“counter‐conversion,” as the transition from orthodoxy to infidelity has
been well styled by Mr. Starbuck. Jouffroy’s doubts had long harassed him;
but he dates his final crisis from a certain night when his disbelief grew
fixed and stable, and where the immediate result was sadness at the
illusions he had lost.
“I shall never forget that night of December,” writes Jouffroy,
“in which the veil that concealed from me my own incredulity was
torn. I hear again my steps in that narrow naked chamber where
long after the hour of sleep had come I had the habit of walking
up and down. I see again that moon, half‐veiled by clouds, which
now and again illuminated the frigid window‐panes. The hours of
the night flowed on and I did not note their passage. Anxiously I
followed my thoughts, as from layer to layer they descended
towards the foundation of my consciousness, and, scattering one by
one all the illusions which until then had screened its windings
from my view, made them every moment more clearly visible.
“Vainly I clung to these last beliefs as a shipwrecked sailor
clings to the fragments of his vessel; vainly, frightened at the
unknown void in which I was about to float, I turned with them
towards my childhood, my family, my country, all that was dear and
sacred to me: the inflexible current of my thought was too
strong,—parents, family, memory, beliefs, it forced me to let go
of everything. The investigation went on more obstinate and more
severe as it drew near its term, and did not stop until the end
was reached. I knew then that in the depth of my mind nothing was
left that stood erect.
“This moment was a frightful one; and when towards morning I threw
myself exhausted on my bed, I seemed to feel my earlier life, so
smiling and so full, go out like a fire, and before me another
life opened, sombre and unpeopled, where in future I must live
alone, alone with my fatal thought which had exiled me thither,
and which I was tempted to curse. The days which followed this
discovery were the saddest of my life.”(93)
In John Foster’s Essay on Decision of Character, there is an account of a
case of sudden conversion to avarice, which is illustrative enough to
quote:—
A young man, it appears, “wasted, in two or three years, a large
patrimony in profligate revels with a number of worthless
associates who called themselves his friends, and who, when his
last means were exhausted, treated him of course with neglect or
contempt. Reduced to absolute want, he one day went out of the
house with an intention to put an end to his life; but wandering
awhile almost unconsciously, he came to the brow of an eminence
which overlooked what were lately his estates. Here he sat down,
and remained fixed in thought a number of hours, at the end of
which he sprang from the ground with a vehement, exulting emotion.
He had formed his resolution, which was, that all these estates
should be his again; he had formed his plan, too, which he
instantly began to execute. He walked hastily forward, determined
to seize the first opportunity, of however humble a kind, to gain
any money, though it were ever so despicable a trifle, and
resolved absolutely not to spend, if he could help it, a farthing
of whatever he might obtain. The first thing that drew his
attention was a heap of coals shot out of carts on the pavement
before a house. He offered himself to shovel or wheel them into
the place where they were to be laid, and was employed. He
received a few pence for the labor; and then, in pursuance of the
saving part of his plan, requested some small gratuity of meat and
drink, which was given him. He then looked out for the next thing
that might chance; and went, with indefatigable industry, through
a succession of servile employments in different places, of longer
and shorter duration, still scrupulous in avoiding, as far as
possible, the expense of a penny. He promptly seized every
opportunity which could advance his design, without regarding the
meanness of occupation or appearance. By this method he had
gained, after a considerable time, money enough to purchase in
order to sell again a few cattle, of which he had taken pains to
understand the value. He speedily but cautiously turned his first
gains into second advantages; retained without a single deviation
his extreme parsimony; and thus advanced by degrees into larger
transactions and incipient wealth. I did not hear, or have
forgotten, the continued course of his life, but the final result
was, that he more than recovered his lost possessions, and died an
inveterate miser, worth £60,000.”(94)
Let me turn now to the kind of case, the religious case, namely, that
immediately concerns us. Here is one of the simplest possible type, an
account of the conversion to the systematic religion of healthy‐mindedness
of a man who must already have been naturally of the healthy‐minded type.
