Varieties of Religious Experience — Lecture 10 part 2 - Conversion - Concluded

The believers in the non‐natural character of sudden conversion have had practically to admit that there is no unmistakable class‐mark distinctive of all true converts.

The super‐normal incidents, such as voices and visions and overpowering impressions of the meaning of suddenly presented scripture texts, the melting emotions and tumultuous affections connected with the crisis of change, may all come by way of nature, or worse still, be counterfeited by Satan.

The real witness of the spirit to the second birth is to be found only in the disposition of the genuine child of God, the permanently patient heart, the love of self eradicated.

And this, it has to be admitted, is also found in those who pass no crisis, and may even be found outside of Christianity altogether.

Throughout Jonathan Edwards’s admirably rich and delicate description of the supernaturally infused condition, in his Treatise on Religious Affections, there is not one decisive trait, not one mark, that unmistakably parts it off from what may possibly be only an exceptionally high degree of natural goodness.

In fact, one could hardly read a clearer argument than this book unwittingly offers in favor of the thesis that no chasm exists between the orders of human excellence, but that here as elsewhere, nature shows continuous differences, and generation and regeneration are matters of degree.

All which denial of two objective classes of human beings separated by a chasm must not leave us blind to the extraordinary momentousness of the fact of his conversion to the individual himself who gets converted.

There are higher and lower limits of possibility set to each personal life.

If a flood but goes above one’s head, its absolute elevation becomes a matter of small importance; and when we touch our own upper limit and live in our own highest centre of energy, we may call ourselves saved, no matter how much higher some one else’s centre may be.

A small man’s salvation will always be a great salvation and the greatest of all facts _for him_, and we should remember this when the fruits of our ordinary evangelicism look discouraging.

Who knows how much less ideal still the lives of these spiritual grubs and earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, might have been, if such poor grace as they have received had never touched them at all?

(125) If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class standing for a grade of spiritual excellence, I believe we shall find natural men and converts both sudden and gradual in all the classes.

The forms which regenerative change effects have, then, no general spiritual significance, but only a psychological significance.

We have seen how Starbuck’s laborious statistical studies tend to assimilate conversion to ordinary spiritual growth.

Another American psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe,(126) has analyzed the cases of seventy‐seven converts or ex‐candidates for conversion, known to him, and the results strikingly confirm the view that sudden conversion is connected with the possession of an active subliminal self.

Examining his subjects with reference to their hypnotic sensibility and to such automatisms as hypnagogic hallucinations, odd impulses, religious dreams about the time of their conversion, etc. , he found these relatively much more frequent in the group of converts whose transformation had been “striking,” “striking” transformation being defined as a change which, though not necessarily instantaneous, seems to the subject of it to be distinctly different from a process of growth, however rapid.

(127) Candidates for conversion at revivals are, as you know, often disappointed: they experience nothing striking.

Professor Coe had a number of persons of this class among his seventy‐seven subjects, and they almost all, when tested by hypnotism, proved to belong to a subclass which he calls “spontaneous,” that is, fertile in self‐ suggestions, as distinguished from a “passive” subclass, to which most of the subjects of striking transformation belonged.

His inference is that self‐suggestion of impossibility had prevented the influence upon these persons of an environment which, on the more “passive” subjects, had easily brought forth the effects they looked for.

Sharp distinctions are difficult in these regions, and Professor Coe’s numbers are small.

But his methods were careful, and the results tally with what one might expect;

and they seem, on the whole, to justify his practical conclusion, which is that if you should expose to a converting influence a subject in whom three factors unite: first, pronounced emotional sensibility; second, tendency to automatisms; and third, suggestibility of the passive type;

you might then safely predict the result: there would be a sudden conversion, a transformation of the striking kind.

Does this temperamental origin diminish the significance of the sudden conversion when it has occurred?

Not in the least, as Professor Coe well says; for “the ultimate test of religious values is nothing psychological, nothing definable in terms of _how it happens_, but something ethical, definable only in terms of _what is attained_.

”(128) As we proceed farther in our inquiry we shall see that what is attained is often an altogether new level of spiritual vitality, a relatively heroic level, in which impossible things have become possible, and new energies and endurances are shown.

The personality is changed, the man _is_ born anew, whether or not his psychological idiosyncrasies are what give the particular shape to his metamorphosis.

