Chapter VIII: Part 8

“One Tuesday evening I sat in a saloon in Harlem, a homeless,
friendless, dying drunkard. I had pawned or sold everything that
would bring a drink. I could not sleep unless I was dead drunk. I
had not eaten for days, and for four nights preceding I had
suffered with delirium tremens, or the horrors, from midnight till
morning. I had often said, ‘I will never be a tramp. I will never
be cornered, for when that time comes, if ever it comes, I will
find a home in the bottom of the river.’ But the Lord so ordered
it that when that time did come I was not able to walk one quarter
of the way to the river. As I sat there thinking, I seemed to feel
some great and mighty presence. I did not know then what it was. I
did learn afterwards that it was Jesus, the sinner’s friend. I
walked up to the bar and pounded it with my fist till I made the
glasses rattle. Those who stood by drinking looked on with
scornful curiosity. I said I would never take another drink, if I
died on the street, and really I felt as though that would happen
before morning. Something said, ‘If you want to keep this promise,
go and have yourself locked up.’ I went to the nearest station‐
house and had myself locked up.

“I was placed in a narrow cell, and it seemed as though all the
demons that could find room came in that place with me. This was
not all the company I had, either. No, praise the Lord; that dear
Spirit that came to me in the saloon was present, and said, Pray.
I did pray, and though I did not feel any great help, I kept on
praying. As soon as I was able to leave my cell I was taken to the
police court and remanded back to the cell. I was finally
released, and found my way to my brother’s house, where every care
was given me. While lying in bed the admonishing Spirit never left
me, and when I arose the following Sabbath morning I felt that day
would decide my fate, and toward evening it came into my head to
go to Jerry M’Auley’s Mission. I went. The house was packed, and
with great difficulty I made my way to the space near the
platform. There I saw the apostle to the drunkard and the
outcast—that man of God, Jerry M’Auley. He rose, and amid deep
silence told his experience. There was a sincerity about this man
that carried conviction with it, and I found myself saying, ‘I
wonder if God can save _me_?’ I listened to the testimony of
twenty‐five or thirty persons, every one of whom had been saved
from rum, and I made up my mind that I would be saved or die right
there. When the invitation was given, I knelt down with a crowd of
drunkards. Jerry made the first prayer. Then Mrs. M’Auley prayed
fervently for us. Oh, what a conflict was going on for my poor
soul! A blessed whisper said, ‘Come’; the devil said, ‘Be
careful.’ I halted but a moment, and then, with a breaking heart,
I said, ‘Dear Jesus, can you help me?’ Never with mortal tongue
can I describe that moment. Although up to that moment my soul had
been filled with indescribable gloom, I felt the glorious
brightness of the noonday sun shine into my heart. I felt I was a
free man. Oh, the precious feeling of safety, of freedom, of
resting on Jesus! I felt that Christ with all his brightness and
power had come into my life; that, indeed, old things had passed
away and all things had become new.

“From that moment till now I have never wanted a drink of whiskey,
and I have never seen money enough to make me take one. I promised
God that night that if he would take away the appetite for strong
drink, I would work for him all my life. He has done his part, and
I have been trying to do mine.”(104)

Dr. Leuba rightly remarks that there is little doctrinal theology in such an experience, which starts with the absolute need of a higher helper, and ends with the sense that he has helped us. He gives other cases of drunkards’ conversions which are purely ethical, containing, as recorded, no theological beliefs whatever. John B. Gough’s case, for instance, is practically, says Dr. Leuba, the conversion of an atheist—neither God nor Jesus being mentioned.(105) But in spite of the importance of this type of regeneration, with little or no intellectual readjustment, this writer surely makes it too exclusive. It corresponds to the subjectively centred form of morbid melancholy, of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But we saw in our seventh lecture that there are objective forms of melancholy also, in which the lack of rational meaning of the universe, and of life anyhow, is the burden that weighs upon one—you remember Tolstoy’s case.(106) So there are distinct elements in conversion, and their relations to individual lives deserve to be discriminated.(107)

Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the centre of their spiritual energy. They may be excellent persons, servants of God in practical ways, but they are not children of his kingdom. They are either incapable of imagining the invisible; or else, in the language of devotion, they are life‐long subjects of “barrenness” and “dryness.” Such inaptitude for religious faith may in some cases be intellectual in its origin. Their religious faculties may be checked in their natural tendency to expand, by beliefs about the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic and materialistic beliefs, for example, within which so many good souls, who in former times would have freely indulged their religious propensities, find themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or the agnostic vetoes upon faith as something weak and shameful, under which so many of us to‐day lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In many persons such inhibitions are never overcome. To the end of their days they refuse to believe, their personal energy never gets to its religious centre, and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity.