It shows how, when the fruit is ripe, a touch will make it fall.
Mr. Horace Fletcher, in his little book called Menticulture, relates that
a friend with whom he was talking of the self‐control attained by the
Japanese through their practice of the Buddhist discipline said:—
“ ‘You must first get rid of anger and worry.’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘is
that possible?’ ‘Yes,’ replied he; ‘it is possible to the
Japanese, and ought to be possible to us.’
“On my way back I could think of nothing else but the words ‘get
rid, get rid’; and the idea must have continued to possess me
during my sleeping hours, for the first consciousness in the
morning brought back the same thought, with the revelation of a
discovery, which framed itself into the reasoning, ‘If it is
possible to get rid of anger and worry, why is it necessary to
have them at all?’ I felt the strength of the argument, and at
once accepted the reasoning. The baby had discovered that it could
walk. It would scorn to creep any longer.
“From the instant I realized that these cancer spots of worry and
anger were removable, they left me. With the discovery of their
weakness they were exorcised. From that time life has had an
entirely different aspect.
“Although from that moment the possibility and desirability of
freedom from the depressing passions has been a reality to me, it
took me some months to feel absolute security in my new position;
but, as the usual occasions for worry and anger have presented
themselves over and over again, and I have been unable to feel
them in the slightest degree, I no longer dread or guard against
them, and I am amazed at my increased energy and vigor of mind; at
my strength to meet situations of all kinds, and at my disposition
to love and appreciate everything.
“I have had occasion to travel more than ten thousand miles by
rail since that morning. The same Pullman porter, conductor,
hotel‐waiter, peddler, book‐agent, cabman, and others who were
formerly a source of annoyance and irritation have been met, but I
am not conscious of a single incivility. All at once the whole
world has turned good to me. I have become, as it were, sensitive
only to the rays of good.
“I could recount many experiences which prove a brand‐new
condition of mind, but one will be sufficient. Without the
slightest feeling of annoyance or impatience, I have seen a train
that I had planned to take with a good deal of interested and
pleasurable anticipation move out of the station without me,
because my baggage did not arrive. The porter from the hotel came
running and panting into the station just as the train pulled out
of sight. When he saw me, he looked as if he feared a scolding,
and began to tell of being blocked in a crowded street and unable
to get out. When he had finished, I said to him: ‘It doesn’t
matter at all, you couldn’t help it, so we will try again to‐
morrow. Here is your fee, I am sorry you had all this trouble in
earning it.’ The look of surprise that came over his face was so
filled with pleasure that I was repaid on the spot for the delay
in my departure. Next day he would not accept a cent for the
service, and he and I are friends for life.
“During the first weeks of my experience I was on guard only
against worry and anger; but, in the mean time, having noticed the
absence of the other depressing and dwarfing passions, I began to
trace a relationship, until I was convinced that they are all
growths from the two roots I have specified. I have felt the
freedom now for so long a time that I am sure of my relation
toward it; and I could no more harbor any of the thieving and
depressing influences that once I nursed as a heritage of humanity
than a fop would voluntarily wallow in a filthy gutter.
“There is no doubt in my mind that pure Christianity and pure
Buddhism, and the Mental Sciences and all Religions, fundamentally
teach what has been a discovery to me; but none of them have
presented it in the light of a simple and easy process of
elimination. At one time I wondered if the elimination would not
yield to indifference and sloth. In my experience, the contrary is
the result. I feel such an increased desire to do something useful
that it seems as if I were a boy again and the energy for play had
returned. I could fight as readily as (and better than) ever, if
there were occasion for it. It does not make one a coward. It
can’t, since fear is one of the things eliminated. I notice the
absence of timidity in the presence of any audience. When a boy, I
was standing under a tree which was struck by lightning, and
received a shock from the effects of which I never knew exemption
until I had dissolved partnership with worry. Since then,
lightning and thunder have been encountered under conditions which
would formerly have caused great depression and discomfort,
without [my] experiencing a trace of either. Surprise is also
greatly modified, and one is less liable to become startled by
unexpected sights or noises.
