night, floods of light and glory seemed to pour through my soul, and oh, how I was changed, and everything became new. My horses and hogs and even everybody seemed changed.”
This man’s case introduces the feature of automatisms, which in suggestible subjects have been so startling a feature at revivals since, in Edwards’s, Wesley’s, and Whitfield’s time, these became a regular means of gospel propagation. They were at first supposed to be semi-miraculous proofs of “power” on the part of the Holy Ghost; but great divergence of opinion quickly arose concerning them. Edwards, in his Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, has to defend them against their critics; and their value has long been matter of debate even within the revivalistic denominations. They undoubtedly have no essential spiritual significance, and although their presence makes his conversion more memorable to the convert, it has never been proved that converts who show them are more persevering or fertile in good fruits than those whose change of heart has had less violent accompaniments. On the whole, unconsciousness, convulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utterances, and suffocation, must be simply ascribed to the subject’s having a large subliminal region, involving nervous instability. This is often the subject’s own view of the matter afterwards. One of Starbuck’s correspondents writes, for instance:—