which took place on the same night. Had any person told me
previous to this that I could have experienced the power of the
Holy Spirit in the manner which I did, I could not have believed
it, and should have thought the person deluded that told me so. I
went directly home after the meeting, and when I got home I
wondered what made me feel so stupid. I retired to rest soon after
I got home, and felt indifferent to the things of religion until I
began to be exercised by the Holy Spirit, which began in about
five minutes after, in the following manner:—
“At first, I began to feel my heart beat very quick all on a
sudden, which made me at first think that perhaps something is
going to ail me, though I was not alarmed, for I felt no pain. My
heart increased in its beating, which soon convinced me that it
was the Holy Spirit from the effect it had on me. I began to feel
exceedingly happy and humble, and such a sense of unworthiness as
I never felt before. I could not very well help speaking out,
which I did, and said, Lord, I do not deserve this happiness, or
words to that effect, while there was a stream (resembling air in
feeling) came into my mouth and heart in a more sensible manner
than that of drinking anything, which continued, as near as I
could judge, five minutes or more, which appeared to be the cause
of such a palpitation of my heart. It took complete possession of
my soul, and I am certain that I desired the Lord, while in the
midst of it, not to give me any more happiness, for it seemed as
if I could not contain what I had got. My heart seemed as if it
would burst, but it did not stop until I felt as if I was
unutterably full of the love and grace of God. In the mean time
while thus exercised, a thought arose in my mind, what can it
mean? and all at once, as if to answer it, my memory became
exceedingly clear, and it appeared to me just as if the New
Testament was placed open before me, eighth chapter of Romans, and
as light as if some candle lighted was held for me to read the
26th and 27th verses of that chapter, and I read these words: ‘The
Spirit helpeth our infirmities with groanings which cannot be
uttered.’ And all the time that my heart was a‐beating, it made me
groan like a person in distress, which was not very easy to stop,
though I was in no pain at all, and my brother being in bed in
another room came and opened the door, and asked me if I had got
the toothache. I told him no, and that he might get to sleep. I
tried to stop. I felt unwilling to go to sleep myself, I was so
happy, fearing I should lose it—thinking within myself
‘My willing soul would stay
In such a frame as this.’
And while I lay reflecting, after my heart stopped beating,
feeling as if my soul was full of the Holy Spirit, I thought that
perhaps there might be angels hovering round my bed. I felt just
as if I wanted to converse with them, and finally I spoke, saying,
‘O ye affectionate angels! how is it that ye can take so much
interest in our welfare, and we take so little interest in our
own.’ After this, with difficulty I got to sleep; and when I awoke
in the morning my first thoughts were: What has become of my
happiness? and, feeling a degree of it in my heart, I asked for
more, which was given to me as quick as thought. I then got up to
dress myself, and found to my surprise that I could but just
stand. It appeared to me as if it was a little heaven upon earth.
My soul felt as completely raised above the fears of death as of
going to sleep; and like a bird in a cage, I had a desire, if it
was the will of God, to get released from my body and to dwell
with Christ, though willing to live to do good to others, and to
warn sinners to repent. I went downstairs feeling as solemn as if
I had lost all my friends, and thinking with myself, that I would
not let my parents know it until I had first looked into the
Testament. I went directly to the shelf and looked into it, at the
eighth chapter of Romans, and every verse seemed to almost speak
and to confirm it to be truly the Word of God, and as if my
feelings corresponded with the meaning of the word. I then told my
parents of it, and told them that I thought that they must see
that when I spoke, that it was not my own voice, for it appeared
so to me. My speech seemed entirely under the control of the
Spirit within me; I do not mean that the words which I spoke were
not my own, for they were. I thought that I was influenced similar
to the Apostles on the day of Pentecost (with the exception of
having power to give it to others, and doing what they did). After
breakfast I went round to converse with my neighbors on religion,
which I could not have been hired to have done before this, and at
their request I prayed with them, though I had never prayed in
public before.
“I now feel as if I had discharged my duty by telling the truth,
and hope by the blessing of God, it may do some good to all who
shall read it. He has fulfilled his promise in sending the Holy
Spirit down into our hearts, or mine at least, and I now defy all
the Deists and Atheists in the world to shake my faith in Christ.”
So much for Mr. Bradley and his conversion, of the effect of which upon
his later life we gain no information. Now for a minuter survey of the
constituent elements of the conversion process.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
If you open the chapter on Association, of any treatise on Psychology, you
will read that a man’s ideas, aims, and objects form diverse internal
groups and systems, relatively independent of one another. Each “aim”
which he follows awakens a certain specific kind of interested excitement,
and gathers a certain group of ideas together in subordination to it as
its associates; and if the aims and excitements are distinct in kind,
their groups of ideas may have little in common. When one group is present
and engrosses the interest, all the ideas connected with other groups may
be excluded from the mental field. The President of the United States
when, with paddle, gun, and fishing‐rod, he goes camping in the wilderness
for a vacation, changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The
presidential anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the
official habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those
who knew the man only as the strenuous magistrate would not “know him for
the same person” if they saw him as the camper.
