Part 6 (1/2)

The psychologists have emphasized not only the facts of conversion but the variety in its mode. It has been pointed out that ”conversion for males is a more violent incident than for females, and more sudden.”[100]

Uhlhorn has observed that it is characteristic of a period of conflict ”that sudden conversions are more frequent then than at other times, that the marvel inherent in every conversion becomes more evident, and, so to speak, more palpable.”[101] A child brought up under strong religious influences will not have the intense struggles which are natural when a hardened criminal or a scoffing unbeliever is converted.

Count Zinzendorf raised serious misgivings in the minds of the Moravians when he insisted that he ”could not tell the day when he first decided for Christ, and had no knowledge of a time when he did not love Him.”[102] The mother of Edmund Gosse, a woman singularly devoted in her labours by tongue and pen to the cause of evangelical religion, wrote in her thirtieth year: ”I cannot recollect the time I did not love religion. If I must date my conversion from my first wish and trial to be holy, I may go back to infancy; if I am to postpone it till after my last willful sin, it is scarcely yet begun.”[103]

100: Starbuck: ”Psychology of Religion,” p. 95.

101: ”Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism,” p. 168.

102: See Stevens: ”Psychology of the Christian Soul,” pp. 159, 160.

103: ”Father and Son,” by Edmund Gosse, 1907, p. 3.

It would be equally one-sided to insist that all conversions must be of the sudden or cataclysmic type, and to ignore the tremendous significance of some sudden and dramatic experiences of conversion. Paul and Augustine are cases in point, and it will scarcely do to dismiss them with the remark that ”Paul was probably a neurotic, and that Augustine was a sensualist with a highly developed nervous temperament.”[104] The true nature of conversion may best be seen, as James suggests, in those experiences which are exaggerated and intense.[105]

104: Ames: ”The Psychology of Religious Experience,” p. 265.

105: ”Varieties,” p. 45.

Conversions of the sudden and dramatic type have, as a matter of fact, exerted the most far-reaching influence in history. The secular historian is apt nowadays to magnify the influence of Paul upon the life of Europe, but the church historian must add that Paul, as apostle or theologian or missionary, cannot be understood apart from the experience at Damascus. Augustine's conversion inspired his thought and determined his theology. Of Luther, whose conversion may not have been of quite so dramatic a type, a recent writer says: ”Indeed, the Reformation in Germany was the spiritual biography of Luther writ large, a spiritual experience materialized in inst.i.tutions and intellectualized in confessions.”[106]

106: H. H. Walker: _Harvard Theological Review_, April, 1913, p. 179.

The psychologists unite with the historians in describing the broad objective effects of religion upon the field of history. Christianity in its Pauline form presented, in the West, a successful obstacle to the flood of Eastern thought and culture. When the structure of the Roman Empire was crumbling, it was Christianity in its Roman organization that resisted the disintegrating influences of the barbarian invasion. It was Christianity in its Calvinistic form that became ”the seed-plot of modern democracy.” ”No student of American history,” says a writer on the psychology of religion, ”can fail to recognize the immense value of religion as a factor in our national development, keeping us in some measure true to the ideals of our fathers.... The fact that our moral conceptions have at all stood the strain of this rapid material development, and that political and social corruption and decay in America to-day are not hopeless and irremediable as they were in Rome during the last century of the Republic, is due, I believe, chiefly to the vitality of religion among us as a factor effectively conservative of our socially recognized values.”[107]

107: W. K. Wright: ”A Psychological Definition of Religion,”

_American Journal of Theology_, July, 1912, p. 406.

3. At a time when the sense of sin is declining, it is interesting to find the psychologists pressing upon our attention the facts of the disorder, the wrongness, the uneasiness, or frankly the need of salvation, of human kind. It would be out of place for the psychologist, as such, to dogmatize upon the subject of original sin, but in his a.n.a.lysis of human nature he cannot overlook the fact of moral discord, a fact often politely ignored in the text-books on ethics. Thus when James speaks unreservedly and autobiographically, he confesses that ”we all need mercy.” The morally athletic att.i.tude tends to break down at last even in the most stalwart; and, in the condition of moral helplessness, ”all our morality appears as a plaster hiding a sore it can never cure, and all our well-doing as the hollowest subst.i.tute for that well-being that our lives ought to be grounded in, but alas! are not.”[108] The essential fact of religion, for Royce, is man's quest for salvation; and the central and essential postulate which he considers in his recent lectures, ”is the postulate that man needs to be saved.”[109]

108: ”Varieties,” p. 47.

109: ”Sources of Religious Insight,” 1912, pp. 8 f.

A distinction is sometimes drawn between a ”once-born” and a ”twice-born” type of religious experience, but the distinction is not absolute. We have already noticed that those who can trace no abrupt change in their experience, nor tell the day or even the year of their conversion, may be zealous in evangelistic labour, and emphatic in their insistence upon the need of regeneration. A well-known example of the once-born type of religion is the late Edward Everett Hale, whose words are often quoted: ”I observe, with profound regret, the religious struggles which come into many biographies, as if almost essential to the formation of a hero. I ought to speak of these, to say that any man has an advantage, not to be estimated, who is born, as I was, into a family where the religion is simple and rational; etc.”[110] And yet Dr.

Hale's son, brought up in such an atmosphere, has himself described in the public press an experience under revival preaching which belongs to the ”twice-born” type.[111]

110: Quoted in Starbuck, pp. 305 f.

111: See _The Literary Digest_, February 10, 1906, p. 210.

The secrets of every heart are not revealed to the psychologist, and we should not expect of him the deepest insight into the sinfulness of sin; but in emphasizing man's sense of need, of incompleteness, of restlessness and of disharmony, psychology has done much to confirm, if it cannot of itself affirm, the Scriptural statement that ”all have sinned.”

4. Is man saved by faith or by works, by faith or by character? As between the evangelical and the legal schemes of salvation, the answer of religious psychology is emphatically in favour of the former.

Psychologists of all schools unite in insisting that those who pa.s.s from restlessness and impotence to peace and fullness of life do so in wonderful accord with the Scriptural method of salvation by faith. The witnesses may be called, even though to a tedious degree one witness only confirms the testimony of another.

We are advised by Jastrow that it is ”necessary for the life that we live that we should frequently permit the focus of our concerns and of our struggles to fade away, and allow the surgings from below to a.s.sert themselves.”[112] James remarks that ”there is a state of mind known to religious men, but to no others, in which the will to a.s.sert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of G.o.d.... The time for tension in our souls is over, and that of happy relaxation, of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived.”[113]

112: ”The Subconscious,” 1906, p. 543.

113: ”Varieties,” p. 47.