conversion experience. The first one to be noted is just this sense of
higher control. It is not always, but it is very often present. We
saw examples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere. The
need of such a higher controlling agency is well expressed in the short
reference which the eminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makes to
the crisis of his own conversion. It was at Naples in his early
manhood, in the summer of 1827.

"My sadness," he says, "was without limit, and having got entire
possession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent external
acts to the most secret thoughts, and corrupted at their source my
feelings, my judgment, and my happiness. It was then that I saw that
to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my reason and my will,
which were themselves diseased, would be to act like a blind man who
should pretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of the other
equally blind one. I had then no resource save in some INFLUENCE FROM
WITHOUT. I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost; and what the
positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing
home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the
first time in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it
answered the needs of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external
supernatural action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them
away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as
he is of the rest of nature. Renouncing then all merit, all strength,
abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other title
to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw myself on
my knees and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life. From this day
onwards a new interior life began for me: not that my melancholy had
disappeared, but it had lost its sting. Hope had entered into my
heart, and once entered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I
then had learned to give myself up, little by little did the rest."[130]

[130] I piece together a quotation made by W. Monod, in his book la
Vie, and a letter printed in the work: Adolphe Monod: I,. Souvenirs
de sa Vie, 1885, p. 433.

It is needless to remind you once more of the admirable congruity of
Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such
experiences. In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously is
can do absolutely nothing. It is completely