5. More about possession A study of states of possession suggests that the brain function of man has altered very little, if at all, over thousands of years. The same phenomenon is reported in higher civilizations and in more primitive societies, in the distant past and still to this day. The art of prehistoric hunting peoples in Europe includes representations of human dancers dressed in animal costumes. For example, one of the most perfect engraved drawings on deer antler, found at Teyjat, is of three small masked dancers disguised as chamois bucks. They are jumping in upright position, and their mighty leaps cause the skins to puff out and swirl. The legs of youthful dancers protrude from under the chamois skins.’1 Rhythmic dancing and leaping are among the principal methods of inducing states of ecstacy in which a man feels taken over by a force or being greater than himself. The dancer dressed as an animal, imitating the animal’s characteristic movements and sounds, bringing all his mental and emotional resources to bear with intense concentration on pretending to be the animal, can come to feel that he actually is it. He may also feel that he is a supernatural being, a god or spirit, since he is after all in a ‘supernormal’ state of mind, markedly different from his ordinary, everyday condition. The most famous of the animal dancers of prehistoric art, the ‘great sorcerer’ of the Trois Freres cave, wears the hide and antlers of a stag, the mask of an owl, bear-like paws and the tail of a horse. It seems likely that he was both a god and the priest who represented the god, not merely in the sense of impersonating him but in the sense of feeling himself to be the living god walking on the earth.
The Australian aborigines who, when first investigated by anthropologists in the nineteenth century, lived in a Stone Age culture, perform long and complex traditional rituals in which they identify themselves with their ancestors and penetrate the dimension of time in which the ancestors live, called the Dream-time or Dreaming. They do this by acting out the story of the ancestors’ adventures, by dressing up as the ancestors, by dancing and chanting. Through intense concentration and elaborate mimicry carried on over many hours they feel that they have become their ancestors: ‘the chanting goes on and on; the decorated actors appear; but they are no longer the men of a few hours previously. They are now the heroes of the Dreaming.’2
In the ancient world kings and priests acted the parts of deities in dramatic rituals and no doubt at solemn moments felt that they literally embodied the gods whom they represented. At the Sed-festival in Egypt, for example, the pharaoh, who even in his ordinary everyday frame of mind, was regarded as a god, was given a fresh access of divine energy by being assimilated to the god Osiris, who had been killed and revived again. After long and exhausting ceremonies, attended by statues of the gods brought from all over the country, the pharaoh was dressed as Osiris, was formally identified with him, and was told: ‘Thou beginnest thy renewal, beginnest to flourish again like the infant god of the Moon, thou art young again year by year, like Nun at the beginning of the ages, thou art reborn by renewing thy festival of Sed.’3
It was not only through acting or dancing that people might be possessed. In ancient Mesopotamia all forms of sickness, including psychological illnesses, were put down to possessing spirits and so numerous were the demons and evil ghosts that might fasten on a man that fear of them has been described as ‘one of the most important factors in the daily life of a Babylonian’.4 Specialist priests exorcized the sufferers. Their principal technique was to transfer the disease-demon to an animal or object by means of impressive and repeated incantations which, with a disturbed patient in a state of heightened suggestibility, may well have had the desired effect.