“As far as I am individually concerned, I am not bothering myself
at present as to what the results of this emancipated condition
may be. I have no doubt that the perfect health aimed at by
Christian Science may be one of the possibilities, for I note a
marked improvement in the way my stomach does its duty in
assimilating the food I give it to handle, and I am sure it works
better to the sound of a song than under the friction of a frown.
Neither am I wasting any of this precious time formulating an idea
of a future existence or a future Heaven. The Heaven that I have
within myself is as attractive as any that has been promised or
that I can imagine; and I am willing to let the growth lead where
it will, as long as the anger and their brood have no part in
misguiding it.”(95)
The older medicine used to speak of two ways, _lysis_ and _crisis_, one
gradual, the other abrupt, in which one might recover from a bodily
disease. In the spiritual realm there are also two ways, one gradual, the
other sudden, in which inner unification may occur. Tolstoy and Bunyan may
again serve us as examples, examples, as it happens, of the gradual way,
though it must be confessed at the outset that it is hard to follow these
windings of the hearts of others, and one feels that their words do not
reveal their total secret.
Howe’er this be, Tolstoy, pursuing his unending questioning, seemed to
come to one insight after another. First he perceived that his conviction
that life was meaningless took only this finite life into account. He was
looking for the value of one finite term in that of another, and the whole
result could only be one of those indeterminate equations in mathematics
which end with 0=0. Yet this is as far as the reasoning intellect by
itself can go, unless irrational sentiment or faith brings in the
infinite. Believe in the infinite as common people do, and life grows
possible again.
“Since mankind has existed, wherever life has been, there also has
been the faith that gave the possibility of living. Faith is the
sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy
himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we
live. If Man did not believe that he must live for something, he
would not live at all. The idea of an infinite God, of the
divinity of the soul, of the union of men’s actions with God—these
are ideas elaborated in the infinite secret depths of human
thought. They are ideas without which there would be no life,
without which I myself,” said Tolstoy, “would not exist. I began
to see that I had no right to rely on my individual reasoning and
neglect these answers given by faith, for they are the only
answers to the question.”
Yet how believe as the common people believe, steeped as they are in
grossest superstition? It is impossible,—but yet their life! their life!
It is normal. It is happy! It is an answer to the question!
Little by little, Tolstoy came to the settled conviction—he says it took
him two years to arrive there—that his trouble had not been with life in
general, not with the common life of common men, but with the life of the
upper, intellectual, artistic classes, the life which he had personally
always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality,
and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change. To work
for animal needs, to abjure lies and vanities, to relieve common wants, to
be simple, to believe in God, therein lay happiness again.
“I remember,” he says, “one day in early spring, I was alone in
the forest, lending my ear to its mysterious noises. I listened,
and my thought went back to what for these three years it always
was busy with—the quest of God. But the idea of him, I said, how
did I ever come by the idea?
“And again there arose in me, with this thought, glad aspirations
towards life. Everything in me awoke and received a meaning....
Why do I look farther? a voice within me asked. He is there: he,
without whom one cannot live. To acknowledge God and to live are
one and the same thing. God is what life is. Well, then! live,
seek God, and there will be no life without him....
