prayer, not 
 desiring that any should perish but of infinite love and compassion. 
 "Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them 
 that fear him." Psalm 103:13. 
 
 And if God is our Father, then we are his children and stand 
 in the same relation to Him spiritually as earthly children to their 
 natural parents. Thus Paul says : "Ye are the children of God 
 through faith in Christ Jesus." Galatians 3 : 6. And again Paul 
 writes : "Then shall they be called children of the living God." 
 Romans 9 : 26. Jesus tells his disciples to love their enemies 
 and to pray for those who persecute them, that ye may be called 
 "the children of your Father in heaven." Matthew 5 : 45. Paul 
 writes thus : "The spirit beareth witness with our spirits that we 
 are the children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God 
 and joint heirs with Christ." Romans 8:16, 17. Or we shall 
 be called the "sons" of God. "Beloved, what manner of love hath 
 the Father bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons 
 of God, Beloved, now are we the sons of God but it doth not 
 yet appear what we shall be ; but we know that when he shall 
 appear we shall be like him ; for we shall see him as he is." I John 
 3:1,2. "Ye are the sons of the living God." Hosea i : 10. As 
 sons we are created in the Father's image and partake of the 
 Father's spiritual nature. We enjoy all the privileges which this 
 relationship implies. We are in His continual presence and enjoy 
 His companionship. We have an honored place at His table. 
 We are fed by His bounty. We have communion with Him. 
 We are also His heirs, "sons of God, joint heirs with Christ." 
 But by virtue of our sonship, we also owe to the Father allegiance 
 and loving obedience and faithful service. We are to work in His 
 vineyard. We are to follow Jesus as our Elder Brother in his 
 mission of love and mercy, now to the mountain top of vision, 
 now to the lowly place where sin and suffering reign, now to 
 the judgment hall and perhaps to the garden and the cross. We 
 
76 
 
 are to love our Father with all our hearts and with all our souls. 
 We are to give Him the supreme allegiance of our hearts and 
 the undivided loyalty and affection of our lives. 
 
 2» As Illustrated by the Growingf Child. 
 
 This conception of the spiritual life as a personal relationship 
 of the soul to God in Jesus Christ, involving all the elements of per- 
 sonal friendship and companionship, is peculiarly applicable to the 
 views of salvation through Christian culture which have been 
 under consideration. And it is a conception which the child can 
 readily understand and which will grow in breadth and reality 
 with the growth and development of the child's personality into 
 maturity. The child knows what earthly parents are and what 
 they have done for him and what they mean to him. He knows 
 what it means to love and to trust his parents and in turn to 
 be loved and trusted by them. He knows that he ought to be 
 good and loving and obedient, and that any failure on his part 
 will cause his father pain and displeasure. He loves to please his 
 father and to be regarded with favor and good will. The strongest 
 motives for the normal child are fear of a father's displeasure and 
 punishment, and desire for a father's approval and commendation. 
 As the years go by fear is displaced more and more by a com- 
 manding love to do the father's will and to enjoy his continued 
 favor. The dutiful son recognizes that all his earthly blessings 
 and comforts come from a father's unbounded love and thought- 
 fulness. And he does not hesitate to come to his father with the 
 greatest degree of freedom and assurance for comfort and consola- 
 tion in times of trouble, for sympathy and fellowship in moments 
 of joy and pleasure, for unlimited favors through childish re- 
 quests in things that are wanted and needed. A father's ability 
 to grant favors and dispense blessings is only exceeded by his 
 ready willingness to satisfy the multiplied needs of the growing 
 child to the fullest extent. This freedom of access and un- 
 bounded confidence and trust in a father's unlimited capacity 
 as a dispenser of all kinds of blessings, is characteristic of 
 the simple faith of childlike trust. Deep down in the child's 
 
77 
 
 innermost heart, and underlying his entire mental attitude toward 
 his father is the full consciousness that he has free and unrestricted 
 access to his father and that he owes his father the best service 
 of his young life. 
 
 This relationship to his earthly father — and I use the word 
 father for the parental relationship — helps the child to under- 
 stand his relationship to his heavenly Father. By a simple and 
 easy process of thought he can be made to carry the conception 
 of his earthly relationship to his father over to the spiritual 
 realm. He has an earthly father and he has a heavenly Father. 
 What the earthly father is to his youthful mind in all the qualities 
 that make the thought of father precious and sacred, that the 
 thought of a kind, loving and merciful heavenly Father is to 
 his childish imagination, only with infinitely greater powers and 
 possibilities. It is really touching to see with what simplicity and 
 guilelessness the young mind will grasp the idea of a God, as 
 Father, with strength and wisdom and power and love and kindly 
 affection, unlimited and unbounded. The trustful child will flee 
 as readily into the loving arms of his heavenly Father as he will 
 into the arms of his earthly father. He may be taught to love 
 his Saviour with all the vividness and intensity of his young soul. 
 It is easy for him to tell God all his troubles and childish 
 disappointments, to confess all his sins and wrongdoings and 
 seek forgiveness, to ask freely for all his real and imaginary 
 needs and desires, and to feel buoyantly happy in his Father's 
 goodwill and approval as revealed in a good conscience. A 
 mingled feeling of fear of God's displeasure and punishment and 
 of desire for his approval and goodwill are powerful motives to 
 the childish mind. In later years fear is displaced more and more 
 by an overpowering love to do the Father's good pleasure, not 
 through fear of punishment, but because of a commanding desire 
 to do the will of God and enjoy His gracious favor in the sweet 
 consciousness of an approving conscience. How precious is such 
 simple faith and childlike trust on the part of the Christian child 
 in the goodness, mercy and loving kindness of our common heav- 
 enly Father. He is ever watchful, ready to hear and answer 
 prayers, always gentle, loving and kind, unlimited in resources 
 
78 
 
 and unfailing in His promises. It is refreshing to hear the secret 
 thoughts and unfeigned faith of some of Jesus' "Httle ones," 
 who pour out their hearts to Him in the greatest simpHcity and 
 trustfulness, never doubting, never fearing. Thus children are 
 taught to sing: 
 
 Jesus was once a little child, 
 
 A little child like me; 
 Was cradled in His mother's arms, 
 
 And sat upon her knee. 
 
 Once He was just the age I am. 
 
 And was as helpless, too ; 
 He used to sleep and walk and speak 
 
 Just as little children do. 
 
 And why was it He chose to be 
 
 A child so poor and weak? 
 It was that I might learn from Him 
 
 How blessed are the meek; 
 
 It was that I might learn from Him 
 
 My parents to obey. 
 And, like the Child of Nazareth, 
 
 Grow holier every day. 
 
 The young child, at a comparatively early age, may be taught 
 to understand some of the simpler truths of this divine relation- 
 ship. But no arbitrary time can be set. Children do not develop 
 alike, either physically or intellectually, much less religiously. 
 Jonathan Edwards tells us of a remarkable case of conversion 
 at the age of six; and Dr. Anthony tells us of a most unusual 
 case of a little girl, just past four, having a vivid sense of her 
 wilfulness and of God's love and forgiveness through childlike 
 prayer. But these cases are unusual. But just as early as the 
 
79 
 
 child begins to understand, in a limited way, what his relationship 
 to his parents means, just so early, in a limited way, he may 
 be made to understand the idea of a God and Father of us all, 
 who not only made us, but also keeps us and watches over us 
 and loves us and cares for us. It is remarkable how early in life 
 the child's religious consciousness develops in some children and 
 how real and how vivid these spiritual relations seem to 
 them. It is in the very nature of the normal child to be trustful, 
 to have a lively sense of right and wrong, to hear vividly these 
 strange and mysterious voices of duty, "thou shalt" and "thou 
 shalt not," and to picture in his youthful imagination the reality 
 of the unseen world. Children can be taught early in life to 
 say their little prayers of "Now I lay me down to sleep" and 
 to love the blessed Saviour who said "Suffer the little children to 
 come unto me and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of 
 heaven," and to pour out their little hearts to God in simple con- 
 fession of wrongdoing and in earnest request for forgiveness and 
 help in their daily tasks and duties. A child thus raised and 
 taught early in life to say its prayers, to love its Saviour, and to 
 do God's will according to the extent of his childish understand- 
 ing, must be considered an earnest, trustful and sincere member 
 of the Father's spiritual household. And he is to be taught to re- 
 main in this simple, childlike attitude of trust all through life. The 
 habit of prayer begun at his mother's knee should remain a precious 
 heritage through all the changing experiences of life. The young 
 heart is to be given early to its Saviour and to remain unchanged 
 in its attitude of obedience and submission to thp end of life. Paul 
 told the Corinthians that when he was a child, he thought as a 
 child, and spake as a child. And this must be peculiarly true of the 
 religious child. As a religious child, he is to think as a child, 
 to feel as a child and to act as a child. But when the spiritual 
 life has developed into manhood, under the careful tutelage 
 of wise and sympathetic parents and teachers, then he may 
 put away his childish conceptions and his childish notions 
 of things religious and enter into the full possession of his 
 spiritual inheritance as a full grown member of God's spir- 
 itual household. But the trustfulness, the openheartedness, the 
 6 
 
8o 
 
 guilelessness, the purity and simplicity of his childish faith 
 are to remain with him to the end. For "of such" is the 
 kingdom of heaven. 
 
 And thus this conception of a personal relationship to God 
 gives us the most beautiful and the most impressive picture of 
 the Qiristian life. Begun in early childhood at his mother's 
 knee, the child of faith and trust never outgrows his youthful 
 idea of his spiritual relationship. With his growing intelligence 
 and with his wider outlook upon life, his childish conception of 
 his relation to his heavenly Father will also expand and enlarge 
 its boundaries. His religion will become less external and less 
 mechanical. As the deeper and more spiritual conception of his 
 relationship to his earthly parents will gradually take possession of 
 the child's mind and supplant his crude and somewhat imperfect 
 notions, in like manner he will conceive of his spiritual relationship 
 to his heavenly Father in a more profound and spiritual sense. 
 His spiritual life grows broader and deeper and less concrete 
 and external. But he will never outgrow the simple yet beauti- 
 ful and profound conception of his spiritual life as a personal 
 relation of friendship to his heavenly Father, because it meets 
 the deepest needs of his soul and satisfies the profoundest aspira- 
 tions of his heart. For the scholar, the philosopher or the man of 
 practical affairs, God is still "Our Father," with all that precious 
 word implies, and we are still his "children," created in His 
 image, fed by His bounty, encompassed by His love, redeemed 
 by His suffering and death on the cruel cross, and made the 
 legatees of his spiritual inheritance, being "heirs of God and 
 joint heirs with Christ Jesus." 
 
 Pres. King in his "Reconstruction in Theology" puts this 
 thought of the spiritual life as a personal relationship in these 
 words : "Let us note that the whole problem of life, of morals 
 and of religion is ultimately for us all a problem of the fulfilment 
 of personal relations, human and divine. It is the problem of 
 simply bringing the child to a genuine sharing of the life of the 
 Father to a choice of character and joy like the Father's ; that 
 is finally the problem of learning to live the life of love as com- 
 plete and all-inclusive." 
 
8i 
 
 V» Some Practical Conclusions* 
 
 t. Salvation through Christian Culture the **NormaP' Process, 
 
 In view of all these considerations should not this method of 
 Christian culture be considered the normal one? As we have 
 seen, Jesus considers the rightful place of His lambs to be in the 
 fold with the shepherd, and the rightful place of the son to be 
 in the father's household with the father. If the child is nor- 
 mally religious, as we have learned by abundant testimony, why 
 should his conversion through gradual growth and development 
 not be considered his normal experience? Is it not time, there- 
 fore, that the church at large lay more emphasis upon holding 
 its children within the fold than to win them back after they have 
 been allowed to wander away? Has not the notion reigned long 
 enough in many churches and among many parents that children 
 are by nature doomed to serve the world and the devil before they 
 can be brought under the influence of the Gospel through a 
 supernatural intervention of divine power? Should not increas- 
 ingly greater emphasis be laid, in all of our religious efforts of 
 home, school, church and Sunday school, upon the importance of 
 careful religious training and instruction of the growing child, 
 to the end that he may become established and strengthened in 
 the positive, expressive side of his religious life so that he may 
 be spared the painful experience of a continued life of sin and 
 degradation and the consequent necessity of a radical conversion? 
 Are parents fully aware of their tremendous responsibilities? 
 Should there not be a revival within the church of parental re- 
 sponsibility for their children and of increased effort by the 
 church to keep the children and to bring them up in the fear 
 and admonition of the Lord ? More mothers Hke Hannah of old, 
 who brought the young Samuel early to the temple and dedi- 
 cated him to the service of God in prayer and self-surrender, 
 more mothers and grandmothers like Eunice and Lois to bring up 
 the young Timothys in the atmosphere of prayer and reverence for 
 God's word and love for His kingdom, would bring a larger 
 
82 
 
 proportion of the young people of Christian homes into right 
 relations with God from childhood up, would save many a young 
 life from waywardness and dissipation, and would result in adding 
 to the church increasing numbers of members who have come by 
 the normal process of Christian culture and Christian education. 
 
 2. Continual Necessity for Efforts to Save the Unconverted. 
 
 There doubtless always will be large numbers of young people 
 who will grow up in a careless and indifferent way and who 
 will need the striking experience of a radical change of heart. 
 There will doubtless always be large numbers of young people, 
 even in Christian families, who will carelessly and thoughtlessly 
 ignore the demands of the spiritual life or wilfully and deliber- 
 ately indulge in the pleasures of sin and folly, who will therefore 
 need a radical transformation of their spiritual natures in conver- 
 sion. And hence there will always be demand for the ringing 
 calls of a John the Baptist : "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven 
 is at hand." Special appeals to the erring ones will always be 
 necessary. The utmost efforts must be put forth to reach the 
 unregenerate and the lost. It is still the mission of the church, 
 as it has always been, to seek and to save that which was lost, 
 to go out after the erring ones and to lift up the fallen. And 
 I wish to record right here my profound conviction of the im- 
 portance of all wisely-directed efforts for the salvation and redemp- 
 tion of the world. We are to save the children for Christ and keep 
 them within the fold by all the available methods within our 
 reach. And there is much more work to be accomplished along 
 this line than most of us realize. The Christian church and 
 Christian educators have not become fully awake yet to the tre- 
 mendous significance and far-reaching importance of Christ's 
 words to Peter when He said : "Feed my lambs." At the same 
 time I am fully aware of the fact that, as in times past, so in the 
 future, there will be continued necessity for special religious effort 
 to bring the careless and indifferent to a vivid sense of their 
 spiritual needs and responsibilities, and the wilfully disobedient 
 and rebellious souls to the point of self-surrender and loyalty to 
 
83 
 
 God through a process of radical conversion. The very fact 
 that some souls, either through neglect or wilfulness, will 
 always become prodigals and wander away from the Father's 
 house makes it necessary to put forth renewed efforts to save 
 such wanderers and bring them back to a life of obedience and 
 loyalty. 
 
 Some natures are so constituted that they need more effort and 
 appeal to respond to spiritual demands upon them. For such 
 people special seasons of religious effort are helpful and almost 
 necessary for proper growth and development. For the hardened 
 sinner and the abandoned profligate, nothing but the most stirring 
 and persuasive appeals will avail for salvation and redemption, 
 and hence there will always be an urgent necessity on the part of 
 the church "to seek and to save" that which is lost by all the 
 legitimate methods of warning and of appeal available through 
 the "saving influences" of the Gospel. In fact, we are to become 
 "all things to all men," so that we may "by all means save some." 
 And hence the "rescue work" in our big cities, the "missions" 
 to the careless and indifferent, the "conventions" for promoting 
 interest in special church activities, the "assemblies" for Bible 
 study and meditation, the quiet "gatherings" of the believers for 
 ■deepening their spiritual lives, the special "appeals" and united 
 "efforts" of the church for the purpose of reaching the "indiffer- 
 ent" and the wilfully "disobedient," will always find an important 
 place in the supreme mission of the church to "bring Christ 
 to the world and to win the world for Him." But the greatest 
 amount of effort should still be to keep the children for Christ, 
 and to "feed the lambs," to bring up Christ's "little ones" in the 
 nurture and admonition of the Lord. "These ought ye to have 
 done and not to leave the other undone." Not less effort for 
 the spiritually "sick" to make them whole, but more effort for 
 the spiritually "whole" to keep them from getting sick; not less 
 effort to "raise" the fallen, but more to keep God's children 
 from "falling;" not less of regeneration through the "new birth" 
 for the prodigals of the world, but more of salvation through 
 Christian culture for God's growing children — this should be the 
 motto of the Christian church. 
 
84 
 
 3. Religious ''Awakenings'' not to be Considered Conversion. 
 
 One thing more. The times of new insight into spiritual 
 things and of a quickened conscience and of enlarged spiritual 
 powers and conceptions, which come to most earnest Christian 
 souls some time during the adolescent period, are not to be 
 regarded as times of conversion. Such a season of intense reli- 
 gious activity in the life of a carefully trained Christian child 
 is a "spiritual awakening" for the soul to the fuller realization 
 of its spiritual powers and capacities. Some foolishly and ig- 
 norantly call these seasons of renewed spiritual activity and of 
 enlarged spiritual capacities the "new birth." But this is mani- 
 festly a wrong conception. Some natures have a number of 
 these "spiritual awakenings," or periods of intensified spiritual 
 activity, during their religious experience. The normal man has 
 "awakenings" or periods of sudden insight and of renewed en- 
 largement of his powers at certain periods of his life on the social, 
 the intellectual and the aesthetic side of his growth and develop- 
 ment. But these "awakenings" in the social and intellectual life 
 of the growing child are easily explained. They are moments of 
 accelerated growth and of intensified activity during which the 
 educative processes grow more rapidly apace, and the social and 
 intellectual powers enlarge their boundaries by leaps and bounds. 
 The same seasons of accelerated growth and of enlarged spiritual 
 capacities frequently occur in the spiritual development of the 
 soul. These "awakenings" of seemingly new spiritual powers 
 and capacities are not to be considered as "steps" into the kingdom, 
 but as religious experiences "within" the kingdom itself, through 
 which God graciously enlarges the spiritual boundaries of the 
 soul and grants it momentary glimpses of heavenly visions or 
 deeper soundings of God's infinite wealth of spiritual riches. 
 Such an experience of "enlargement" and of "vision" the Apostle 
 Paul had when he was caught up into the third heaven and 
 "heard unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to 
 utter," or when he besought the Lord earnestly that the thorn in 
 his flesh might be removed from him, and the Spirit said unto him : 
 
85 
 
 "My grace is sufficient unto thee: for my strength is made 
 perfect in weakness." 
 
 It is well to bear this fact in mind. These religious "awaken- 
 ings" are by no means unique experiences, but are of frequent 
 occurrence in the intellectual and social life of many individuals. 
 As Prof. Starbuck points out: "The instances are numerous in 
 solving problems, making inventions, reaching scientific conclu- 
 sions, and the like, of persons feeling after an idea with unrest 
 and perplexity until the result is finally presented to clear con- 
 sciousness, ready-made." It is not an uncommon thing for some 
 minds to have experiences of "sudden awakenings" to a sense of 
 new powers or of new truths in their intellectual development. 
 Such experiences might well be called an intellectual "new birth," 
 but they require no new powers or faculties of the mind, but 
 simply an increased activity and a sudden deepening and enlarg- 
 ing of the powers and faculties inherent in the human mind 
 and capable of training and development by proper educational 
 processes. In like manner, some spiritual natures have "times" 
 and "seasons" of renewed activity, of greater vividness and 
 responsiveness and of a keener sense of the depth and reality of 
 the spiritual life, but these experiences require no new spiritual 
 powers or faculties for their rational explanation. And it is to 
 be remembered that only certain types of temperament are sub- 
 ject to these special awakenings. As in the intellectual life, so 
 in the spiritual life, there are occasional "crises" or "awakenings" 
 for certain religious temperaments, usually accompanied by some 
 emotional upheaval and some element of strain and conflict, but 
 these are, however, not to be regarded as indications of new- 
 bom powers and faculties, suddenly called into life by the Spirit 
 of God, but as "stages" of advancement in the spiritual progress 
 and "seasons" of enlargement and of greater fulness in the 
 spiritual development of the soul's inherent capacities. 
 
 4. The Fundamental Thought, the One ** Great Question.^ 
 
 The fundamental thought underlying the whole question of 
 conversion and the nature and origin of the Christian life is the: 
 
86 
 
 Fatherhood of God and the benevolent attitude of the soul 
 towards God. God is our Father and we are His children. We 
 cannot get away from this fact. Our heavenly Father loves us 
 and desires us to love and serve Him. His heart is full of com- 
 passion. He hates sin but loves the sinner and has exhausted 
 His divine resources to bring the human soul into right relations 
 with Him. How beautifully Jesus has illustrated those truths 
 in His parables of the Great Supper, the Lost Sheep and the 
 Lost Coin and the Prodigal Son. The sheep belong to the shep- 
 herd and he is concerned about them whether they remain in the 
 fold or wander away and are lost. The prodigal is still a son 
 whether he acknowledges his sonship or not. He can get away 
 from his father's presence, but not from his sonship. And God, 
 by His very nature, cannot and will not cancel the sonship. 
 Whether we choose to remain in the spiritual fold or wander 
 away into the mountains of sin to be rescued and brought back 
 with rejoicing, we are still members of God's chosen flock. Or 
 whether we prefer to grow up in the Father's family, or choose 
 to separate ourselves from God by voluntary sin and disobedience 
 for a season, or even forever, we are nevertheless God's children, 
 made in His image, imbued with His life and spirit, and endowed 
 with the spark of immortality. God loves and cares for His flock. 
 He desires the children of His spiritual household to remain with 
 Him. Simply to wander away from the flock is not the normal 
 act. Neither is it a filial act to leave the father's house like the 
 prodigal did. To grow up in the fold, to remain under the paternal 
 roof are the normal, sane and natural things to expect. The 
 Father's love and care are over all. How natural, therefore, and 
 how beautiful for the growing young life, born of Christian 
 parents and reared in Christian families to unfold its spiritual 
 nature, under the vivifying influences of the Spirit, as the bloom- 
 ing flower unfolds its fragrant petals to the warmth and sunshine 
 of a spring morning. Surely this ought to be the ideal way. 
 And it is the possible way and also the actual way for large num- 
 bers of God's dear children. 
 
