All this indicates that in a certain sense the history of mysticism and religious experience may well go back to the very beginnings of humanity. Yet in another and perhaps more important sense they are modern inventions. By thus naturalizing religious experience, James hopes to make of it the starting-point for a new science of religion, and perhaps even one day for a new line of religious apologetics. The hope persisted until very recently in the publications of Alistair Hardy's Religious Experience Research Unit, established at Manchester College, Oxford. After the publication of Stephen Katz' symposium, people quickly acknowledged that religious experiences are everywhere couched in the locally avail-able symbolic vocabulary.
Every religious experience is a datable human cultural expression.
Here we come across a most important point. The physical world of Nature and even the social world were by Calvin drastically secularized. So was reason, with the effect that there was no way to God either through the public world of empirical fact or by philosophy. The only way to God was through the impact of Scripture, God's self-revelation, within and upon the individual soul. Against this background one can see both why Calvinism and the Protestant type of appeal to religious experience once seemed so strong, and also why they have now collapsed so ignominiously.