“Sanctification” is the technical name of this result; and erelong examples of it shall be brought before you.

In this lecture I have still only to add a few remarks on the assurance and peace which fill the hour of change itself.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ One word more, though, before proceeding to that point, lest the final purpose of my explanation of suddenness by subliminal activity be misunderstood.

I do indeed believe that if the Subject have no liability to such subconscious activity, or if his conscious fields have a hard rind of a margin that resists incursions from beyond it, his conversion must be gradual if it occur, and must resemble any simple growth into new habits.

His possession of a developed subliminal self, and of a leaky or pervious margin, is thus a _conditio sine qua non_ of the Subject’s becoming converted in the instantaneous way.

But if you, being orthodox Christians, ask me as a psychologist whether the reference of a phenomenon to a subliminal self does not exclude the notion of the direct presence of the Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as a psychologist I do not see why it necessarily should.

The lower manifestations of the Subliminal, indeed, fall within the resources of the personal subject: his ordinary sense‐material, inattentively taken in and subconsciously remembered and combined, will account for all his usual automatisms.

But just as our primary wide‐awake consciousness throws open our senses to the touch of things material, so it is logically conceivable that _if there be_ higher spiritual agencies that can directly touch us, the psychological condition of their doing so _might be_ our possession of a subconscious region which alone should yield access to them.

The hubbub of the waking life might close a door which in the dreamy Subliminal might remain ajar or open.

Thus that perception of external control which is so essential a feature in conversion might, in some cases at any rate, be interpreted as the orthodox interpret it: forces transcending the finite individual might impress him, on condition of his being what we may call a subliminal human specimen.

But in any case the _value_ of these forces would have to be determined by their effects, and the mere fact of their transcendency would of itself establish no presumption that they were more divine than diabolical.

I confess that this is the way in which I should rather see the topic left lying in your minds until I come to a much later lecture, when I hope once more to gather these dropped threads together into more definitive conclusions.

The notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not at this point of our inquiry to be held to _exclude_ all notion of a higher penetration.

If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get access to us only through the subliminal door.

(See below, p. 515 ff.

) ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Let us turn now to the feelings which immediately fill the hour of the conversion experience.

The first one to be noted is just this sense of higher control.

It is not always, but it is very often present.

We saw examples of it in Alline, Bradley, Brainerd, and elsewhere.

The need of such a higher controlling agency is well expressed in the short reference which the eminent French Protestant Adolphe Monod makes to the crisis of his own conversion.

It was at Naples in his early manhood, in the summer of 1827. “My sadness,” he says, “was without limit, and having got entire possession of me, it filled my life from the most indifferent external acts to the most secret thoughts, and corrupted at their source my feelings, my judgment, and my happiness.

It was then that I saw that to expect to put a stop to this disorder by my reason and my will, which were themselves diseased, would be to act like a blind man who should pretend to correct one of his eyes by the aid of the other equally blind one.

I had then no resource save in _some influence from without_.

I remembered the promise of the Holy Ghost; and what the positive declarations of the Gospel had never succeeded in bringing home to me, I learned at last from necessity, and believed, for the first time in my life, in this promise, in the only sense in which it answered the needs of my soul, in that, namely, of a real external supernatural action, capable of giving me thoughts, and taking them away from me, and exerted on me by a God as truly master of my heart as he is of the rest of nature.

Renouncing then all merit, all strength, abandoning all my personal resources, and acknowledging no other title to his mercy than my own utter misery, I went home and threw myself on my knees, and prayed as I never yet prayed in my life.

From this day onwards a new interior life began for me: not that my melancholy had disappeared, but it had lost its sting.

Hope had entered into my heart, and once entered on the path, the God of Jesus Christ, to whom I then had learned to give myself up, little by little did the rest.

”(129) It is needless to remind you once more of the admirable congruity of Protestant theology with the structure of the mind as shown in such experiences.

In the extreme of melancholy the self that consciously _is_ can do absolutely nothing.

It is completely bankrupt and without resource, and no works it can accomplish will avail.

Redemption from such subjective conditions must be a free gift or nothing, and grace through Christ’s accomplished sacrifice is such a gift.

“God,” says Luther, “is the God of the humble, the miserable, the oppressed, and the desperate, and of those that are brought even to nothing; and his nature is to give sight to the blind, to comfort the broken‐hearted, to justify sinners, to save the very desperate and damned.