 What a blessed thing it is to know that God has set no arbitrary 
 standards for admission to His kingdom. Whether we come as 
 
8; 
 
 the prodigal came, through repentance and remission of sins after 
 a period of waywardness or rebelHon, or as the young Timothy, 
 through Christian training and education ; the one great ques- 
 tion is, "Have we come to Jesus and given our hearts to Him 
 in loving obedience." Not the manner of our entrance to the 
 kingdom, but the blessed fact that we are actual disciples of 
 the Master now is the one great thing to be considered. The 
 question of supreme and overshadowing importance is not the 
 one of time, or place, or circumstances of our coming to Christ, 
 but the essential fact that we have actually come to Jesus, that He 
 is our Saviour, Redeemer and Friend, here and now, and that we 
 love Him and serve Him in sincerity and in truth with all our 
 hearts and with all our souls, with all our strength and with all 
 our might ; and that we love our neighbors as ourselves, irrespec- 
 tive of when that love began to manifest itself or how it came into 
 our hearts. What a blessed thing it is that we are not called upon 
 to give an account of where we first met Jesus face to face, or when 
 we first heard the voice of Jesus say, "Come unto me and I will 
 give you rest," and heeded its pleading tone, or even how we 
 were brought into loving relationship with the Master so that 
 we might enjoy His precious spiritual companionship without inter- 
 ruption. No ! No ! Not how we came, or when we came, or 
 where we came to Jesus and learned to know and to love Him, 
 but that we came to a saving knowledge of our heavenly Father 
 in Christ Jesus, and that we have yielded Him the loyal homage of 
 our hearts and the loving service of our lives, and that we can 
 say, and say with assurance and confidence, as Paul could say to 
 the Colossians : "I know whom I have believed and am per- 
 suaded that he is able to save that which I have committed unto Him 
 against that day," this is "the one thing needful," this is the supreme 
 and all-inclusive question of our lives. If we know ourselves as 
 children of God's spiritual household, if we know that we have 
 given our hearts unto God and that we have entrusted our lives 
 to His keeping, if we are confident that we have submitted 
 our wills to His blessed will and that our supreme desire in life is 
 to do the will of God, not only in word and in promise, but in 
 ^'deed and in truth ;" if we know deep down in our hearts that 
 
supreme love to God and a disinterested love to our fellowmen 
 are the ruling passions of our lives, then we may rest assured 
 with absolute certainty that "it is well with our souls," and that 
 our title to membership in God's spiritual kingdom is absolute 
 and unimpeachable, because attested by Jesus Christ himself when 
 He said : "And this is life eternal, to know thee as the only 
 true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou didst send," and by the 
 seal of the Holy Spirit in the words: "As many as received 
 him to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even 
 to them that believe on his name." 
 
 The following verses express this same thought most beauti- 
 fully and may, therefore, serve to bring this part of our treatise 
 to a fitting close : 
 
 You ask me hozv I gave my heart to Christ ? 
 
 I do not know. 
 There came a yearning for Him in my soul, 
 
 So long ago. 
 I found earth's flowers would fade and die — 
 I wept for something that could satisfy ; 
 And then — and then — somehow I seemed to dare 
 To lift my broken heart to Him in prayer. 
 
 I do not know — 
 
 I cannot tell you how; 
 
 I only know 
 
 He is my Saviour now. 
 
 You ask me when I gave my heart to Christ ? 
 
 I cannot tell. 
 The day, or just the hour, I do not now 
 
 Remember well. 
 It must have been when I was all alone 
 The light of His forgiving spirit shone 
 Into my heart, so clouded o'er with sin; 
 I think — I think 'twas then I let Him in. 
 
89 
 
 I do not know — 
 
 I cannot tell you when; 
 I only know 
 
 He is so dear since then. 
 
 You ask me where I gave my heart to Christ ? 
 
 I cannot say. 
 That sacred place has faded from my sight, 
 
 As yesterday. 
 Perhaps He thought it better I should not 
 Remember where. How I should love that spot- 
 I think I could not tear myself away, 
 For I should wish forever there to stay. 
 
 I do not know — 
 
 I cannot tell you where; 
 
 I only know 
 
 He came and blessed me there. 
 
 You ask me why I thought this loving Christ 
 
 Would heed my prayer? 
 I knew He died upon the cross for me — 
 
 I nailed Him there? 
 I heard His dying cry, "Father, forgive !" 
 I saw Him drink death's cup that I might live ; 
 My head was bowed upon my breast in shame! 
 He called me — and in penitence I came. 
 
 He heard my prayer! 
 I cannot tell you how, 
 
 Nor when, nor where; 
 Only I love Him now. 
 
PART THREE. 
 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE IN 
 CONVERSION. 
 
 Conversion, as we have seen, consists in a radical change of 
 heart and life for the wilfully and deliberately unrepentant, and 
 in a gradual unfolding of the religious nature through Christian 
 culture for the child of religious parents and surroundings. What 
 is involved in these fundamental changes has been discussed under 
 conversion. It will be the purpose of this portion of our treat- 
 ise to consider more particularly the affective experiences of con- 
 version, and to discuss what the states and changes of conversion 
 are in respect to the emotional side of the transaction. The term 
 "religious experience" is commonly used to define the subjec- 
 tive aspect of conversion. It is that element in conversion which 
 manifests itself in the feelings rather than in states of intelligence 
 or the disposition of the will. Indeed, the question is frequently 
 asked, how may we know that we have passed from death unto 
 life? Are there not some subjective states of religious feeling 
 which are the test and proof of conversion? Is there not a wit- 
 ness of the spirit by which we may know with certainty that we 
 are the children of God? In other words, may we not feel with 
 unmistakable definiteness and spiritual fervor that we have 
 experienced the new birth, and that we have entered into our 
 spiritual inheritance? 
 
 Most assuredly there is an emotional element in religious ex- 
 perience which is not to be ignored. There is a witness of 
 the spirit which bears witness to our spirits that we are the 
 children of God. There is an inner attestation of the reality 
 of the new birth in the full realization of new spiritual powers 
 
 90 
 
91 
 
 that have come into our lives through conversion. This element 
 of feeling in the religious life, which is an accompaniment of 
 all deep religious changes, and which contributes so large a 
 measure of happiness or unhappiness to our spiritual states, is 
 the emotional element in religion, or so-called religious experience. 
 It is not a matter of belief nor a state of the will. It is what 
 Jonathan Edwards calls the "Religious Affections." 
 
 L Varieties of Religious Experience* 
 
 That the experiences of people in conversion should be varied 
 and diverse is self-evident. Men have widely different experi- 
 ences in all the other interests and responsibilites of life. No 
 two people have exactly the same states of feeling in any affair 
 of human interest or human activity. It is only natural, there- 
 fore, that the great crises of the religious life, the times and 
 seasons when the soul wrestles with its eternal destiny, should 
 affect different natures quite differently. Men differ widely 
 in temperament, in intellect, in social and religious antecedents, 
 in power of feeling and capacity for expression. All these fac- 
 tors affect men very differently in all other experiences of life. 
 Why should they not affect them even more diversely in matters 
 of religious experience? The spiritual interests of man are his 
 most vital and his most important concerns. Man is most pro- 
 foundly affected on the side of his spiritual nature. Temporal 
 and eternal destinies are determined by our religious attitude. 
 And when the great religious crises come upon us, and the soul 
 wrestles with the conflicting forces which seek to take posses- 
 sion of it, then we may expect a stirring of the emotional nature 
 to its very depth, and religious experiences as varied and diverse 
 as human souls differ in temperament, training and innate 
 capacity. On the other hand, the soul that enters into the ful- 
 ness of its spiritual experiences through the gradual process of 
 religious development and growth would manifestly not require 
 as sudden and radical changes in its formative processes, and 
 hence would not be so likely to experience such pronounced states 
 of religious feeling. 
 
92 
 
 In general we may say there are four distinct types of religious 
 •experience in conversion: (i) The "revival" type, which is the 
 product of strong religious excitement and which is usually ac- 
 companied by excessive emotion; (2) the "spontaneous" type, 
 which is the product of a seemingly spontaneous religious awa- 
 kening not in a public gathering, and which is also accompanied 
 by a strong emotional element; (3) the "volitional" type, in which 
 the change is largely one of moral attitude, unaccompanied by 
 much religious emotion; (4) the "gradual-growth" type, or the 
 type of "Christian culture," which is the product of a gradual 
 unfolding and development of the spiritual nature through care- 
 ful religious training. Both the revival and the spontaneous 
 types are accompanied by strong emotional disturbances, and 
 hence might be properly called the "emotional" type of con- 
 version, or the type of self-surrender. The "volitional" type and 
 the "gradual-growth" type consist largely in the intelligent 
 choice of the good and in conscious voluntary effort to conform 
 to the higher spiritual standards and requirements as revealed 
 in the life and example of Jesus Christ, and might be called 
 the "volitional" type of conversion. The one is predominatingly 
 emotional in character, and involves usually a radical and often a 
 violent change of disposition and feeling ; the other is prevailingly 
 volitional, and involves more of intelligent choice and conscious 
 effort toward spiritual ends. The one is measured largely in 
 terms of feeling; the other in terms of will and conscious effort 
 toward benevolent ends. 
 
 J. The Emotional Type of Conversion. 
 
 This is the type which Prof. Starbuck designates the "self- 
 surrender" type. In this class belong the people whose spiritual 
 transformation comes suddenly and strikingly, and whose ex- 
 periences are usually vivid and intense in their religious fervor. 
 The striking and abrupt changes involved in the emotional type 
 of conversion may be occasioned by special religious services 
 and by a more or less continuous state of religious interest and 
 excitement. It occurs usually in connection with revival services 
 
93 
 
 or during periods of high reUgious tension of some kind or 
 other. The spontaneous type usually has a deeper origin and 
 cannot be attributed, as a rule, to any visible or tangible influence 
 as the occasion or cause of the striking changes in feeling and 
 disposition. The revival type is produced under certain well- 
 known religious conditions and by clearly understood religious 
 causes, and usually conforms to certain accepted standards of 
 experience. The spontaneous type is of a more remote and more 
 mysterious origin and occurs under widely different conditions of 
 religious surroundings, and expresses itself not infrequently in 
 unusual forms of religious experience. In both types the reli- 
 gious feelings are powerfully and profoundly agitated. Here be- 
 long the people who pass from death unto life with a struggle 
 and who usually experience a season of sorrow and anguish for 
 past sins before conversion, and of joy and rapture in the pos- 
 session of peace and forgiveness after conversion. It is not 
 unusual to find cases of the most extreme and violent eruptions 
 of the emotional nature in this type of experience. The sense 
 of sorrow and remorse for sin during the period of conviction 
 and the feeling of joy and spiritual exaltation after the sense of 
 relief has come in forgiveness are sometimes so pronounced that 
 they take the form of tumultuous and violent disturbances of the 
 emotions, resulting not infrequently in visions, hallucinations, 
 uncontrollable movements of the body or in a sudden collapse 
 of the nervous system in a dead swoon. With people of strongly 
 emotional natures and under intense religious excitement, the 
 most extraordinary inward experiences of a super-normal and 
 super-sensuous character may be had. Thus Jonathan Edwards 
 in his "Religious Affections" : "Some have impressed upon them 
 ideas of a great outward light, and this they call a spiritual dis- 
 covery of God's or Christ's glory. Some have had ideas of 
 Christ's hanging on the cross and His blood running from His 
 wounds, and this they call a spiritual sight of Christ crucified, 
 the way of salvation by His blood. Some have had lively ideas 
 of heaven and of Christ on His throne there, and shining ranks 
 of saints and angels ; and this they call seeing heaven opened 
 to them. Some from time to time have had a livelv idea of 
 
94 
 
 a person of a beautiful countenance smiling upon them ; and 
 this they call a spiritual discovery of the love of Christ to their 
 souls. And they regard these things as spiritual discoveries, for 
 they can see them when their eyes were shut. And in like man- 
 ner, the imaginations of some have been impressed with ideas of 
 the sense of hearing. They have had ideas of Christ's speaking 
 comforting words to them, or of explaining passages of Scrip- 
 ture. These things they have called hearing the voice of Christ 
 spiritually in their hearts, having the witness of the spirit, and 
 the inward testimony of the love of Christ." Edwards remarks 
 in this connection that while some people regard these peculiar 
 and special inner manifestations as supernatural, he does not, be- 
 cause they can be explained on other grounds. He adds : "It is 
 known by abundant experience that it is not the advancing or 
 perfecting human nature which makes persons more capable of 
 having such lively and strong imaginary ideas, but that on the 
 contrary, the weakness of body and mind and distempers of 
 body, make persons abundantly more suggestive of such im- 
 pressions." And yet Jonathan Edwards was a strong believer 
 in the emotional type of conversion and in the value of the 
 religious affections. 
 
 That many of the strong religious characters of history have 
 been of this rather extreme emotional type is abundantly illus- 
 trated by such religious leaders as Paul, Augustine, Luther, Wes- 
 ley, John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards and many others. Such 
 powerful emotional natures joined to vigorous intellects and well- 
 balanced wills constitute the religious geniuses of the world; men 
 who move the world mightily on the religious side by their influ- 
 ence and who shape the policies of religious organizations and 
 who formulate the dogmas of religious belief for the churches. 
 These are the men of powerful religious impulses and of fear- 
 less religious convictions. Their emotional currents run rapidly 
 and usually unevenly. Their emotional states lack equilibrium. 
 Such lives are more or less stormy and agitated, but they are 
 never dull. Religious leaders of this type have strong convic- 
 tions of truth, warm affections for friends, and a lively hatred 
 for their enemies. They are impatient of delay. They can, with 
 
95 
 
 difficulty, brook resistance. They grow restless under oppo- 
 sition, and often appear arbitrary and dictatorial in their spiritual 
 demands. Such natures make typical religious leaders. They 
 condemn sin in vigorous terms and with an unsparing hand, 
 because they themselves once tasted its bitterness and hollowness. 
 They are ever ready to call down fire from heaven to con- 
 sume their enemies. They can stir men's souls to lofty enthusi- 
 asm because they themselves are full of glowing inspiration. 
 These are the spectacular and dramatic men of religious history. 
 Thus we have a Paul before a frenzied mob, defending him- 
 self and declaring his innocence; a Luther, fearless and even 
 defiant, before the assembled nobles of the temporal and spiritual 
 realm; a John Knox, making kings and queens tremble in fear 
 and anger upon their thrones. That such impulsive and passionate 
 natures should experience unusual religious agitation and exalta- 
 tion of spirit is, therefore, a thing to be expected, and marks 
 them as men of unusual power and influence. 
 
 On the other hand, these strong, emotional natures, uncon- 
 trolled by a vigorous intellect and by a firm, steady will, become 
 the religious cranks of the world and the pious fanatics of reli- 
 gious bodies. In the case of many such extreme emotional natures, 
 the religious feelings color the entire life of the individual. 
 Religion for such natures consists more in an enjoyable state of 
 feeling than in an attitude of the benevolent will. And as the 
 feelings are bound to fluctuate, the religion of such natures is 
 bound to fluctuate with the feelings, and to be unsteady and un- 
 even in its life and flow of spirit. Religion as benevolent char- 
 acter and as social service has for such people little attraction 
 unless it bubbles over with excitement and is aglow with 
 feeling. This is one extreme as over against the cold, unfeeling 
 intellectuality of the other extreme. The great danger is that this 
 type of religious experience may be regarded as the normal type, 
 whereas the real facts in the case are that it is the abnormal 
 and extreme type. And although such natures have their due 
 place in the church and contribute the largest measure of service 
 to the music of the church and to the encouragement of the prayer- 
 meeting, and to the support of all religious enterprises by word 
 7 
 
96 
 
 of mouth, yet their real influence is frequently discounted and 
 their efforts underrated because of their emotional extravagance 
 and their seeming inconsistency and hypocrisy. 
 
 In every typical case of emotional conversion there is pres- 
 ent in the consciousness of the penitent a sense of sin and guilt 
 involving dissatisfaction with and remorse for past life, and a 
 sense of relief and equilibrium after the crisis has been passed, 
 manifesting itself in varying degrees of happiness and religious 
 exaltation. But the motives which lead to the crisis of regenera- 
 tion, the particular states of unhappiness preceding and of hap- 
 piness following the act of self-surrender are various and manifold. 
 They make an interesting study. 
 
 Prof. Starbuck in his analysis of numerous cases of emo- 
 tional conversion, as given in his "Psychology of Religion," finds 
 the motives for taking the decisive step of self-surrender into 
 the Christian life many and varied. They seem to fall naturally 
 into eight groups: fears, other self-regarding motives, altruistic 
 motives, following out a moral ideal, remorse and conviction for 
 sin, response to teaching, example and imitation, urging, and other 
 forms of social pressure. As Prof. Starbuck points out, such ex- 
 pressions occur among the numerous replies received : "The ter- 
 rors of hell were dwelt on at revival until I became so scared 
 I cried," writes one. Another one: "I wanted the approval of 
 others." And again : "Father had died and I thought I would 
 get to meet him." Still another wrote: "I felt I must be better 
 and do more good in the world." "It was love for God who 
 had done so much for me." A desire for a higher ideal of life 
 led one to write: "I had a yearning for a higher ideal of life.'' 
 "I wanted to be good and to control my anger and passions." 
 Under remorse and conviction we have such expressions as these : 
 "I was thoroughly convicted of sin." "Remorse for my past con- 
 duct was my chief motive." "My sins were very plain to me." 
 Another one writes : "Mother talked to me and made the way of 
 salvation plain." "A pleading word from my teacher helped me." 
 And again: "I saw so many becoming good that I just had 
 to become a Christian." Here we have the example of others as a 
 strong motive. It appears from these examples and from many 
 
97 
 
 others which might be quoted that fears of hell and punishment 
 have greater prominence than hope of heaven and love for Christ 
 in the emotional type of conversion. These statistics show what 
 a small part rational considerations usually play in this kind of 
 conversion. And this may account for the fact that there are 
 so many cases of back-sliding and failure in the revival type of 
 conversion. The feelings are usually too strongly excited, the 
 intelligence and the reason are not sufficiently consulted and hence 
 no profound moral change is wrought in the will, with the usual 
 result, moral failure and a "falling from grace." 
 
 The emotional states accompanying and following conversion 
 of this type are equally diverse. There is a great difference in 
 the intensity of the emotions, from almost no perceptible feeling 
 on the one hand to examples of the most vivid and intense 
 experiences of pain and joy at the other extreme. Various terms 
 are used by Prof. Starbuck's respondents to define the emotional 
 content during conversion. Such expressions as these are used : 
 •'While I was struggling in prayer, I felt a peace within. A 
 calm came over me." "I prayed and cried to God for help. 
 I wandered four years, seeking rest." "After much prayer I 
 surrendered completely and had the assurance that I was accepted." 
 "I determined to yield my heart and life to God's service." One 
 writes: "I seemed to hear Jesus speak words of forgiveness." 
 Another one: "I rose for prayer and felt relieved." Here is a 
 striking case: "After failing of relief at revival, I was singing 
 songs by myself at home. After I got through singing I sat 
 and thought, 'Why, God does forgive me and if I live right he 
 will help me.' " The expected feeling did not come but a sense 
 of relief and assurance came. Another one found relief during 
 sleep: "I read the Bible and prayed far into the night. Then 
 I went to sleep and during the night the thing had cleared itself 
 up in my mind and I was ready to live or die by it." This 
 was purely emotional and unconscious without any element of 
 choice. Another one writes: "The witness of the spirit that I 
 was a child of God was very clear." And again : "It was a 
 sudden awakening so I could say in my heart, our Father in 
 heaven." Self-surrender, yielding the personal will to God's 
 
98 
 
 will, a sense of sins forgiven, a feeling of oneness with God, 
 a sense of buoyancy and of joy and of bodily lightness, weep- 
 ing and shouting, peace and quietness of spirit, a sense of great 
 relief as of a burden lifted; these and similar states of feeling 
 are experienced by different ones under emotional pressure. In 
 the more extreme cases of emotional conversion, the feelings are 
 reduced to the last degree of tension and then recoil. They 
 are pent up and suddenly burst. Life appears to force itself to 
 the farthest extreme in a given direction, and then to break forth 
 into free activity in another direction. Perhaps the purest type 
 of self-surrender is found in such cases of conversion as those 
 of drunkards, like John B. Gough and H. H. Hadley. 
 
 It is to be noted also, in accordance with Prof. Starbuck's analysis 
 of conversion-cases that joy and the intenser emotions are more 
 frequently with males, while the sense of oneness and acceptance 
 is with females; also, that the cases of physical and nervous 
 excitability are more numerous in the cases of conversion in 
 religious gatherings, while the calmer spiritual experiences of 
 peace, happiness and the feeling of acceptance with God are more 
 characteristic of the cases of conversion at home and alone. The 
 comparison in the same persons of the feelings before conver- 
 sion and after conversion is also suggestive. In general, it may 
 be said that the more deeply and violently the emotions were dis- 
 turbed before conversion the intenser the experiences of joy 
 and exaltation will be after conversion. Or, as Prof. Starbuck 
 puts it : "The disposition which feels keenly before conversion 
 reacts violently at the crisis and has the more intense experiences 
 afterward. Those who are thrown back on themselves and ex- 
 perience markedly the sense of sin and depression are the ones 
 who are thrown vigorously in the direction of the new life. 
 It will be observed also that the temperament which shuts itself 
 against new influences, as evidenced by resistance before con- 
 version rarely ever experiences joy; while on the contrary a more 
 open nature, as indicated by prayer and effort, feels joy and 
 acceptance afterward." 
 
 The results of the emotional type of conversion, of both the 
 revival and the spontaneous type, are, of course, varied. For 
 
99 
 
 many the process is one of enlarged powers and of increased 
 capacity for usefulness and service. The high spiritual plane 
 reached by some converts under great stress of feeling is to 
 many a precious memory and a constant source of inspiration. 
 On the other hand, large numbers find the exalted states of the 
 new life slip away from them in the common round of duties 
 to be performed and they relapse again into coldness and indif- 
 ference. That numbers of God's children are swept into the 
 kingdom by the strong currents of religious feeling, either in- 
 cited in public gatherings or spontaneously awakened in quiet 
 and solitude, is abundantly illustrated by the testimony of his- 
 tory and of human experience. That the results of many of these 
 emotional conversions are far-reaching and permanent cannot be 
 doubted. That many hopeful converts, buoyantly swept along 
 at first by strong religious excitement and supremely happy for 
 a while in a new-found peace and joy, soon experience a loss 
 of religious glow, become discouraged and disheartened, and even- 
 tually drop out by the wayside, cannot be doubted either. Revul- 
 sions of feeling must inevitably come as a reaction from the high 
 tension of nervous excitement. And this is followed in its track 
 by countless cases of back-sliding, whose last state unfortunately 
 is often worse than the first. The dangers of emotionalism in 
 religion are only too apparent. As President David Starr Jordan, 
 of Leland Stanford University, says (as quoted by Prof. 
 Starbuck) : "Sterile emotions are not religion, and hysteria of 
 the same nature as drunkenness may be even more dangerous, be- 
 cause it is insidious, and because it may come under the protection 
 of the honored church. It is certain that chronic religious excite- 
 ment is destructive to the higher life. The great efforts put forth 
 to save the sinner, should not be used as a dissipation for those 
 who believe themselves saints." 
 
 2. The Volitional Type of Conversion. 
 
 In this type of conversion "the regenerative change is usually 
 gradual and consists in building up, piece by piece, of a new set of 
 moral and spiritual habits." In adults the process partakes more 
 
I(DO 
 
 of the nature of reform or a breaking" away from old habits and 
 forming new habits. In children it is a gradual unfolding of 
 the child's religious nature through wise and sympathetic moral 
 training. The one type involves a double process, a breaking 
 away from a life of sin and a building up of a life of obedience 
 and righteousness. The determining factor is the will, a conscious 
 choice. This is the type of the prodigal. The other type is one 
 of gradual development, of awakened powers, of new relations. 
 of building by degrees in the consciousness of the child a moral 
 attitude of trust in God and union with His spirit. Both types 
 emphasize the supreme importance of the rational will in the 
 conscious choice of the good in life. Both types subordinate 
 the feelings to their normal place and lay stress upon the neces- 
 sity of building the Christian character upon the substantial 
 elements of rational thought and the benevolent will. It is the 
 Scriptural type. The wilfully disobedient is to turn away from 
 evil and to learn to do good. He is to crucify his flesh, to abandon 
 the old life and follow the Master in the new life of the spirit, 
 whatever his feelings in the matter may be. Or it is the type of 
 the young Samuel, hearing the voice of God calling to him in 
 the temple to a larger life ; or of the young Timothy, of pious 
 parentage, who was taught to know the Scriptures from his 
 youth up and to consider himself a member of the spiritual house- 
 hold of faith by virtue of his Christian training and education. 
 
