It was important for Roberts to have
supernatural abilities to discern true and false conversion, since the
methodology he employed in the Welsh holiness revival to produce regeneration
was not, as in the Bible, bold, powerful, and clear preaching of the gospel
(Romans 10:17; 1 Peter 1:23-25), but getting people to stand up.[1]  Those who stood up were assumed to have been
converted.  Roberts would “walk up and
down the isles,” look at specific people, and ask them, “Are you ready to stand
up now and confess Christ?”[2]  People would think, “Why can’t I?  I am religious!” and then “stand up to
confess” when Roberts asked them to.[3]  Roberts would, at times, call on “[a]ll who
love Jesus to stand,” as well as “all church members” and “[a]ll who love
Christ more than anything else,”[4]
and was able to get great crowds to stand up in this way.[5]  In  an
atmosphere charged with extreme emotion, but little careful preaching, Roberts
called on unsaved people to stand,” and then “men [would] . . . rise up and
confes[s] Christ.”[6]  “[A]midst prayers and exhortations in Welsh
and English,” people “rose one by one” and were assumed to be converted because
they did so, while the “press circulated stories about Evan Roberts’s
irreverence, hysteria, mesmerism, and improper pressures upon impressionable
females.”[7]

            Roberts’s coworkers described scenes
of “feverish emotionalism” where “the air was electrical” as “young men, nerved
by the sympathetic atmosphere . . . r[ose], from floor and gallery [of a chapel
meeting house, and] followed the formula set by the first, ‘I get up to confess
Christ.’”[8]  Large groups would go to the front of church
buildings, and, in the words of one of Roberts’s converts, be “asked . . . to
confess Jesus Christ as our Saviour. . . . I did not understand it . . . [t]he
thing was entirely new to me . . . but I accepted everything from him because I
looked up to him . . . [by this confession] we had an interest in heaven.”[9]  If not enough people stood up, Roberts would
ask again.  For example, “at the meeting
in Van Road,
Caerphilly . . . Evan asked, ‘Will everyone who will confess Christ rise?’  When only forty responded, Evan professed to
be astonished.  ‘What!  Is this the number?’ he cried. . . . So the
people were challenged again. They realized that they had not come to be
entertained but to ‘show their side.’”[10]  Sometimes,
however, getting up one time would not work, and one would need to stand up
more than once to go to heaven; for example, one man stood up twice because a
spirit being told him in a vision that he had lost his salvation:

I could stand up to confess since I had been faithful
to all the chapel meetings and was morally upright . . . I did stand up to
confess Christ . . . [but a few days later] I saw . . . I felt Jesus coming to
me and I was going to him . . . and as He came towards me—He was on the
cross—He moved His hand and pushed me away. 
“If God has deserted me,” [I thought], “only a lost state awaits me.”[11]

The man
therefore stood up a second time and said, “Dear friends, God has departed from
me; I have no hope; only total loss awaits me; pray for me.”  People responded, “[I]f you are lost, where
are we others?”[12]

            At another meeting, Roberts
exercised his supernatural powers to predict that “everybody present in that
meeting was going to ‘come to Christ’ that day,”[13]
indicating that all present, including ministers and Roberts himself, were
unconverted and were going to be saved that day by standing up, or that
equating standing up with conversion produces incredible confusion and many
false professions—unless the prophecy was to be taken allegorically.  However, at the end of the day, “all . . .
had stood up to declare themselves followers of Christ,”[14]
so it appears that Roberts’s prophecy was not simply an allegory.  A very sympathetic eyewitness described
Roberts’s procedure of producing conversions by putting pressure on people to
stand up:

Mr. Evan Roberts, toward the
close of the meeting, asks all who from their hearts believe and confess their
Saviour to rise.  At the meetings at
which I was present nearly everybody was standing.  Then for the sitting remnant the storm of prayer
rises to the mercy seat.  When one after
another rises to his feet, glad strains of jubilant song burst from the
watching multitude.[15]

Getting people
to stand up, repeating such calls to stand when not enough do so, putting
pressure on the unconverted to stand up by having everyone watch them, and
getting people to think that all who do not stand at Mr. Roberts’s call are at
that instant claiming to be openly and actively against Christ is radically
different from Biblical evangelistic methodology and a horrible recipe for
producing spurious salvation decisions. 
Indeed, it was even immediately apparent that often people would stand
and “confess Chris[t] to escape notice” that would come on them were they to
stay seated.[16]  Therefore, one must be a firm believer in
Evan Roberts’s supernatural powers to accept the validity of such a procedure.  Only the
authority of the marvels surrounding Roberts’s work could validate what would
otherwise be a very clearly anti-supernatural, fleshly, and devilish rejection
of truly supernatural regeneration for the natural work of arising from a
chair.  For unless Roberts could do what
no other man could, and see into everyone else’s heart, the overwhelming
majority of people whom he deceived into thinking that standing up is a sure
sign of supernatural conversion and the new birth were in fearful danger of
remaining unconverted, being deceived, and being eternally damned, while
churches would end up filled with religious but unregenerate people, to the
destruction of Christianity and the glory of the devil.  Supernatural conversion by the
miraculous power of the Spirit through the preached Word would be replaced with
supernatural marvels performed by Evan Roberts and a merely natural outward
response erroneously equated with regeneration. 

Roberts,
however, was able to use his supernatural powers to detect when people stood up
but were not born again on that account:

[On] one occasion Roberts
refused to leave the building, when the service had been declared closed by the
ministers, because he said that one man in an indicated gallery, a Welshman, he
was certain had not confessed Christ as he ought to have done.  The minister in charge of that gallery
“tested” the people and reported that every one had confessed Christ.  Roberts was not satisfied:  six times was the appeal made during the next
25 minutes and not until the sixth test did a man come forward and admit that
he had not been sincere in professing as a convert with the rest.  Roberts directed the minister to speak to the
man, and after a short talk he too gave in.[17]

In such a
manner, false professions apparently could be avoided.  Furthermore, visions from the spirit world
confirmed that people had indeed been truly saved through the ministry of Evan
Roberts.  A man who became an evangelist
after professing conversion through Roberts’s ministry recounted that he had
felt “petrified . . . tossed about . . . puzzled . . . crushed . . . disturbed
. . . and . . . mobbed,” but then saw “a panoramic vision of Jesus moving through
a crowd and a blind, beseeching beggar, whom he recognized as himself,
pleading, ‘Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.’”  The man related, “A sweet voice spoke within
my spirit so clearly, unmistakably, [and] audibly, that the voices of all creation
could never succeed in drowning its message: 
‘Be of good cheer, thy sins are forgiven thee.’  Heaven came into my heart that very moment.”[18]  Ministers also claimed to be converted
because of visions.  For instance, an
elder testified:  “I was led up to the
great white throne, where the Father was seated in his eternal glory. The Holy
Spirit came to me and dressed me in the Son’s righteousness.  When He had clothed me in white raiment He
introduced me to the Father.  ‘Here he is
for you,’ said He to the Father, ‘what do you think of him in the Son’s
righteousness?’ . . . Thanks be to Him!”[19] 

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