The feelings or sensations raised in us by the gospel and the experience of various religious states are properly called emotions. Feeling is the more common word used in describing these emotions; and persons are apt to express themselves thus: I want a religion that a man can feel; I have deep feelings on religious matters; or, my feelings convince me that I am a Christian. What these feelings are it is somewhat difficult to define. Generally they are a pleasurable excitement of the sensibility; a sensation of joy or satisfaction; a degree of happiness short of that state in which a man gives some outward demonstration of an exulting and joyful Spirit.

      Emotions do not exist without a cause, but different causes may produce kindred, if not the same, emotions. That religion, in its comprehensive sense of justification, adoption, pardon, etc., should be a cause sufficiently strong to produce emotions or feelings in unquestionably true. Indeed, when the nature of the change is contemplated, and also the prospects and promises connected therewith, it would be wholly unnatural if it did not produce emotions. View a man as he is represented in a carnal state, and then contrast that state with the one into which regeneration introduces him, and if he is conscious of the change he would be other than human to have no consequent emotions--if he had no feeling. Experience testifies to this fact, and fully corroborates the deductions of science.

      But the emotions, those feelings, are not a final test of our religious state. If different causes may produce kindred emotions, it is possible that a man may be deceived if he concludes from the feelings that he has, that he must be a Christian. The data upon which to determine our moral relationship to God are much better than emotions or feelings. We are nowhere in the Bible directed to examine our emotions, our feelings, in order to ascertain whether we are born again. But knowing from other data that we are children of God, we are exhorted to rejoice and be glad in the Lord.

      Religion only indirectly affects the sensibility. A man knows that he is a sinner. This knowledge is not the result of feeling, but whatever feeling he may have is the result of the knowledge of his moral state and its consequence. In the Bible he is directed what to do that his sins may be covered and his transgressions forgiven, that he may become a child of God, an heir of heaven, and have a claim to all the promises of the word. He does as he is directed to do. Of his so doing he is and must be clearly conscious--he must know it. And as the promise of pardon is suspended upon the fulfillment of the specified conditions, when he has done what he is required to do, he may know by faith that he is reconciled to God and is a new creature in Christ Jesus. Then, contemplating the change, the new relationship, the promises, the hopes of the gospel--in short, the great salvation, he will feel--cannot but feel. And if he comes thus to have feelings they amount to something, they become a species of evidence of the change that has been wrought. But if he has certain feelings without this previous knowledge, they may prove seriously deceptive.

      Here we apprehend is the great danger of laying so much stress upon feeling. That we want Christian sensibility, tenderness of heart, yes, a breaking up of the very fountain of our hearts, a melting that shall dissolve the hardness and coldness of our hearts into joyful tears or ejaculations of praise, is not to be denied; but we want much more a clear, antecedent consciousness that we have passed from death to life. We want the testimony of our consciousness, of our affections for God's children, the evidence of a holy, godly life, an exemplary walk, chaste conversation, honesty, equity and rightness in all our dealings as a ground work for rational emotions. Experience and observation have alike taught us how deceptive feelings are without such precedent evidences. The most emotional, blustering, noisy, shouting, jumping Christians are not the best as a rule. These are the signs of feeling, and are right in so far as the feelings have right causes, but it is the cause that need more looking after than the effects.

      It is but natural that a man should have some emotions in contemplating the beauties of a rich and productive farm, with its alternating fields of grass, and grain, and corn, and orchards; with its undulations, its thriving shade trees, its brooks and rills. He may look upon all these riches of nature worked out of its hidden laboratory and enjoy it and feel emotion highly gratifying and pleasurable, without as much as inquiring his relation to it other than a beholder. He may, as a lover of the beautiful in nature, feel more deeply than the proprietor; but all his acts show that he is not the proprietor. Thus may it be with this emotional religion. A man may contemplate God in his infinite perfections; he may dwell upon the blessedness of a Christian, both present and prospective, and it may raise very strong emotions; but where is the deed to all this property--the inheritance of the saints? When it comes to personal possession and the advantages resulting therefrom it is necessary that we have more than emotions to fall back on--we need the deed, the heart-registered witness of the Spirit that we are born of God.

[The Church Advocate 40 (July 21, 1875): 4.]

      Christian H. Forney's "Emotion in Religion" was first published in The Church Advocate, Vol. 40, No. 12 (July 21, 1875), p. 4. The electronic version has been transcribed from a copy of the article printed from a microfilmed edition of the newspaper held by the State Library of Pennsylvania. Thanks to Adams Memorial Library for arranging for the interlibrary loan, and to St. Vincent College Library for the use of its microfilm reader/printer.

      Inconsistencies in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and typography have been retained.

      Addenda and corrigenda are earnestly solicited.

Ernie Stefanik
Derry, PA

Created 26 June 1999.
Updated 13 July 2003.