If now he should never go back, and never again suffer political interests
to gain dominion over him, he would be for practical intents and purposes
a permanently transformed being. Our ordinary alterations of character, as
we pass from one of our aims to another, are not commonly called
transformations, because each of them is so rapidly succeeded by another
in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim grows so stable as to expel
definitively its previous rivals from the individual’s life, we tend to
speak of the phenomenon, and perhaps to wonder at it, as a
“transformation.”
These alternations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be
divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two or
more different groups of aims, of which one practically holds the right of
way and instigates activity, whilst the others are only pious wishes, and
never practically come to anything. Saint Augustine’s aspirations to a
purer life, in our last lecture, were for a while an example. Another
would be the President in his full pride of office, wondering whether it
were not all vanity, and whether the life of a wood‐chopper were not the
wholesomer destiny. Such fleeting aspirations are mere _velleitates_,
whimsies. They exist on the remoter outskirts of the mind, and the real
self of the man, the centre of his energies, is occupied with an entirely
different system. As life goes on, there is a constant change of our
interests, and a consequent change of place in our systems of ideas, from
more central to more peripheral, and from more peripheral to more central
parts of consciousness. I remember, for instance, that one evening when I
was a youth, my father read aloud from a Boston newspaper that part of
Lord Gifford’s will which founded these four lectureships. At that time I
did not think of being a teacher of philosophy: and what I listened to was
as remote from my own life as if it related to the planet Mars. Yet here I
am, with the Gifford system part and parcel of my very self, and all my
energies, for the time being, devoted to successfully identifying myself
with it. My soul stands now planted in what once was for it a practically
unreal object, and speaks from it as from its proper habitat and centre.
When I say “Soul,” you need not take me in the ontological sense unless
you prefer to; for although ontological language is instinctive in such
matters, yet Buddhists or Humians can perfectly well describe the facts in
the phenomenal terms which are their favorites. For them the soul is only
a succession of fields of consciousness: yet there is found in each field
a part, or sub‐field, which figures as focal and contains the excitement,
and from which, as from a centre, the aim seems to be taken. Talking of
this part, we involuntarily apply words of perspective to distinguish it
from the rest, words like “here,” “this,” “now,” “mine,” or “me”; and we
ascribe to the other parts the positions “there,” “then,” “that,” “his” or
“thine,” “it,” “not me.” But a “here” can change to a “there,” and a
“there” become a “here,” and what was “mine” and what was “not mine”
change their places.
What brings such changes about is the way in which emotional excitement
alters. Things hot and vital to us to‐day are cold to‐morrow. It is as if
seen from the hot parts of the field that the other parts appear to us,
and from these hot parts personal desire and volition make their sallies.
They are in short the centres of our dynamic energy, whereas the cold
parts leave us indifferent and passive in proportion to their coldness.
Whether such language be rigorously exact is for the present of no
importance. It is exact enough, if you recognize from your own experience
the facts which I seek to designate by it.
Now there may be great oscillation in the emotional interest, and the hot
places may shift before one almost as rapidly as the sparks that run
through burnt‐up paper. Then we have the wavering and divided self we
heard so much of in the previous lecture. Or the focus of excitement and
heat, the point of view from which the aim is taken, may come to lie
permanently within a certain system; and then, if the change be a
religious one, we call it a _conversion_, especially if it be by crisis,
or sudden.
Let us hereafter, in speaking of the hot place in a man’s consciousness,
the group of ideas to which he devotes himself, and from which he works,
call it _the habitual centre of his personal energy_. It makes a great
difference to a man whether one set of his ideas, or another, be the
centre of his energy; and it makes a great difference, as regards any set
of ideas which he may possess, whether they become central or remain
peripheral in him. To say that a man is “converted” means, in these terms,
that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his consciousness, now take
a central place, and that religious aims form the habitual centre of his
energy.
Now if you ask of psychology just _how_ the excitement shifts in a man’s
mental system, and _why_ aims that were peripheral become at a certain
moment central, psychology has to reply that although she can give a
general description of what happens, she is unable in a given case to
account accurately for all the single forces at work. Neither an outside
observer nor the Subject who undergoes the process can explain fully how
particular experiences are able to change one’s centre of energy so
decisively, or why they so often have to bide their hour to do so. We have
a thought, or we perform an act, repeatedly, but on a certain day the real
meaning of the thought peals through us for the first time, or the act has
suddenly turned into a moral impossibility. All we know is that there are
dead feelings, dead ideas, and cold beliefs, and there are hot and live
ones; and when one grows hot and alive within us, everything has to re‐
crystallize about it. We may say that the heat and liveliness mean only
the “motor efficacy,” long deferred but now operative, of the idea; but
such talk itself is only circumlocution, for whence the sudden motor
efficacy? And our explanations then get so vague and general that one
realizes all the more the intense individuality of the whole phenomenon.