 This more quiet and less dramatic kind of religious experience 
 must be recognized as just as valid and useful as the more vio- 
 lent and dramatic kind. And yet, as Prof. Bowne tells us in 
 his "Immanence of God," "there has been a very general tendency 
 in the history of the church to look upon emotional ebulliencies, 
 anarchic raptures, anomalous and spectacular experiences as the 
 truly classical manifestations of religion." And it is even now 
 too much the fashion in some quarters and by some narrow and 
 uncharitable religionists of the emotional type, to assert that there 
 can be no genuine conversion, no true, saving states of grace, 
 without the violent experiences of a sudden and striking emotional 
 conversion. This view is unwarranted by Scripture and unsub- 
 stantiated by healthy Christian experience. Just as we have to 
 
lOI 
 
 recognize the validity and reality of the intenser kinds of re- 
 ligious feeling in conversion, when it occurs under strong religious 
 excitement as well as strong social excitement, so we must with 
 equal justice and for like reasons, recognize the reality and the 
 validity of a less dramatic experience of conversion or of a less 
 spectacular entrance into the kingdom. "The wind bloweth where 
 it listeth." It also bloweth how it listeth. Its strength and effect 
 are not alike in all cases. The presence of the spirit is not always 
 nor even usually with demonstrations of power and the excite- 
 ment of the spirit. The operations of the divine spirit on the 
 soul are usually without excitement or confusion. Not in the 
 earthquake, nor in the fire, nor in the whirlwind, but in the "still 
 small voice," did Elijah detect the presence of the spirit and power 
 of God. 
 
 It has been too much the custom in some religious bodies to 
 lay stress upon the more striking and explosive types of religious 
 experience, and to underestimate or else to ignore entirely, the 
 more quiet and unobtrusive kind, which is after all the normal 
 and ideal type. Some men enter the kingdom by shouting and 
 hallelujahs, but the larger proportion by the more quiet and 
 more uneventful method of simply doing the will of God and 
 trusting in the loving kindness of the heavenly Father. There 
 are souls who must pass through conflict and strife into the 
 state of redemption, not because God must be importuned and 
 wrestled with, as though He were unwilling to grant His favor, 
 but because their own pride and stubbornness of will are unwill- 
 ing to yield in self-surrender without a struggle. But most 
 assuredly not all the children of the kingdom are obliged to pass 
 through a "storm and stress" period before they can find peace 
 with God. The great saints of the kingdom have had unusual 
 careers of struggle and conflict, of vision and ecstasy. But not 
 so the rank and file of the army of God's host. To take the 
 unusual, the extraordinary and the striking kind of religious 
 experience as the ideal type to be sought after and to be culti- 
 vated is to set false and unnatural standards. To ignore the 
 common, everyday simple life of faith and trust of the average 
 child of God is both a wrong and an injustice. It is surely 
 
I02 
 
 important that the full value of a simple, trustful life of faith 
 should receive more abundant recognition in the literature of 
 the Christian church and in the language of religious leaders in 
 public gatherings. For most children of Christian parentage and 
 surroundings the religious life, if carefully and sympathetically 
 trained, is one of gradual unfolding, not to be measured in terms 
 of emotional content, nor to be marked off by periods of religious 
 ecstasy. The men who have been raised after the manner of Dr. 
 E. E. Hale, who says he always knew God loved him, are the 
 representatives of what Prof. James calls the "once born," the 
 types of "healthy-mindedness," the natures who are born "with 
 an inner constitution which is harmonious and well-balanced 
 from the outset, and whose impulses are consistent one with 
 another, and whose wills follow without trouble the guidance 
 of their intellect, whose passions are not excessive and whose 
 lives are little haunted by regret." "So that the awakening of the 
 new life for them comes as quietly as the growth of a plant, 
 and it is impossible to mark off periods of growth in their religious 
 development," as P'rof. Starbuck would say. To be raised in 
 a Christian family, to be dedicated at an early age to the service 
 of God in prayer by Christian parents, to be brought from child- 
 hood's early dawn to love and to do the right for Jesus' sake, to 
 be early imbued with the goodness and mercy of a kind heavenly 
 Father, to be willing and ready to accept new truths or new obliga- 
 tions as they may be presented to the childish understanding 
 by loving parents or faithful teachers, to love the Lord Jesus 
 Christ with all the earnestness and intensity of a child's affec- 
 tionate nature, to be conscious of one's self-surrender to the 
 holy will of God for a life of trust and service, and to continue 
 thus with increasing earnestness of purpose and renewed loyalty 
 to the pure and unselfish ideals of one's early spiritual enthusiasm 
 to the end of life, this surely is a possible experience because 
 lovingly and reverently attested by thousands who have known 
 of no other way. It is the ideal way. Why should not all of 
 God's children learn to love and serve their heavenly Father 
 from childhood up and never depart from the Father's presence 
 and loving companionship? 
 
I03 
 
 A child of God who is early brought to the temple and dedi- 
 cated to the service of God, as the young Samuel was, or who 
 has a Christian mother and grandmother to teach him the Scrip- 
 tures and the way of God from childhood up, as the young 
 Timothy had, has surely many advantages over the one who has 
 been living persistently and wilfully for a longer or shorter period 
 of time, a life of sin and rebellion against God. He may not 
 have the exalted and entrancing vision of an overwrought emo- 
 tional conversion, but neither does he have the recollection of 
 the bitterness and hollowness of a sinful and wasted life. He 
 may not be able to tell the times and the seasons, nor the par- 
 ticular place and hour, when he was brought into the kingdom, 
 but he does know the more blessed fact that he has passed from 
 death unto life and occupies an humble place in the kingdom, 
 because he loves the brethren. He may have blundered and 
 fallen into momentary sin at times and thus repeated the ex- 
 perience of the prodigal on a small scale, but he never remained 
 for any length of time away from the Father's house in a state 
 of conscious estrangement from the Father. He may not have 
 the witness of the spirit as a seal of certainty with supernatural 
 attestation of divine power, but he has the quiet and peaceful 
 assurance of knowledge and conviction so that he can say with 
 Paul : "I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he 
 is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against 
 that day." He does have new experiences of God's love, 
 new joys and satisfaction in His service, new vistas of His glory 
 as he goes on in his Christian life and career, but these are not 
 evidences of new experiences in conversion ; they are simply 
 stages in his Christian development, steps in his spiritual unfold- 
 ing, tokens of the soul's spiritual health and enlargement. 
 
 3. Room for Both Types of Experience. 
 
 It is only fair and just at this point to state that there are 
 endless varieties of Christian experience which pass by almost 
 imperceptible gradations from the striking explosive type of 
 emotional conversion to the quiet, unassertive type of inner 
 
I04 
 
 assurance and of childlike trust in God's goodness and mercy. No 
 two people have just exactly the same kind of experience. What- 
 ever the causes may be for the great variety of religious experience, 
 and however widely they may differ in degree and quality, we 
 are in duty bound to recognize in others the reality and worth 
 of their own individual experiences. The emotional religionist 
 is very apt to question the genuineness of any other kind of re- 
 ligious experience not conforming to his own individual type. 
 He is tempted to insist on a state of conflict and struggle, fol- 
 lowed by an experience of joy and satisfaction, as the only pos- 
 sible condition of entrance to the new life. And if he has been 
 brought up in the strictly revivalistic churches, he is likely to 
 insist on the anxious bench, on public confession and on an ex- 
 perience of the "Power" as the only possible conditions of sal- 
 vation ; as though God's spirit was limited to times and places 
 and His power circumscribed by the narrow walls of a sectarian 
 church. On the other hand, the representatives of the unemo- 
 tional type of conversion are apt to look with disfavor upon the 
 more dramatic experiences of their emotional brethren. They 
 are inclined to doubt the reality of any experience more striking 
 or more pronounced than that of their own. They are tempted 
 to question the honesty and sincerity of much of the testimony 
 of the ordinary prayer-meeting services, especially when it comes 
 from the lips of those whose conduct harmonizes so poorly with 
 their professions. There undoubtedly is much that is superficial 
 and ungenuine in the current religious testimony of supernatu- 
 ralism in experience. The methods employed to bring about the 
 desired results cannot fail to produce much shallowness and 
 hypocrisy. Yet we must be charitable. We are in duty bound, 
 as members of the body of Christ, to believe in each other's 
 experience, and not to set ourselves up as judges and condemn 
 others, who are not of our own individual type of Christian ex- 
 perience, to outer darkness and perdition, as though the human 
 heart was an instrument of only one string. The emotional nature 
 of man is a most complex and a most expressive instrument of 
 human experience. The spirit of God can play upon it with 
 endless variety of inner music. But the value of the music is 
 
105 
 
 determined by the character of the one whose hands touch the 
 strings and make it to vibrate. Not the instrument but the player 
 is the matter of greatest moment. The strong, virile, resolute 
 hand of the benevolent will, playing upon the responsive instru- 
 ment of our emotional nature, may produce harmonious music of 
 great sweetness and purity. 
 
 The chief thing is not feeling, nor ecstasy, but benevolence 
 and good will. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, 
 saith the Lord." He that hath the spirit is a child of God, what- 
 ever the quality or intensity of his religious experience may have 
 been in conversion. As Dr. Hyde says, in his "God's Education 
 of Man": "The man who has this disposition (i. e., devout ac- 
 ceptance of the will of the Father), has God in his life, Christ 
 in his heart and the Holy Spirit in his soul. It matters not 
 whether he got it at the first hour or at the eleventh, whether- 
 through Jewish law or Greek philosophy, whether in the cathedral 
 or in a Methodist chapel, whether the articles of his creed are thirty- 
 nine or none, whether he succeed in living up to his aim or per- 
 petually fails, whether he can thank God that he is not like other 
 men, or can simply cry, 'Lord, be merciful to me a sinner.' No 
 man or woman to-day holds so false a creed, or accepts so false a 
 philosophy, or knows so little or so much of Christ, or has so 
 bad a record, or so weak a will, or so irritable a temper, or so 
 sensuous a temperament, that he or she need remain for one 
 instant outside the kingdom of God in consequence. For the one 
 thing needful, the rock foundation, the oil that lights the lamp 
 of life, the sap that makes the branch a member of the vine, the 
 blood relationship which makes one a brother or sister of the 
 Christ, is the sincere disposition to do the will of God." 
 
 II. Some Reasons for the Large Variety of Religious 
 Experience in Conversion. 
 
 Experiences in matters of religion are varied for the same reason 
 that they are not uniform in other matters of human interest. 
 And we might w^ell expect larger variety and greater differences 
 in both kind and degree in this department of our emotional life. 
 
io6 
 
 for the simple reason that religious concerns affect us more 
 profoundly than any other interest in life. Our religious natures 
 are fundamentally and unchangeably predominant in the organiza- 
 tion of our affective life. "Man is incurably religious," as has 
 been so well said. His religious instincts are most active and 
 influential in determining his conduct and manner of life from 
 childhood to old age. They are among the most persistent and 
 most potent of all the implanted dispositions and impulses of the 
 human soul. It is practically impossible to eradicate the religious 
 impulses of the soul even by neglect and disuse. They will assert 
 themselves in the most striking and impressive manner in great 
 crises of human life. Man cannot get away from the simple fact 
 that he is more than body and more than nerves and thinking 
 powers. His moral nature is a distinguishing characteristic 
 Vhich separates him by an impassable gulf even from the most 
 intelligent and most highly developed of the lower animals. The 
 solemn and inexorable demands of the soul in matters of duty 
 and conscience are among the most awe-inspiring facts of human 
 existence. The sublime grandeur of the heavens and the solemn 
 mystery of human obligation in authoritative dictums of "Thou 
 shalt" and "Thou shalt not" were the two most impressive facts in 
 human life to the great German philosopher Kant. The moral 
 life, as expressed in the human conscience, relates us not only 
 to other sentient beings to whom we owe something, but also to 
 the Creator and Maker of us all "with whom we have to do." 
 We cannot get away from duty. We cannot get away from 
 conscience. We cannot get away from God. 
 
 Religion grows out of our moral constitution. Its roots are 
 imbedded within us in undying instincts and elemental impulses. 
 These, uncontrolled and untamed, may lead to the grossest 
 religious practices and to the vilest religious excesses. On the 
 other hand, if they are held in sway by intelligence and reason 
 and under the energizing influences of the Holy Spirit, they lead 
 to the loftiest acts of self-sacrifice and to the noblest deeds of 
 moral heroism. The soil for a multiform religious life is, there- 
 fore, inexhaustibly fertile. It is rich in the elements which make 
 great variety in religious experience not only possible but even 
 
I07 
 
 necessary and unavoidable. We need not wonder, therefore, why 
 the religious elements are so all-pervading in human life. They 
 constitute a large part of life. Nay, verily, religion is life and 
 all true moral life is religious ; i. e., it relates itself to personal 
 and divine obligations. 
 
 It will be our task in the following pages to explain some 
 of the reasons for the widely different and even extreme types 
 of religious experience in conversion and to discuss some of the 
 essential conditions for the proper development and expression 
 of the true spiritual life during its regenerative processes. Uni- 
 formity in Christian experience is not to be desired nor even 
 expected. Extreme types, however, need explanation and they 
 may be explained and accounted for on a psychological and re- 
 ligious basis. What are some of the reasons for such diversified 
 religious experience? 
 
 J. The Character of the Life Led Previous to Conversion. 
 
 One of the reasons for differences in emotional experiences 
 during conversion is the character of the life led previous to 
 conversion by the convert. Two men of similar temperament 
 and spiritual capacity would evidently not be subjected to the 
 same kind of struggle and conflict in conversion if one had been 
 all his life-time a moderately clean and pure man morally, while 
 the other had been a persistent transgressor of practically all the 
 commandments of the decalogue. It is no small matter to re- 
 construct and transform a human heart whose moral fibres have 
 been set wrong and hardened by continual use in immoral acts. 
 Conversion means the reconstruction of the whole moral man, and 
 hence the more warped the moral nature has become and the 
 more easily and spontaneously the moral organism acts in response 
 to selfish and immoral motives, the more of an effort it will be 
 to regenerate the moral organism and to make its fibres respond 
 easily and naturally to lofty and unselfish influences. The hard- 
 ened criminal and the careless, easy-going pleasure seeker have to 
 pass through two entirely different subjective experiences during 
 the process of regeneration. 
 
io8 
 
 That men who have been immersed in the filth of moral un- 
 cleanness should need a more radical process of cleansing than the 
 man who has only soiled his outer garment, as it were, in moral 
 uncleanness is evident. And surely the soul which has tasted the 
 pleasures of sin for a season ought also to be made to taste its 
 bitterness before it is allowed to enjoy the peace and pleasure 
 of forgiveness. Jonathan Edwards in his exhaustive work on 
 "The Religious Affections" puts this phase of the subject thus: 
 "Surely it cannot be unreasonable that before God delivers us 
 from a state of sin and liability to everlasting woe, He should 
 give us some considerable sense of the evil from which He de- 
 livers us, 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 do for us. As those who are saved are successively 
 in two extremely different states — first in a state of condemna- 
 tion and then in a state of justification and blessedness — and, as 
 God, in the salvation of men, deals with them as rational and 
 intelligent creatures, it appears agreeable to this wisdom, that 
 those who are saved should be made sensible of their being in 
 those two different states. In the first place, that they should be 
 made sensible of their state of condemnation ; and afterwards, of 
 their state of deliverance and happiness." 
 
 It is, therefore, no matter for surprise when we are told that 
 some of the great saints who were also great sinners before their 
 conversion had unusual experiences of inward conflict before the 
 "old man" could be brought to the point of surrender. We do not 
 wonder, therefore, that the spirit of intense bitterness and unre- 
 lenting hatred against the early Christians on the part of Saul, 
 the persecutor, should have required supernatural manifesta- 
 tions of divine power for its transformation with accompaniments 
 of great strife and moral conflict. Augustine was a heathen by 
 association and by practice and went through the fiery furnace 
 of conflict and self-torture before he emerged into the full light 
 and sweetness of his Christian experience. Charles G. Finney, the 
 noted evangelist, was an avowed infidel and a pronounced op- 
 ponent of Christianity before his conversion. There was required 
 on his part a tremendous inner conflict and a bitter struggle 
 
109 
 
 with his spirit before his pride was broken down and the 
 abounding peace of God's forgiveness rolled in upon him and 
 thrilled him with joy unspeakable. Murderers and hardened 
 criminals usually break down and cry like children under the 
 saving influences of the Gospel. Other things being equal, great 
 sinners should in the very nature of the case also become great 
 penitents and converts of marked joy and exaltation of spirit. 
 
 But, as a matter of fact, the conditions and circumstances of 
 people in conversion are not the same. Two confirmed sinners of 
 equal moral unworthiness may have widely different experi- 
 ences in regeneration. Deeply sensitive natures feel most 
 poignantly the utter baseness of a sinful life and naturally ex- 
 perience most keenly the great joy of deliverance and the peace 
 of forgiveness. And so it comes about that frequently the depth 
 of conviction and the joy of deliverance during conversion in 
 the case of hardened sinners, is not so pronounced as in the case 
 of delicate women with sensitive consciences in matters of really 
 minor offences. Dr. Geo. C. Lorimer, in his "Treatise on Con- 
 version," makes these pertinent remarks on the subject: "The 
 degree of this feeling (i. e., of conviction of sin) will vary. It 
 will not be decided, however, as some preachers seem to think, 
 by the actual guilt of the soul under conviction, but rather by 
 its moral susceptibility. Some of the purest, most virtuous of 
 people with whom I have had to deal in my ministry have evinced 
 the deepest compunction of conscience and the profoundest solici- 
 tude for their condition. Children and women have manifested 
 a pungent sorrow that strong men, whose lives have been a 
 continued profanation of every holy thing, have failed to exhibit. 
 I have often found it difficult in my ministrations to awaken 
 in the professed penitential felon an adequate abhorrence of his 
 guilt. All genuine converts will feel according to their moral 
 sensitiveness their iniquity." 
 
 In the same line of thought Prof. Coe says this : "It is sup- 
 posed by many that striking transformations in the affective or 
 emotional life are reserved for those who have been great sinners. 
 I know of more than one person who has been tempted to become 
 a great sinner in order to be able to experience a brilliant 
 
no 
 
 conversion. The idea seems to be that an abrupt transition from 
 moral badness to moral goodness naturally carries great emo- 
 tional disturbances with it. And doubtless such circumstances 
 do tend to intensify whatever happens. But it does not at all 
 appear that these circumstances are the chief factors that deter- 
 mine the degree of affective transformation at conversion." They 
 undoubtedly do play an important part, but as will be shown later 
 the chief mental qualities and states favorable to these striking 
 experiences are expectation, abundance of feeling, and passive 
 suggestibility, with its tendency to abnormal nervous disturbances. 
 
 2. Differences of Temperament Affect Religious Experience in 
 Conversion. 
 
 We recognize temperamental differences in other experiences of 
 life. Why should we not in the religious sphere? People differ 
 very widely in matters of temperament and in mental and moral 
 responsiveness and these differences are constitutional. They 
 give color and tone to the entire emotional or affective life of 
 the individual. Hence they would naturally determine, to a con- 
 siderable extent, the quality and intensity of religious experience. 
 And as in other vital and important interests of life we explain 
 widely different modes of action and feeling, under quite similar 
 conditions, to inner constitutional differences of temperament ; why 
 should we not take more cognizance of the same legitimate reasons 
 for differences in the religious realm ? 
 
 Temperament is preeminently determined by the cast of the 
 nervous system and indirectly affected by differences in the cir- 
 culatory, digestive and muscular systems of the body. Some men 
 have sanguine temperaments, with a quick, lively, nervous 
 response and with a buoyant, emotional disposition. Others 
 again are of a choleric temperament, usually of dark complexion, 
 of a more or less sluggish nervous responsiveness, but of con- 
 siderable self-confidence and strength of will. Still others have 
 the phlegmatic temperament, not easily moved or excited, with 
 the life forces running slowly and leisurely, and disinclined to 
 sudden, abrupt, or extreme actions of any kind. The fourth 
 
Ill 
 
 class has the melancholic temperament, with bright expressive 
 eyes, usually of slender figure, and with lively emotional respon- 
 siveness. These are given to poetry and music, are rather dreamy 
 and imaginative and care little for the practical affairs of life. 
 True, these are only types and in actual life they are usually 
 mixed and yet they help to explain many of the inherent differ- 
 ences of people, differences over which they have little control. 
 
 Or again, we may characterize fundamental differences of peo- 
 ple in proportion as their emotional, or intellectual, or their 
 volitional natures predominate. The emotional type of character 
 is controlled largely by the activity and intensity of the feelings, 
 which predominate and give color and tone to their entire sub- 
 jective life. In the intellectual type, the thinking processes are 
 preeminent, and subordinate the other activities of the mind to their 
 sway. Such natures are not easily moved, somewhat cold and 
 calculating, little given to sentiment or tears. The volitional type 
 is strong and dominant on the side of the will, more or less 
 stubborn and obstinate and not easily moved by sentiment or 
 emotional appeals of any kind. These psychological differences 
 affect mightily people's feelings and actions in all kinds of ex- 
 periences in life. They are constitutional differences, inherited 
 from their ancestors and little subject to change or modification 
 by training or education. In fact, they predetermine the man- 
 ner to a very great extent in which people react during all the 
 vital processes of training and education. They are consequently 
 of the utmost importance in helping to explain the large variety 
 of religious experiences on a rational basis. 
 
 In the ordinary concerns of life, people react on the side of 
 their feelings in widely different ways, under similar circum- 
 stances and conditions. And yet this occasions no comment. We 
 say people are made differently and have different natures. One 
 young man settles the great question of his life-work without 
 any evident strain or conflict, while another young man in much 
 the same situation settles the same question only after much inner 
 struggle and painful deliberation. One young man breaks a bad 
 habit by a simple, resolute act of the will, unaccompanied by 
 any emotional disturbance. Another young man — a personal 
 
112 
 
 acquaintance — makes so simple a thing as the matter of smoking the 
 subject of his prayers and after much wrestling with himself and 
 much self-examination and struggle he was led to quit the "filthy 
 and ungodly habit," with inner transports of joy and satisfaction. 
 The same radical differences of temperament appear in matters 
 of love, courtship and marriage. For some, the course of love 
 runs smoothly and uneventfully, without any moments of exces- 
 sive joy or of crushing sorrow and disappointment. For others, 
 there are great emotional disturbances, frequently affecting seri- 
 ously and profoundly the entire conscious states of the individual 
 and disturbing the normal activities and functions of his life. 
 One's affection and regard may be just as deep and strong as that 
 of the other. In fact, the most passionate demonstrations of 
 undying affection are not infrequently of the most unstable and 
 vacillating character. One man loses a fortune and makes 
 the best of it. Another one is broken in body and crushed 
 in spirit by a similar misfortune. Perhaps the greatest tempera- 
 mental differences appear in times of sorrow and bereave- 
 ment. At the open grave of loved ones, some are burdened and 
 heavy in spirit but fail to shed a tear or display any striking out- 
 ward emotion; others find relief in uncontrollable weeping and in 
 floods of tears. Both may have the same blessed assurance of 
 their loved ones' conquering faith in the hour of death and of 
 a glorious resurrection, and both may be equally firm believers 
 in the reality of the Christian religion and in the hope of a blessed 
 reunion in the life beyond. The striking differences in experience 
 are largely due to fundamental differences of temperament. 
 