In Israel, where diseases and psychological disorders were again put down to invading demons, there was also a long tradition of inspired prophecy, in which the prophet in an ecstatic state believed himself to be the mouthpiece of God, the temporary vessel of the divine, which spoke through him.5 In the Greek world at certain celebrated oracles the gods possessed priestesses whom we should now call ‘mediums’ or ‘sensitives’ and spoke through their utterances in trance. The pronouncements of Apollo at Delphi, delivered through a priestess in trance and interpreted by priests, were regarded with the utmost respect and affected all sorts of important political and personal decisions, even though they were famous for being double-edged and deceptive. In the Aeneid Virgil gives a graphic description of the sibyl of Cumae, possessed by Apollo. Cumae was the oldest Greek colony in Italy and behind the temple of Apollo on the hill there, among the caves still to be seen in the rock, the sibyl had her lair. ‘There is a cleft in the flank of the Euboean Rock forming a vast cavern. A hundred mouthways and a hundred broad tunnels lead into it, and through them the Sibyl’s answer comes forth in a hundred rushing streams of sound.’ While Aeneas prayed to the god, ‘the prophetess who had not yet submitted to Apollo ran furious riot in the cave, as if in hope of casting the god’s power from her brain. Yet all the more did he torment her frantic countenance, overmastering her wild thoughts, and crushed her and shaped her to his will.’ She spoke his answer and ‘the cavern made her voice a roar as she uttered truth wrapped in obscurity. Such was Apollo’s control as he shook his rein till she raved and twisted the goad which he held to her brain.’6
In Tibet, until the Communist conquest, the Dalai Lama and his advisers consulted the state oracle on all important matters, the oracle being a young monk through whose mouth the god spoke. This oracle decided whether the last Dalai Lama was to leave the country when Chinese troops invaded. ‘In order to function as an oracle,' Heinrich Harrer explained, ‘the monk has to be able to dislodge his spirit from his body, to enable the god of the temple to take possession of it and to speak thorough his mouth. At that moment the god is manifested in him,' Harrer described the actual possession as follows: ‘He began to concentrate . . . He looked as if the life were fading out of him. Now he was perfectly motionless, his face a staring mask. Then suddenly, as if he had been struck by lightning, his body curved upward like a bow. The onlookers gasped. The god was in possession. The medium began to tremble; his whole body shook and beads of sweat stood out on his forehead . . . The trembling became more violent. The medium’s heavily laden head wavered from side to side, and his eyes started from their sockets. His face was swollen and covered with patches of hectic red. Hissing sounds pierced through his closed teeth. Suddenly he sprang up. Servants rushed to help him, but he slipped by them and to the moaning of the oboes began to rotate in a strange exotic dance . . . The medium became calmer. Servants held him fast and a Cabinet Minister stepped before him and threw a scarf over his head. Then he began to ask questions carefully prepared by the Cabinet about the appointment of a governor, the discovery of a new Incarnation, matters involving war and peace. The Oracle was asked to decide on all these things.’7
One of the major techniques of theurgy, developed as part of the pagan resistance to the rising tide of Christianity in the early centuries after Christ, was to induce the presence of a god in a human being, and the philosopher Proclus defined theurgy as ‘in a word all the operations of divine possession'. The god’s words, spoken through the human medium, were recorded: ‘Seraphis, being summoned and housed in a human body, spoke as follows.’ A distinction was made where consciousness was completely in abeyance and superseded by the god, and cases where the medium’s normal consciousness persisted. E. R. Dodds has pointed to the similarities between theurgy and modern Spiritualism, though the theurgists were concerned with communications from gods, not from the human dead.8
The pagans lost the battle against Christianity and theurgy was banned in the sixth century, but the Christians themselves in fact had specialized in another phenomenon associated with spirit possession, ‘speaking in tongues’. Oh the day of Pentecost, not long after the Ascension, Jesus’s followers were gathered together. ‘And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.’9
This phenomenon of possession by the Holy Spirit continued and evidently played an important role in impressing pagans, making converts, and cementing the faith of the converted. ‘From Paul’s first letter to the Church in Corinth we have as nearly a detailed picture of the assemblies of a church of the first generation of Christians as has come down to us . . . Paul implies that the assemblies were open to non-Christians as well as Christians, and that they were often noisy and confusing. Several might simultaneously “speak with tongues”. At the same time two or more might be “prophesying”, that is, voicing a message which they believed had been given them by the Spirit, perhaps in the form of a “revelation”. There were some who were gifted with the ability to “interpret tongues”, or to put into the common speech the meaning of what had been spoken in an unknown tongue. There were those who broke out in spontaneous prayer in a “tongue” or in the vernacular. Apparently it was the custom for the hearers to say “Amen” -- “so be it” -- a sign of emphatic agreement, at the end of a prayer, especially if it were one of thanksgiving. There was singing, perhaps at times in a “tongue”, at other times with a psalm.’10
