ill
cover an enormous number of cases psychologically and leaves all the
religious importance to the result which it has on any other theory."[5]

[Footnote 5: Letters of William James, Vol. II, p. 57.]

In Luther, Augustine and St. Paul, and a great fellowship beside, this
stress of the divided self was both immediate and intense. Such as these
through the consciousness of very real fault--and this is true of
Augustine and St. Paul--or through a rare spiritual sensitiveness and an
unusual force of aspiration--and this is true of many others--did not
need any conviction of sin urged upon them from the outside. They had
conviction enough of their own. But all these have been men and women
apart, intensely devout by nature, committed by temperament to great
travail of soul and concerned, above all, for their own spiritual
deliverance. But their spiritual sensitiveness is by no means universal,
their sense of struggle not a normal experience for another type of
personality. The demand, therefore, that all religious experience be
cast in their particular mould, and that religion be made real to every
one through the same travail of soul in which it was made real to them,
carries with it two very great dangers: first, that some semblance of
struggle should be created which does not come vitally out of
experience; and second, that the resultant peace should be artificial
rather than true, and therefore, should not only quickly lose its force
but really result in reactions which would leave the soul of the one so
misled, or better perhaps, so mishandled, emptier of any real sense of
the reality of religion than to begin with.

_Protestantism Found Its Authority in an Infallibly Inspired Bible_

Now this is too largely what has happened in evangelical Protestantism.
The "twice-born" have been set up as the standard for us all; they have
demanded of their disciples the same experience as those through which
they themselves have passed. Since this type of religious experience has
always been the more ardent and vivid, since the churches in which least
has been made of it have generally tended to fall away into routine and
some want of real power, we have had, particularly since Jonathan
Edwards in America and the Wesleys in England, a recurrent insistence
upon it as the orthodox type of religious experience. Partly through
inheritance and partly in answer to its own genius Protestantism has
built up a system of theology tend