THE WHOLE, is Dr. Maudsley's final test of a belief. This is our
own empiricist criterion; and this criterion the stoutest
insisters on supernatural origin have also been forced to use in
the end. Among the visions and messages some have always been
too patently silly, among the trances and convulsive seizures
some have been too fruitless for conduct and character, to pass
themselves off as significant, still less as divine. In the
history of Christian mysticism the problem how to discriminate
between such messages and experiences as were really divine
miracles, and such others as the demon in his malice was able to
counterfeit, thus making the religious person twofold more the
child of hell he was before, has always been a difficult one to
solve, needing all the sagacity and experience of the best
directors of conscience. In the end it had to come to our
empiricist criterion: By their fruits ye shall know them, not by
their roots. Jonathan Edwards's Treatise on Religious Affections
is an elaborate working out of this thesis. The ROOTS of a man's
virtue are inaccessible to us. No appearances whatever are
infallible proofs of grace. Our practice is the only sure
evidence, even to ourselves, that we are genuinely Christians.

"In forming a judgment of ourselves now," Edwards writes, we
should certainly adopt that evidence which our supreme Judge will
chiefly make use of when we come to stand before him at the last
day. . . . There is not one grace of the Spirit of God, of the
existence of which, in any professor of religion, Christian
practice is not the most decisive evidence. . . . The degree in
which our experience is productive of practice shows the degree
in which our experience is spiritual and divine."