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.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
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.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
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.