 Various writers on religious experience have called attention 
 to the importance of temperamental differences in explaining types 
 and varieties of religious experience. But Prof. Geo. A. Coe, of 
 the Northwestern University, Evanston, 111., was the first modern 
 writer on religious subjects to do full justice to this phase of 
 the subject. He made a careful investigation of seventy-seven 
 cases of the religious experience of people in conversion, many 
 being college students of Methodist extraction, with special ref- 
 erence to the matter of striking, abrupt and abnormal experiences 
 during conversion. Ol the seventy-seven cases carefully 
 
113 
 
 considered and their temperaments and emotional experiences 
 duly analyzed, it appears that of seventeen of those who expected an 
 abrupt emotional experience in conversion and also got it, fifteen 
 were of the emotional or sanguine type of temperament, who were 
 also subject to other emotional disturbances, such as religious 
 dreams, visions, communications with deceased friends, uncon- 
 trollable laughter and weeping, hallucinations, etc. Of twelve 
 cases examined who expected a striking emotional experience dur- 
 ing conversion but did not find it, nine were decidedly of the 
 intellectual or choleric-phlegmatic type of temperament, and who 
 had no unusual emotional disturbances in other kinds of experi- 
 ences either. In other words, practically the entire number of 
 Prof. Coe's subjects, who expected striking religious experiences 
 during conversion and got them, belong to the emotional type 
 of temperament, which is easily excited, responds quickly and 
 freely to influences and appeals, and is subject to extreme emo- 
 tional disturbances under all the various circumstances of life 
 and of character. While on the other hand the overwhelming 
 majority of cases which expected striking religious experience 
 in conversion and did not find it, belong to the intellectual type 
 of temperament, in which the thinking powers predominate and 
 in which the will is not easily moved by the emotions. 
 
 Prof. Coe also points out the additional fact that practically all 
 of the cases, examined by him with reference to the matter of 
 experiencing hallucinations, dreams, visions and other supra- 
 normal manifestations, were of the sanguine or emotional tem- 
 perament. He also found that of the seventeen cases who expected 
 and also found a striking religious experience in conversion, 
 thirteen of them were good hypnotic subjects, while of the twelve 
 respondents who sought an abrupt, emotional experience in con- 
 version but did not find it, only one was a good hypnotic subject, 
 i. e., one whose emotional nature is highly developed and who pos- 
 sesses the power of prompt concentration and voluntary atten- 
 tion. It is a striking and impressive fact that good hypnotic sub- 
 jects and representatives of the striking emotional experience all 
 belong to one type of temperament — the emotional or sanguine 
 — melancholic kind, whereas representatives of the intellectual 
 
114 
 
 and volitional types of temperament — i. e., of the phlegmatic or 
 choleric kind — will simply not respond either to hypnotic sug- 
 gestions or to intense religious influences in any marked or strik- 
 ing manner. The conclusion is irresistible. The manifestations 
 of striking, abrupt emotional experiences in religion with its 
 accompanying phenomena of dreams, visions, voices, hallucina- 
 tions, motor and other automatisms and even catalepsy, are to 
 be explained on the basis of temperament and religious excite- 
 ment. The sanguine-melancholic temperament, with its emotional 
 responsiveness, is the fruitful soil and the only soil for these 
 striking experiences. 
 
 What then? Shall we say these abrupt emotional experiences 
 in conversion have no moral value? Shall we, therefore, con- 
 clude that they are practically nothing but an automatic per- 
 formance ? It may be that but not necessarily. Intense abnormal 
 emotional experiences may be highly moral and spiritual, and 
 they be absolutely immoral. In themselves they have no moral 
 value. It simply means that profound religious agitation may 
 clothe itself "in certain emotional habiliments" provided the proper 
 and necessary nervous organism is present, the required emotional 
 temperament. As Prof. Coe puts it : "Would you understand 
 the emotional aspects of religious experiences. Do not ascribe 
 them to the inscrutable ways of God, but to ascertainable differ- 
 ences in men's mental constitutions ; do not theorize about divine 
 grace, but study the workings of the human mind." 
 
 Given a decided emotional temperament and the necessary con- 
 ditions for its excitement and you will have experiences of a 
 striking and unusual character. Practically all the brilliant ex- 
 periences of religious history come under this type of character. 
 These are the responsive natures which respond powerfully to 
 stirring influences and to religious appeal. They are the Aeolian 
 harps upon which the wind of the spirit plays its loudest and 
 most stirring music. On the other hand, the strongly intellectual 
 and volitional types of character not only do not respond so power- 
 fully to religious influences, but they are so constituted that they 
 simply cannot so respond. They do not possess the necessar}^ 
 religious organism. It is simply physically and therefore morally 
 
115 
 
 impossible for certain natures to be profoundly and excessively 
 moved on the side of their emotional natures by influences or 
 appeals of any kind, because of temperament and disposition. 
 It is simply impossible, nervously and religiously, for some peo- 
 ple to experience religion as Jonathan Edwards did, or as Charles 
 G. Finney did, or even as many humble professors of a certain 
 kind of temperament have done and are doing continually. Each 
 one must enjoy his religion, as his other experiences of life, 
 according to the measure of his inner quality of temperament 
 and the character of the religious influences at work. 
 
 3. The Time of Adolescence is Significant for Religious Changes, 
 
 It is a most impressive fact that practically all the cases of 
 deep religious changes occur in the period of life, from about 
 twelve to twenty, known as adolescence. This is the time of 
 most rapid growth, of most numerous physical and mental changes 
 and of the most profound moral and spiritual transformations. 
 It is in a peculiar sense the period of "reconstruction," not only 
 for the moral life, but also for the physical and the social and 
 the intellectual life as well. 
 
 Prof. Starbuck in his "Psychology of Religion" has called at- 
 tention to the fact that "there is a normal period somewhere 
 between the innocence of childhood and the fixed habits of ma- 
 turity while the person is yet impressionable and has already 
 capacity for spiritual insight, when conversions most frequently 
 occur." There are isolated cases of conversion as young as six 
 or seven years of age and as old as fifty and sixty, but these are 
 the exceptions, not the rule. The overwhelming proportion of con- 
 versions and spiritual awakenings in life occur between the ages 
 of twelve and twenty-one, very few being converted under eight 
 and very-, very few above thirty. Of seven hundred and seventy- 
 six graduates of Drew Theological Seminary the largest number 
 were converted at the age of sixteen. Of five hundred and twenty- 
 six officers of the Y. M. C. A. in the United States and Canada, 
 the average age of conversion was 16.5. Of two hundred and 
 seventy-six members of the Rock River Methodist Conference as 
 
ii6 
 
 reported by Prof. Coe, the average age of conversion was 16.4. 
 Or, taking a total of one thousand seven hundred and eighty-four 
 cases as reported and tabulated in Coe's "Spiritual Life," the 
 average age of conversion is 16.4 years. The distribution of the 
 two hundred and seventy-six members of the Rock River Con- 
 ference as to age of conversion is as follows : Thirteen are re- 
 ported as having been converted below nine and thirty-five below 
 twelve years of age ; twenty-three are reported as having been con- 
 verted at twelve, fifteen at thirteen, eighteen at fourteen, twenty 
 at fifteen, thirty-four at sixteen, twenty-five at seventeen, eighteen 
 at eighteen, twenty-five at nineteen, fifteen at twenty, and thirteen 
 at twenty-one years of age, and altogether only eleven above 
 twenty-five and none above thirty-six years of age. Other tables 
 of statistics give about the same results. The statistics for men 
 who have had more or less decisive religious awakenings of a non- 
 revival type coincide with those given above. Of ninety-nine 
 cases of spiritual awakenings of the non-revival type reported by 
 Prof. Coe only ten per cent, occurred under twelve years of age 
 and only four per cent, above twenty-five years of age and 
 seventy-six per cent, of this number fall between the ages of 
 twelve and twenty. 
 
 These figures are supremely impressive. It is clearly evident 
 that the largest number of religious awakenings and actual con- 
 versions fall within the period of life known as puberty or adoles- 
 cence. Prof. Starbuck remarks that "during the period of most 
 rapid bodily growth is the time when conversion is most likely 
 to occur," and further that "the spiritual and the physical aspects 
 of development in individual instances tend to supplement each 
 other." In other words, the period of adolescence seems to be 
 the most favorable period for moral and religious changes. And 
 there are some self-evident reasons for this. It is the period of 
 life when the child emerges from childhood into manhood, when 
 great organic changes take place in his body, when rapid vital 
 changes take place in his nervous organism and when spontaneous 
 awakenings of the religious life and explosive conversions are most 
 likely to occur because the conditions are most favorable and 
 because the soil is well prepared. In fact, practically all of the 
 
117 
 
 striking religious phenomena of abrupt conversions or of power- 
 ful spontaneous religious awakenings fall within this period of 
 the body's most rapid growth and the spirit's most receptive 
 and plastic condition, during which the various elements of the 
 personal life are apt to crystalize into more or less permanent 
 modes of thought and feeling and fixed habits of life and conduct. 
 It is a fateful period of life, frought with the most momentous 
 consequences and well might it have an important bearing 
 on the question of religious experience. It is eminently the re- 
 construction period of life during which the immature, childish, 
 undeveloped self, through a process of increased physical, mental, 
 and spiritual activity and ferment, more or less marked, emerges 
 into the larger and fuller and completer life of manhood and thus 
 enters, as it were, into the life of the new birth, not only socially, 
 mentally, and physically, but also morally and religiously. It is 
 the time of life particularly favorable, therefore, for deep religious 
 impressions. It is both the seed and the harvest time of the young 
 soul. It is the time when mental and intellectual life undergoes 
 the greatest changes. It is the period of life when "new kinds of 
 sensation and of emotion, new modes of thought, new attitudes 
 of will, new meanings of life, new problems of duty, new kinds 
 of temptation, new mysteries in religion" make their presence 
 felt in the young, growing life. It is the "storm and stress" 
 period of life for the emotional type of temperament. For the 
 intellectual type it is the period of "intellectual and social new 
 birth," as Prof. Stanley Hall calls it in his massive volumes on 
 "Adolescence." It is the period, with many young people, of 
 doubt and uncertainty, of self-examination and questionings as 
 to the why and wherefore of their existence, of remorseless 
 criticism of self and others, frequently of morbid self-conscious- 
 ness, of high ideals and of unusual restlessness and dissatis- 
 faction. 
 
 It is important to observe, however, that for the Giristian 
 child, trained from infancy to love the Lord and to do right, 
 this so-called "storm and stress" period of the adolescent life is 
 not properly called conversion. For the Christian child, the be- 
 ginning of its spiritual life had its origin in the earlier years 
 
ii8 
 
 of its Christian training and it has been continuous. But to 
 many children thus trained in a simple, childlike life of trust 
 and faith in God, the adolescent period brings more fulness of 
 knowledge and more elements of conscious choice, and these the 
 growing soul now fully and freely adopts for itself, by a conscious 
 intelligent appropriation of the will. For many young people, too, 
 in the adolescent period, there come moments of religious crisis 
 more or less striking, which, though by some called conversion, 
 are really only periods of increased spiritual activity and of a deeper 
 insight into the meaning of spiritual things. The age of youth 
 is specially well fitted for such awakenings or re-awakenings of 
 the religious nature, though with many people such experiences 
 occur more or less frequently in later life. Prof. Coe puts it 
 thus : "The quickened conscience, with its thirst for absolute 
 righteousness ; the quickened intellect, with its thirst for absolute 
 truth ; the quickened aesthetic sense, with its intuitions of a beauty 
 that eye hath not seen and the ear hath not heard ; the quickened 
 social sense, with its longing for perfect and eternal companion- 
 ship — in short, the new meaningfulness and mystery of life — 
 all this tends to bring in a new and distinct epoch in religious 
 experience. If one has not been religious in childhood, now is 
 the supremely favorable time for conversion ; and if one has 
 been religious, there is still need, in most cases, for a personal 
 decision and personal acceptance that shall supersede the more 
 external habits of childhood. Without giving to our terms any 
 theological significance, we may say that conversion, or some 
 equivalent personalising of religion, is a normal part of adolescent 
 growth." 
 
 It thus becomes increasingly evident that a consideration of 
 the great number and variety of changes that take place in the 
 adolescent life, say from twelve to twenty, throws much 
 light on the differences in quality and intensity of religious ex- 
 periences. In fact, this is par excellence the period not only of 
 conversion, but also of all kinds of religious activity in the re- 
 awakening, deepening and quickening of the spiritual life. It 
 is well for parents and religious teachers to understand the fate- 
 fulness of this period of life, as the most opportune time for 
 
119 
 
 spiritual sowing and spiritual reaping as well. It is the normal 
 time of the catechetical class, of the Young People's Society of 
 Christian Endeavor with its youthful enthusiasm, of joining the 
 church, of engaging in all kinds of religious activities. It is 
 the most favorable time of great moral decisions, not only with 
 reference to one's relation to God in conversion, but also with 
 reference to one's relation to his fellow-men in a life-calling. 
 
 It is supremely important to remember that the period of 
 life under consideration is not only the most favorable time for 
 sowing, but also for reaping, in the realm of the spiritual harvest 
 field. It is the time when the spirit calls in strongest and loudest 
 accent : "To-day, if you hear his voice, harden not your hearts." 
 It is the time when every normal impulse of the soul and every 
 youthful enthusiasm of the awakened and responsive moral nature 
 summons the soul to high and unselfish endeavor. It is pathetic 
 to know that those who pass through the adolescent period of life, 
 unmoved by the influences of the spirit and unregenerated by the 
 transforming power of the divine life, are in imminent danger of 
 being abandoned to the spirit of the world for life and of remain- 
 ing in a condition of "spiritual death" in the midst of physical 
 and intellectual life. What an impressive fact it is, that scarcely 
 one soul in a thousand is regenerated after thirty years of age ! 
 How important for the young to realize that the period of youth 
 is the natural and appropriate time, ordained by God and written 
 into their very constitutions, to open their hearts to God and 
 to enter into their spiritual inheritance. It is the time of invita- 
 tion, the time of the calling of the spirit, when not only the 
 voice from above through the spirit of God, but also the voice 
 from within, through the awakened conscience, summons the young 
 life to high and unselfish service. How dangerous it is to let this 
 plastic, receptive period of youth go by, unregenerated and uncon- 
 verted, when every passing hour only confirms the ruling forces of 
 evil and strengthens the bonds of slavery which evil habit has 
 forged, and makes the regenerative process more difficult and more 
 unlikely, with the result that the soul may be compelled to cry out in 
 anguish and sorrow : "The harvest is past, the summer is ended 
 and we are not saved." 
 
120 
 
 4. The Religfious Environment Affects the Character of Experi- 
 ence in Conversion. 
 
 The character of the religious environment has also much to do 
 in determining the type of religious experience in conversion. 
 The nature of the truths emphasized to be believed and the 
 type of religious experience held up before the penitent sinner 
 for realization have a profound influence upon the kind of reli- 
 gious experience thus fostered. With proper preaching of the 
 doctrine of total depravity in its extreme form and of an 
 angry God to be appeased and of a literal hell fire yawning 
 for the unrepentant sinner, a somewhat somber and austere type 
 of experience may be developed, especially if the preaching is of 
 the kind to stir up the feelings to lively activity. Such was the 
 case with the Puritans, whose earnest struggle to escape from the 
 incarnate powers and forces of evil produced a somber and some- 
 what austere type of Christian experience. With the preaching of 
 God's infinite love and mercy as the key-note to the Gospel, and 
 with emphasis laid upon the necessity of a closer union with Him 
 in the spirit, a less dramatic but more wholesome and healthy 
 type of religious experience is fostered. This is strikingly illus- 
 trated by the preaching of Jonathan Edwards and that of Dwight 
 L. Moody and the types of experience obtained through their 
 preaching. Jonathan Edwards preached the terror of an angry 
 God and of the final judgment with a most vivid reality, and his 
 converts reacted profoundly and violently. Dwight L. Moody sang 
 the praises of a loving heavenly Father with infinite variety and 
 touching pathos, and most of his converts came into the kingdom 
 with joy and gladness, but with no accompaniment of extreme 
 emotional excesses. 
 
 Again, if the abrupt, emotional kind of experience in conver- 
 sion is held up before the seekers after salvation and duly and 
 properly emphasized, and if all the services of the church are 
 conducted with a view of obtaining this type of experience in the 
 "mourners" at the "anxious bench," then we may expect to see 
 the prescribed type of conversion realized in the experiences of 
 
121 
 
 the young convert so far as their temperaments are able to respond 
 to the influences at work. Here is the key to the whole situation. 
 In the revival type of denominations, with their protracted meet- 
 ings, their intense religious enthusiasm, with the "anxious bench" 
 and a period of "mourning" and struggle required for the seeker 
 after God, with all the circumstances and surroundings of great 
 emotional tension present, the most calm and unemotional natures 
 are bound to be agitated to the full limit of their capacity, while 
 the strongly emotional natures will be aroused to the highest pitch 
 of tumultuous religious enthusiasm, resulting frequently in all 
 sorts of strange and abnormal kinds of subjective phenomena. 
 The same people, in the non-revival churches, amidst less exciting 
 and less intense religious surroundings, would make their peace 
 with God in self-surrender and enter into closer union with Him 
 without any striking, abrupt emotional experience whatsoever. 
 The kind of preaching dwelt upon and the type of conversion 
 demanded, together with the character of the religious influences 
 at work, determine very largely the nature of the experience ob- 
 tained in conversion. The extreme type is fostered under the most 
 favorable conditions that exist in the typical old fashioned 
 revival services, with its surcharge of pent-up emotionalism. 
 It is in the revival type of denominations chiefly and almost 
 altogether that the extreme types of emotional conversion 
 occur. 
 
 The striking, extraordinary experiences of the extreme type of 
 emotional conversion have occasionally disturbed the peace of mind 
 and even the serenity of spirit of the "uninitiated" for fear that, 
 after all, there might be something superior and really essential 
 in these seemingly supernatural manifestations. The unusual 
 character of the phenomena has attracted attention and not infre- 
 quently defied rational explanation unless on the assumption that 
 they were really supernatural manifestations of divine power. 
 The feeling of absolute certainty as to one's spiritual state and the 
 intoxicating joy of the young convert, are these not the witness 
 of the spirit and must there not be such a witness to make the 
 process of conversion valid? And the "power," so-called, with 
 its hallucinations and automatisms, its exultant hallelujahs and its 
 
122 
 
 vigorous, uncontrollable movements of the body in leaping and 
 jumping, or in catalepsy, are these not the supernatural evidences 
 of the Holy Spirit's presence, in great power? Such are the usual 
 explanations of those who are believers in this type of conversion. 
 And there are not a few pious people who wonder at times 
 whether, after all, these exalted, extraordinary states of religious 
 emotion are not superior and therefore to be coveted. And many 
 a conscientious, sensitive soul has been persuaded to seek the 
 supposedly blessed experiences of the "anxious bench" under the 
 mistaken notion that such super-normal states of religious feeling 
 were really necessary for genuine conversion and indicated a 
 higher state of religious attainment. And frequently great pres- 
 sure is brought to bear upon sensitive and nervous natures, with 
 the confident assertion that they should be "converted" and "ex- 
 perience religion" in accordance with the methods and experiences 
 of the "anxious bench" or else they would be lost forever. The 
 test of the "power" and the actual "witness of the spirit" with 
 demonstrations of power are made the conditions of salva- 
 tion and the only conditions. And the undoubted honesty and 
 sincerity of many who have had such striking experiences of 
 the "power" and their confident assertion that such states are 
 blessed states of experience, especially to be coveted, and 
 essential to true salvation, has had its effect on many earnest 
 souls who had no other explanation for these remarkable 
 phenomena than that they were the supernatural evidence of 
 divine power. 
 
 It is however possible to offer reasonable explanation for all 
 these things. We know that any emotional nature, at certain 
 times in life, in particular, and especially under the pressure of 
 great religious excitement, may be moved to states of frenzy. 
 The so-called "power" is no solitary phenomena found only among 
 certain religious denominations and to be regarded as a special 
 evidence of the presence of God's spirit in mighty power. It is 
 easy to prove, without being guilty of irreverence or sacrilege, 
 that "the striking psychical manifestations which reach their climax 
 among us in emotional revivals, camp-meetings, and negro services 
 have a direct relation to certain states of an essentially hypnotic 
 
123 
 
 and hallucinatory kind." As Prof. Coe, who is himself a profes- 
 sor in a university of the strictly revival type of denomination, 
 so aptly puts it : "The explanation of the 'power' and similar out- 
 breaks is simple. Under the pressure of religious excitement there 
 occurs a sporadic case of hallucination, or of motor automatism, 
 or of auto-hypnotism, taking the form of trance, visions, voices, 
 or catalepsy. Trances like that of the Buddha are brought about 
 in substantially the same way, namely, by abstracting the mind 
 from its ordinary multiplicity of interests and narrowing the 
 attention until self-conscious control lapses and one seems to 
 be absorbed in the infinite. All that is necessary is prolonged 
 fixation of attention upon any simple object. It is the process 
 actually cultivated to-day by theosophists of the type of Mrs. 
 Besant." 
 
 All these striking experiences referred to are fostered and 
 brought about on the human side by forces which we may under- 
 stand. Barring the few solitary cases of those who have violent 
 eruptions of their religious feelings of a seemingly spontaneous 
 character the explanation lies on the surface. They have been 
 produced by efifort, under conditions and in accordance with laws 
 now well known to modern psychology. There is first of all an 
 expectation of something to be experienced ; then there is the 
 efifort to arrive at the desired state of feeling, the continuous 
 concentration of the mind upon the matter in hand, the going for- 
 ward to the anxious bench, the wrestling and praying and pleading, 
 the lively singing of stirring hymns, the clapping of hands and the 
 shouting of hallelujahs by anxious friends, the suggestions by 
 pastor and friends of words to repeat or a certain feeling to 
 expect, the long, exhausting nervous strain. All these conditions 
 finally result in a more or less sudden explosion of the emotional 
 nature accompanied frequently by sights, visions, hallucinations, 
 trance or catalepsy, and then a reaction, a complete collapse of 
 the over-wrought nervous system. There is nothing mysterious 
 or supernatural about such abnormal phenomena. Nor are they 
 peculiar to the revival-type of the protestant denominations. "The 
 religious history of humanity, quite apart from Christianity, is 
 full of strange and abnormal experiences which are supposed to 
 
124 
 
 be peculiarly religious. Mohammedanism and Hinduism abound 
 in phenomena of this sort. They are even possible on the purely 
 physiological plane through the influence of alcohol and anaesthetics 
 and narcotics." 
 
