tion, 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 condemnation 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."

Such quotations express sufficiently well for our purpose the doctrinal
interpretation of these changes. Whatever part suggestion and
imitation may have played in producing them in men and women in excited
assemblies, they have at any rate been in countless individual
instances an original and unborrowed experience. Were we writing the
story of the mind from the purely natural-history point of view, with
no religious interest whatever, we should still have to write down
man's liability to sudden and complete conversion as one of his most
curious peculiarities.

What, now, must we ourselves think of this question? Is an
instantaneous conversion a miracle in which God is present as he is
present in no change of heart less strikingly abrupt? Are there two
classes of human beings, even among the apparently regenerate, of which
the one class really partakes of Christ's nature while the other merely
seems to do so? Or, on the contrary, may the whole phenomenon of
regeneration, even in these startling instantaneous examples, possibly
be a strictly natural process, divine in its fruits, of course, but in
one case more and in another less so, and neither more nor less divine
in its mere causation and mechanism than any other process, high or
low, of man's interior life?

Before proceeding to answer this question, I must ask you to listen to
some more psychological remarks. At our last lecture, I explained the
shifting of men's centres of personal energy within them and the
lighting up of new crises of emotion. I explained the phenomena as
partly due to explicitly conscious processes of thought and will, but
as due largely also to the subconscious incubation and maturing of
motives deposited by the experiences of life. When ripe, the results
hatch out, or burst into flower. I have now to speak of the
subconsci