The picture could scarcely be closer to that of the revivalist and fundamentalist type of worship, of which I give some examples in later chapters, in which possession by the Spirit of God creates and reinforces convinced faith among people in a highly emotional and highly suggestible state of mind. When Christ was baptized in the Jordan, the Spirit of God descended upon him, or ‘into him’, according to one early manuscript of St Mark’s gospel, and it was held in the early Church that it was through this possession that Christ became imbued with the divine. St Paul, in his turn, experienced the possession by the divine which enabled him to say, ‘It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.’11 The religion of the early Church and its appeal to the spiritually unsatisfied was rooted in this direct experience of the presence of the divine. ‘The distinctive quality of the mysticism which is the essence of Pauline and Johannine Christianity is indicated in the term “Christ-mysticism”. The experience in which it centres is union with Christ . . . Since Christ is Spirit, he can live in men — can possess them, and speak through them, and become the inner principle of their being . . . and they can live in him.’12
Early on, however, St Paul found that possession by the Spirit and the gift of tongues caused serious difficulties, precisely because they created a state of fervent belief which, though edifying, was uncritical and confused. On the day of Pentecost itself, St Peter found it necessary to tell the astonished onlookers that the possessed Christians were not drunk, and St Paul, who was worried by the irrationality of the phenomenon, lectured the Corinthian Christians on the need for greater order and good sense, and the importance of interpreting the ‘tongues’. ‘For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit . . . Therefore, he who speaks in a tongue should pray for the power to interpret. For if I pray in a tongue my spirit prays but my mind is unfruitful ... If, therefore, the whole church assembles and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are mad? ... do not forbid speaking in tongues, but all things should be done decently and in order.’13
St Paul himself, however, had experienced a severe attack of dissociative mental collapse on the road to Damascus, in which he had been converted to Christianity and had suddenly and uncritically embraced beliefs which he had previously been busy attacking. And he made it clear to the Corinthians that he himself had the gift of tongues and spoke in them more often than anybody; in other words, he still had recurrent bouts of ecstatic hysterical trance.
The gift of tongues is still present and observable in various religious movements; All cases, when carefully examined, seem to be typical hysterical and dissociative phenomena, and there is really nothing to suggest that the early Christian speaking in tongues was anything different.
It is now time to return to some of the earlier observations which aroused my own interest in this whole topic. These are Wesley’s recorded experiences of the power of the Holy Spirit and the Devil’s nefarious activities. There is no doubt about the effectiveness of Wesley’s preaching methods. He made converts in droves and the church he founded is still one of the largest in the Christian world. People coming to hear him, especially in the early days of his preaching, were presented with a dire alternative; either they must accept God’s forgiveness, obtain ‘saving faith’ and adopt a new way of life, or they would suffer an eternity of torment in hell. The results were experiences of the type with which we are now familiar.
In Volume II of his Journal 14 we read:
1739, Monday, Jan. 1st. Mr. Hall, Kinchin, Ingham, Whitefield, Hutchins, and my brother Charles were present at our lovefeast in Fetter Lane, with about sixty of our brethren. About three in the morning, as we were continuing instant in prayer, the power of God came mightily upon us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground. As soon as we were recovered a little from that awe and amazement at the presence of His Majesty we broke out with one voice, ‘We praise Thee, O God; we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord’.
And again:
While I was speaking one before me dropped down as dead, and presently a second and a third. Five others sank down in half an hour, most of whom were in violent agonies. The ‘pains’ as 'of hell came about them, the snares of death overtook them.’ In their trouble we called upon the Lord, and He gave us an answer of peace. One indeed continued an hour in strong pain, and one or two more for three days; but the rest were greatly comforted in that hour, and went away rejoicing and praising God.
And again:
About ten in the morning, J. C., as she was sitting at work, was suddenly seized with grievious terrors of mind, attended with strong trembling. Thus she continued all the afternoon; but at the society in the evening God turned her heaviness into joy. Five or six others were also cut to the heart this day, and soon after found Him whose hand makes whole; as did one likewise who had been mourning many months, without any to comfort her.
Wesley was, however, much more critical of the same sort of phenomena when they resulted from rival preaching.