 As to the ethical value of such striking religious phenomena, 
 there is little agreement. The adherents of the revival-type of 
 denominations have been accustomed to lay great stress upon them. 
 And yet even in the house of its friends this type of religious 
 experience is greatly discredited and no special spiritual value 
 attributed to it. Such noted writers in Methodist institutions as 
 Prof. Bowne of the Boston University and Prof. Coe of the 
 Northwestern University, explain these striking, seemingly super- 
 natural phenomena on the basis of psychological vagaries. They 
 are simply the excrescences of religious excitement. They are 
 "the striking psychic manifestations which reach their climax 
 among us in emotional revivals, camp-meetings and negro services 
 and have a direct relation to certain states of an essentially hyp- 
 notic and hallucinatory kind." If you seek to produce overpower- 
 ing religious emotions, the methods and conditions are at hand. 
 But it would be foolish to regard these striking and super-normal 
 phenomena as special evidences of God's presence in power. And 
 it would be equally foolish to deny any ethical value to them, 
 if fostered and developed under ethical conditions. As Prof. 
 James says in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," relative to 
 the matter of striking religious phenomena: "They undoubtedly 
 have no essential spiritual significance, and although their presence 
 makes his conversion more memorable to the convert, it has never 
 been proved that converts who show them are more persevering 
 or fertile in good fruits than those whose change of heart has had 
 less violent accompaniments. On the whole, unconsciousness, con- 
 vulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utterances, and suffocation, 
 must be simply ascribed to the subjects having a large subliminal 
 region, involving nervous instability." 
 
 Finally, in the matter of variety in religious experience, it 
 may be said with assurance, that the religious environment is 
 really the greatest factor in determining religious experience in 
 conversion. The life of the repentant sinner before conversion 
 
125 
 
 has some degree of influence on the type of his reHgious ex- 
 perience during conversion. The differences in temperament 
 explain the possibiHty of wide differences of emotional experience 
 in conversion. The period of life determines the most natural 
 and most favorable time for all kinds of religious experiences. 
 But the matter of religious teaching and religious environment, 
 during the process of conversion, really detennines most emphati- 
 cally what the character of the religious experience shall be in con- 
 version. Young people among the revival churches are most likely 
 to experience the abrupt, violent kinds of experience; whereas 
 the young people among the non-revival churches, with few ex- 
 ceptions, will not know much of stress or conflict during their 
 period of religious transformation. Knowing the type of tem- 
 perament and disposition, and knowing the circumstances of the 
 penitent's religious surroundings we can predict with considerable 
 certainty what his experiences will be in conversion. The Holy 
 Spirit works continuously and untiringly upon the minds and hearts 
 of all unrepentant souls. Whenever the soul responds and turns 
 to God in anticipation and earnestly desires a closer union with the 
 Father, the answer will come and the indwelling spirit will make 
 His presence felt with varying degrees of assurance and joy, de- 
 pending upon the quality of the seeker's inner constitution and 
 upon the external circumstances of his conversion. But the vital 
 thing is not the varying degrees of feeling, accompanying the 
 process, but the indwelling of the Holy Spirit with cleansing 
 and transforming power. 
 
 This type of extreme, abnormal experience has been unduly 
 emphasized in some denominations and has wrought great wrong 
 and injustice upon many less emotional natures, just as sincere and 
 honest in their spiritual lives, but not capable of enjoying such 
 extreme states of religious feeling. The effect has been most 
 unfortunate and it has wrought evil in three ways, as Pres. King 
 points out in his excellent pamphlet on "Christian Training and 
 the Revival as Methods of Converting Men" : "First it has tended 
 to lay a quite unwholesome emphasis upon the form of religious 
 experience, instead of upon the real fundamental ethical relation to 
 God and men ; second, it has tended to lead men to more or less 
 
126 
 
 superficial and self -deceived imitation of others' experiences; 
 third, it has tended to throw into deep darkness and almost 
 despair some of the most conscientious and clear-sighted men and 
 women, whose temperament hardly allowed the experiences 
 sought and who could not deceive themselves as to the form of 
 their experience, but knew that they had not come into an experi- 
 ence of the prescribed type. These three mistakes are still being 
 repeated again and again by many most earnest and conscientious 
 religious leaders." 
 
 In other words, it is quite natural for men of a striking religious 
 experience to insist that all men must have the same kind to be 
 valid. And because the religious leaders of the world have been 
 very frequently and perhaps usually men of the emotional type, 
 this type came to be held up as the standard and truly certified 
 type, not to be departed from. And the invariable danger has 
 been to discount all milder and quieter types of experience as 
 lacking the essential spiritual quality. But knowing better the 
 origin and nature of religious emotions and the conditions under 
 which they are fostered abnormally, we can interpret these things 
 more intelligently and judge them more rationally. 
 
 in. What is not Essential in Religious Experience. 
 
 What then are the really essential things in religious experi- 
 ence, and what are the things which are non-essential? We have 
 seen that there are emotional experiences of endless variety in 
 conversion, and we have considered some of the reasons for this 
 variety. We have found that the more extreme types of reli- 
 gious experience in conversion depend upon temperamental condi- 
 tions for their existence and upon excessive religious excitement 
 for their development and their manifestations. But we have 
 also found that these are not the essential things in religion. Let 
 us consider, first, what are not to be regarded as essential ex- 
 periences in conversion so that we may afterward consider more 
 intelligently what are the really important and all-essential things 
 in Christian experience. 
 
127 
 
 i. States of Feeling are not Essential. 
 
 It is greatly to be deplored that so many people confuse their 
 feelings with states of religion. It is a matter of deep regret 
 that so much emphasis is laid by many religious leaders upon 
 the matter of feeling in religion, as though the amount of reli- 
 gion in a seeker after God could be measured by the intensity of 
 his religious emotions. It is a great pity that so many struggling 
 souls are disturbed and distressed beyond measure by the mis- 
 taken notion that unless they have a vivid and overpowering 
 sense of religious emotion they cannot be regarded as being in a 
 state of salvation, when as a matter of fact the Bible does not 
 require any distinct or specific state of feeling at all for discipleship. 
 Not feeling, but faith ; not emotion, but self-surrender ; not 
 ecstasy, but obedience; these are the biblical requirements. 
 
 Prof. F. G. Peabody, in his "Jesus Christ and the Christian 
 Character," has this to say in the relation of the feelings to reli- 
 gion and their ethical value : "Feeling, therefore, has in itself no 
 moral value. Strictly speaking, there is no ethics of the emo- 
 tions. The emotions are corollaries to be drawn, rather than 
 problems to be solved. They are the wave which leaps up in light 
 and color on the crest of the heaving ocean. If the sea is deeply 
 stirred, its crest will inevitably carry the foam of feeling; if the 
 sea is sluggish and flat, the whitecaps of emotion cannot be induced 
 to break. The ethics of emotion, then, is to be sought, not in 
 the emotion itself, but in the source from which it proceeds. 
 Feelings which are apparently akin may be, ethically, strangers 
 to each other. The sense of the beautiful may be either a spir- 
 itualizing and refining grace, or a degrading and sensual self- 
 indulgence. Religious mysticism may express itself either in 
 exalted vision or in fleshly ecstasies. Even the supreme emotion of 
 love, whether to God or to man, may represent loyalty, sacrifice 
 and service, or may exhaust itself in ineffective sentimentalism 
 and pious rapture." The feelings are only accompaniments of 
 our moral attitude, testifying more or less strongly to the rightness 
 or wrongness of our moral course, but in themselves they have 
 9 
 
128 
 
 no moral value. They are not things to be sought after or ends 
 to be attained. The issues of life and the decisions of character 
 lie not in our religious feelings and experiences but in the conscious 
 and deliberate attitude of our hearts and in the disposition of 
 our wills. Religious feelings are not character-determining. 
 They often come and go fitfully and arbitrarily. They are not 
 of the essence or vital content of spirituality. They may be 
 caused by certain physical conditions ; they may be explained 
 on the basis of temperament, they may be fostered by stimu- 
 lation and they may even be counterfeited. 
 
 If there were any importance attached to certain states of reli- 
 gious feeling, or if a striking emotional experience in conversion 
 were necessary then surely there ought to be evidences of such 
 necessity either in the teachings of Scripture or in the examples 
 of conversion as recorded in the Bible. But we look for such evi- 
 dences in vain. 'Tn the New Testament we find no preference 
 given to revivals or to the experiences which they foster. Jesus 
 makes no clear reference to anything of the sort. Much less 
 does He directly or indirectly command such methods of work 
 or the seeking of such experiences. Among His immediate dis- 
 ciples not one appears to have passed through conversion 
 phenomena of the emotional type and only Paul, of all New 
 Testament characters, stands out as a clear case of the kind." But 
 Paul himself does not appear to have taken his own experience 
 as a standard of conversion, nor to have demanded striking reli- 
 gious phenomena in others, or even that he commonly witnessed 
 them in his converts. Other New Testament conversions were 
 decidedly unlike Paul's. The blind Bartimgeus, who called upon 
 Jesus for mercy and healing, received the assuring answer, "Thy 
 faith has made thee whole," and immediately he followed the 
 Master with great rejoicing. The woman at the well simply 
 allowed the Master's spirit to come into her life and change 
 it, and immediately went and told her friends that she had found 
 the promised Messiah. The Philippian jailor asked with fear and 
 trembling: "What must I do to be saved," and was told, "Be- 
 lieve on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved," and 
 without any prolonged period of agony of spirit he received 
 
129 
 
 the blessing as it was in Christ Jesus and was forthwith baptized. 
 Zacchaeus desired to see Jesus, receiving Him in his house by 
 invitation and forthwith declared his intention to abandon 
 unrighteousness with the result that Jesus said : "To-day 
 salvation has come into this house." The Ethiopian, as soon as he 
 was made to understand fully the meaning of the Gospel message, 
 requested to be baptized, and without any recorded emotional 
 excitation the baptism was performed and he went on his way 
 rejoicing. Matthew, sitting at the receipt of custom, heard the 
 Master call, "Follow me," and he immediately followed Him. 
 All these and kindred cases show most conclusively, as does 
 also the extraordinary case of the Apostle Paul, himself, that 
 there is no particular kind of emotional experience required or 
 taught in the New Testament. It is well to get this clearly and 
 definitely before our minds. There is not one word said in the 
 Bible, either directly or indirectly, of the necessity of having any 
 particular kind of experience or of having any striking "witness 
 of the spirit," or of having the striking proof of the "power," 
 or even of having any state of feeling at all. This is surely sig- 
 nificant. There is much said of the necessity of faith and of 
 the importance of following the Master and of the absolute need of 
 implicit trust in God. But as Mr. Moody himself says : "The 
 Bible does not say that he that feeleth or he that feeleth and 
 believeth hath everlasting life, nothing of the kind ; it is always, 
 'He that believeth on the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved.' " 
 
 Neither do the great Protestant Reformers who ushered in 
 the great Protestant Reformation teach any special type of 
 experience as necessary in conversion. These men were power- 
 ful religious leaders themselve's and labored under the stress 
 of strong religious excitement and ferment. And they might 
 have been excused for some extravagance on this point. And 
 indeed the intrepid Luther himself had striking religious ex- 
 periences, even to the extent of seeing the Tempter himself in 
 bodily form. Yet nowhere did any of them lay any burden upon 
 their followers by prescribing a definite or specific kind of 
 religious experience as necessary to the spiritual life. These 
 mighty interpreters of the new religious spirit ushered in by 
 
I30 
 
 the Reformation preached most strongly and most profoundly 
 upon the cardinal doctrines of faith in God, of the saving influ- 
 ence of the Gospel and of the value of supreme trust in the wis- 
 dom, love, and mercy of a kind Heavenly Father. True they 
 also spoke of Christian experience and of the quiet and comfort- 
 ing assurance that comes through complete surrender to the 
 will of God; but nowhere in their voluminous writings can these 
 pioneers of the Protestant Reformation be cited in proof of a 
 theory of conversion which emphasizes the emotional element 
 and insists on any striking states of feeling as essential to the 
 regenerated state. They say nothing of conversion by feeling, 
 or of a witness of the spirit in terms of emotion. It is faith, 
 trust, self-surrender. Christian life, and Christian service. 
 
 The same testimony may be cited concerning the teaching 
 of the great modern revivalists : John Wesley, Geo. Whitfield, 
 Jonathan Edwards, Charles G. Finney, Dwight L. Moody. 
 Thousands and tens of thousands of souls were converted under 
 the preaching of these mighty men oi the spirit. And it is also 
 true that under the influence of the powerful religious awaken- 
 ing occasioned by their stirring appeals, men and women 
 frequently fell on the floor as dead, and experienced visions, hallu- 
 cinations and all kinds of strange subjective experiences. But they 
 never commended these striking manifestations or considered 
 them as necessary to genuine conversion. In fact, these 
 phenomena gave Wesley no little concern at times, and Jonathan 
 Edwards recognized that they could be imitated and even 
 brought about by Satanic influences, and hence he set no value 
 upon them. Dwight L. Moody, the greatest of modern revivalists, 
 while always emphasizing the necessity of conversion and of Chris- 
 tian certainty, and insisting not only on the possibility, but on the 
 reality of instantaneous conversion, frequently cautions his hearers 
 not to build on their feelings or to trust on their emotional states, 
 but to put their entire faith on "Him, who is the way, the truth 
 and the life." He uses these apt words, "Now we have power 
 to see and to hear, and we also have power to believe. It is all 
 folly for inquirers to take the ground that they cannot believe. 
 They can if they will. But the trouble with most people is 
 
131 
 
 that they have confounded feeling with believing. Now feel- 
 ing has nothing whatsoever to do with believing. The Bible 
 does not say: He that feeleth or he that feeleth and believeth 
 hath everlasting life. Nothing of the kind. But it does say 
 and say distinctly: 'Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that 
 heareth my word and believeth on him that sent me hath ever- 
 lasting life, and shall not come into judgment !' " 
 
 It is important to take these things seriously to heart so that 
 we may have a clear and definite understanding of the rightful 
 place of the feelings in the religious life. The feelings are not 
 to be cultivated for their own sakes. Lofty states of religious 
 emotion may have no value at all and they may be evidences 
 of profound religious influences at work. They may be manu- 
 factured, and therefore lack genuineness, or they may be 
 spontaneous and carry with them some measure of religious 
 worth. A man's state of religion cannot and must not be 
 measured by the degree and intensity of his religious experience. 
 He may have strong feelings and be really unregenerated at 
 heart. He may have relatively little religious emotion and may 
 be one of the world's great saints. The inquiring sinner should 
 not begin with an analysis of his feelings. He must address 
 himself resolutely to the subject of his moral attitude, which 
 needs reorganization and regeneration. The young convert 
 should not rely upon the unstable condition of his post-con- 
 version feelings, for these will leave him frequently in doubt and 
 uncertainty as to his real spiritual condition. Feelings will come 
 and feelings will go, but they are not the measure of one's moral 
 worth, nor do they mark stages in one's spiritual progress. 
 As loving witnesses of the spirit's presence in our lives they are 
 to be welcomed if they come. But absence of religious emo- 
 tion in a more or less pronounced form is not a proof sufificient 
 of an imperfect moral state. This lack may be accounted for 
 by temperament, by physical condition, by a state of health. 
 No! Feelings must not be made the criterion of moral worth. 
 That would be like building upon the sand. 
 
 "Who, then, is the Christian in his emotional life? He is not 
 to be recognized by his ecstatic utterances or turbulent repentances 
 
132 
 
 or demonstrations of passionate affection for a visualized Christ. 
 These states of feeling may be the best expression of the Christian 
 character, or may, on the other hand, have no moral significance. 
 Christian emotion is an instrument of Christian consecration. 
 The Christian has his exalted moments of emotional communion 
 with God, like those in which Jesus said, 'All things have been 
 delivered unto me by my Father;' but these moments of vision 
 rise out of valleys of common duty-doing, as when Jesus, in the 
 same passage, said to the weary and heavy-laden, 'I will give 
 you rest.' The Christian, like his Master, has his mount of 
 transfigured feeling; but at its foot waits the life of service, as 
 Jesus went down to heal the demoniac boy. The Christian is 
 touched by the feeling of compassion; but it is a conscientious 
 and continuous compassion, as when the Samaritan set the suf- 
 ferer on his own beast and took care of him. Behind Christian 
 feeling, stands Christian thoughtfulness ; behind Christian passion, 
 power in reserve. The emotions are not superficial agitations 
 of nervous excitement, like little waves tossed up by a passing 
 steamer with its churning wheels; they are the crests that lift 
 themselves when the depths of nature are stirred, and the whole 
 character is lifted, like a heaving roller, to the surface of life." 
 Thus Prof. Peabody characterizes the Christian in his emotional 
 life. It is a life that is tinged with emotions of a chastened self- 
 restraint and of an unselfish service. 
 
 2, ''Visions/' ''Voices/' ''Trances/* and the Like not Essential to 
 Christian Experience, 
 
 Some people have an idea that some striking manifestation 
 of divine power in the form of "visions," voices," "dreams," or 
 the like is necessary for genuine conversion. But such phe- 
 nomena have necessarily no religious significance. They are 
 easily explained and are of frequent occurrence, not only in 
 religious excitement, but also in times of high fever, great bodily 
 weakness or nervous derangement. It is comparatively easy 
 for the human mind under normal conditions "to see" objects 
 with the mind's eye, or "to hear" voices and sounds with the 
 
133 
 
 mind's ear. With the aid of a good memory or of a vivid 
 imagination, we can readily reproduce the experiences of our 
 younger days. We can see the old homestead, the familiar 
 scenes of play and toil, the faces of friends and loved ones; or 
 we can hear voices of parents or playmates long since silent in 
 death, with the vividness and reality almost of real life. A 
 retentive memory and a lively imagination not only enable us 
 to recall very vividly past scenes and experiences, but also to 
 conjure up new scenes and surroundings, to see new sights, to 
 hear strange voices, and to live in a new world of our own mak- 
 ing. Our "day dreams" are sometimes strikingly real and life- 
 like. What we think about most frequently and most intently, 
 makes the deepest impression upon our minds and, therefore, 
 furnishes the best material for day dreams, or night dreams 
 either. 
 
 In times of sickness or nervous disorder or religious excite- 
 ment, our imaginations are stirred to unusual activity, and hence 
 the greater frequency and vividness of pictures, sights, voices, 
 dreams, and like phenomena. A good ministerial brother told 
 me not long since that, during a period of great nervous depres- 
 sion, he had several most striking "visions" of the glory of 
 heaven and the dazzling splendor of angels and heard most 
 beautiful strains of heavenly music. But the good brother 
 attributed no special significance to the "vision," because he was 
 subject at the time to spells of nervous weakness and disorder. 
 A young girl of fifteen, during an attack of fever and under the 
 influence of extraordinary nervous excitement, not many years 
 ago, heard the voice of an angel, and received comforting 
 messages of hope and encouragement to members of the family, 
 under circumstances of the greatest impressiveness. For hours 
 at a time she spoke incessantly of the beautiful heavenly sights 
 that she saw and of the wondrously sweet and delightful music 
 which she heard in her delirium. All these things seemed very 
 real at the time, but to-day there is not a vestige left in the 
 memory of the young lady. The history of nervous disorders 
 through sickness, fever or bodily weakness of some kind or other, 
 is full of such strange phenomena, some of which may have moral 
 
134 
 
 or religious significance, but not necessarily so. The spirit may 
 operate in such ways, but they are surely not the normal methods 
 of its activity. 
 
 On similar grounds, and for similar reasons, the striking 
 religious experiences of many religious leaders may be explained. 
 Under strong religious excitement, and as a result of prolonged 
 intense thought on certain religious subjects, as for instance, God, 
 Heaven, the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, or a personal 
 devil, the mind may conceive of these realities in a most vivid 
 and impressive manner. Thus Paul "saw a light" and "heard 
 a voice," Augustine heard a "voice." Luther saw the bodily 
 form of the Tempter, and hurled his ink bottle at him, where- 
 upon he fled. Charles G. Finney saw his Saviour stand be- 
 fore him transformed. Some of the monks of the Middle Ages 
 had most remarkable experiences of this kind. And not infre- 
 quently, and for similar reasons, some of the converts of our 
 own time, have lively experiences of "visions" and "voices." 
 They may behold glimpses of the glories of Heaven. The\' 
 may see their blessed Redeemer with the marks of nails in His 
 hands and in His feet; they may hear voices of angels, or of 
 loved ones long since departed. They may have verses of Scrip- 
 ture impressed upon their minds. They may behold beautiful 
 forms of spiritual beings, or ugly, terrifying forms of evil spirits, 
 and possibly hear the sound of intelligible voices, either of com- 
 fort or of warning. All these things and many others of a similar 
 character, are of frequent occurrence with certain emotional 
 natures, and under certain mental and physical conditions. 
 
 But no special spiritual significance must be attributed to most 
 of these striking experiences. They may have some spiritual 
 value and they may be utterly void of spiritual meaning. They 
 may be of the nature of a delusion, or of an hallucination. They 
 may come with deep religious thought and feeling, and they 
 may come as the result of nervous disorders or of narcotic stimula- 
 tion. The man who is religiously intoxicated and the man who 
 is alcohoHcally intoxicated may have similar experiences of 
 delusion and hallucination, and the one may have just about as 
 much spiritual value as the other. The point to be remembered 
 
135 
 
 is that these cases of hallucination, of automatism, of special 
 ^'sights" and "voices,"' belong almost invariably to the emotional 
 temperament, and to this temperament only. These special 
 experiences are not prescribed by Scripture; they are incapable 
 of being experienced by certain temperaments, and they are 
 not essential to conversion or even to normal Christian experience. 
 When we hear emotional enthusiasts, therefore, testify of their 
 remarkable experiences of heavenly visions or of terrifying 
 shapes and forms of the evil one, and when we observe how they 
 glory in these things as being seemingly superior manifestations 
 of divine favor, then we know how to make due allowances. 
 These phenomena are not to be sought for their own sakes. 
 They are not to be regarded as special tokens of divine favor. 
 They may have much or little spiritual meaning or none at 
 all. They may be counterfeited and imitated by the devil, as 
 Jonathan Edwards claims, and hence cannot be considered as 
 tokens of a superior spiritual state or signs of divine power. They 
 are absolutely worthless as evidences of conversion, or as tokens 
 of divine favor, unless we know their origin and are sure of 
 their genuineness. As Professor James puts it : "The super-normal 
 incidents, such as voices, visions and overpowering impressions 
 of the meaning of suddenly presented Scripture texts, the melt- 
 ing emotions and tumultuous affections connected with the crisis 
 of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be 
 counterfeited by Satan. The real witness of the spirit to the 
 second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine 
 child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self 
 eradicated." 
 
 3, The so-called **Powef '* and Religious "Ecstasy*^ not Essential. 
 
