PRESENT DAY FACTORS IN NEW TESTAMENT STUDY. 51 



a bye-word for vice and licentiousness, and as we read the 

 terrible catalogue of sins in St. Paul's exhortation to the 

 Corinthians (i Corinthians vi) we cannot fail to be aware of 

 something of the change which must have been involved, as men 

 turned from such degrading vices to holiness and virtue. " And 

 such were some of you : but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, 

 but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the 

 Spirit of our God" (i Corinthians vi, 11). 



And as we pass for a moment beyond the New Testament we 

 are conscious of the same transformation from the power of 

 Satan unto God. " St. Augustine," writes Eomanes, " after thirty 

 years of age, and other fathers, bear testimony to a sudden, 

 enduring, and extraordinary change in themselves, called 

 conversion. Kow this experience has been repeated and testified 

 to by countless millions of civilized men and women in all 

 nations and all degrees of culture. It signifies not whether the 

 conversion be sudden or gradual, though, as a psychological 

 phenomenon, it is more remarkable when sudden and there is 

 no symptom of mental aberration otherwise. But, even as a 

 gradual growth in mature years, its evidential value is not less " 

 {Thoughts on Religion, p. 162). 



But psychology has much to say, not only to conversion, but 

 to the glossolalia, as Dr. Kirsopp Lake so fully reminds us in 

 one of his appendices to his recent work on St. Paul's Epistles. 

 What he says is sufficiently startling. The fullest investigation 

 of the glossolalia is perhaps owing to a recent essay iDy an 

 American student, E. Mosiman, an essay which he has published 

 in German, giving us a most valuable historical sketch of the 

 various phenomena connected with the speaking in tongues. The 

 writer is not prepared to deny that the speaking in tongues was 

 a gift which had its place in the opening life of the Christian 

 Church. But still it was connected, not with the highest, but 

 with the lowest stages of religious growth and Church life, and 

 the greatness of St. Paul is seen in the fact that these ecstatic 

 conditions, at all events in Corinth, were subordinated by him 

 to those gifts of the Spirit which were the most important and 

 the most essential ; those gifts, e.g., which find a place in 

 St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians, in which he notes as the 

 fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, 

 goodness, faithfulness, meekness, temperance — Galatians v, 22 

 {Das Zungenreden, p. 133, 1911). 



In conclusion, it is my earnest hope that this consideration, 

 brief and sketchy as it is, of the three factors which were 

 mentioned at the outset, and of the literature connected with 



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