Now that pernicious and pestilent opinion of man’s own righteousness, which will not be a sinner, unclean, miserable, and damnable, but righteous and holy, suffereth not God to come to his own natural and proper work.

Therefore God must take this maul in hand (the law, I mean) to beat in pieces and bring to nothing this beast with her vain confidence, that she may so learn at length by her own misery that she is utterly forlorn and damned.

But here lieth the difficulty, that when a man is terrified and cast down, he is so little able to raise himself up again and say, ‘Now I am bruised and afflicted enough; now is the time of grace; now is the time to hear Christ.

’ The foolishness of man’s heart is so great that then he rather seeketh to himself more laws to satisfy his conscience.

‘If I live,’ saith he, ‘I will amend my life: I will do this, I will do that.

’ But here, except thou do the quite contrary, except thou send Moses away with his law, and in these terrors and this anguish lay hold upon Christ who died for thy sins, look for no salvation.

Thy cowl, thy shaven crown, thy chastity, thy obedience, thy poverty, thy works, thy merits?

what shall all these do?

what shall the law of Moses avail?

If I, wretched and damnable sinner, through works or merits could have loved the Son of God, and so come to him, what needed he to deliver himself for me?

If I, being a wretch and damned sinner, could be redeemed by any other price, what needed the Son of God to be given?

But because there was no other price, therefore he delivered neither sheep, ox, gold, nor silver, but even God himself, entirely and wholly ‘for me,’ even ‘for me,’ I say, a miserable, wretched sinner.

Now, therefore, I take comfort and apply this to _myself_.

And this manner of applying is the very true force and power of faith.

For he died _not_ to justify the righteous, but the _un_‐righteous, and to make _them_ the children of God.

”(130) That is, the more literally lost you are, the more literally you are the very being whom Christ’s sacrifice has already saved.

Nothing in Catholic theology, I imagine, has ever spoken to sick souls as straight as this message from Luther’s personal experience.

As Protestants are not all sick souls, of course reliance on what Luther exults in calling the dung of one’s merits, the filthy puddle of one’s own righteousness, has come to the front again in their religion; but the adequacy of his view of Christianity to the deeper parts of our human mental structure is shown by its wildfire contagiousness when it was a new and quickening thing.

Faith that Christ has genuinely done his work was part of what Luther meant by faith, which so far is faith in a fact intellectually conceived of.

But this is only one part of Luther’s faith, the other part being far more vital.

This other part is something not intellectual but immediate and intuitive, the assurance, namely, that I, this individual I, just as I stand, without one plea, etc. , am saved now and forever.

(131) Professor Leuba is undoubtedly right in contending that the conceptual belief about Christ’s work, although so often efficacious and antecedent, is really accessory and non‐essential, and that the “joyous conviction” can also come by far other channels than this conception.

It is to the joyous conviction itself, the assurance that all is well with one, that he would give the name of faith _par excellence_.

“When the sense of estrangement,” he writes, “fencing man about in a narrowly limited ego, breaks down, the individual finds himself ‘at one with all creation.

’ He lives in the universal life; he and man, he and nature, he and God, are one.

That state of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement of moral unity, is the _Faith‐state_.

Various dogmatic beliefs suddenly, on the advent of the faith‐state, acquire a character of certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith.

As the ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is irrelevant.

But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith‐state, it is a gross error to imagine that the chief practical value of the faith‐state is its power to stamp with the seal of reality certain particular theological conceptions.

(132) On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending desires to one direction; a growth which expresses itself in new affective states and new reactions; in larger, nobler, more Christ‐like activities.

The ground of the specific assurance in religious dogmas is then an affective experience.

The objects of faith may even be preposterous; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude.

The more startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems, the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated notions.

”(133) The characteristics of the affective experience which, to avoid ambiguity, should, I think, be called the state of assurance rather than the faith‐ state, can be easily enumerated, though it is probably difficult to realize their intensity, unless one have been through the experience one’s self.

The central one is the loss of all the worry, the sense that all is ultimately well with one, the peace, the harmony, the _willingness to be_, even though the outer conditions should remain the same.