Jan. 28, 1739. I went ... to a house where was one of those commonly called French prophets. After a time she came in. She seemed about four or five and twenty, of an agreeable speech and behaviour. She asked why we came, I said, ‘To try the spirits, whether they be of God.’ Presently after she leaned back in her chair, and seemed to have strong workings in her breast, with deep sighings intermixed. Her head and hands, and, by turns, every part of her body, seemed also to be in a kind of convulsive motion. This continued about ten minutes, till, at six, she began to speak (though the workings, sighings, and contortions, of her body were so intermixed with her words, that she seldom spoke half a sentence together) with a clear, strong voice, ‘Father, Thy will. Thy will be done ’ . . . She spoke much (all as in the person of God, and mostly in Scripture words) of the fillfilling of the prophecies, the coming of Christ how at hand, and the spreading gospel all over the earth . . . Two or three of our company were much affected, and believed she spoke by the Spirit of God. But this was in no wise clear to me. The motion might be either hysterical or artificial . . . But I left the matter alone; knowing this, that ‘if it be not of God, it will come to nought.’
Wesley’s own preaching continued to produce similar effects, especially in those who had become very excited or angry with him.
March 2nd, 1739. One of the most surprising instances of His power which I ever remember to have seen was on the Tuesday following, when I visited one who was above measure enraged at this new way, and zealous in opposing it ... I broke off the dispute, and desired we might join in prayer, which she so far consented to as to kneel down. In a few minutes she fell in an extreme agony, both of body and soul, and soon after cried out with the utmost earnestness, ‘Now I know I am forgiven for Christ’s sake’ . . . And from that hour God hath set her face as a flint to declare the faith which before she persecuted.
March 8th, 1739. In the midst of the dispute one who sat at a small distance felt, as it were, the piercing of a sword, and before she could be brought to another house, whither I was going, could not avoid crying out aloud, even in the street. But no sooner had we made our request known to God than He sent help from His holy place.
Southey, in his biography, of Wesley, was impressed by the fact that the most striking psychological manifestations were caused, not by the ‘emotional and overwhelmingly eloquent preaching of Whitefield’, but by the ‘logical, expository, and eminently theological discourses of John Wesley’. He could not explain it; he also reported the interesting ‘conditioning’ effect that not only the spoken but even the printed word of Wesley was liable to produce the same results. But Wesley’s quiet but eloquent insistence on the crucial choice confronting his listeners could be terrifying,
When preaching on the alternatives of hell or salvation by faith to condemned felons in Newgate Prison, who were due to be hanged very soon anyway, his message was peculiarly effective.
April 26th and 27th, 1739. While I was preaching at Newgate on these words, ‘He that believeth hath everlasting life!’ ... Immediately one, and another, and another sunk to the earth; they dropped on every side as thunderstruck. One of them cried aloud. We besought God in her behalf, and He turned her heaviness into joy. A second being in the same agony, we called upon God for her also; and He spoke peace unto her soul . . . One was so wounded by the sword of the Spirit that you would have imagined she could not live a moment . . . All Newgate rang with the cries of those whom the word of God cut to the heart.
Later on, Wesley was forced to wonder whether some of these manifestations were the work of the Devil rather than the Holy Ghost, as in a case like the following:
23rd October, 1739. Returning in the evening, I was extremely pressed to go back to a young woman, (Sally Jones) in Kingswood. The fact I nakedly relate, and leave every man to his own judgment on it. I went. She was nineteen or twenty years old; but, it seems, could not write or read. I found her on the bed, two or three persons holding her. It was a terrible sight. Anguish, horror and despair, above all description, appeared in her pale face. The thousand distortions of her whole body showed how the dogs of hell were gnawing her heart. The shrieks intermixed were scarce to be endured. But her stony eyes could not weep. She screamed out, as soon as words could find their way, ‘I am damned, damned; lost for ever. Six days ago you might have helped me ... I have (now) given myself to him. His I am. Him I must serve. With him I must go to hell. I will be his. I will serve him. I will go with him to hell. I cannot be saved. I will not be saved. I must, I will, I will be damned.’ She then began praying to the devil . . . We continued in prayer till past eleven; when God in a moment spoke peace into her soul, first of the first tormented, and then of the other. And they both joined in singing praise to Him who had ‘stilled the enemy and the avenger'.
Wesley’s converts were often thought of as mad because of their behaviour. Wesley’s mother wrote to him on 13 December 1740:
I am somewhat troubled at the case of poor Mr McGune, I think his wife was ill-advised to send for that wretched fellow Monroe [sic], for by what I hear, the man is not lunatic, but rather under strong conviction of sin, and hath much more need of a spiritual than a bodily physician.