In the end we fall back on the hackneyed symbolism of a mechanical
equilibrium. A mind is a system of ideas, each with the excitement it
arouses, and with tendencies impulsive and inhibitive, which mutually
check or reinforce one another. The collection of ideas alters by
subtraction or by addition in the course of experience, and the tendencies
alter as the organism gets more aged. A mental system may be undermined or
weakened by this interstitial alteration just as a building is, and yet
for a time keep upright by dead habit. But a new perception, a sudden
emotional shock, or an occasion which lays bare the organic alteration,
will make the whole fabric fall together; and then the centre of gravity
sinks into an attitude more stable, for the new ideas that reach the
centre in the rearrangement seem now to be locked there, and the new
structure remains permanent.
Formed associations of ideas and habits are usually factors of retardation
in such changes of equilibrium. New information, however acquired, plays
an accelerating part in the changes; and the slow mutation of our
instincts and propensities, under the “unimaginable touch of time” has an
enormous influence. Moreover, all these influences may work subconsciously
or half unconsciously.(99) And when you get a Subject in whom the
subconscious life—of which I must speak more fully soon—is largely
developed, and in whom motives habitually ripen in silence, you get a case
of which you can never give a full account, and in which, both to the
Subject and the onlookers, there may appear an element of marvel.
Emotional occasions, especially violent ones, are extremely potent in
precipitating mental rearrangements. The sudden and explosive ways in
which love, jealousy, guilt, fear, remorse, or anger can seize upon one
are known to everybody.(100) Hope, happiness, security, resolve, emotions
characteristic of conversion, can be equally explosive. And emotions that
come in this explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.
In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Starbuck of
California has shown by a statistical inquiry how closely parallel in its
manifestations the ordinary “conversion” which occurs in young people
brought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a larger
spiritual life which is a normal phase of adolescence in every class of
human beings. The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and
seventeen. The symptoms are the same,—sense of incompleteness and
imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense of
sin; anxiety about the hereafter; distress over doubts, and the like. And
the result is the same,—a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence
in self gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider
outlook. In spontaneous religious awakening, apart from revivalistic
examples, and in the ordinary storm and stress and moulting‐time of
adolescence, we also may meet with mystical experiences, astonishing the
subjects by their suddenness, just as in revivalistic conversion. The
analogy, in fact, is complete; and Starbuck’s conclusion as to these
ordinary youthful conversions would seem to be the only sound one:
Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to
the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intellectual and
spiritual life of maturity.
“Theology,” says Dr. Starbuck, “takes the adolescent tendencies and builds
upon them; it sees that the essential thing in adolescent growth is
bringing the person out of childhood into the new life of maturity and
personal insight. It accordingly brings those means to bear which will
intensify the normal tendencies. It shortens up the period of duration of
storm and stress.” The conversion phenomena of “conviction of sin” last,
by this investigator’s statistics, about one fifth as long as the periods
of adolescent storm and stress phenomena of which he also got statistics,
but they are very much more intense. Bodily accompaniments, loss of sleep
and appetite, for example, are much more frequent in them. “The essential
distinction appears to be that conversion intensifies but shortens the
period by bringing the person to a definite crisis.”(101)
The conversions which Dr. Starbuck here has in mind are of course mainly
those of very commonplace persons, kept true to a pre‐appointed type by
instruction, appeal, and example. The particular form which they affect is
the result of suggestion and imitation.(102) If they went through their
growth‐crisis in other faiths and other countries, although the essence of
the change would be the same (since it is one in the main so inevitable),
its accidents would be different. In Catholic lands, for example, and in
our own Episcopalian sects, no such anxiety and conviction of sin is usual
as in sects that encourage revivals. The sacraments being more relied on
in these more strictly ecclesiastical bodies, the individual’s personal
acceptance of salvation needs less to be accentuated and led up to.
But every imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I
propose that for the future we keep as close as may be to the more first‐
hand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to be found
in sporadic adult cases.
Professor Leuba, in a valuable article on the psychology of
conversion,(103) subordinates the theological aspect of the religious life
almost entirely to its moral aspect. The religious sense he defines as
“the feeling of un‐wholeness, of moral imperfection, of sin, to use the
technical word, accompanied by the yearning after the peace of unity.”
“The word ‘religion,’ ” he says, “is getting more and more to signify the
conglomerate of desires and emotions springing from the sense of sin and
its release”; and he gives a large number of examples, in which the sin
ranges from drunkenness to spiritual pride, to show that the sense of it
may beset one and crave relief as urgently as does the anguish of the
sickened flesh or any form of physical misery.
Undoubtedly this conception covers an immense number of cases. A good one
to use as an example is that of Mr. S. H. Hadley, who after his conversion
became an active and useful rescuer of drunkards in New York. His
experience runs as follows:—
“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)