ne. It never occurred to me to ask whether I was good
enough, or to hesitate over my unfitness, or to find out what I thought
of his church, or ... to wait until I should be satisfied. Satisfied!
I was satisfied. Had I not found my God and my Father? Did he not
love me? Had he not called me? Was there not a Church into which I
might enter? ... Since then I have had direct answers to prayer--so
significant as to be almost like talking with God and hearing his
answer. The idea of God's reality has never left me for one moment."

Here is still another case, the writer being a man aged twenty-seven,
in which the experience, probably almost as characteristic, is less
vividly described:--

"I have on a number of occasions felt that I had enjoyed a period of
intimate communion with the divine. These meetings came unasked and
unexpected, and seemed to consist merely in the temporary obliteration
of the conventionalities which usually surround and cover my life....
Once it was when from the summit of a high mountain I looked over a
gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean
that ascended to the horizon, and again from the same point when I
could see nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on
the blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was
on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors.

What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own identity,
accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a deeper
significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It is in this
that I find my justification for saying that I have enjoyed
communication with God. Of course the absence of such a being as this
would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without its presence."

Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God's presence
the following sample from Professor Starbuck's manuscript collection
may serve to give an idea. It is from a man aged forty-nine--probably
thousands of unpretending Christians would write an almost identical
account.

"God is more real to me than any thought or thing or person. I feel
his presence positively, and the more as I live in closer harmony with
his laws as written in my body and mind. I feel him in the sunshine or
rain; and awe mingled with a delicious restfulness most nearly
describes my feelings. I talk to him as to a companion in prayer and
praise, and our communion is delight