Wesley and Dr Monro, head physician of Bethlem Hospital, then sited at Moorfields, were on bad terms. But Wesley highly praised the treatment given to the mentally ill at the new St Luke’s Hospital in Old Street, also near to Wesley’s Chapel in City Road. Religious possession was often being mistaken for madness, and vice versa. And madness at that time was generally treated by combating the body’s supposed ‘abnormal’ humours and vapours, which had now taken the place of evil spirits as a supposed medical causative factor. But unfortunately, patients still received the same sort of treatments which had been regarded for many centuries as essential to drive ‘spirits’ of all sorts out of madmen.
Wesley's abreactive shock techniques could have interesting effects in some states of depression accompanied by religious preoccupations, as seen in the following:
January 21st, 1739. We were surprised in the evening, while I was expounding in the Minories. A well-dressed, middle-aged woman suddenly cried out as in the agonies of death. She continued to do so for some time, with all the signs of sharpest anguish of the spirit. When she was a little recovered, I desired her to call upon me the next day. She then told me that about three years before she was under strong convictions of sin, and in such terror of mind that she had no comfort in anything, nor any rest day or night ... A physician was sent for accordingly, who ordered her to be blooded, blistered and so on. But this did not heal her wounded spirit. So that she continued much as she was before; till the last night.
He had even developed some interesting physiological theories as to what might be happening: 'How easy it is to suppose that strong, lively and sudden apprehension of the hideousness of sin and the wrath of God, and the bitter pains of eternal death, should affect the body as well as the soul, suspending the present laws of vital union and interrupting or disturbing the ordinary circulation and putting nature out of its course.’
William James in his Varieties of Religious Experience15 concluded that:
In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually check or reinforce one another ... a new perception, a sudden emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration, will make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new structure remains permanent.
He went on to quote Professor Leuba’s conclusion that:
The ground of the specific assurance in religious dogmas is then an affective (emotional) experience. The objects of faith may even be preposterous; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakeable certitude. The more startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems, the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated motions.16
This is what Breuer also noted in dealing with the occurrence of a ‘hypnoid’ state of brain activity in situations of stress, leading to uncritical acceptance of certain ideas. It is worth remembering that Wesley wanted to convert his hearers to a set of beliefs which may well seem to be, on the face of it, unlikely: that God had a son who was born of a virgin and lived on the earth for a time long ago in Palestine, and died and rose from the dead and was taken up into heaven: that they had achieved faith in the presence and power of God’s Spirit; that their past sins were now forgiven them, and that they were sure to go to heaven rather than burn for eternity in hell-fire. Wesley found to his surprise that conversion to these beliefs was, on his methods, always something which happened suddenly. The explanation is surely that they could only be accepted in a hypnoid and suggestible state of brain activity. It seems very unlikely, in fact, that so strange a set of beliefs could ever be accepted as a result of purely intellectual processes.
Many other religious sects have relied on states of possession and trance to inculcate faith. In the early days of the Quakers, so called because they shook and trembled before the Lord, men and women and small children foamed at the mouth and roared aloud. Their leader, George Fox, described what happened to one of their critics, Captain Drury:
This Captain Drury, though he sometimes carried fairly, was an enemy to me and to Truth, and opposed it; and when professors came to me (while I was under his custody) and he was by, he would scoff at trembling, and call us Quakers, as the Independents and Presbyterians had nicknamed us before. But afterwards he once came to me and told me that, as he was lying on his bed to rest, in the day time, he fell atrembling, that his joints knocked together, and his body shook so that he could not get off the bed; he was, so shaken that he had not strength left, and cried to the Lord. And he felt His power was upon him . . . and said he never would speak against the Quakers more, and such as trembled at the word of God.17
George Salmon, who was Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, published in 1859 a factual account of supposed possession by the Holy Ghost, in the great Belfast revival of that year; the after-effects of which have profoundly influenced the religious life of the town right up to the present day.18Strong men burst into tears; women fainted, and went off in hysterics: The piercing shrieks of those who called aloud for mercy, and the mental agony from which they suffered, were, perhaps, the most affecting that you could imagine. The penitents flung themselves on the floor, tore their hair, entreated all around to pray for them, and seemed to have the most intense conviction of their lost state in the sight of God.
