CHARLES CULLIS (Episcopal)
CHARLES CULLIS (Episcopal)
I was brought up in a very respectable church, and knew nothing about conversion. At
about the age of seventeen I felt that I ought to be a Christian. How, I did not know. Nobody told me. I supposed the only way would be to read the Bible and pray, and I went at it. When I was converted I do not know, but I am very sure I was. I don’t know the date, for there was no particular sensation or emotion to mark it.
Some four or five years after that I met with a great sorrow, and I consecrated myself
wholly to God. Soon after I thought about being something for the Master, and it came about, in answer to prayer, in the establishment of a Consumptives’ Home and other institutions. My thought then was how to conduct this work–whether or not I should beg. The promises of God were brought very forcibly to my mind as to whether they were true or not. I puzzled over them for a few days, and the more I puzzled and thought the more doubt began to came in, until one day I took my Bible between my two hands, and, holding it up, in my room alone, I said, “I will believe every word inside of these two covers whether I understand it or not.”
From that moment to this I have never had the least shadow of doubt of the truth of God’s
Word, and have acted upon the promises and lived according to them for nearly twenty-five years.
This was my justified state, in which I found a good deal of comfort; but how should I get
rid of the natural temperament, and the failing, which was a great one with me, of getting irritated over very little things, and then getting a vexed with myself because I did get irritated! I had spent hours and hours upon my knees, with tears running down my cheeks, praying that the Lord would help me to overcome this; but He did not.
One day, in prayer, the Lord’s Prayer came home to me very blessedly by the Spirit, in its
closing sentences, “Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.” It flashed through my soul in a moment, “Thine is the power, and, Lord, I have been asking Thee to help me to overcome this; thine is the power to do it all”; and with joy unspeakable in my soul I got up from my knees
praising God for victory. Whether this was my reception of sanctification or not I do not know. It is the only very marked experience of deliverance that I ever had. I believe that years ago He gave me a clean heart and baptized me with the Holy Ghost. There have been occasional slight lapses through weakness of faith, but the light has been burning steadily from that day to this. My Saviour has become more and more precious to me, and I am conscious that the blood cleanseth, and the Holy Ghost abides.
CHARLES CULLIS, BOSTON, MASS., Feb. 24, 1888.
Source: “Forty Witnesses” by S. Olin Garrison
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HOW THEY ENTERED CANAAN (A Collection of Holiness Experience Accounts) Compiled by Duane V. Maxey
Vol. I — Named Accounts