In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men anæsthetic on the religious side, deficient in that category of sensibility. Just as a bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain to the reckless “animal spirits” enjoyed by those of sanguine temperament; so the nature which is spiritually barren may admire and envy faith in others, but can never compass the enthusiasm and peace which those who are temperamentally qualified for faith enjoy. All this may, however, turn out eventually to have been a matter of temporary inhibition. Even late in life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the man’s hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling. Such cases more than any others suggest the idea that sudden conversion is by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not imagine ourselves to deal with irretrievably fixed classes.

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Now there are two forms of mental occurrence in human beings, which lead to a striking difference in the conversion process, a difference to which Professor Starbuck has called attention. You know how it is when you try to recollect a forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working for it, by mentally running over the places, persons, and things with which the word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the name were _jammed_, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give up the effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in half an hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson says, as carelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden process was started in you by the effort, which went on after the effort ceased, and made the result come as if it came spontaneously. A certain music teacher, says Dr. Starbuck, says to her pupils after the thing to be done has been clearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully attempted: “Stop trying and it will do itself!”(108)

There is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntary and unconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished; and we find both ways exemplified in the history of conversion, giving us two types, which Starbuck calls the _volitional type_ and the _type by self‐ surrender_ respectively.

In the volitional type the regenerative change is usually gradual, and consists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral and spiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at which the movement forward seems much more rapid. This psychological fact is abundantly illustrated by Dr. Starbuck. Our education in any practical accomplishment proceeds apparently by jerks and starts, just as the growth of our physical bodies does.

“An athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of
the fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as
the convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on
engaging in the sport, there may come a day when all at once the
game plays itself through him—when he loses himself in some great
contest. In the same way, a musician may suddenly reach a point at
which pleasure in the technique of the art entirely falls away,
and in some moment of inspiration he becomes the instrument
through which music flows. The writer has chanced to hear two
different married persons, both of whose wedded lives had been
beautiful from the beginning, relate that not until a year or more
after marriage did they awake to the full blessedness of married
life. So it is with the religious experience of these persons we
are studying.”(109)

We shall erelong hear still more remarkable illustrations of subconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which we suddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton and Professor Laycock of Edinburgh were among the first to call attention to this class of effects; but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the term “unconscious cerebration,” which has since then been a popular phrase of explanation. The facts are now known to us far more extensively than he could know them, and the adjective “unconscious,” being for many of them almost certainly a misnomer, is better replaced by the vaguer term “subconscious” or “subliminal.”

Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give examples,(110) but they are as a rule less interesting than those of the self‐surrender type, in which the subconscious effects are more abundant and often startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter, the more so because the difference between the two types is after all not radical. Even in the most voluntarily built‐up sort of regeneration there are passages of partial self‐surrender interposed; and in the great majority of all cases, when the will has done its uttermost towards bringing one close to the complete unification aspired after, it seems that the very last step must be left to other forces and performed without the help of its activity. In other words, self‐surrender becomes then indispensable. “The personal will,” says Dr. Starbuck, “must be given up. In many cases relief persistently refuses to come until the person ceases to resist, or to make an effort in the direction he desires to go.”

“I had said I would not give up; but when my will was broken, it
was all over,” writes one of Starbuck’s correspondents.—Another
says: “I simply said: ‘Lord, I have done all I can; I leave the
whole matter with Thee;’ and immediately there came to me a great
peace.”—Another: “All at once it occurred to me that I might be
saved, too, if I would stop trying to do it all myself, and follow
Jesus: somehow I lost my load.”—Another: “I finally ceased to
resist, and gave myself up, though it was a hard struggle.
Gradually the feeling came over me that I had done my part, and
God was willing to do his.”(111)—“Lord, Thy will be done; damn or
save!” cries John Nelson,(112) exhausted with the anxious struggle
to escape damnation; and at that moment his soul was filled with
peace.

Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true, account—so far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all—of the reasons why self‐surrender at the last moment should be so indispensable. To begin with, there are two things in the mind of the candidate for conversion: first, the present incompleteness or wrongness, the “sin” which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the positive ideal which he longs to compass. Now with most of us the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the “sin” almost exclusively engrosses the attention, so that conversion is “_a process of struggling away from sin rather than of striving towards righteousness_.”(113) A man’s conscious wit and will, so far as they strain towards the ideal, are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined. Yet all the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious strainings are letting loose subconscious allies behind the scenes, which in their way work towards rearrangement; and the rearrangement towards which all these deeper forces tend is pretty surely definite, and definitely different from what he consciously conceives and determines. It may consequently be actually interfered with (_jammed_, as it were, like the lost word when we seek too energetically to recall it), by his voluntary efforts slanting from the true direction.

