lways assumed that only its own type of religious
experience can be perfect; you must first be nailed on the cross of
natural despair and agony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be
miraculously released.

It is natural that those who personally have traversed such an
experience should carry away a feeling of its being a miracle rather
than a natural process. Voices are often heard, lights seen, or
visions witnessed; automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always
seems, after the surrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous
higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense
of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and
jubilant as well to warrant one's belief in a radically new substantial
nature.

"Conversion," writes the New England Puritan, Joseph Alleine, "is not
the putting in a patch of holiness; but with the true convert holiness
is woven into all his powers, principles, and practice. The sincere
Christian is quite a new fabric, from the foundation to the top-stone.
He is a new man, a new creature."

And Jonathan Edwards says in the same strain: "Those gracious
influences which are the effects of the Spirit of God are altogether
supernatural--are quite different from anything that unregenerate men
experience. They are what no improvement, or composition of natural
qualifications or principles will ever produce; because they not only
differ from what is natural, and from everything that natural men
experience in degree and circumstances, but also in kind, and are of a
nature far more excellent. From hence it follows that in gracious
affections there are [also] new perceptions and sensations entirely
different in their nature and kind from anything experienced by the
[same] saints before they were sanctified.... The conceptions which
the saints have of the loveliness of God, and that kind of delight
which they experience in it, are quite peculiar, and entirely different
from anything which a natural man can possess, or of which he can form
any proper notion."

And that such a glorious transformation as this ought of necessity to
be preceded by despair is shown by Edwards in another passage.

"Surely it cannot be unreasonable," he says, "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 delivers us, in
order that we may know and feel the importance of salva