“After this, things cleared up within me and about me better than
ever, and the light has never wholly died away. I was saved from
suicide. Just how or when the change took place I cannot tell. But
as insensibly and gradually as the force of life had been annulled
within me, and I had reached my moral death‐bed, just as gradually
and imperceptibly did the energy of life come back. And what was
strange was that this energy that came back was nothing new. It
was my ancient juvenile force of faith, the belief that the sole
purpose of my life was to be _better_. I gave up the life of the
conventional world, recognizing it to be no life, but a parody on
life, which its superfluities simply keep us from
comprehending,”—and Tolstoy thereupon embraced the life of the
peasants, and has felt right and happy, or at least relatively so,
ever since.(96)
As I interpret his melancholy, then, it was not merely an accidental
vitiation of his humors, though it was doubtless also that. It was
logically called for by the clash between his inner character and his
outer activities and aims. Although a literary artist, Tolstoy was one of
those primitive oaks of men to whom the superfluities and insincerities,
the cupidities, complications, and cruelties of our polite civilization
are profoundly unsatisfying, and for whom the eternal veracities lie with
more natural and animal things. His crisis was the getting of his soul in
order, the discovery of its genuine habitat and vocation, the escape from
falsehoods into what for him were ways of truth. It was a case of
heterogeneous personality tardily and slowly finding its unity and level.
And though not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps,
of the aboriginal human marrow in our bones, most of us may at least feel
as if it might be better for us if we could.
Bunyan’s recovery seems to have been even slower. For years together he
was alternately haunted with texts of Scripture, now up and now down, but
at last with an ever growing relief in his salvation through the blood of
Christ.
“My peace would be in and out twenty times a day; comfort now and
trouble presently; peace now and before I could go a furlong as
full of guilt and fear as ever heart could hold.” When a good text
comes home to him, “This,” he writes, “gave me good encouragement
for the space of two or three hours”; or “This was a good day to
me, I hope I shall not forget it”; or “The glory of these words
was then so weighty on me that I was ready to swoon as I sat; yet
not with grief and trouble, but with solid joy and peace”; or
“This made a strange seizure on my spirit; it brought light with
it, and commanded a silence in my heart of all those tumultuous
thoughts that before did use, like masterless hell‐hounds, to roar
and bellow and make a hideous noise within me. It showed me that
Jesus Christ had not quite forsaken and cast off my Soul.”
Such periods accumulate until he can write: “And now remained only
the hinder part of the tempest, for the thunder was gone beyond
me, only some drops would still remain, that now and then would
fall upon me”;—and at last: “Now did my chains fall off my legs
indeed; I was loosed from my afflictions and irons; my temptations
also fled away; so that from that time, those dreadful Scriptures
of God left off to trouble me; now went I also home rejoicing, for
the grace and love of God.... Now could I see myself in Heaven and
Earth at once; in Heaven by my Christ, by my Head, by my
Righteousness and Life, though on Earth by my body or person....
Christ was a precious Christ to my soul that night; I could scarce
lie in my bed for joy and peace and triumph through Christ.”
Bunyan became a minister of the gospel, and in spite of his neurotic
constitution, and of the twelve years he lay in prison for his non‐
conformity, his life was turned to active use. He was a peacemaker and
doer of good, and the immortal Allegory which he wrote has brought the
very spirit of religious patience home to English hearts.
But neither Bunyan nor Tolstoy could become what we have called healthy‐
minded. They had drunk too deeply of the cup of bitterness ever to forget
its taste, and their redemption is into a universe two stories deep. Each
of them realized a good which broke the effective edge of his sadness; yet
the sadness was preserved as a minor ingredient in the heart of the faith
by which it was overcome. The fact of interest for us is that as a matter
of fact they could and did find _something_ welling up in the inner
reaches of their consciousness, by which such extreme sadness could be
overcome. Tolstoy does well to talk of it as _that by which men live_; for
that is exactly what it is, a stimulus, an excitement, a faith, a force
that re‐infuses the positive willingness to live, even in full presence of
the evil perceptions that erewhile made life seem unbearable. For
Tolstoy’s perceptions of evil appear within their sphere to have remained
unmodified. His later works show him implacable to the whole system of
official values: the ignobility of fashionable life; the infamies of
empire; the spuriousness of the church, the vain conceit of the
professions; the meannesses and cruelties that go with great success; and
every other pompous crime and lying institution of this world. To all
patience with such things his experience has been for him a permanent
ministry of death.
