So the new faith entered upon the stage of history, not as a human work, but as an elemental experience of the spirit, as the power of God. The historian will estimate this experience differently, according to his fundamental standpoint. But he cannot contest its actuality. And if he should happen to interpret it otherwise, then the psychologist intervenes and points out that the experience of Pentecost did not remain an isolated event, but has worked on the history of the world with unexampled power, and that a permanent religious union of minds has resulted from it. Such a permanent union of minds would be psychologically inexplicable, had not man’s fundamental aptitude for the divine found, and did it not continually find, precisely in this experience its fulfillment and its satisfaction. So the experience of Pentecost corresponds to a basic fact of the human spirit, its ordination to God, and thereby has an importance that transcends the particular experience, an importance as wide as humanity. All other individual religious experiences, such as those of Simon Magus, of Dositheus, of Elchasai, are lacking in this distinctive quality of effecting a permanent union of minds. They vanish from history as quickly as they come, and by that very fact prove themselves false experiences, possessing no human and universal importance fundamentally rooted in the spirit of man.

The experience of Pentecost was a torch which was never again to be extinguished in humanity. That is the decisive fact which the historian may not ignore. On his own principles the psychologist can conclude that this is no case of mass-suggestion or hallucination, but a genuine, religious experience, a permanent grip of the soul by powers which are not of this world. While the historian examines this psychological fact in the light of historical knowledge and ascertains in detail what enormous opposition that Pentecostal experience encountered in the Jewish and pagan world, how the Christian faith had to struggle not only with political forces but also with religious and cultural enemies, nay with the very desires of the heart in the martyrdom of the body and more bitter trials of the soul, how the gospel of Christ crucified, so incredible and paradoxical in itself and proclaimed by such simple, poor and unlettered men, yet in a few centuries conquered the world (cf. St. Augustine, “De civ Dei,” xxii, 5), he passes out of the region of mere psychology on to the plane of historical reality and attains the highest degree of historical certainty. Thus an unprejudiced appreciation of the psychological and historical results of the miracle of Pentecost may even provide a rational basis for St. Paul’s testimony to the Gospel: “It is the power of God unto salvation for everyone that believeth therein” (Rom. i, 16).