 Among the denominations which lay great stress upon emo- 
 tional experiences in conversion, the so-called "power" is fre- 
 quently considered as a test or proof of conversion. It is often 
 urged by religious enthusiasts of this extreme type that every 
 human soul must pass through a peculiar, striking and abrupt 
 kind of emotional experience, which is characterized by such 
 
136 
 
 terms as the "power," "getting- happy," and "getting reHgion,'" or 
 "finding peace," before it can be considered in a state of grace. 
 According to this doctrine, so prevalent among the emotional 
 rehgionists of the Methodist, Evangelical and other denomina- 
 tions of the revival type of conversion, there is only one entrance 
 to the Kingdom, and that is through the gate of emotional revolu- 
 tion and chaos; there is only one method of salvation, and that 
 is the one of the "anxious bench," the protracted meeting, the 
 religious frenzy and the so-called "power;" there is only one 
 possible condition of discipleship, and that is through tumultuous 
 disturbances of the religious feelings, and through violent emo- 
 tional frenzy, resulting in a "witness of the spirit," with power, 
 and in uncontrollable movements of the body, such as shouting, 
 clapping of hands, jumping, convulsions, often ending in a dead 
 swoon as the climax. These violent and abrupt emotional 
 experiences are supposed to be the results of the outpouring of 
 the Holy Spirit, and as necessary and indispensable conditions 
 for membership to Christ's spiritual kingdom, in spite of the 
 fact that Jesus himself said not one word in justification of such 
 an arbitrary and unreasonable doctrine. Such extreme emotional 
 enthusiasts stoutly maintain that the denominations which con- 
 duct an orderly and dignified type of religious service that ap- 
 peals to the intelligence and the reason are "dead churches ;" 
 that members of such denominations, whose religion consists not 
 in empty profession or in vulgar and uncharitable criticisms of 
 others, but in a quiet, earnest life of love and service, are "icicles" 
 or "unconverted" or "children of the devil;" and that the places 
 of public worship where religious services are conducted with 
 dignified feeling and a chastened restraint of the emotions are 
 "refrigerators," or "cemeteries," or places where the children 
 of wrath are lulled to sleep and made comfortable and satisfied 
 in their state of "unregeneration." For such extreme and un- 
 thinking religionists, pious noise and confusion take the place 
 of thought and intelligence ; emotional eflfervescence and froth, 
 that of reason and judgment; religious fervor and ecstasy, that of 
 calmness of the soul and benevolence of will. The greatest saints, 
 according to this conception of conversion, are those who have 
 
137 
 
 the most frequent experiences of the "power" or who can make 
 the loudest professions or indulge in the most violent and 
 boisterous demonstrations of religion in prayers or testimony, 
 however empty the head, or unchanged the heart, or inconsistent 
 and unfruitful the life may be. It were laughable, if it were 
 not pitiful and pathetic, that such crude and unscriptural con- 
 ceptions of religion still find adherents and advocates in our own 
 day and generation, much to the pity and disgust of all intelligent 
 and reasonable disciples of the Master, who seek to serve the 
 Lord Jesus Christ, not in "word," neither in "tongue," but "in 
 deed and in truth," and who delight to worship the Lord their 
 God, who is a Spirit, "in spirit and in truth." 
 
 When one hears of such performances one is reminded of 
 the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal, and the two types 
 of religious service contrasted in that strange and interesting 
 account. The prophets of Baal were loud and boisterous ; they 
 called on the name of Baal "from morning even until noon," "O 
 Baal, hear us;" they "leaped" upon the altar; they "cried aloud;" 
 they "cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets," 
 with the hope that thereby they might "compel" their god to 
 hear; they were told by Elijah in a taunting manner to cry 
 louder and louder for fear their god might be absent from home, 
 or engaged in conversation, or even asleep, and hence "must be 
 waked up." This is not an altogether inappropriate description 
 of the method of conducting religious services in some localities 
 to-day. One is tempted to ask whether it can be possible that 
 our God may at times be off on a journey, or engaged in con- 
 versation, or possibly be even asleep, when it is deemed necessary 
 by some of the perfervid types of religionists in our enlightened 
 times to cry aloud to God with all the intensity and volume of 
 which the human voice is capable, to "leap" as it were, upon 
 the altar, to "cry aloud" unceasingly and in unison, lest God 
 might not hear, and to "cut themselves," as it were, with spiritual 
 implements of torture, that they might thereby "compel" the 
 Lord their God to have mercy upon them, and to lend an un- 
 willing ear to their passionate appeals. How^ dififerent the 
 quiet, assuring faith of an Elijah, who came "at the time of the 
 
138 
 
 offering of the evening sacrifice," with his people, before the 
 Most High, in quietness of spirit, and with assurance bom of 
 impHcit faith and trust in God, and Hfted up his voice to Heaven 
 with the petition: "Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this peo- 
 ple may know that thou art the Lord God." And the Lord God 
 hearkened and heard the simple prayer of Elijah with the result 
 that "the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt sacrifice, 
 and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the 
 water that was in the trench." 
 
 The religious services conducted in some localities and among 
 some emotional enthusiasts in our day, with its accompaniments 
 of confusion, boisterous and unrestrained explosions of religious 
 feeling, with its "crying aloud" from morning even until noon, 
 or from evening until midnight, its "leaping" upon the altar and 
 its self-torture, to the end that religious frenzy and the "power" 
 may be produced, may not have more religious value in the 
 sight of God than the emotional and irrational performances 
 of the prophets of Baal. Religious frenzy thus produced may 
 have some religious value, and it may be absolutely immoral in 
 its expression, and an abomination in the sight of God. If the 
 mistaken and deluded promoters of this kind of religious hysteria 
 and emotional frenzy would only know the real origin of such phe- 
 nomena, they would not attribute so much spiritual significance to 
 them. In various forms, such states of religious frenzy have ap- 
 peared and reappeared throughout the historv^ of religion. Ex- 
 amples of such strange and violent religious experiences are found 
 "in the sacred frenzy of the Bacchantes, the trance of the sibyls, the 
 ecstasy of the Neo-Platonists, the enlightenment that came to 
 Buddha under the sacred Bo-tree, the visions of the canonized 
 saints, the absorption into God experienced by various mystics, 
 the religious epidemics of the Middle Ages," and the wild 
 and frenzied experiences of the American Indians during the 
 excitement of their religious dances. It is manifestly not a 
 "Christian" experience. "The religious history of humanity," 
 as Professor Bowne has said, "quite apart from Christianity, is 
 full of strange and abnormal experiences, which are supposed to 
 be peculiarly religious. Mohammedanism and Hinduism abound 
 
139 
 
 in phenomena of this sort. They are even possible on the purely 
 physiological plane through the influence of alcohol and 
 anaesthetics and narcotics." 
 
 A good Christian brother recently assured me that the rea- 
 son for some strange and unusual religious experiences of his 
 was the power of the Holy Ghost in his soul. And the vivid- 
 ness and strangeness of his religious experience need not be 
 doubted. But to attribute all such strange and abnormal emo- 
 tional experiences to the agency of the Holy Ghost is to mis- 
 understand and confuse the nature and origin of religious 
 emotions. When we know such unusual experiences as trances, 
 visions, voices, catalepsy and the "power" have been experienced 
 in all ages of the world, by heathen Greeks, by fanatical 
 Mohammedans, by dreamy Buddhists, and by savage and 
 uncivilized American Indians, as well as by religious enthusiasts 
 and emotional religionists of the Christian church in all ages, 
 then we must seek some other explanation than the agency of 
 the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit may be present in some of 
 these strange religious phenomena, but He is most assuredly 
 not the sole cause or origin of them, or else we must assume 
 His activity as being lawless and arbitrary and not limited to 
 the time and people of the Christian dispensation. And when 
 we know further that these same unusual phenomena, like the 
 "power," may be experienced by men under the influence of liquor, 
 or other stimulants, or may be produced by absolutely unspiritual 
 and even unmoral conditions, and with physical stimuli, as 
 has been demonstrated again and again, then we must be 
 careful in attributing every religious phenomena of this sort to 
 the Holy Ghost. A great many sins have been committed in 
 the name of the Holy Ghost. "Under the influence of religious 
 excitement there occurs," as Professor Coe says, "a sporadic case 
 of hallucination, or of motor automatism, or of autohypnotism, 
 taking the form of trance, vision, voices or catalepsy." This is 
 the simple explanation of the "power" and similar religious 
 phenomena. That they have no religious significance whatso- 
 ever, no one would want to assert. To claim that such experiences 
 are necessary or essential to conversion or sane religious 
 
140 
 
 perience would be absurd and ridiculous. They have their 
 origin in an emotional temperament, they are fostered and pro- 
 duced by strong religious excitement and they are frequently 
 accompanied by the most disgusting performances. To attribute 
 such lawless and abnormal experiences to the agency of the Holy 
 Ghost is an insult to true religion, and a reflection upon the 
 sanity and intelligence 6f God's Holy Spirit. 
 
 It is pathetic to think that there are still Christian communities 
 and Christian churches among us at the present time, whose 
 chief aim seems to be to foster this unhealthy and abnormal 
 types of religious experience. It is really pitiful that sincere 
 Christian men and women can find it in their hearts to encourage 
 and propagate a form of emotional frenzy and of religious 
 intoxication which is absolutely unwarranted by Scripture, and 
 contrary to reason and intelligence. What excesses have been 
 committed in the name of religion ! And to insist that all souls 
 shall be obliged to enter the Kingdom by the method of emo- 
 tional conversion and the so-called "power"' is to do violence 
 to many a sensitive religious nature, and to cause it unneces- 
 sary suffering and agony. To make it possible for every emo- 
 tional nature to respond violently to religious influences 
 requires a process of religious excitement and ferment, and a 
 period of more or less protracted emotional agitation altogether 
 uncalled for in Scripture. And to work for striking emotional 
 experiences and confidently to expect them is to seek "signs 
 and wonders," which expectation Jesus condemned in the Jews. 
 To cultivate the religious feelings, and to stir them up excessively 
 and unduly for the mere pleasure of "enjoying religion" is a 
 form of religious dissipation which is no less disastrous than 
 many other forms of excessive indulgence. The religious feel- 
 ings were given us that they might serve the higher and nobler 
 ends of reverence, of worship, of religious thoughtfulness and of 
 Christian charity. There is a physical debauchery by overin- 
 dulgence in stimulants. There is a religious debauchery by 
 overindulgence in religious stimulants which is absolutely unmoral 
 and dangerous. The flabby kind of character and the low 
 standard of morals produced by excessive indulgence in 
 
141 
 
 •oniotionalism in relig^ion is only too manifest where this type of 
 religion flourishes. To magnify the feelings in religion is to 
 subvert the moral standards. To indulge the rehgious emotions 
 excessively to the neglect of the intelligence and the will is 
 liable to foster the kind of ethical standards of the negro type 
 which regards it justifiable to rob the chicken coop or the melon 
 patch so long as you are not detected. The greatest saint of the 
 emotional type, with most frequent attacks of the "power," 
 and with the loudest professions of loyalty to Christ, is not 
 infrequently the most dubious and crooked in his business 
 transactions. Unduly to indulge the emotions in religion is to 
 allow the moral forces to evaporate in "heat and smoke," and 
 leave the moral fibres flabby and the moral standards erratic. 
 This is the most charitable explanation of the fact that prac- 
 tically all business men of all religious denominations expect more 
 business honesty and business integrity at the hands of the worldly 
 and the non-professors of religion, than they do of many of the 
 extreme types of emotionalism in religion, whose religion too 
 frequently consists only in pious professions and whose profes- 
 sions too often belie their ordinary daily conduct and life. "By 
 their fruits ye shall know them," not by their professions. 
 
 Excessive emotionalism in religion is to be looked upon with 
 distrust and disfavor. "Nothing could be more exaggerated," 
 says Peabody in his "Religion of an Educated Man," "than to 
 regard the ecstasies and fevers, the earthquakes and volcanoes 
 of spiritual experience as normal aspects of the religious life. 
 Under such a view, religion would not be a form of health and 
 sanity, but a form of intoxication or fever, and the religious life, 
 intermittent, spasmodic, hysterical, must fail to command the 
 rational confidence of an educated man. These abnormal inci- 
 dents, these volcanic eruptions, in fact, make more impressive 
 the orderliness and continuity which mark the normal condition 
 of the spiritual life. The religious nature is no more abnormal 
 and revolutionary than the physical or intellectual life of man. 
 It is not a scene of catastrophes and pathological excesses, but 
 of a silent process of evolution and education, of expansion, 
 progress and growth." 
 
142 
 
 4. The Spirit of Over-Confidence and of Self-Satisfaction not 
 Essential. 
 
 It is not necessary for genuine Christian experience that a 
 behever should be over-confident of his true spiritual state or 
 self-satisfied with his Christian attainments. In fact, too great 
 assurance of one's spiritual excellence is only too frequently a 
 sure indication of self-deception or of hypocrisy. It behooves 
 the earnest Christian disciple to speak of his spiritual states and 
 achievements in the language of moderation and self-restraint. 
 It is very true that a disciple of the Master should be sure of his 
 attitude of loyalty and of devotion, but he is not called upon to 
 be over-confident or boastful. Too great confidence begets 
 spiritual pride, and spiritual pride, we are told, goeth before a 
 fall. When Peter was most confident in his assertion. "Though 
 all should forsake thee and leave thee, yet will not I," he was 
 on the very brink of his great denial of the Master. We may 
 well rejoice in our spiritual redemption and in the evidences of 
 God's goodness and mercy to us, but the knowledge of our many 
 shortcomings and of our imperfections should make us 
 distrustful of our own strength and dissatisfied with our own 
 spiritual attainments. An earnest seeker after spiritual excellence 
 is profoundly grateful, on the one hand, for numberless tokens 
 of divine help and favor received, and, on the other hand, deeply 
 grieved and humiliated over the consciousness that his life has 
 not been as "fruitful" and his spiritual progress not as rapid as 
 might have been expected. A true knowledge of one's spiritual 
 shortcomings and weaknesses should lead to spiritual meekness 
 and humility and not to spiritual pride and self-righteousness. 
 
 One of the deplorable results of emotionalism in religion is 
 the tendency, on the part of the more excitable natures, to 
 boastful over-confidence and to pharisaical self-righteousness. 
 A truly converted man ought to be possessed of the spirit of 
 meekness and humility, but quite the opposite is frequently true 
 of the converts of emotional revivalism. This tendency to 
 self-exaltation in religious matters must have been prevalent in 
 
143 
 
 the days of the great revival under Jonathan Edwards, for he 
 writes about it after this fashion: "It is no sufficient reason 
 to determine that men are saints and their affections gracious, 
 because the affections they have are attended with an exceeding 
 confidence that their state is good and their affections divine." 
 Edwards contends that such boastful professions as the following, 
 "I know certainly that God is my Father," "I know so surely 
 that I shall go to heaven as if I were there," "I know that God 
 is now manifesting Himself to my soul and is now smiling upon 
 me," "I know that I am in a state of sinlessness and am thankful 
 that 'I am not as other men are,' " and others of like character 
 so often heard by over-confident professors of religion, are to 
 be attributed to an "overbearing, high-handed and violent sort of 
 confidence," which has not the countenance of "true Christian 
 assurance," but savors of the "spirit of the Pharisees, who never 
 doubted that they were the most eminent saints" to be found 
 anywhere. 
 
 It is almost inconceivable that a truly penitent soul, who 
 professes to be a follower of the meek and "lowly Jesus," should 
 find it in his heart, as is so frequently the case, to rejoice in his 
 own superior goodness and virtue, to sit in judgment upon the 
 religious state of others, and to condemn them indiscriminately 
 to "outer darkness" and utter hopelessness, to speak boastfully 
 and sacrilegiously of favored "glimpses into heaven" and of 
 who was seen there, and who was not seen there, to the 
 disparagement of members of other shades of belief and prac- 
 tice, and to proclaim in flippant and irreverent tones of 
 familiarity with God, his spiritual attitude of pharisaical pride : 
 "God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are, extortioners, 
 unjust adulterers, or even as this publican." Did not Christ tell 
 us, "Judge not that ye be not judged"? Are we not told, "He 
 that exalteth himself shall be abased"? Did not our Master warn 
 us against harsh criticism when He said : "And why beholdest 
 thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not 
 the beam that is in thine own eye" ? Are we not assured that 
 the "meek" shall inherit the earth and that "God resisteth the 
 proud, but giveth grace to the humble"? Not every one that saith, 
 
144 
 
 "Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that 
 doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." Neither will 
 people be heard necessarily for their much-speaking or for their 
 loud professions. "Many will say unto me on that day, Lord, 
 Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy name cast 
 out devils, and in thy name done many wonderful works? And 
 then will I profess unto them, I never knew you ; depart from 
 me, ye that work iniquity." Matthew 7 : 22, 23. Is it not 
 possible that Christ will say to some of these mistaken, but 
 over-confident zealots of religion, when they shall come to Him 
 for approval, saying: "Lord, Lord, did we not make 'loud 
 professions' in Thy name? Did we not make long public prayers 
 and offer much self-laudatory testimony in Thy name? Did 
 we not speak of the glories of heaven and of its membership 
 limited to Thy chosen few among the praying saints of the earth 
 in Thy name ? And did we not, in Thy name, extol ourselves as the 
 'Lord's elect,' and condemn the 'sheep' not of our fold to hopeless 
 despair?" I say, is it not possible that Christ will say to some of 
 these : "I never knew you ; depart from me, ye workers of 
 iniquity." 
 
 One of the first requisites of the "new life" is Christian meekness 
 and humility. "Blessed are the meek," not the proud, or boastful, 
 or self-confident. "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me: for 
 I am meek and lowly in heart." Matthew 1 1 : 29. Christ himself 
 was meek and lowly in spirit and He wants His followers to 
 learn of Him in this respect, that they may inherit the kingdom. 
 To be sure, not all meekness and humbleness of mind is a sign 
 of true conversion. But the absence of meekness and Christlike 
 humility is most assuredly an infallible sign of spiritual pride, or 
 of carnal self-satisfaction. The followers of the meek and "lowly" 
 Jesus must themselves, in their own words and deeds, show forth 
 the spirit of true meekness and of Christian charity. "Charity 
 suffereth long and is kind ; charity vaunteth not itself, is not easily 
 puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, 
 is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil." 
 
 It is a most impressive fact that Christ's strongest condem- 
 nation of sinners fell not upon the worldly, the careless or 
 
145 
 
 indifferent, nor upon the adulterers, the betrayers and the profli- 
 gates, but upon the spiritual pride and self-righteousness of the 
 Pharisees. For the worldly and the abandoned there was hope, 
 because they realized their unworthiness. For the self-satisfied 
 Pharisees, who were sufficient unto themselves, there was little 
 hope of spiritual improvement, because they lacked the neces- 
 sary spiritual hunger and the spiritual thirst, without which they 
 could not be "filled." Jesus was glad to receive all sorts and 
 conditions of men that He might minister unto them. But the 
 Pharisees, who "loved to pray standing in the synagogues and 
 in the corners of the streets," were satisfied with their spiritual 
 states, and consequently they did not come to Christ with hungry 
 souls so that He might minister unto them and refresh them 
 spiritually. They were absolutely sure of their moral superiority. 
 They did not fail to talk much of their spiritual attainments. 
 They loved the "uppermost rooms" at religious gatherings and 
 the "chief seats" in the synagogues. They did "all their works 
 to be seen of men," and for a pretense "made long prayers" in 
 the hearing of men, thinking that they would be "heard for their 
 much-speaking." Because of their spiritual pride and self- 
 sufficiency, Christ was unable to reach them or to minister unto 
 them out of His fulness. And hence His unmeasured terms of 
 scathing rebuke : "Woe unto you scribes and Pharisees, 
 hypocrites." And it is this spirit of self-sufficiency and of moral 
 superiority which makes the modern representatives of the 
 Pharisees of old such "hopeless" cases for spiritual improvement. 
 It is their self-sufficiency, their unteachableness, their self-com- 
 placency which smites the heart of Jesus with their hopelessness 
 to-day. They lack the "teachableness," the open-mindedness, the 
 spiritual humility of children, so necessary for membership to 
 Christ's spiritual tutelage. And well might it be said of these 
 modern Pharisees, who love to make a display of their religion, 
 and who are constrained to stand in "the chief seats" of our 
 modern synagogues and to pray: "God, I thank thee that I am 
 not as other men are, or even as these 'publicans,' " except ye 
 be "converted" from your spiritual pride and self-satisfaction and 
 "become as little children" in teachableness, in humility, and in 
 
146 
 
 simplicity of faith, "ye shall not enter into the kingdom of 
 Heaven." 
 
 President Hyde has this to say on the pride of the Pharisee, 
 and the conceit of the perfectionist : "Of all the monstrosities 
 that misdirected and shortsighted spiritual effort has produced, 
 this self-righteousness of a loveless legalism is the most repellent. 
 People of this type commit, perhaps, few overt acts of flagrant 
 indiscretion, but they rise to no lofty heights of heroic righteous- 
 ness. They manage to keep their precious souls just out of the 
 hell of social reprobation they are afraid of; but they never come 
 in sight of the shining battlements of heaven. They may not 
 cheat you ; but you must not expect them to make a costly sacri- 
 fice in your behalf. They may not get drunk; but their homes 
 are not so happy that their children and neighbors find it prefer- 
 able to the saloon. They may not commit adultery, or risk the 
 scandal of a divorce ; but marriage is not to them a sacrament 
 of self-devotion. They may not tell many lies ; but they seldom 
 speak the truth with gentleness or refrain from peddling scandal 
 out of thoughtfulness and kindly consideration. They may not 
 break the Sabbath ; but no one who has to spend it with them 
 likes to see the dreadful day come around. They may not swear 
 themselves; but they are so prim and punctilious in their propriety,, 
 that they make the people who see them want to. The man who 
 fancies he has kept the whole law of God, and prides himself upon 
 it, merely shows how incapable he is of appreciating the infinite 
 breadth of service and depth of sympathy the real keeping of 
 the divine law would involve." 
 
 Verily, too much confidence in one's spiritual attainments 
 is not essential to true Christian experience. On the contrary, 
 too great positiveness is a pretty sure indication of self-deception 
 or spiritual pride. Genuine spiritual excellence leads to modesty 
 and humility of spirit. The sacrifices of God are a broken and 
 a contrite heart. The earnest seeker after God does indeed rejoice 
 that God has done so much for him, but he is also deeply grieved 
 over the fact that he has done so little for God. The true penitent 
 verily knows that he has passed from death unto life, and that 
 he is now on the road to heaven and immortalitv, but he also 
 
147 
 
 realizes most keenly that his progress in true Christian self-con- 
 trol and in the formation of a Christlike character has been pain- 
 fully slow. He is made extremely happy in the realization of 
 what has already been accomplished in his spiritual education ; but 
 he is also profoundly impressed with the greatness and serious- 
 ness of the task still to be accomplished. A true knowledge of 
 the greatness of God's grace in his redemption, makes the honest 
 believer feel like saying with Paul : "Thanks be to God, which 
 giveth us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." A full 
 realization of what is involved in "fighting the good fight of 
 faith," makes him cry out with the apostle : "O wretched man 
 that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death." An 
 earnest, sincere disciple of Jesus Christ is constrained to be truly 
 humble and distrustful of his own spiritual worth in comparison 
 with the holy and spotless character of Jesus Christ, his Example 
 and Leader and Guide. And hence his prayer is better expressed 
 in the spirit and words of the publican: "God, be merciful to 
 me a sinner," than in the boastful and self-satisfied utterance 
 of the Pharisee : "God, I thank thee that I am not as other 
 men are, or even as this publican." 
 
