The First Symptom of Conversion

“And Saul arose from the earth; and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man.” — Acts ix. 8.

The immediate effect of Saul’s illumination was a sense of darkness. It seems” a wild paradox. But in the spiritual world it is the experience or every enlightened man. It is true even of secular development. The first manifestation of every mental light is a sense of mystery. It does not exist in the child. Children have not a feeling of mental blindness. They are not conscious of difficulty, are not overawed by the things around them. They do not experience the need of picking their steps or walking warily. They appear, to themselves, to see everything plainly. The reason is that the light has not come and that therefore the sense of blindness has not come. The first effect of larger light will be decreasing confidence. There will come by-and-by a stage called wonder. What is wonder? I should define it to be the soul’s sense of its inability to see. We begin to marvel at a thing when we find that we do not see 276

through it; and what enables us to have the experience is an increase of mental light. The feeling of incompetency in the inward eye is created by the new flash of intelligence. So is it in the religious life. When God illuminates a soul the new power of vision manifests itself as mist. When Saul of Tarsus gets his enlightenment he experiences for the first time an inability to walk alone. The immediate gift of God to him is a sense of insufficiency. He had not felt it yesterday; his prevalent feeling yesterday was a sense of individual power. But to-day the light has come and the self-sufficiency has died. He is unable to find his way along the same road on which yesterday he strutted with the most confident and fearless step. It is the same road, the same company, the same outward man; what makes the difference? An inward something — light. It is that which makes him feel the sense of impotence; it is that which makes him cry, “O wretched man that I am!” If a grown man got his sight for the first time, he would for the first time feel blind. He would cease to find his way in the old paths; he would need to be led about awhile. So with God’s illumination. It makes old things new, and therefore I do not recognise them; it causes me to cry out for the leading of my Father. 277

Lord, Thou hast arrested me on my Damascus journey; Thou hast transformed self-consciousness into humility. I set out on the road with boundless belief in myself; I felt no obstacle, I experienced no difficulty. Suddenly, at a turning of the way my soul grew paralysed. The confidence faded. The world no longer stretched before me as a pleasure-ground. There came a mist over the scene, and I could not find my way. It all happened in the meeting with one man — a man from Nazareth. Before I met Him, my pride of self was unbounded; I said in my heart, “I shall carve my own destiny.” But one glance at the man of Nazareth laid me low. My fancied glory became ashes; my imagined strength became weakness; I beat upon my breast and cried, “Unclean!” Shall I repine because I met that man! Shall I weep because a flash of light at a street corner threw all my greatness into shade! No, my Father, for the shade is the reflex of the sheen. It is because I have seen Thy beauty that humanity has grown dim. It is enlargement that has made me humble. I have gazed for a moment on a perfect ideal, and its brightness has eclipsed my candle. It is not night, but day, that blinds me to my own possessions. It is light that makes me loathe myself. It is sunshine that reveals my 278

soiledn8Ss. It is dawn that tells me of my darkness. It is morning that discloses my mean attire. It is the glow that spots my garments. It is the clearness that numbers my clouds. O God, my God, I only lose my way when I am lit by Theei