Starbuck seems to put his finger on the root of the matter when he says that to exercise the personal will is still to live in the region where the imperfect self is the thing most emphasized. Where, on the contrary, the subconscious forces take the lead, it is more probably the better self _in posse_ which directs the operation. Instead of being clumsily and vaguely aimed at from without, it is then itself the organizing centre. What then must the person do? “He must relax,” says Dr. Starbuck,—“that is, he must fall back on the larger Power that makes for righteousness, which has been welling up in his own being, and let it finish in its own way the work it has begun.... The act of yielding, in this point of view, is giving one’s self over to the new life, making it the centre of a new personality, and living, from within, the truth of it which had before been viewed objectively.”(114)

“Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity” is the theological way of putting this fact of the need of self‐surrender; whilst the physiological way of stating it would be, “Let one do all in one’s power, and one’s nervous system will do the rest.” Both statements acknowledge the same fact.(115)

To state it in terms of our own symbolism: When the new centre of personal energy has been subconsciously incubated so long as to be just ready to open into flower, “hands off” is the only word for us, it must burst forth unaided!

We have used the vague and abstract language of psychology. But since, in any terms, the crisis described is the throwing of our conscious selves upon the mercy of powers which, whatever they may be, are more ideal than we are actually, and make for our redemption, you see why self‐surrender has been and always must be regarded as the vital turning‐point of the religious life, so far as the religious life is spiritual and no affair of outer works and ritual and sacraments. One may say that the whole development of Christianity in inwardness has consisted in little more than the greater and greater emphasis attached to this crisis of self‐ surrender. From Catholicism to Lutheranism, and then to Calvinism; from that to Wesleyanism; and from this, outside of technical Christianity altogether, to pure “liberalism” or transcendental idealism, whether or not of the mind‐cure type, taking in the mediæval mystics, the quietists, the pietists, and quakers by the way, we can trace the stages of progress towards the idea of an immediate spiritual help, experienced by the individual in his forlornness and standing in no essential need of doctrinal apparatus or propitiatory machinery.

Psychology and religion are thus in perfect harmony up to this point, since both admit that there are forces seemingly outside of the conscious individual that bring redemption to his life. Nevertheless psychology, defining these forces as “subconscious,” and speaking of their effects as due to “incubation,” or “cerebration,” implies that they do not transcend the individual’s personality; and herein she diverges from Christian theology, which insists that they are direct supernatural operations of the Deity. I propose to you that we do not yet consider this divergence final, but leave the question for a while in abeyance—continued inquiry may enable us to get rid of some of the apparent discord.

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Revert, then, for a moment more to the psychology of self‐surrender.

When you find a man living on the ragged edge of his consciousness, pent in to his sin and want and incompleteness, and consequently inconsolable, and then simply tell him that all is well with him, that he must stop his worry, break with his discontent, and give up his anxiety, you seem to him to come with pure absurdities. The only positive consciousness he has tells him that all is _not_ well, and the better way you offer sounds simply as if you proposed to him to assert cold‐blooded falsehoods. “The will to believe” cannot be stretched as far as that. We can make ourselves more faithful to a belief of which we have the rudiments, but we cannot create a belief out of whole cloth when our perception actively assures us of its opposite. The better mind proposed to us comes in that case in the form of a pure negation of the only mind we have, and we cannot actively will a pure negation.

There are only two ways in which it is possible to get rid of anger, worry, fear, despair, or other undesirable affections. One is that an opposite affection should overpoweringly break over us, and the other is by getting so exhausted with the struggle that we have to stop,—so we drop down, give up, and _don’t care_ any longer. Our emotional brain‐centres strike work, and we lapse into a temporary apathy. Now there is documentary proof that this state of temporary exhaustion not infrequently forms part of the conversion crisis. So long as the egoistic worry of the sick soul guards the door, the expansive confidence of the soul of faith gains no presence. But let the former faint away, even but for a moment, and the latter can profit by the opportunity, and, having once acquired possession, may retain it. Carlyle’s Teufelsdröckh passes from the everlasting No to the everlasting Yes through a “Centre of Indifference.”

Let me give you a good illustration of this feature in the conversion process. That genuine saint, David Brainerd, describes his own crisis in the following words:—

“One morning, while I was walking in a solitary place as usual, I
at once saw that all my contrivances and projects to effect or
procure deliverance and salvation for myself were utterly in vain;
I was brought quite to a stand, as finding myself totally lost. I
saw that it was forever impossible for me to do anything towards
helping or delivering myself, that I had made all the pleas I ever
could have made to all eternity; and that all my pleas were vain,
for I saw that self‐interest had led me to pray, and that I had
never once prayed from any respect to the glory of God. I saw that
there was no necessary connection between my prayers and the
bestowment of divine mercy; that they laid not the least
obligation upon God to bestow his grace upon me; and that there
was no more virtue or goodness in them than there would be in my
paddling with my hand in the water. I saw that I had been heaping
up my devotions before God, fasting, praying, etc., pretending,
and indeed really thinking sometimes that I was aiming at the
glory of God; whereas I never once truly intended it, but only my
own happiness. I saw that as I had never done anything for God, I
had no claim on anything from him but perdition, on account of my
hypocrisy and mockery. When I saw evidently that I had regard to
nothing but self‐interest, then my duties appeared a vile mockery
and a continual course of lies, for the whole was nothing but
self‐worship, and an horrid abuse of God.

