. . . Once it was when from the
summit of a high mountain I looked over a gashed and corrugated
landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to
the horizon, and again from the same point when I could see
nothing beneath me but a boundless expanse of white cloud, on the
blown surface of which a few high peaks, including the one I was
on, seemed plunging about as if they were dragging their anchors.
What I felt on these occasions was a temporary loss of my own
identity, accompanied by an illumination which revealed to me a
deeper significance than I had been wont to attach to life. It
is in this that I find my justification for saying that I have
enjoyed communication with God. Of course the absence of such a
being as this would be chaos. I cannot conceive of life without
its presence."
Of the more habitual and so to speak chronic sense of God's
presence the following sample from Professor Starbuck's
manuscript collection may serve to give an idea. It is from a
man aged forty-nine--probably thousands of unpretending
Christians would write an almost identical account.
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