"I got to thinkin’ like this – ‘Here’s me preachin’ grace. An’ here’s them people gettin’ grace so hard they’re jumpin’ an’ shoutin’. Now they say layin’ up with a girl comes from the devil. But the more grace a girl got in her, the quicker she wants to go out in the grass.’ An’ I got to thinkin’ how in hell, s’cuse me, how can the devil get in when a girl is so full of the Holy Sperit that it’s spoutin’ out of her nose an’ ears. You’d think that’d be one time when the devil didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell. But there it was." His eyes were shining with excitement.
– John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 4. Jim Casy is the novel’s most spiritual and philosophical thinker. Fallen away from his evangelical pursuits, the ex-preacher is wrestling with questions about sin and sanctity. Here he appears to question how sleeping with girls after his sermons could have been a sin, when the girls were full of the "Holy Sperit" at the time. He sees the girls as willing participants filled with God’s "grace" while engaged in sexual acts with him.