“I continued, as I remember, in this state of mind, from Friday
morning till the Sabbath evening following (July 12, 1739), when I
was walking again in the same solitary place. Here, in a mournful
melancholy state _I was attempting to pray; but found no heart to
engage in that or any other duty; my former concern, exercise, and
religious affections were now gone. I thought that the Spirit of
God had quite left me; but still was not distressed; yet
disconsolate, as if there was nothing in heaven or earth could
make me happy. Having been thus endeavoring to pray—though, as I
thought, very stupid and senseless_—for near half an hour; then,
as I was walking in a thick grove, unspeakable glory seemed to
open to the apprehension of my soul. I do not mean any external
brightness, nor any imagination of a body of light, but it was a
new inward apprehension or view that I had of God, such as I never
had before, nor anything which had the least resemblance to it. I
had no particular apprehension of any one person in the Trinity,
either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost; but it appeared to
be Divine glory. My soul rejoiced with joy unspeakable, to see
such a God, such a glorious Divine Being; and I was inwardly
pleased and satisfied that he should be God over all for ever and
ever. My soul was so captivated and delighted with the excellency
of God that I was even swallowed up in him; at least to that
degree that I had no thought about my own salvation, and scarce
reflected that there was such a creature as myself. I continued in
this state of inward joy, peace, and astonishing, till near dark
without any sensible abatement; and then began to think and
examine what I had seen; and felt sweetly composed in my mind all
the evening following. I felt myself in a new world, and
everything about me appeared with a different aspect from what it
was wont to do. At this time, the way of salvation opened to me
with such infinite wisdom, suitableness, and excellency, that I
wondered I should ever think of any other way of salvation; was
amazed that I had not dropped my own contrivances, and complied
with this lovely, blessed, and excellent way before. If I could
have been saved by my own duties or any other way that I had
formerly contrived, my whole soul would now have refused it. I
wondered that all the world did not see and comply with this way
of salvation, entirely by the righteousness of Christ.”(116)

I have italicized the passage which records the exhaustion of the anxious emotion hitherto habitual. In a large proportion, perhaps the majority, of reports, the writers speak as if the exhaustion of the lower and the entrance of the higher emotion were simultaneous,(117) yet often again they speak as if the higher actively drove the lower out. This is undoubtedly true in a great many instances, as we shall presently see. But often there seems little doubt that both conditions—subconscious ripening of the one affection and exhaustion of the other—must simultaneously have conspired, in order to produce the result.

T. W. B., a convert of Nettleton’s, being brought to an acute
paroxysm of conviction of sin, ate nothing all day, locked himself
in his room in the evening in complete despair, crying aloud, “How
long, O Lord, how long?” “After repeating this and similar
language,” he says, “several times, _I seemed to sink away into a
state of insensibility_. When I came to myself again I was on my
knees, praying not for myself but for others. I felt submission to
the will of God, willing that he should do with me as should seem
good in his sight. My concern seemed all lost in concern for
others.”(118)

Our great American revivalist Finney writes: “I said to myself:
‘What is this? I must have grieved the Holy Ghost entirely away. I
have lost all my conviction. I have not a particle of concern
about my soul; and it must be that the Spirit has left me.’ ‘Why!’
thought I, ‘I never was so far from being concerned about my own
salvation in my life.’... I tried to recall my convictions, to get
back again the load of sin under which I had been laboring. I
tried in vain to make myself anxious. I was so quiet and peaceful
that I tried to feel concerned about that, lest it should be the
result of my having grieved the Spirit away.”(119)

But beyond all question there are persons in whom, quite independently of any exhaustion in the Subject’s capacity for feeling, or even in the absence of any acute previous feeling, the higher condition, having reached the due degree of energy, bursts through all barriers and sweeps in like a sudden flood. These are the most striking and memorable cases, the cases of instantaneous conversion to which the conception of divine grace has been most peculiarly attached. I have given one of them at length—the case of Mr. Bradley. But I had better reserve the other cases and my comments on the rest of the subject for the following lecture.

LECTURE X. CONVERSION—CONCLUDED.

In this lecture we have to finish the subject of Conversion, considering at first those striking instantaneous instances of which Saint Paul’s is the most eminent, and in which, often amid tremendous emotional excitement or perturbation of the senses, a complete division is established in the twinkling of an eye between the old life and the new. Conversion of this type is an important phase of religious experience, owing to the part which it has played in Protestant theology, and it behooves us to study it conscientiously on that account.