Bunyan also leaves this world to the enemy.
“I must first pass a sentence of death,” he says, “upon everything
that can properly be called a thing of this life, even to reckon
myself, my wife, my children, my health, my enjoyments, and all,
as dead to me, and myself as dead to them; to trust in God through
Christ, as touching the world to come; and as touching this world,
to count the grave my house, to make my bed in darkness, and to
say to corruption, Thou art my father, and to the worm, Thou art
my mother and sister.... The parting with my wife and my poor
children hath often been to me as the pulling of my flesh from my
bones, especially my poor blind child who lay nearer my heart than
all I had besides. Poor child, thought I, what sorrow art thou
like to have for thy portion in this world! Thou must be beaten,
must beg, suffer hunger, cold, nakedness, and a thousand
calamities, though I cannot now endure that the wind should blow
upon thee. But yet I must venture you all with God, though it
goeth to the quick to leave you.”(97)
The “hue of resolution” is there, but the full flood of ecstatic
liberation seems never to have poured over poor John Bunyan’s soul.
These examples may suffice to acquaint us in a general way with the
phenomenon technically called “Conversion.” In the next lecture I shall
invite you to study its peculiarities and concomitants in some detail.
LECTURE IX. CONVERSION.
To be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience
religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the
process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and
consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously
right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious
realities. This at least is what conversion signifies in general terms,
whether or not we believe that a direct divine operation is needed to
bring such a moral change about.
Before entering upon a minuter study of the process, let me enliven our
understanding of the definition by a concrete example. I choose the quaint
case of an unlettered man, Stephen H. Bradley, whose experience is related
in a scarce American pamphlet.(98)
I select this case because it shows how in these inner alterations one may
find one unsuspected depth below another, as if the possibilities of
character lay disposed in a series of layers or shells, of whose existence
we have no premonitory knowledge.
Bradley thought that he had been already fully converted at the age of
fourteen.
“I thought I saw the Saviour, by faith, in human shape, for about
one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to
me, Come. The next day I rejoiced with trembling; soon after, my
happiness was so great that I said that I wanted to die; this
world had no place in my affections, as I knew of, and every day
appeared as solemn to me as the Sabbath. I had an ardent desire
that all mankind might feel as I did; I wanted to have them all
love God supremely. Previous to this time I was very selfish and
self‐righteous; but now I desired the welfare of all mankind, and
could with a feeling heart forgive my worst enemies, and I felt as
if I should be willing to bear the scoffs and sneers of any
person, and suffer anything for His sake, if I could be the means
in the hands of God, of the conversion of one soul.”
Nine years later, in 1829, Mr. Bradley heard of a revival of
religion that had begun in his neighborhood. “Many of the young
converts,” he says, “would come to me when in meeting and ask me
if I had religion, and my reply generally was, I hope I have. This
did not appear to satisfy them; they said they _knew they_ had it.
I requested them to pray for me, thinking with myself, that if I
had not got religion now, after so long a time professing to be a
Christian, that it was time I had, and hoped their prayers would
be answered in my behalf.
“One Sabbath, I went to hear the Methodist at the Academy. He
spoke of the ushering in of the day of general judgment; and he
set it forth in such a solemn and terrible manner as I never heard
before. The scene of that day appeared to be taking place, and so
awakened were all the powers of my mind that, like Felix, I
trembled involuntarily on the bench where I was sitting, though I
felt nothing at heart. The next day evening I went to hear him
again. He took his text from Revelation: ‘And I saw the dead,
small and great, stand before God.’ And he represented the terrors
of that day in such a manner that it appeared as if it would melt
the heart of stone. When he finished his discourse, an old
gentleman turned to me and said, ‘This is what I call preaching.’
I thought the same; but my feelings were still unmoved by what he
said, and I did not enjoy religion, but I believe he did.