The certainty of God’s “grace,” of “justification,” “salvation,” is an objective belief that usually accompanies the change in Christians; but this may be entirely lacking and yet the affective peace remain the same—you will recollect the case of the Oxford graduate: and many might be given where the assurance of personal salvation was only a later result.

A passion of willingness, of acquiescence, of admiration, is the glowing centre of this state of mind.

The second feature is the sense of perceiving truths not known before.

The mysteries of life become lucid, as Professor Leuba says; and often, nay usually, the solution is more or less unutterable in words.

But these more intellectual phenomena may be postponed until we treat of mysticism.

A third peculiarity of the assurance state is the objective change which the world often appears to undergo.

“An appearance of newness beautifies every object,” the precise opposite of that other sort of newness, that dreadful unreality and strangeness in the appearance of the world, which is experienced by melancholy patients, and of which you may recall my relating some examples.

(134) This sense of clean and beautiful newness within and without is one of the commonest entries in conversion records.

Jonathan Edwards thus describes it in himself:— “After this my sense of divine things gradually increased, and became more and more lively, and had more of that inward sweetness.

The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything.

God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the sun, moon, and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind.

And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me.

Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me.

”(135) Billy Bray, an excellent little illiterate English evangelist, records his sense of newness thus:— “I said to the Lord: ‘Thou hast said, they that ask shall receive, they that seek shall find, and to them that knock the door shall be opened, and I have faith to believe it.

’ In an instant the Lord made me so happy that I cannot express what I felt.

I shouted for joy.

I praised God with my whole heart....

I think this was in November, 1823, but what day of the month I do not know.

I

remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees.

I was like a new man in a new world.

I spent the greater part of my time in praising the Lord.

”(136) Starbuck and Leuba both illustrate this sense of newness by quotations.

I

take the two following from Starbuck’s manuscript collection.

One, a woman, says:— “I was taken to a camp‐meeting, mother and religious friends seeking and praying for my conversion.

My emotional nature was stirred to its depths; confessions of depravity and pleading with God for salvation from sin made me oblivious of all surroundings.

I plead for mercy, and had a vivid realization of forgiveness and renewal of my nature.

When rising from my knees I exclaimed, ‘Old things have passed away, all things have become new.

’ It was like entering another world, a new state of existence.

Natural objects were glorified, my spiritual vision was so clarified that I saw beauty in every material object in the universe, the woods were vocal with heavenly music; my soul exulted in the love of God, and I wanted everybody to share in my joy.

” The next case is that of a man:— “I know not how I got back into the encampment, but found myself staggering up to Rev. ——’s Holiness tent—and as it was full of seekers and a terrible noise inside, some groaning, some laughing, and some shouting, and by a large oak, ten feet from the tent, I fell on my face by a bench, and tried to pray, and every time I would call on God, something like a man’s hand would strangle me by choking.

I don’t know whether there were any one around or near me or not.

I thought I should surely die if I did not get help, but just as often as I would pray, that unseen hand was felt on my throat and my breath squeezed off.

Finally something said: ‘Venture on the atonement, for you will die anyway if you don’t. ’ So I made one final struggle to call on God for mercy, with the same choking and strangling, determined to finish the sentence of prayer for Mercy, if I did strangle and die, and the last I remember that time was falling back on the ground with the same unseen hand on my throat.

I don’t know how long I lay there or what was going on.

None of my folks were present.

When I came to myself, there were a crowd around me praising God.

The very heavens seemed to open and pour down rays of light and glory.

Not for a moment only, but all day and night, floods of light and glory seemed to pour through my soul, and oh, how I was changed, and everything became new.

My horses and hogs and even everybody seemed changed.

” This man’s case introduces the feature of automatisms, which in suggestible subjects have been so startling a feature at revivals since, in Edwards’s, Wesley’s, and Whitfield’s time, these became a regular means of gospel propagation.

They were at first supposed to be semi‐miraculous proofs of “power” on the part of the Holy Ghost; but great divergence of opinion quickly arose concerning them.

Edwards, in his Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England, has to defend them against their critics; and their value has long been matter of debate even within the revivalistic denominations.

(137) They undoubtedly have no essential spiritual significance, and although their presence makes his conversion more memorable to the convert, it has never been proved that converts who show them are more persevering or fertile in good fruits than those whose change of heart has had less violent accompaniments.