I think I had better cite two or three of these cases before proceeding to a more generalized account. One must know concrete instances first; for, as Professor Agassiz used to say, one can see no farther into a generalization than just so far as one’s previous acquaintance with particulars enables one to take it in. I will go back, then, to the case of our friend Henry Alline, and quote his report of the 26th of March, 1775, on which his poor divided mind became unified for good.

“As I was about sunset wandering in the fields lamenting my
miserable lost and undone condition, and almost ready to sink
under my burden, I thought I was in such a miserable case as never
any man was before. I returned to the house, and when I got to the
door, just as I was stepping off the threshold, the following
impressions came into my mind like a powerful but small still
voice. You have been seeking, praying, reforming, laboring,
reading, hearing, and meditating, and what have you done by it
towards your salvation? Are you any nearer to conversion now than
when you first began? Are you any more prepared for heaven, or
fitter to appear before the impartial bar of God, than when you
first began to seek?

“It brought such conviction on me that I was obliged to say that I
did not think I was one step nearer than at first, but as much
condemned, as much exposed, and as miserable as before. I cried
out within myself, O Lord God, I am lost, and if thou, O Lord,
dost not find out some new way, I know nothing of, I shall never
be saved, for the ways and methods I have prescribed to myself
have all failed me, and I am willing they should fail. O Lord,
have mercy! O Lord, have mercy!

“These discoveries continued until I went into the house and sat
down. After I sat down, being all in confusion, like a drowning
man that was just giving up to sink, and almost in an agony, I
turned very suddenly round in my chair, and seeing part of an old
Bible lying in one of the chairs, I caught hold of it in great
haste; and opening it without any premeditation, cast my eyes on
the 38th Psalm, which was the first time I ever saw the word of
God: it took hold of me with such power that it seemed to go
through my whole soul, so that it seemed as if God was praying in,
with, and for me. About this time my father called the family to
attend prayers; I attended, but paid no regard to what he said in
his prayer, but continued praying in those words of the Psalm. Oh,
help me, help me! cried I, thou Redeemer of souls, and save me, or
I am gone forever; thou canst this night, if thou pleasest, with
one drop of thy blood atone for my sins, and appease the wrath of
an angry God. At that instant of time when I gave all up to him to
do with me as he pleased, and was willing that God should rule
over me at his pleasure, redeeming love broke into my soul with
repeated scriptures, with such power that my whole soul seemed to
be melted down with love; the burden of guilt and condemnation was
gone, darkness was expelled, my heart humbled and filled with
gratitude, and my whole soul, that was a few minutes ago groaning
under mountains of death, and crying to an unknown God for help,
was now filled with immortal love, soaring on the wings of faith,
freed from the chains of death and darkness, and crying out, My
Lord and my God; thou art my rock and my fortress, my shield and
my high tower, my life, my joy, my present and my everlasting
portion. Looking up, I thought I saw that same light [he had on
more than one previous occasion seen subjectively a bright blaze
of light], though it appeared different; and as soon as I saw it,
the design was opened to me, according to his promise, and I was
obliged to cry out: Enough, enough, O blessed God! The work of
conversion, the change, and the manifestations of it are no more
disputable than that light which I see, or anything that ever I
saw.

“In the midst of all my joys, in less than half an hour after my
soul was set at liberty, the Lord discovered to me my labor in the
ministry and call to preach the gospel. I cried out, Amen, Lord,
I’ll go; send me, send me. I spent the greatest part of the night
in ecstasies of joy, praising and adoring the Ancient of Days for
his free and unbounded grace. After I had been so long in this
transport and heavenly frame that my nature seemed to require
sleep, I thought to close my eyes for a few moments; then the
devil stepped in, and told me that if I went to sleep, I should
lose it all, and when I should awake in the morning I would find
it to be nothing but a fancy and delusion. I immediately cried
out, O Lord God, if I am deceived, undeceive me.

“I then closed my eyes for a few minutes, and seemed to be
refreshed with sleep; and when I awoke, the first inquiry was,
Where is my God? And in an instant of time, my soul seemed awake
in and with God, and surrounded by the arms of everlasting love.
About sunrise I arose with joy to relate to my parents what God
had done for my soul, and declared to them the miracle of God’s
unbounded grace. I took a Bible to show them the words that were
impressed by God on my soul the evening before; but when I came to
open the Bible, it appeared all new to me.

“I so longed to be useful in the cause of Christ, in preaching the
gospel, that it seemed as if I could not rest any longer, but go I
must and tell the wonders of redeeming love. I lost all taste for
carnal pleasures, and carnal company, and was enabled to forsake
them.”(120)

Young Mr. Alline, after the briefest of delays, and with no book‐learning but his Bible, and no teaching save that of his own experience, became a Christian minister, and thenceforward his life was fit to rank, for its austerity and single‐mindedness, with that of the most devoted saints. But happy as he became in his strenuous way, he never got his taste for even the most innocent carnal pleasures back. We must class him, like Bunyan and Tolstoy, amongst those upon whose soul the iron of melancholy left a permanent imprint. His redemption was into another universe than this mere natural world, and life remained for him a sad and patient trial. Years later we can find him making such an entry as this in his diary: “On Wednesday the 12th I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding carnal mirth.”