He went on to say that:
The physical affections are of two kinds, (1) The patient either becomes deeply affected by the appeals which he or she may have heard, and bursts into the loudest and wildest exclamations of sorrow, and continues praying and pleading with God for mercy, sometimes for hours; or (2) falls down completely insensible, and continues in this state for different periods varying from about one or two days . . . During continuance of the state (2) the person affected remains perfectly tranquil, apparently unconscious of everything going on around; the hands occasionally clasped as in prayer, the lips moving, and sometimes the eyes streaming with tears; the pulse generally regular, and without any indications of fever . . . and the persons who have recovered from it represent it as the time of their ‘conversion’. There is a most remarkable expression in their countenances, a perfect radiance of joy, which I have never seen on any other occasion. I would be able to single out the persons who have gone through this state by the expression of their features.
In Russia, well into this century, the Holy Ghost has manifested itself in a variety of strange ways, as among the sect of Khlysty:
They claimed to be inspired with the Word and to incarnate Christ. They attained this heavenly communion by the most bestial practices, a monstrous combination of the Christian religion with pagan rites and primitive superstitions. The faithful used to assemble by night in a hut or in a forest clearing, lit by hundreds of tapers. The purpose of these radenyi, or ceremonies, was to create a religious ecstasy, an erotic frenzy. After invocations and hymns, the faithful formed a ring and began to sway in rhythm, and then to whirl round and round, spinning faster and faster. As a state of dizziness was essential for the ‘divine flux’, the master of ceremonies flogged any dancer whose vigour abated. The radenyi ended in a horrible orgy, everyone rolling on the ground in ecstacy, or in convulsions. They preached that he who is possessed by the ‘Spirit’ belongs not to himself but to the ‘Spirit’ who controls him and is responsible for all his actions and for any sins he may commit.19
Finally, the extraordinary effectiveness of methods of this sort in altering a person’s beliefs, interrupting the normal ‘flow of consciousness’ and allowing uncritical acceptance of new and strange beliefs, which are afterwards held with absolute conviction, is reported once again by Thomas Butts, who examined the effects of the supposed work of the Holy Ghost or the Devil among Wesley’s followers: ‘As to persons crying out or being in fits, I shall not pretend to account exactly for that, but only make this observation: it is well known that most of them who have been so exercised were before of no religion at all, but they have since received a sense of pardon, have peace and joy in believing, and are now more holy and happy than ever they were before. And if this be so, no matter what remarks are made on their fits.’20
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Notes:1 Johannes Maringer, The Gods of Prehistoric Man, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1960, pp. 102-3
2 A. P. Elkin, ‘Australia’, in Man, Myth & Magic, Purnell, London 1970-72, vol. 1, p. 180
3 E. O. James, The Beginnings of Religion, Hutchinson, London, p. 65
4 S. H. Hooke, Babylonian and Assyrian Religion, Hutchinson, London 1953, p. 77
5 See J. Lindblom, Prophecy in Ancient Israel, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1962
6 Virgil, Aeneid, translated by W. F. Jackson Knight, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1956, pp. 148-50
7 Heinrich Harrer, Seven Tears in Tibet, translated by Richard Graves, Reprint Society, London 1955, pp. 206-8
8 See E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, University of California Press, 1951, appendix 1; ‘Theurgy’, in Man, Myth & Magic, vol. 7, pp. 2821-4
9 Acts 2 : 2-4
10 Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christianity, Harper, New York 1953, p. 196
11 Galatians 2: 20
12 Sidney Spencer, Mysticism in World Religion, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth 1963, pp. 216-17
13 I Corinthians 14
14 C. Kelly, Journal of John Wesley, Standard Edition, London 1909-16
15 W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans Green, London 1914
16 H. Leuba, Amer. Journ. Psychology, 1895, 7, p. 345
17 The Journal of George Fox, Everyman Edition, Dent, London
18 G. Salmon, The Evidence of the Work of the Holy Spirit, Hodges, Smith, Dublin 1859
19 F. Youssoupoff, Lost Splendour, Cape, London 1953
20 W. L. Doughty, John Wesley, Epworth Press, London 1955