On the whole, unconsciousness, convulsions, visions, involuntary vocal utterances, and suffocation, must be simply ascribed to the subject’s having a large subliminal region, involving nervous instability.

This is often the subject’s own view of the matter afterwards.

One of Starbuck’s correspondents writes, for instance:— “I have been through the experience which is known as conversion.

My explanation of it is this: the subject works his emotions up to the breaking point, at the same time resisting their physical manifestations, such as quickened pulse, etc. , and then suddenly lets them have their full sway over his body.

The relief is something wonderful, and the pleasurable effects of the emotions are experienced to the highest degree.

” There is one form of sensory automatism which possibly deserves special notice on account of its frequency.

I refer to hallucinatory or pseudo‐ hallucinatory luminous phenomena, _photisms_, to use the term of the psychologists.

Saint Paul’s blinding heavenly vision seems to have been a phenomenon of this sort; so does Constantine’s cross in the sky.

The last case but one which I quoted mentions floods of light and glory.

Henry Alline mentions a light, about whose externality he seems uncertain.

Colonel Gardiner sees a blazing light.

President Finney writes:— “All at once the glory of God shone upon and round about me in a manner almost marvelous....

A light perfectly ineffable shone in my soul, that almost prostrated me on the ground....

This light seemed like the brightness of the sun in every direction.

It was too intense for the eyes....

I think I knew something then, by actual experience, of that light that prostrated Paul on the way to Damascus.

It was surely a light such as I could not have endured long.

”(138) Such reports of photisms are indeed far from uncommon.

Here is another from Starbuck’s collection, where the light appeared evidently external:— “I had attended a series of revival services for about two weeks off and on.

Had been invited to the altar several times, all the time becoming more deeply impressed, when finally I decided I must do this, or I should be lost.

Realization of conversion was very vivid, like a ton’s weight being lifted from my heart; a strange light which seemed to light up the whole room (for it was dark); a conscious supreme bliss which caused me to repeat ‘Glory to God’ for a long time.

Decided to be God’s child for life, and to give up my pet ambition, wealth and social position.

My former habits of life hindered my growth somewhat, but I set about overcoming these systematically, and in one year my whole nature was changed, i.

e. , my ambitions were of a different order.

” Here is another one of Starbuck’s cases, involving a luminous element:— “I had been clearly converted twenty‐three years before, or rather reclaimed.

My experience in regeneration was then clear and spiritual, and I had not backslidden.

But I experienced entire sanctification on the 15th day of March, 1893, about eleven o’clock in the morning.

The particular accompaniments of the experience were entirely unexpected.

I was quietly sitting at home singing selections out of Pentecostal Hymns.

Suddenly there seemed to be a something sweeping into me and inflating my entire being—such a sensation as I had never experienced before.

When this experience came, I seemed to be conducted around a large, capacious, well‐lighted room.

As I walked with my invisible conductor and looked around, a clear thought was coined in my mind, ‘They are not here, they are gone.

’ As soon as the thought was definitely formed in my mind, though no word was spoken, the Holy Spirit impressed me that I was surveying my own soul.

Then, for the first time in all my life, did I know that I was cleansed from all sin, and filled with the fullness of God.

” Leuba quotes the case of a Mr. Peek, where the luminous affection reminds one of the chromatic hallucinations produced by the intoxicant cactus buds called mescal by the Mexicans:— “When I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of God appeared in all his visible creation.

I well remember we reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may so express it, in the glory of God.

”(139) The most characteristic of all the elements of the conversion crisis, and the last one of which I shall speak, is the ecstasy of happiness produced.

We have already heard several accounts of it, but I will add a couple more.

President Finney’s is so vivid that I give it at length:— “All my feelings seemed to rise and flow out; and the utterance of my heart was, ‘I want to pour my whole soul out to God.

’ The rising of my soul was so great that I rushed into the back room of the front office, to pray.

There was no fire and no light in the room; nevertheless it appeared to me as if it were perfectly light.

As I went in and shut the door after me, it seemed as if I met the Lord Jesus Christ face to face.

It did not occur to me then, nor did it for some time afterwards, that it was wholly a mental state.

On the contrary, it seemed to me that I saw him as I would see any other man.

He said nothing, but looked at me in such a manner as to break me right down at his feet.

I have always since regarded this as a most remarkable state of mind; for it seemed to me a reality that he stood before me, and I fell down at his feet and poured out my soul to him.