The next case I will give is that of a correspondent of Professor Leuba, printed in the latter’s article, already cited, in vol. vi. of the American Journal of Psychology. This subject was an Oxford graduate, the son of a clergyman, and the story resembles in many points the classic case of Colonel Gardiner, which everybody may be supposed to know. Here it is, somewhat abridged:—

“Between the period of leaving Oxford and my conversion I never
darkened the door of my father’s church, although I lived with him
for eight years, making what money I wanted by journalism, and
spending it in high carousal with any one who would sit with me
and drink it away. So I lived, sometimes drunk for a week
together, and then a terrible repentance, and would not touch a
drop for a whole month.

“In all this period, that is, up to thirty‐three years of age, I
never had a desire to reform on religious grounds. But all my
pangs were due to some terrible remorse I used to feel after a
heavy carousal, the remorse taking the shape of regret after my
folly in wasting my life in such a way—a man of superior talents
and education. This terrible remorse turned me gray in one night,
and whenever it came upon me I was perceptibly grayer the next
morning. What I suffered in this way is beyond the expression of
words. It was hell‐fire in all its most dreadful tortures. Often
did I vow that if I got over ‘this time’ I would reform. Alas, in
about three days I fully recovered, and was as happy as ever. So
it went on for years, but, with a physique like a rhinoceros, I
always recovered, and as long as I let drink alone, no man was as
capable of enjoying life as I was.

“I was converted in my own bedroom in my father’s rectory house at
precisely three o’clock in the afternoon of a hot July day (July
13, 1886). I was in perfect health, having been off from the drink
for nearly a month. I was in no way troubled about my soul. In
fact, God was not in my thoughts that day. A young lady friend
sent me a copy of Professor Drummond’s Natural Law in the
Spiritual World, asking me my opinion of it as a literary work
only. Being proud of my critical talents and wishing to enhance
myself in my new friend’s esteem, I took the book to my bedroom
for quiet, intending to give it a thorough study, and then write
her what I thought of it. It was here that God met me face to
face, and I shall never forget the meeting. ‘He that hath the Son
hath life eternal, he that hath not the Son hath not life.’ I had
read this scores of times before, but this made all the
difference. I was now in God’s presence and my attention was
absolutely ‘soldered’ on to this verse, and I was not allowed to
proceed with the book till I had fairly considered what these
words really involved. Only then was I allowed to proceed, feeling
all the while that there was another being in my bedroom, though
not seen by me. The stillness was very marvelous, and I felt
supremely happy. It was most unquestionably shown me, in one
second of time, that I had never touched the Eternal: and that if
I died then, I must inevitably be lost. I was undone. I knew it as
well as I now know I am saved. The Spirit of God showed it me in
ineffable love; there was no terror in it; I felt God’s love so
powerfully upon me that only a mighty sorrow crept over me that I
had lost all through my own folly; and what was I to do? What
could I do? I did not repent even; God never asked me to repent.
All I felt was ‘I am undone,’ and God cannot help it, although he
loves me. No fault on the part of the Almighty. All the time I was
supremely happy: I felt like a little child before his father. I
had done wrong, but my Father did not scold me, but loved me most
wondrously. Still my doom was sealed. I was lost to a certainty,
and being naturally of a brave disposition I did not quail under
it, but deep sorrow for the past, mixed with regret for what I had
lost, took hold upon me, and my soul thrilled within me to think
it was all over. Then there crept in upon me so gently, so
lovingly, so unmistakably, a way of escape, and what was it after
all? The old, old story over again, told in the simplest way:
‘There is no name under heaven whereby ye can be saved except that
of the Lord Jesus Christ.’ No words were spoken to me; my soul
seemed to see my Saviour in the spirit, and from that hour to
this, nearly nine years now, there has never been in my life one
doubt that the Lord Jesus Christ and God the Father both worked
upon me that afternoon in July, both differently, and both in the
most perfect love conceivable, and I rejoiced there and then in a
conversion so astounding that the whole village heard of it in
less than twenty‐four hours.