 He that is down need fear no fall, 
 
 He that is low no pride ; 
 He that is humble ever shall 
 
 Have God to be his Guide. 
 
 IV* What is Essential in Religious Experience. 
 
 t. The Right Attitude of the Will is Essential. 
 
 As in ethics, so in religion, the right attitude of the will is all- 
 important. The undue emphasis placed upon the feelings and 
 the great prominence they assume in emotional conversion has 
 given the will a less prominent place than it deserves in the 
 sphere of religion. In all other human relations and interests we 
 
148 
 
 ask for the purpose or the intention underlying an act. If the 
 intention is good, we say the act is a good act. If the purpose 
 is sinister or the intention is bad, we call the act a bad act, 
 however strongly it may flavor of the spirit of charity. In courts 
 of law, in the interpretation of the fundamental principles which 
 govern conduct, men seek to get at the purpose or intention of an 
 act, so that they may judge properly of its inherent moral value. 
 Not the act so much as the purpose back of it determines the 
 guilt or innocence of an accused man in a court of law or before 
 the bar of public opinion. We are applying this principle con- 
 tinually in our attempts to judge the conduct of our fellow-men. 
 We always seek for the intention. We make ample allowances 
 for blundering actions, provided the intention was good. We 
 judge harshly and severely the seemingly correct conduct of a 
 man whose principles and purposes of life are known to be false 
 and selfish. Why should not the same standards obtain in the 
 religious sphere of life? 
 
 What is sin? What is goodness? What makes us culpable 
 before God or acceptable in His sight ? Holiness is in the heart, in 
 the consciously right attitude towards God and man, in the "be- 
 nevolent will," as Fairchild would say. "Sin is the transgression 
 of the law." But this implies purpose or intention or else it could 
 not be voluntary transgression. "To him that knoweth to do 
 good and doeth it not, to him it is sin." The knowing to do a 
 right thing and refusing to do it involves an attitude of the 
 will. It is sin, a sin of omission. There are sins of omission 
 and sins of commission, but they have the same source in the 
 human will. The prodigal's sin consisted in his deliberate choice 
 to "ask for the goods" that did not belong to him. His sal- 
 vation dawned when he came to himself and said, "I will arise." 
 Here was the turning point. When he pulled himself together 
 and gathered up the tattered fragments of his moral nature to- 
 gether in one supreme resolution of his sovereign will, involved 
 in the words : "I will arise and go to my father and I will 
 say, father I have sinned," then the all-important act of his 
 redemption was done, so far as his part of the transaction was 
 concerned. The rest all followed as a logical outcome of his new 
 
149 
 
 attitude, which crystallized in the critical moment in which, under 
 the influence of God's spirit, he asserted his sovereign right of 
 benevolent choice and resolved henceforth to surrender his will 
 to the will of his heavenly Father. And this is invariably the 
 view of the Bible. And it is preeminently the view of Jesus. 
 
 It is a striking fact that all the conditions laid down by our 
 Master for entrance into His kingdom imply a distinct and unmis- 
 takable element of conscious will-power. When the jailer at 
 Philippi asked Paul that all-important question, "What must I 
 do to be saved," the reply was : "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ 
 and thou shalt be saved." So Jesus told his disciples : "He that 
 helieveth on the Son hath everlasting life; he that believeth not 
 the Son shall not see life." John 3 : 36. Faith in the Lord 
 Jesus Christ is here made the one condition of salvation. Jesus 
 addressed the woman, who came that she might but touch the 
 "hem of his garment" and be cured, as follows : "Daughter, be 
 of good cheer, thy faith hath made thee whole." Matthew 9 : 22. 
 And Paul tells the Romans : "A man is justified by faith." And 
 again : "Ye are the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus." 
 Galatians 3 : 26. The words "faith" and "believe" occur more 
 frequently in the Bible, as necessary conditions of heart for salva- 
 tion, than any other expressions which can be found. It is 
 "through faith" in Christ Jesus that we are saved. And this 
 "saving faith" implies an active outreaching of the human heart, 
 through a conscious effort on the part of the soul towards the 
 object of its faith, namely, Jesus Christ and His redeeming love. 
 The most prominent element in the "saving faith" mentioned in 
 the Bible is that of a conscious, voluntary movement of the human 
 will towards something outside of itself. A living faith is an 
 active faith, not a passive one ; a voluntary outgoing of the soul, 
 not a passive state of collapse and inefficiency. And hence, 
 the faith which maketh whole, which moves men's lives and in- 
 fluences them powerfully for good is a positive, deliberate attitude 
 of the human will in its reaching out towards the Divine for 
 strength and help. The same element of voluntary attitude is im- 
 plied in all the other terms of Scripture used for conversion, for 
 regeneration or for the conditions of the new life. To "cease 
 
ISO 
 
 to do evil" and "learn to do well," to "put off the old man" and 
 to "put on the new man," to "arise" and go to the Father, to "fol- 
 low" Jesus in a life of love and service, to "believe," to "trust," 
 to "give" one's heart in self-surrender, to "love" the Lord our 
 God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves, to 
 "choose" the better part, to "do" the will of God, to "hunger and 
 thirst" after righteousness, to be "meek" and "lowly in spirit," 
 to "have the mind" of the Master, to "sit" at the feet of Jesus, 
 to "accept" the invitation to the marriage feast, to "build" one's 
 house upon the rock, these and similar expressions imply a deliber- 
 ate and positive attitude of the will in conscious choice and active 
 effort. It is an impressive fact to note that not a single condition 
 for the spiritual life mentioned in the Bible is in terms of feeling 
 or emotion, but always and invariably in terms of conscious, self- 
 directing, voluntary effort on the part of the sovereign will towards 
 righteous and benevolent ends. This is strikingly illustrated in the 
 teaching and example of our Master himself, who came to do the 
 "will of God" and who found His highest expression of obedience 
 and submission in His prayer, "Not my will but Thine, be done." 
 Jesus appeals to the intellect and to the will. It was His 
 knowledge of God which gave Him power-tranquility, "He 
 that knoweth the Son knoweth the Father." "And this is life 
 everlasting to know thee as the only true God and Jesus Girist 
 whom thou hast sent into the world," says Jesus, in John 17:3. 
 He expects from men a moral initiative. "Follow me," He says. 
 "Sell all that thou hast and follow me." "Whosoever shall do 
 the will of God, the same is my brother and sister and mother." 
 Mark 3 : 35. This is a matter of choice. "Be it unto thee even 
 as thou wilt." And so Jesus says about himself : "Not my will 
 but thine, be done." "My meat is to do the will of Him that 
 sent me." John 4 : 34. The dominant factor both in his ex- 
 perience and in his teaching is not intellectual achievement or 
 emotional exaltation, but ethical decision. So again Jesus says : 
 "He that willeth to do the will shall know of the doctrine whether 
 it be of God or whether I speak of myself." John 7: 17. In 
 the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes the doing of his will, 
 not the mere profession, "Lord. Lord," the test of discipleship : 
 
151 
 
 "Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into 
 the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father 
 which is in heaven." Matthew 5:21. And in Revelation we 
 have the sweeping invitation : "Whosoever will may come and 
 take the water of life freely." Revelation 22:17. The em- 
 phasis is on the willingness to yield obedience and to do the will 
 of God. "First obedience, then insight; first decision, then pre- 
 cision ; first the following of Jesus, then later the understand- 
 ing of Him, such is the sequence of Christian experience," as 
 Prof. Peabody so well says. "Among the baffling truths, which 
 invite and defy reason and the tides of feeling which rise only to 
 fall, the beginnings of Christian experience are, according to the 
 teaching of Jesus, in the conversion of the will. 
 
 "Our wills are ours, we know not how. 
 Our wills are ours to make them Thine." 
 
 It is disheartening to see the essential condition for disciple- 
 ship expressed so often and so persistently in terms of intellectual 
 belief or of emotional states or of simple acts or deeds, whereas 
 Jesus himself gave abundant recognition to the supremacy of the 
 will. "Systems of theology have been devised in which every 
 virtue is ascribed to God except that of simple goodness, and 
 every hope offered to men except that of moral choice." Too 
 often the attitude of the Christian leaders has been that "dogma 
 is more than obedience and feeling more than righteousness." 
 Christian discipleship begins where all moral excellence begins, 
 in the dedication of the will to God. "The first demand of Jesus 
 is not for orthodoxy or ecstasy, but for morality." Seek first 
 the kingdom of God. This is the first article of Christian prac- 
 tice. The first step in the process of discipleship is in the reso- 
 lution to do the will of God. 
 
 "One ship drives east and the other drives west 
 
 With the self-same winds that blow ; 
 'Tis the set of the sails and not the gales, 
 
 W^hich tells us the wav thev go. 
 
152 
 
 Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate 
 
 As we voyage along through life ; 
 'Tis the set of the soul that decides its goal 
 
 And not the calm or the strife." 
 
 And so it is "the set of the will" that determines not only the 
 course of the ship but also the character of the haven reached 
 at last. He who sets his will resolutely and supremely for the 
 moral haven desired will ultimately reach the goal, whatever 
 the currents may be or however the gales may blow. The moral 
 decision is the first and most important and all-essential step in 
 the process of conversion. Whatever the feelings may be before 
 the supreme moment of decision or whatever the intellectual 
 attitude, whatever divine influences may have been at work or 
 conflicting personal motives may have been at war in the soul, 
 the sovereign act of conversion culminates in conscious, deliberate 
 and unreserved dedication of the will to God in self-surrender. 
 "The moral decision may be accompanied by a clarifying thought 
 or by an emotional surprise or by both." In fact, intense reli- 
 gious emotion and tumultuous ebullitions of feeling may ac- 
 company the fateful decision. But they are not essential. The 
 vessel of Christian character has not indeed reached its port 
 through the initial decision of the will for Christ ; but the voyage 
 is begun and by one sharp decisive impulse of the will, the vessel 
 has been launched and received momentum and direction towards 
 its final goal. The continual "set of the sail" will be necessary 
 throughout the voyage, whatever the winds of feeling that blow 
 or the currents of thought that may run counter and impede 
 the progress. May we not all pray the prayer of the poet and 
 dedicate our wills to God's service? 
 
 Laid on Thine altar, O my Lord divine, 
 Accept my will this day for Jesus' sake ; 
 
 I have no jewels to adorn Thy shrine — 
 Nor any world-proud sacrifice to make ; 
 
 But here I bring, within my trembling hand. 
 This will of mine — a thing that seemeth small. 
 
153 
 
 And Thou alone, O God, canst understand 
 
 How, when I yield Thee this, I yield mine all ! 
 Hidden therein, Thy searching gaze can see 
 
 Struggles of passion — visions of delight — 
 All that I love, and am, and fain would be. 
 
 Deep loves, fond hopes, and longings infinite. 
 It has been wet with tears^ and dimmed with sighs. 
 
 Clenched in my grasp, till beauty hath it none — 
 Now, from Thy footstool where it vanquished lies. 
 
 The prayer ascendeth, "May Thy will be done." 
 Take it, O Father, ere my courage fail. 
 
 And merge it so in Thine own will, that e'en 
 If, in some desperate hour, my cries prevail, 
 
 And Thou give back my will, it may have been 
 So changed, so purified, so fair have grown, 
 
 So one with Thee, so filled with peace divine, 
 I may not see, nor know it as my own. 
 
 But gaining back my will, may find it Thine. 
 
 2. A Reasonable Degree of Christian Assurance. 
 
 With a right moral attitude there comes a reasonable degree 
 of Christian certainty and assurance. The witness of the spirit 
 to our inner states will not be in the amount of feeling we may 
 have in the matter, but in the blessed consciousness that we have 
 given ourselves to God for service. We can surely know our 
 own conscious attitude. We know, for instance, whether we love 
 our parents. This love to parents may be accompanied by a 
 certain amount of pleasurable emotion. But the important con- 
 sideration is not our states of feeling in the matter, but our con- 
 scious attitude of obedience and filial regard. Whether our 
 regard for our parents is highly tinged with lively emotion 
 or is simply a conscious disposition on our part to render them 
 all the faithful service and the kind and loving consideration 
 we can because they are our parents and because we owe them 
 loving obedience and service, matters not. The chief and all- 
 
154 
 
 important thing is that we have this conscious attitude of fiUal 
 regard which expresses itself in obedient, loving, ungrudging 
 service. And this we can know. We know absolutely whether 
 we have the right attitude towards our parents or not, whether 
 we consciously and intentionally offer them the full measure of 
 filial obedience and of loyal service which we owe them in return 
 for what they are and for what they have done for us. In 
 like manner we may know our attitude towards our heavenly 
 Father. Whether we have come with much fear and trembling, 
 or whether we have come in confidence and assurance, is a small 
 matter. The question is, have we come? And we most as- 
 suredly know whether we have come to the Father and we know 
 whether we have surrendered our wills to His will, and we know 
 whether we have rendered Him the full measure of obedience 
 and of loving service which we owe Him for what He is and 
 for what He has done for us. And we may know to a 
 certainty, and beyond the question of a doubt, whether our sur- 
 render to Him has been complete or only partial, and whether 
 our inward conscious pledge of obedience and loyalty to His 
 will was made in good faith and without any reservation, fully, 
 unreservedly, unconditionally. I say, we may and can know all 
 these things. It is a matter of certain knowledge, for the mind 
 always knows its own conscious states and acts. 
 
 When the young man who was blind from his youth up and 
 who was cured of his blindness by Jesus, as recorded in the 
 ninth chapter of John, was asked what "he thought of Jesus," 
 he replied by saying: "Whether he (Jesus) be a sinner or not, 
 I know not. One thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now 
 I see." This was the test. He had been blind, now he could 
 see. That was an evident fact of which he was certain. He 
 knew it. And so we know whether our eyes have been opened 
 spiritually and whether we can see God in all His loveliness. John 
 tells us that "We know we have passed from death unto life 
 because we love the brethren." I John 3 : 14. And again : "And 
 hereby we know that he abideth in us because we love the breth- 
 ren." I John 3 : 14. And still once again John writes : "And 
 hereby we know that he abideth in us, by the spirit which he 
 
155 
 
 has given us." I John 3 : 24. John tells his hearers that they 
 ma}' know God's presence by the spirit manifested in their lives 
 and by their conscious attitude of love and obedience towards 
 God and towards the brethren. According to John, we may know 
 positively not only that our attitude to God is right, but we 
 may know God's presence within us and the approval of His 
 favor upon us by the consciousness of the spirit of love towards 
 the brethren. We may know our spiritual states in regenera- 
 tion, not only in being conscious of a right attitude towards God, 
 but also in the consciousness of a benevolent attitude towards 
 our fellow-men in "love to the brethren." A consciousness of 
 "love to the brethren" is, therefore, also proof positive of a right 
 personal relation to God, because real genuine "love to the 
 brethren" comes only from a supreme love to God. And we 
 surely know whether we have a disinterested and unselfish regard 
 for "our brethren." "And this is life everlasting, to know Thee 
 as the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou didst send." 
 John 17:3. These words of Jesus assume a true knowledge of 
 God the Father, and of Jesus the Son as evidence of salvation. 
 To know the love and mercy of God in all its fulness and to 
 know ourselves as voluntarily and deliberately trusting in and 
 relying upon that love, is salvation. This knowledge requires 
 no accompanying states of feeling, no audible witness of the 
 spirit. It is the sort of inner knowledge which maketh not 
 ashamed and which Paul had when he wrote to Timothy : "I 
 know whom I have believed and am persuaded that he is able 
 to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day." 
 II Timothy i : 12. 
 
 But some trembling, doubting soul may say : "I want to know 
 positively that I am saved, and how can I know conclusively 
 unless I can feel it powerfully in my heart and have striking 
 proof of it in the promised 'witness of the spirit' in my soul." This 
 expectation of a seemingly supernatural attestation of the spirit 
 is all wrong. There is absolutely no such requirement given 
 in Scripture and no sanction in Christian experience for such ex- 
 pectation. It is true that the witness of the spirit is promised, 
 but this does not necessarily nor usually come with demonstration 
 
156 
 
 of power. A witness in court is not expected to shout his testi- 
 mony in the feverish language of excitement. A normal wit- 
 nessing is in calmness of spirit and with composure of manner. 
 As has been said before, God does not love confusion. His 
 spirit may be most clearly and distinctly perceived in quickening 
 and energizing the normal functions of the soul in thought and 
 will and in the deeper, calmer states of subdued and chastened 
 emotion. Not in the earthquake nor in the storm, nor in the 
 fire but in the "still small voice," did Elijah discover the presence 
 of God. "Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith 
 the Lord." No. No. If we have an earnest and sincere desire 
 to abstain from evil and to cleave to that which is good, if we have 
 resolved to commit ourselves to our loving heavenly Father's care 
 and keeping, if we have fully and freely and unreservedly dedi- 
 cated ourselves to God for unselfish service in His kingdom; and 
 if we have consciously and knowingly resolved to surrender our 
 wayward wills to God's sweet will without any reservation what- 
 soever, then we may rest assured. And all this we can most 
 decidedly know, and, knowing, rest assured and contented. With 
 such a moral decision there always comes some sense of inner 
 "harmony. And there may come rolling in upon the soul feelings 
 of tumultuous joy following the supreme moment of self-surrender 
 or of spiritual reconstruction. But these lofty states of feeling are 
 not to be sought after as "signs" and "wonders," for the seeking 
 after "signs" and "wonders" is what Jesus condemned in the Jews. 
 In fact, there is great moral danger in the matter of expect- 
 ing some striking kind of emotional experience during conver- 
 sion. Many a fearful heart has suffered untold agony because of 
 false and unwarranted expectations of a supernatural witness 
 of the spirit in conversion. This is strikingly illustrated by the 
 testimony of one of Professor Coe's respondents. It is as fol- 
 lows : "They told me to read the Bible and I read it. They 
 told me to pray, and I prayed. They said, 'now all you need to 
 do is to go to the 'mourner's bench,' and ask God to forgive 
 you, and be blessed.' They told me I would know the very 
 instant that He saved me, and that I would know it just as 
 •definitely as I knew anything. I went forward night after night, 
 
157 
 
 "expecting a sudden reversal of my whole being. The meetings 
 closed. I had no change, no experience." This same person 
 tried it again during a subsequent season of special services with 
 the same unsatisfactory results, until he was almost driven to 
 distraction and despair. This is a typical case. This young man 
 was honest with himself. He could not "feel" any such reversal 
 of his entire being as he was led to believe he could, because he 
 lacked the characteristic emotional temperament. Neither could 
 he deceive himself into believing that he had really experienced 
 a striking conversion when, as a matter of fact, he had not. 
 He was too honest with himself. And the consequence was that 
 for years this honest seeker after God was kept in the darkness 
 of moral despair through no fault of his own, until he was finally 
 led to see that all that was required of him was obedience to 
 the will of God and faith in His love and mercy. After he 
 stopped seeking for "signs" and "wonders" in a striking con- 
 version, and simply yielded his heart to God in loving obedience, 
 he found peace and assurance. 
 
 Another testimony runs thus: "I have had a long and bitter 
 experience because of the language used by people at revival 
 meetings. I have striven to come into immediate communion 
 with God, to have a vivid sense of His presence, but that has 
 never been." Professor Coe tells us of young people from 
 among his correspondents who sought a special kind of ex- 
 perience in conversion for twelve years, but never found it. They 
 were kept in moral uncertainty and in spiritual anguish for 
 years because of foolish and unscriptural requirements imposed 
 upon them, which they were not able honestly to meet on account 
 of the lack of the necessary emotional temperament, requisite 
 for brilliant religious experiences. I have known, myself, of 
 people who were made extremely unhappy and miserable for 
 years because they foolishly, but honestly and sincerely, sought 
 through more than one series of special revival services, some 
 striking evidence of the Holy Spirit's witness in the feelings, but 
 which failed to come either because of a lack of the necessary 
 emotional temperament or because of too honest and con- 
 scientious a heart to allow deception in the matter. 
 
158 
 
 That most of these honest souls eventually find peace and 
 joy through the "better way" of simple faith and childlike trust 
 in God's precious promises does not alter the fact that such con- 
 ceptions of conversion are responsible for an immense amount 
 of unnecessary and often cruel spiritual suffering on the part 
 of young and inexperienced seekers after God. Not infrequently 
 these unsuccessful seekers after an arbitrary and abnormal 
 experience in conversion are driven to agnosticism and infidelity. 
 Others again may simply grow cold and indifferent to all 
 religious influences and conclude that all religious experience is 
 a humbug and a delusion. And in more than one instance, some 
 earnest seeker after "signs" and "wonders" in conversion has 
 been so wrought up by religious excitement and so deeply 
 grieved and depressed by a fruitless search after some promised 
 experience of a striking conversion, that the result was either 
 religious melancholy or violent religious insanity. Many a 
 delicate, sensitive soul has been driven to hopeless insanity or 
 to an early grave by reason of the cruel spiritual tortures inflicted 
 because of extreme views of conversion foolishly and unwisely 
 applied without reason or judgment. What shall a person think 
 of a conception of conversion put into practice which requires, 
 on the part of the earnest seeker after God, a protracted period 
 of spiritual agony and unwholesome religious excitement be- 
 fore he may be permitted to taste of the joy of forgiveness? It 
 is a reflection upon God's infinite love and mercy to claim that 
 the courts of heaven must first be stormed by a season of agoniz- 
 ing prayer and religious frenzy before the coveted blessing is 
 permitted to come. God is infinitely more willing to give than 
 we are able to ask or receive. The stubborn will must be broken. 
 The disobedient and wilful soul must yield and run into the 
 loving arms of a merciful Heavenly Father, and then all is over. 
 To seek a special experience of emotional conversion is to seek 
 what God does not require, and what human nature may not 
 always be capable of. To insist that every seeker after God shall 
 work himself up to a certain pitch of religious frenzy that he 
 may have a vivid realization of the "witness of the spirit" with 
 power, before he may be permitted to consider himself a member 
 
159 
 
 of God's spiritual household is "to bind heavy burdens and 
 grievous to be borne and lay them upon men's shoulders." 
 What self-torture, agony and spiritual suffering might not be 
 avoided, and what days and weeks and even years of moral 
 uncertainty and hopeless despair might not be prevented if ear- 
 nest seekers after salvation would only come to God in sincerity 
 and in truth, and yield their hearts and lives to His service and 
 trust His infinite goodness for forgiveness and pardon without 
 any reference to states of feeling to be expected or religious emo- 
 tions to be enjoyed. John tells us in his Gospel: "To as many 
 as received Him, to them gave He the power (or the authority 
 or the right) to become the sons of God, to as many as believed 
 in His Name." This is a simple transaction. If the sinner does 
 his part, God will most assuredly do His part. Whoever believes 
 with all his heart in the name of Jesus Christ, has the right to 
 call himself a child of God. Nothing more is required. Noth- 
 ing extremely difficult and unreasonable is asked of us. No 
 verification is necessary. If we take Jesus Christ into our lives, 
 and allow Him to rule our spirits and to fashion our ideals and 
 purposes, then we may, with confidence and assurance, call our- 
 selves His disciples without any further proof or testimony. 
 