I wept aloud like a child, and made such confessions as I could with my choked utterance.

It seemed to me that I bathed his feet with my tears; and yet I had no distinct impression that I touched him, that I recollect.

I

must have continued in this state for a good while; but my mind was too much absorbed with the interview to recollect anything that I said.

But I know, as soon as my mind became calm enough to break off from the interview, I returned to the front office, and found that the fire that I had made of large wood was nearly burned out.

But as I turned and was about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost.

Without any expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was any such thing for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me, body and soul.

I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and through me.

Indeed, it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not express it in any other way.

It seemed like the very breath of God.

I can recollect distinctly that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings.

“No words can express the wonderful love that was shed abroad in my heart.

I wept aloud with joy and love; and I do not know but I should say I literally bellowed out the unutterable gushings of my heart.

These waves came over me, and over me, and over me, one after the other, until I recollect I cried out, ‘I shall die if these waves continue to pass over me.

’ I said, ‘Lord, I cannot bear any more;’ yet I had no fear of death.

“How long I continued in this state, with this baptism continuing to roll over me and go through me, I do not know.

But I know it was late in the evening when a member of my choir—for I was the leader of the choir—came into the office to see me.

He was a member of the church.

He found me in this state of loud weeping, and said to me, ‘Mr. Finney, what ails you?

’ I could make him no answer for some time.

He then said, ‘Are you in pain?

’ I gathered myself up as best I could, and replied, ‘No, but so happy that I cannot live.

’ ” I just now quoted Billy Bray; I cannot do better than give his own brief account of his post‐conversion feelings:— “I can’t help praising the Lord.

As I go along the street, I lift up one foot, and it seems to say ‘Glory’; and I lift up the other, and it seems to say ‘Amen’; and so they keep up like that all the time I am walking.

”(140) One word, before I close this lecture, on the question of the transiency or permanence of these abrupt conversions.

Some of you, I feel sure, knowing that numerous backslidings and relapses take place, make of these their apperceiving mass for interpreting the whole subject, and dismiss it with a pitying smile at so much “hysterics.

” Psychologically, as well as religiously, however, this is shallow.

It misses the point of serious interest, which is not so much the duration as the nature and quality of these shiftings of character to higher levels.

Men lapse from every level—we need no statistics to tell us that.

Love is, for instance, well known not to be irrevocable, yet, constant or inconstant, it reveals new flights and reaches of ideality while it lasts.

These revelations form its significance to men and women, whatever be its duration.

So with the conversion experience: that it should for even a short time show a human being what the high‐water mark of his spiritual capacity is, this is what constitutes its importance,—an importance which backsliding cannot diminish, although persistence might increase it.

As a matter of fact, all the more striking instances of conversion, all those, for instance, which I have quoted, _have_ been permanent.

The case of which there might be most doubt, on account of its suggesting so strongly an epileptoid seizure, was the case of M. Ratisbonne.

Yet I am informed that Ratisbonne’s whole future was shaped by those few minutes.

He gave up his project of marriage, became a priest, founded at Jerusalem, where he went to dwell, a mission of nuns for the conversion of the Jews, showed no tendency to use for egotistic purposes the notoriety given him by the peculiar circumstances of his conversion,—which, for the rest, he could seldom refer to without tears,—and in short remained an exemplary son of the Church until he died, late in the 80’s, if I remember rightly.

The only statistics I know of, on the subject of the duration of conversions, are those collected for Professor Starbuck by Miss Johnston.

They embrace only a hundred persons, evangelical church‐members, more than half being Methodists.

According to the statement of the subjects themselves, there had been backsliding of some sort in nearly all the cases, 93 per cent.

of the women, 77 per cent.

of the men.

Discussing the returns more minutely, Starbuck finds that only 6 per cent.

are relapses from the religious faith which the conversion confirmed, and that the backsliding complained of is in most only a fluctuation in the ardor of sentiment.

Only six of the hundred cases report a change of faith.

Starbuck’s conclusion is that the effect of conversion is to bring with it “a changed attitude towards life, which is fairly constant and permanent, although the feelings fluctuate....

In other words, the persons who have passed through conversion, having once taken a stand for the religious life, tend to feel themselves identified with it, no matter how much their religious enthusiasm declines.

”(141)