“But a time of trouble was yet to come. The day after my
conversion I went into the hay‐field to lend a hand with the
harvest, and not having made any promise to God to abstain or
drink in moderation only, I took too much and came home drunk. My
poor sister was heart‐broken; and I felt ashamed of myself and got
to my bedroom at once, where she followed me, weeping copiously.
She said I had been converted and fallen away instantly. But
although I was quite full of drink (not muddled, however), I knew
that God’s work begun in me was not going to be wasted. About
midday I made on my knees the first prayer before God for twenty
years. I did not ask to be forgiven; I felt that was no good, for
I would be sure to fall again. Well, what did I do? I committed
myself to him in the profoundest belief that my individuality was
going to be destroyed, that he would take all from me, and I was
willing. In such a surrender lies the secret of a holy life. From
that hour drink has had no terrors for me: I never touch it, never
want it. The same thing occurred with my pipe: after being a
regular smoker from my twelfth year the desire for it went at
once, and has never returned. So with every known sin, the
deliverance in each case being permanent and complete. I have had
no temptation since conversion, God seemingly having shut out
Satan from that course with me. He gets a free hand in other ways,
but never on sins of the flesh. Since I gave up to God all
ownership in my own life, he has guided me in a thousand ways, and
has opened my path in a way almost incredible to those who do not
enjoy the blessing of a truly surrendered life.”

So much for our graduate of Oxford, in whom you notice the complete abolition of an ancient appetite as one of the conversion’s fruits.

The most curious record of sudden conversion with which I am acquainted is that of M. Alphonse Ratisbonne, a freethinking French Jew, to Catholicism, at Rome in 1842. In a letter to a clerical friend, written a few months later, the convert gives a palpitating account of the circumstances.(121) The predisposing conditions appear to have been slight. He had an elder brother who had been converted and was a Catholic priest. He was himself irreligious, and nourished an antipathy to the apostate brother and generally to his “cloth.” Finding himself at Rome in his twenty‐ninth year, he fell in with a French gentleman who tried to make a proselyte of him, but who succeeded no farther after two or three conversations than to get him to hang (half jocosely) a religious medal round his neck, and to accept and read a copy of a short prayer to the Virgin. M. Ratisbonne represents his own part in the conversations as having been of a light and chaffing order; but he notes the fact that for some days he was unable to banish the words of the prayer from his mind, and that the night before the crisis he had a sort of nightmare, in the imagery of which a black cross with no Christ upon it figured. Nevertheless, until noon of the next day he was free in mind and spent the time in trivial conversations. I now give his own words.

“If at this time any one had accosted me, saying: ‘Alphonse, in a
quarter of an hour you shall be adoring Jesus Christ as your God
and Saviour; you shall lie prostrate with your face upon the
ground in a humble church; you shall be smiting your breast at the
foot of a priest; you shall pass the carnival in a college of
Jesuits to prepare yourself to receive baptism, ready to give your
life for the Catholic faith; you shall renounce the world and its
pomps and pleasures; renounce your fortune, your hopes, and if
need be, your betrothed; the affections of your family, the esteem
of your friends, and your attachment to the Jewish people; you
shall have no other aspiration than to follow Christ and bear his
cross till death;’—if, I say, a prophet had come to me with such a
prediction, I should have judged that only one person could be
more mad than he,—whosoever, namely, might believe in the
possibility of such senseless folly becoming true. And yet that
folly is at present my only wisdom, my sole happiness.

“Coming out of the café I met the carriage of Monsieur B. [the
proselyting friend]. He stopped and invited me in for a drive, but
first asked me to wait for a few minutes whilst he attended to
some duty at the church of San Andrea delle Fratte. Instead of
waiting in the carriage, I entered the church myself to look at
it. The church of San Andrea was poor, small, and empty; I believe
that I found myself there almost alone. No work of art attracted
my attention; and I passed my eyes mechanically over its interior
without being arrested by any particular thought. I can only
remember an entirely black dog which went trotting and turning
before me as I mused. In an instant the dog had disappeared, the
whole church had vanished, I no longer saw anything, ... or more
truly I saw, O my God, one thing alone.

“Heavens, how can I speak of it? Oh no! human words cannot attain
to expressing the inexpressible. Any description, however sublime
it might be, could be but a profanation of the unspeakable truth.

“I was there prostrate on the ground, bathed in my tears, with my
heart beside itself, when M. B. called me back to life. I could
not reply to the questions which followed from him one upon the
other. But finally I took the medal which I had on my breast, and
with all the effusion of my soul I kissed the image of the Virgin,
radiant with grace, which it bore. Oh, indeed, it was She! It was
indeed She! [What he had seen had been a vision of the Virgin.]

“I did not know where I was: I did not know whether I was Alphonse
or another. I only felt myself changed and believed myself another
me; I looked for myself in myself and did not find myself. In the
bottom of my soul I felt an explosion of the most ardent joy; I
could not speak; I had no wish to reveal what had happened. But I
felt something solemn and sacred within me which made me ask for a
priest. I was led to one; and there, alone, after he had given me
the positive order, I spoke as best I could, kneeling, and with my
heart still trembling. I could give no account to myself of the
truth of which I had acquired a knowledge and a faith. All that I
can say is that in an instant the bandage had fallen from my eyes;
and not one bandage only, but the whole manifold of bandages in
which I had been brought up. One after another they rapidly
disappeared, even as the mud and ice disappear under the rays of
the burning sun.

