elf into the mold of any other man's
experience. There is no regular routine in spiritual transformation.
Some men come in on a high tide of feeling, like Billy Bray, the
drunken miner, who, released from his debasing slavery and reborn into
a vigorous life, cried, "If they were to put me into a barrel I would
shout glory out through the bunghole! Praise the Lord!" Some men come
in like Bushnell, the New England scholar and preacher, who, when he
was an unbelieving tutor at Yale, fell on his knees in the quiet of his
study and said, "O God, I believe there is an eternal difference
between right and wrong and I hereby give myself up to do the right and
to refrain from the wrong." Some men break up into the new life
suddenly like the Oxford graduate who, having lived a dissolute life
until six years after his graduation from the university in 1880,
picked up in his room one day Drummond's "Natural Law in the Spiritual
World," and, lo! the light broke suddenly--"I rejoiced there and then
in a conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in
less than twenty-four hours." Some come slowly, like old John
Livingstone, who said, "I do not remember any particular time of
conversion, or that I was much cast down or lift up." Spiritual
transformation is infinitely various because it is so infinitely vital;
but behind all the special forms of experience stands the colossal fact
that men can be transformed by the Spirit of God.

That this experience of inward enlightenment and transformation should
ever be neglected or minimized or forgotten or crowded out is the more
strange because one keeps running on it outside religion as well as
within. John Keats, when eighteen years old, was handed one day a copy
of Spenser's poems. He never had known before what his life was meant
to be. He found out that day. Like a voice from heaven his call came
in the stately measures of Spenser's glorious verse. He knew that he
was meant to be a poet. Upon this master fact that men can be inwardly
transformed Christ laid his hand and put it at the very center of his
gospel. All through the New Testament there is a throb of joy which,
traced back, brings one to the assurance that no man need stay the way
he is. Among the gladdest, solemnest words in the records of our race
are such passages in the New Testament as this: Fornicators,
adulterers, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revelers, extortioners, such
were some of you; but y