 3. The Fruits of the Spirit arc All-essential. 
 
 The end of all religious life and all religious activity must be 
 the formation of Christian character. The best test of conversion, 
 therefore, and of Christian growth and development must ulti- 
 mately be in the spirit and character of the lives thus influenced. 
 Neither conversion nor growth are the ends, but character and 
 service. Conversion is only the beginning and Christian experi- 
 ence only the incidents or accompanying states of the process 
 Avhich shall issue in the ripened fruit of a Christlike character. 
 Jesus told his disciples : "By their fruits ye shall know them." 
 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a cor- 
 rupt tree bring forth good fruit. If the foundations are well laid 
 and the processes of growth and development are wholesome and 
 sound, then we may look for the proper fruits of Christian 
 II 
 
i6o 
 
 charity. If the planting has been well done and the conditions 
 of growth have been favorable, the fruits must begin to appear 
 in their various manifestations. Whatever the kind of conver- 
 sion may have been or whatever the character of Christian ex- 
 perience, if the requisite fruits of the spirit are lacking, then there 
 must be something radically wrong. "A good tree cannot bring 
 forth evil fruit." A genuine spiritual life, whatever the experience 
 in conversion may have been, will show itself in many and un- 
 mistakable ways by its "fruits" of love and service. 
 
 Jesus tells us in John 15: "Herein is my Father glorified 
 that ye bear much fruit. So shall ye be my disciples." John 
 15:8. And again: "Ye have not chosen me but I have chosen 
 you and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit 
 and that your fruit should remain." John 15:15. The object 
 and end of discipleship is fruit. To this end Jesus has called and 
 ordained his disciples. Just as the vine-dresser has planted and 
 cultivated his vineyard that he might have fruit, and just as the 
 "sower" went forth to sow that his seed might fall upon good 
 ground and bring forth fruit as a reward for his toil, so Christ 
 himself has planted His spiritual vineyard and sowed His spiritual 
 seed that He might have the fruits of Christian love and Christian 
 character. He puts forth labor upon His spiritual vineyard that 
 it may bring forth more fruit. "Every branch in me that beareth 
 not fruit he taketh away ; and every branch that beareth fruit 
 he purgeth it that it may bring forth more fruit." John 15:2, 
 Paul uses the same language in writing to the Romans : "Now 
 I would not have you ignorant, brethren, that oftentimes I pur- 
 posed to come unto you, that I might have some fruit among 
 you also, even as among other Gentiles." Romans 1:13. And 
 again : "The Gospel bringeth forth fruit in you." Colossians i : 6. 
 And again : "That we should bring forth fruit to God." Romans 
 7 : 4. Paul also desires an increase of fruit in his followers : 
 "Now he that ministereth seed to the sower both minister bread 
 for your food and multiply your seed sown and increase the 
 fruits of your righteousness." H Corinthians 9:10. 
 
 The character of the fruit of the spiritual life is beautifully 
 expressed by Paul as follows : "The fruit of the spirit is love, 
 
i6i 
 
 joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meek- 
 ness, self-control. Against such there is no law." Galatians 5 : 22. 
 This surely is pretty comprehensive and reaches down into the 
 mainsprings of life, the heart of love, and up and out into the 
 manifestations of life as revealed in acts of self-control, meek- 
 ness, gentleness of spirit, kindness of treatment to our fellow- 
 men, and faithfulness in our relations to both God and man. A 
 conversion that is capable of producing such fruit must be con- 
 sidered a success, whether by a radical change or through gradual 
 growth and development. Jesus came into the world that men 
 might have life and that they might have it more abundantly. 
 Spiritual life as it is found in the life and character of Christ 
 Jesus is an essential fruit of the spirit. Those that have the Son 
 have this life. "I am the way, the truth, and the life." "And 
 ye will not come to me that ye might have life." John 5 : 49. 
 Contact and communion with Jesus, our Master, bring us the 
 spiritual life. And this must be a living contact to be vital, 
 for the same reason that the branch must remain in the vine so 
 as to be fruitful. Living relationship with the source of spiritual 
 life is the requisite for fruitfulness. "As the branch cannot bear 
 fruit of itself except it abide in the vine ; no more can ye except 
 ye abide in me." John 15:4. The condition of spiritual fruit- 
 fulness is a vital connection with the sources of all spiritual life 
 and spiritual power. With these conditions fulfilled, the fruitful- 
 ness will follow as a matter of course : "He that abideth in me 
 and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit." John 15:5. 
 It is a fact of the utmost importance that whatever our process 
 of spiritual regeneration may have been or our Christian ex- 
 perience since conversion, if we havq this close and intimate con- 
 nection with the life and character of our Saviour we shall indeed 
 show forth the fruits of the spirit. And if this vital spiritual 
 relationship is lacking, be our professions ever so earnest or our 
 outward lives ever so correct, or our words ever so full of 
 the appearance of charity, then our lives must remain spiritually 
 unfruitful and barren in the sight of God. "Though I speak 
 with the tongues of men or of angels," "though I have the gift 
 of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge," 
 
1 62 
 
 "though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor and have not 
 charity, I am nothing." Professions will not avail, neither will 
 the shadow of godliness : "Not every one that saith unto me, 
 Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven, but he that 
 doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven." Matthew 5 : 21. 
 What are the evidences of conversion as judged by the results 
 of "fruits"? The Lord expects "fruit" in his spiritual vineyard. 
 The character of the fruits of the spirit has been noted. What, 
 now, is the relation of conversion and Christian experience to the 
 matter of Christian f ruitfulness ? Have conversions of the radical 
 type the largest claim upon us when judged by the standard 
 of Christian f ruitfulness ? Are the more violent and more ex- 
 treme types of religious experience in conversion more fruitful of 
 permanent spiritual results than the normal types of simple trust 
 and quiet assurance? If the striking spiritual experience of the 
 emotional type of conversion is the only genuine kind, as some 
 would claim, then manifestly those who have had these brilliant 
 experiences ought to be superior in Christian character or more 
 fruitful in works of love and mercy. If the volcanic religious 
 disturbances found in some extreme cases of emotional conversion 
 are due only to the powerful agency of the Holy Spirit, then the 
 effect of such gracious, supernatural activity should be noticeable 
 and permanent. But is such the case? Most assuredly not. 
 Prof. James has these pertinent remarks about the "fruits" of 
 brilliant religious experience: "Well, how is it with the 
 fruits? If we except the class of preeminent saints whose 
 names illumine history and consider only the usual run of 
 saints, the shop-keeping church members, and ordinary youth- 
 ful or middle-aged recipients of instantaneous conversion, 
 whether at revivals or in the spontaneous course of meth- 
 odistic growth, you will probably agree that no splendor 
 worthy of a wholly supernatural creature fulgurates from them 
 or sets them apart from the mortals who have never experienced 
 that favor." If a special emotional experience in conversion is 
 indispensable to a genuine Christian life and imparts special gifts 
 and graces to those who are privileged to enjoy such brilliant 
 experiences, then there ought to be tangible evidence of such 
 
1 63 
 
 unwonted gracious influences in the visible "fruits'" of character 
 and conduct. But it would be difficult to discover any such con- 
 vincing evidence. It surely cannot be claimed that the Qiristian 
 disciples of the revival type are more fruitful in missionary 
 activity, or more generous in their church benevolences, or more 
 disinterested in their social and political duties or more exemplary 
 in their private and family relationships than those of the non- 
 revival type. And it is equally evident that the members of the 
 non-revival churches, as a class, are just as sincere in their reli- 
 gious professions, just as honest in their business relations, just 
 as exemplary in their personal lives and just as faithful in their 
 social and family duties as the adherents of the revivalistic de- 
 nominations. If it is impossible to detect any difference in life 
 and conduct between the man who entered the kingdom through 
 a brilliant conversion and the one who came by the more quiet 
 process of growth and development, then we may safely conclude 
 that there is no superior value in brilliant emotional experiences, 
 when judged by the standard of fruits of the spirit in the 
 Christian life and character. If the process of conversion through 
 Christian culture and that of conversion through a radical change 
 produces virtually the same spiritual results, namely, the requisite 
 fruits of the spirit, in the majority of cases, then it is important 
 that we spend less time in discussing the relative merits of dif- 
 ferent processes of religious growth and development and more 
 time in emphasizing the fruits of the converted life. "By their 
 fruits ye shall know them." Wherever the fruits of the spirit 
 are manifest, there we may be sure of finding the gracious influ- 
 ences of the spirit active. 
 
 Jonathan Edwards, the greatest promoter of revivals in Colonial 
 times and the author of the most exhaustive work on the Religious 
 Affections, places the greatest emphasis upon the Christian graces 
 as fruits of the spirit. Earnest believer that he was in the 
 emotional type of conversion, he yet recognized the fact that the 
 real test of the Christian life is after all not in special signs 
 and experiences during conversion, but in the possession of the 
 true spirit of Christ and in the production of the necessary fruits 
 of the Christian life enjoined by the Master. And so he makes 
 
164 
 
 these discriminating remarks as to the evidences of conversion. 
 It is no sign that a man is or that he is not a converted man, 
 "if his religious affections are very great or raised very high," 
 so that "they have great effects on the body," or that "those who 
 have these affections are fluent, fervent and abundant in talking 
 of things religious," or that the religious states are accompanied 
 by "texts of Scripture remarkably brought to mind," or that 
 comforts and joys seem to follow awakenings and convictions 
 of conscience in a certain order, or "that persons be zealously en- 
 gaged in the external duties of worship," or that "persons are 
 led with their mouths to praise and glorify God," or that they 
 have great confidence that what they have experienced "is divine 
 and that they are in a good estate," or that they think they can 
 discern "the good estate of others as though it were immediately 
 revealed from heaven." Edwards stoutly maintains that these 
 various states and dispositions are no sign that a person is a 
 Christian or that he is not a Christian, because they can be 
 imitated and counterfeited by Satan. 
 
 On the other hand, according to Edwards, the distinguishing 
 signs of a true spiritual life are such as these : "Affections that 
 are truly spiritual and gracious come from those influences and 
 operations on the heart which are spiritual, supernatural and 
 divine," "founded on the loveliness and moral excellency of divine 
 things," "the mind being enlightened richly and spiritually to 
 understand and apprehend divine things," "gracious affections 
 are attended with Evangelical humiliation," "a dove-like spirit of 
 love, meekness, quietness, forgiveness and mercy, as it appears 
 in Christ," "a Christian tenderness of spirit," "spiritual appetite 
 and longing after spiritual attainments," "fruits in Christian prac- 
 tice." These and other terms abound in almost every page of 
 Edwards' treatise on the "Religious Affections." These are the 
 evidences and unmistakable signs of true religion. And the greatest 
 of these is "fruits in Christian practice." Edwards continues : 
 "Christian practice is the sign of signs in this sense, that it is 
 the great evidence which confirms and crowns all other signs of 
 godliness. There is no one grace of the spirit of God but that 
 Christian practice is the most decisive evidence of the truth of 
 
i65 
 
 it. It is the proper evidence of repentance. Christian practice is 
 the chief of all the signs of saving grace." 
 
 Jesus emphasized the "doing of His will" as the real test of 
 discipleship. He closed His Sermon on the Mount by declaring: 
 "Whosoever heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them shall be 
 likened unto a man who built his house upon the rock." "And 
 everyone that heareth these sayings of mine and doeth them not, 
 shall be likened unto a foolish man who built his house upon the 
 sand." Matthew 7 : 24, 26. Qirist came to do his Father's will. And 
 He wants us to do His will and to keep His commandments. 
 And the doing of His will and the keeping of His commandments 
 find expression in Christian conduct. "He that hath the Son 
 hath life." So we may say, he that hath the spirit doeth the 
 works of the spirit. And the reverse is also true. He that doeth 
 not the works of the spirit hath not the spirit and is therefore 
 none of His. And the "fruits of the spirit" are made manifest 
 by living our lives in the spirit of Christ and by rendering our 
 service in His spirit and in His name. Christ's final word of 
 approval is the recognition of services rendered to His children 
 in his name. The words, "Come ye blessed of my Father," 
 were spoken to those who had ministered to Christ through His 
 children. "For I was an hungered and ye gave me meat. I was 
 thirsty and ye gave me drink. I was a stranger and ye took 
 me in. Naked and ye clothed me. I was sick and ye visited 
 me. I was in prison and ye came unto me." Matthew 25 : 35, 
 36. And when those on the right hand claimed no knowledge of 
 having done these things to Jesus, He said : "Inasmuch as ye have 
 done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done 
 it unto me." Matthew 25 : 40. Failure to show the fruits 
 of the spirit in the spirit of the Master was the cause for con- 
 demnation to those on the left side. "Inasmuch as ye have not 
 done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have not done 
 it unto me." Matthew 25:41. "And these" — the sluggards and 
 drones in the spiritual kingdom — "shall go away into everlasting- 
 punishment," because they failed to produce in their lives the 
 peaceable "fruits" of righteousness in Christian service. Not 
 profession, nor confession, but service is required. "Not every 
 
i66 
 
 one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom 
 of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father who is in 
 heaven." Matthew 7 : 21. 
 
 As we come to the end of our discussion of these serious 
 and important problems, the conviction is forced upon us 
 with ever-increasing impressiveness that the all-essential thing 
 in life is the "spirit" of Jesus Christ himself and the 
 "fruits" of the spirit as revealed in a life of love and 
 service. The possession of the Christ-spirit is the first 
 thing. The entrance to the kingdom is through the gate of 
 simplicity, of trustfulness and of childlike faith. Jesus is will- 
 ing to impart His spirit to all who "hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness," that He may feed them the bread of life and 
 refresh them at the inexhaustible fountain of "living waters." 
 The coming to Christ with hungry hearts and thirsty souls is the 
 first step so that he may give us of His spirit and fill us with His 
 bounty. "Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after 
 righteousness for they shall be filled." And again: "If thou 
 knewest the gift of God and who it is that saith unto thee, 'Give 
 me to drink,' thou wouldst have asked of him and he would have 
 given thee Hving water." "Whosoever drinketh of the water 
 that I shall give him shall never thirst ; but the water that I shall 
 give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into 
 everlasting life." John 4:10, 14. The truth of Jesus and the 
 spirit of His life, appropriated by a living faith, may thus become 
 perennial sources of spiritual power and refreshment. And 
 whether we come into the possessioin of Christ's life and spirit 
 through a process of Christian culture and training, or through 
 a sudden transformation of our spiritual natures in conversion, 
 is matter of small moment so long as we are fully conscious of 
 being in possession of the spirit. We need to come continually in 
 the spirit of childlike trust and teachableness and ask Him to 
 teach us of His wisdom and to inspire us with His zeal and to 
 fill us with His spiritual presence, so that we may be able to 
 show forth His love and wisdom in our lives and to reflect His 
 divine graciousness and beauty in our characters. To live the life 
 of faith, to do the will of Him that saved us and redeemed us, 
 
167 
 
 to love the Lord our God with all our hearts and our neighbors 
 as ourselves, to "follow the Master" in His mission of service 
 and self-surrender, to minister to the lowly and needy, to carry 
 the bread and water of life to the hungry and thirsty souls of 
 God's children, these are some of the duties and privileges imposed 
 upon us as children of God's spiritual kingdom ; and in the faithful 
 and loving performance of these lowly services in the spirit 
 and for the sake of the Master, we do show forth most effectually 
 the "fruits" of the spirit. 
 
 V. Concluding Remarks. 
 
 The great question with us, therefore, should be, "Are we living 
 the life of the spirit and do we shew forth the 'fruits' of the 
 spirit" in our lives here and now. Do we really love the Lord 
 our God with all our hearts and our neighbors as ourselves in 
 the sense that we have an overpowering regard for the interests 
 of God's kingdom and an unselfish and a disinterested desire to do 
 good to our fellow-men? Is it really our supreme delight to do 
 the will of our Father which is in heaven? Is our faith in the 
 Lord Jesus a living, personal faith which takes hold of our 
 lives and which appropriates the mercies and sacrifices of Jesus 
 for spiritual nourishment and refreshment ? Have we surrendered 
 our wills to God's will and our lives to His guidance and control 
 in such a complete and unreserved way that we are ready at 
 all times and under all circumstances to say, "Not my will, but 
 thine, O Lord, be done"? Is our highest aim in life to con- 
 form to the spirit and character of Jesus Christ, who is the express 
 image of the invisible God, so that we may grow up "into Him" 
 in all things and "come into the unity of the faith and of the 
 knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure 
 of the stature of the fulness of Christ" ? Is it the supreme and all- 
 absorbing desire of our lives to be really "emptied of self" so that 
 we may be "filled with all the fulness of God," to the end that our 
 feeble lives may be instruments in the hands of God for the 
 "furtherance of the Gospel," and the building up of His 
 
i68 
 
 kingdom in the hearts of His children. If we can answer these- 
 questions in the affirmative, then we may know absolutely that we 
 are in a state of regeneration and of salvation, whatever our 
 method of conversion or the type of our Christian experience 
 may have been. The important question is not, "How did I 
 become a member of God's spiritual household," or "What were 
 my experiences during conversion," but "Am I a member of the 
 kingdom now?" Not how we entered into the spiritual Zion, or 
 by what road we approached the gates, or what were the con- 
 ditions of being admitted, but the consciousness of the blessed 
 fact of being in the spiritual Zion now and of being permitted to 
 behold its dazzling splendor and to participate in its glorious 
 services and to worship at the feet of Him who sits upon the 
 throne, these are the supreme facts to be considered. Whether we 
 have entered the heavenly Zion through the gate of feeling, 
 or through the gate of intelligence and reason, or through the 
 gate of a childlike trust and simplicity, is a matter of small 
 consequence, so long as we really have entered and passed in 
 "through the gates into the city" of the New Jerusalem, "whose 
 Builder and Maker is God." 
 
 In conclusion, I wish to quote from Pres. King's excellent 
 pamphlet on "Christian Training and the Revival as Methods of 
 Converting Men." I quote rather freely, and the italics are mine. 
 Says Prof. King: "For myself, the conception that best brings 
 together all the types of religious experience and best enables one 
 to do justice to all, that can include the sudden and gradual con- 
 version and the life that seems to have lived always in the light, 
 that can include the methods of both Christian training and the 
 revival, that in particular can do full justice to feeling in religion, 
 and yet indicate its plain limits, and the conception, which at the 
 same time seems to me truest to the lines of Christ's own revela- 
 tion, is the conception of the religious life as a personal relation 
 with the personal God. The conditions and laws of such a life 
 would be those of a deepening friendship. And this thoroughly 
 personal conception seems to me best of all able to do justice 
 to the deepest elements of Christian experience at the same time 
 that it guards most delicately against all possible excesses. It 
 
169 
 
 is able, I believe, to take up into itself all the justifiable elements 
 of mysticism, and yet avoid its errors. 
 
 "And a true mysticism knows that the spirit, reverent of per- 
 sonality, leads to a self-restraint that does not seek the emotional 
 experience simply as such on any conditions, but knowing the 
 supreme psychological conditions of happiness and character and 
 influence, it loses itself in an unselfish love, and in absorbing work, 
 and in rational attention to the great spiritual realities, and under- 
 stands that it must simply let the experiences come. It will have 
 nothing therefore to do with strained emotion or with tJte working 
 up of feeling for its ozmt sake. It seeks health, not merely the 
 signs of health. It recognizes that the supreme joy is joy in 
 personal life, joy in entering into the revelation of a person ; and it 
 believes with reason that a grozving acquaintance with God must 
 have such heights and depths of meaning as no other personal rela- 
 tion can have. True mysticism is therefore not afraid or dis- 
 trustful of true emotion — of joy or peace, of intense longmg or 
 of keen satisfaction — in the religious life. But it views with deep 
 distrust an emotional emphasis in religion which ignores the 
 ethical. It cannot forget that Christ thought that everything 
 must be tested by its fruits in life." 
 
 The true Christian life is a life of faith and trust. Ray Palmer, 
 the author of that precious hymn, "My faith looks up to Thee," 
 has expressed the spirit of a life of simple faith and childlike 
 trust in the following beautiful verses in "Father, Lead On." 
 
 I take pleasure in bringing this treatise on Conversion and Re- 
 ligious Experience to a close in the words of the poet, believing 
 that the beautiful spirit of trustfulness embodied in this devout 
 prayer for spiritual guidance expresses the repentant and sub- 
 missive attitude of heart, out of which all true religious experience 
 must flow. 
 
 FATHER, LEAD ON. 
 
 My Father God^ lead on ! 
 Calmly I follow where Thy guiding hand 
 Directs my steps. I would not trembling stand. 
 
170 
 
 Though all before the way 
 Is dark as night, I stay 
 My soul on Thee, and say : 
 Father, I trust Thy love : lead on. 
 
 Jesus as Thou wilt : lead on ! 
 For I am as a child, and know not how 
 To tread the starless path whose windings now 
 
 Lie hid from mortal ken. 
 
 Although I know not when 
 
 Sweet day will dawn again, 
 Father, I wait Thy will : lead on. 
 
 I ask not why : lead on ! 
 Mislead, Thou canst not, though through days of grief 
 And nights of anguish, pangs without relief, 
 
 Or fears that would o'erthrow 
 
 My faith. Thou bidst me go. 
 
 Thy changeless love, I know. 
 Father, my soul will keep : lead on. 
 
 With Thee is light : lead on ! 
 When dank and chill at eve the night mists fall, 
 O'erhanging all things like a dismal pall. 
 
 The gloom, with dawn hath fled ; 
 
 So, though 'mid shades I tread. 
 
 The dayspring o'er my head, 
 Father, from Thee shall break : lead on. 
 
 The way is peace : lead on ! 
 Made heir of all things, I were yet unblest, 
 Didst Thou not dwell with me and make me rest 
 
 Beneath the brooding wing 
 
 That Thou dost o'er me fling, 
 
 Till Thou thyself shalt bring, 
 Father, my spirit home : lead on. 
 
171 
 
 Thou givest strength : lead on ! 
 I cannot sink while Thy right hand upholds, 
 Nor comfort lack while Thy kind arm enfolds. 
 
 Through all my soul I feel 
 
 A healing influence steal, 
 
 While at Thy feet I kneel, 
 Father, in lowly trust: lead on. 
 
 'Twill soon be o'er : lead on ! 
 Left all behind, earth's heartaches then shall seem 
 Even as memories of a vanished dream ; 
 
 And when of griefs and tears 
 
 The golden fruit appears, 
 
 Amid the eternal years, 
 Father, all thanks be Thine! Lead on. 
 
y 
 

 "^'^^MMr^y 
 
 '- i 
 
 -3 ■'' •' - '^' 
 
 .'5:<- ^- 
 
 •fiy»»i: > "• \ ^'^-:;j;t^^*>v^ ;v^"s:^'^v«vi;''- 
 
 'v-<-.7?.-i'-i*'"i»'AJ 
 
 w " \' r^, J.'J^'m, 
 
 /f/ DATE DUE 
 
 ^^***'''***~Wi iiTa^ 
 
 
 
 -'"**'^ 
 
 
 
 '^■^^'i^l^^,^,^,,,.^ 
 
 
 
 ■^^ ^ *tr. 
 
 
 
 
 •.«*P-*»-«^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 
 
 *- - 
 
 
 
 
 
 ;/ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 j 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 GAY LORD 
 
 PRINTED IN us. A. 
 
 ^fe 
 
 ?^'^^ 
 

 :-Jv 
 
 -r . ,