“I came out as from a sepulchre, from an abyss of darkness; and I
was living, perfectly living. But I wept, for at the bottom of
that gulf I saw the extreme of misery from which I had been saved
by an infinite mercy; and I shuddered at the sight of my
iniquities, stupefied, melted, overwhelmed with wonder and with
gratitude. You may ask me how I came to this new insight, for
truly I had never opened a book of religion nor even read a single
page of the Bible, and the dogma of original sin is either
entirely denied or forgotten by the Hebrews of to‐day, so that I
had thought so little about it that I doubt whether I ever knew
its name. But how came I, then, to this perception of it? I can
answer nothing save this, that on entering that church I was in
darkness altogether, and on coming out of it I saw the fullness of
the light. I can explain the change no better than by the simile
of a profound sleep or the analogy of one born blind who should
suddenly open his eyes to the day. He sees, but cannot define the
light which bathes him and by means of which he sees the objects
which excite his wonder. If we cannot explain physical light, how
can we explain the light which is the truth itself? And I think I
remain within the limits of veracity when I say that without
having any knowledge of the letter of religious doctrine, I now
intuitively perceived its sense and spirit. Better than if I saw
them, I _felt_ those hidden things; I felt them by the
inexplicable effects they produced in me. It all happened in my
interior mind; and those impressions, more rapid than thought,
shook my soul, revolved and turned it, as it were, in another
direction, towards other aims, by other paths. I express myself
badly. But do you wish, Lord, that I should inclose in poor and
barren words sentiments which the heart alone can understand?”

I might multiply cases almost indefinitely, but these will suffice to show you how real, definite, and memorable an event a sudden conversion may be to him who has the experience. Throughout the height of it he undoubtedly seems to himself a passive spectator or undergoer of an astounding process performed upon him from above. There is too much evidence of this for any doubt of it to be possible. Theology, combining this fact with the doctrines of election and grace, has concluded that the spirit of God is with us at these dramatic moments in a peculiarly miraculous way, unlike what happens at any other juncture of our lives. At that moment, it believes, an absolutely new nature is breathed into us, and we become partakers of the very substance of the Deity.

That the conversion should be instantaneous seems called for on this view, and the Moravian Protestants appear to have been the first to see this logical consequence. The Methodists soon followed suit, practically if not dogmatically, and a short time ere his death, John Wesley wrote:—

“In London alone I found 652 members of our Society who were
exceeding clear in their experience, and whose testimony I could
see no reason to doubt. And every one of these (without a single
exception) has declared that his deliverance from sin was
instantaneous; that the change was wrought in a moment. Had half
of these, or one third, or one in twenty, declared it was
_gradually_ wrought in _them_, I should have believed this, with
regard to _them_, and thought that _some_ were gradually
sanctified and some instantaneously. But as I have not found, in
so long a space of time, a single person speaking thus, I cannot
but believe that sanctification is commonly, if not always, an
instantaneous work.” Tyerman’s Life of Wesley, i. 463.

All this while the more usual sects of Protestantism have set no such store by instantaneous conversion. For them as for the Catholic Church, Christ’s blood, the sacraments, and the individual’s ordinary religious duties are practically supposed to suffice to his salvation, even though no acute crisis of self‐despair and surrender followed by relief should be experienced. For Methodism, on the contrary, unless there have been a crisis of this sort, salvation is only offered, not effectively received, and Christ’s sacrifice in so far forth is incomplete. Methodism surely here follows, if not the healthier‐minded, yet on the whole the profounder spiritual instinct. The individual models which it has set up as typical and worthy of imitation are not only the more interesting dramatically, but psychologically they have been the more complete.

In the fully evolved Revivalism of Great Britain and America we have, so to speak, the codified and stereotyped procedure to which this way of thinking has led. In spite of the unquestionable fact that saints of the once‐born type exist, that there may be a gradual growth in holiness without a cataclysm; in spite of the obvious leakage (as one may say) of much mere natural goodness into the scheme of salvation; revivalism has always assumed that only its own type of religious experience can be perfect; you must first be nailed on the cross of natural despair and agony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be miraculously released.

It is natural that those who personally have traversed such an experience should carry away a feeling of its being a miracle rather than a natural process. Voices are often heard, lights seen, or visions witnessed; automatic motor phenomena occur; and it always seems, after the surrender of the personal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken possession. Moreover the sense of renovation, safety, cleanness, rightness, can be so marvelous and jubilant as well to warrant one’s belief in a radically new substantial nature.

“Conversion,” writes the New England Puritan, Joseph Alleine, “is
not the putting in a patch of holiness; but with the true convert
holiness is woven into all his powers, principles, and practice.
The sincere Christian is quite a new fabric, from the foundation
to the top‐stone. He is a new man, a new creature.”