* 
 
 
 
 tibravy of Che Cheoicvgicai gvminary 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 BV 4915 .J3 
 
 Jackson, George, 1864-1945 
 
 The fact of conversion 
 
 ?*Pp^M f M 
 
 
 '&&K 
 
The Cole Lectures for ipoS 
 delivered before Vanderbilt University 
 
 The Fact of Conversion 
 
 By 
 GEORGE JACKSON, B.A. 
 
 New York Chicago Toronto 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 London and Edinburgh 
 
Copyright, 1908, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 OS* 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avenue 
 Chicago: 80 Wabash Avenue 
 Toronto: 25 Richmond Street, W. 
 London: 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 100 Princes Street 
 
To 
 
 The Members of 
 
 The Theological Faculty 
 
 Vanderbilt University 
 
 whose generous confidence invited 
 and ivhose sympathy encouraged 
 the delivery of these lectures 
 
THE COLE LECTURES 
 
 THE late Colonel E. W. Cole of Nashville, Ten- 
 nessee, donated to Vanderbilt University the sum 
 of five thousand dollars, afterwards increased by 
 Mrs. E. W. Cole to ten thousand, the design and con- 
 ditions of which gift are stated as follows : 
 
 " The object of this fund is to establish a foundation 
 for a perpetual Lectureship in connection with the Bib- 
 lical Department of the University, to be restricted in its 
 scope to a defense and advocacy of the Christian re- 
 ligion. The lectures shall be delivered at such inter- 
 vals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the 
 Board of Trust ; and the particular theme and lecturer 
 shall be determined by nomination of the Theological 
 Faculty and confirmation of the College of Bishops of 
 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Said lecture 
 shall always be reduced to writing in full, and the man- 
 uscript of the same shall be the property of the Univer- 
 sity, to be published or disposed of by the Board of 
 Trust at its discretion, the net proceeds arising there- 
 from to be added to the foundation fund, or otherwise 
 used for the benefit of the Biblical Department." 
 
Preface 
 
 THE six lectures contained in this 
 volume were delivered, in the spring 
 of this year, at Vanderbilt University, 
 in response to the invitation of the Theological 
 Faculty. In sending them forth to a larger 
 public, it is unnecessary to add more than a 
 brief word of introduction. 
 
 The book is addressed primarily to those 
 who, like myself, are engaged in the practical 
 work of the Christian Church. I have done 
 my best to become acquainted with the 
 relevant literature on the subject, but the 
 book remains still the message of a busy city 
 pastor rather than the scientific treatise of a 
 professional student. 
 
 The point of view from which the whole 
 discussion proceeds can be stated very simply. 
 With all my heart I believe that, as the author 
 of Ecce Homo says, the article of Conversion 
 is the true artictdus stantis aut cadentis 
 9 
 
IO PREFACE 
 
 ecclesice. But in theology we retain nothing 
 that we cannot re-interpret. " We are not 
 done with Conversion," says a writer in The 
 Expository Times, whose words appeared 
 after these Lectures were completed ; " we 
 never shall be done with it. But we must 
 tell our own generation what Conversion 
 means." That is what this little book seeks 
 to do. 
 
 Some readers may be disposed to complain 
 of the frequency and length of the biograph- 
 ical illustrations of which I have made use. 
 I cannot apologize for them ; they were 
 essential to my purpose. Facts and an in- 
 terpretation are all that the book contains, 
 all that it was ever designed to contain. 
 
 It only remains for me to acknowledge my 
 indebtedness to my friend and former col- 
 league, the Rev. E. J. Ives (of Bristol, 
 England), who has assisted me with many 
 valuable suggestions, and to my wife, who 
 has been in this, as in all my public work, 
 my unfailing helpmeet and adviser. 
 
 George Jackson. 
 
 Toronto, igo8. 
 
Contents 
 
 I. The Reality of Conversion 
 
 As a Fact of Conscious- 
 ness 13 
 
 II. The Reality of Conversion 
 
 As a Fact for Life . 55 
 
 III. Varieties of Conversion . 95 
 
 IV. The Rationale of Conver- 
 
 sion ... .131 
 
 V. The Psychology of Conver- 
 
 sion . . . .167 
 
 VI. Present Day Preaching and 
 
 Conversion . . . ,199 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 
 
 "^CHRISTIANITY," wrote Henry 
 I . Drummond, now more than twenty 
 years ago, 1 "is learning from 
 science to go back to its facts. There is, 
 however," he went on, " one portion of this 
 field of facts which is still strangely 
 neglected, and to which a scientific theology 
 may turn its next attention. The evidence 
 for Christianity is not the Evidences. 'The 
 evidence for Christianity is a Christian.l The 
 unit of physics is the atom, of biology the 
 cell, of philosophy the man, of theology the 
 Christian. The natural man, his regenera- 
 tion by the Holy Spirit, the spiritual man and 
 his relations to the world and to God, these 
 are the modern facts for a scientific theology. 
 
 1 In an essay entitled " The Contribution of Science to Chris- 
 tianity," Expositor, third series, Vol. I. 
 
 J 5 
 
l6 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 We may indeed talk with science on its own 
 terms about the creation of the world, and 
 the spirituality of nature, and the force be- 
 hind nature, and the unseen universe ; but 
 our language is not less scientific, not less 
 justified by fact, when we speak of the work 
 of the risen Christ and the contemporary 
 activities of the Holy Ghost, and the facts of 
 regeneration, and the powers which are free- 
 ing men from sin. There is a great experi- 
 ment which is repeated every day, the evi- 
 dence for which is as accessible as for any 
 fact of science ; its phenomena are as pal- 
 pable as any in nature, its processes are as 
 explicable, or as inexplicable ; its purpose is 
 as clear ; and yet science has never been 
 seriously asked to reckon with it, nor has 
 theology ever granted it the place its im- 
 pressive reality commands. One aim of a 
 scientific theology will be to study conversion, 
 and restore to Christianity its most powerful 
 witness." 
 
 I know no words with which more fitly to 
 introduce the subject of this brief course of 
 lectures. It is not — in the sense at least in 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 1 7 
 
 which the term is commonly employed — a 
 theological discussion on which we are about 
 to enter, but an inquiry into certain indubi- 
 table facts of the religious life. It may be 
 true, as we are repeatedly told, that men 
 to-day do not care for theology ; but, how- 
 ever impatient it may be of dogma, an age 
 which boasts of its hunger and thirst after 
 fact will surely not refuse a hearing to the 
 facts of the religious consciousness. 
 
 It is, I hope, possible to enter on an inquiry 
 of this nature without exposing oneself to un- 
 pleasant suspicions. I shall have much to 
 say throughout these lectures about conver- 
 sion experiences, but I must not therefore be 
 understood as claiming for those Churches 
 which are wont to lay greater emphasis on 
 such experiences a higher rank than others in 
 the spiritual order ; it is the reality of the ex- 
 periences themselves which is our present 
 sole concern. And if sometimes I seem to 
 some to speak rather the dialect of a prov- 
 ince than the common speech of the king- 
 dom, I can but reply that this dialect, if such 
 it be, is the spiritual mother tongue of multi- 
 
18 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 tudes who daily speak in it the mighty works 
 of God. Neither must anything in these lec- 
 tures be construed as putting forward in be- 
 half of one type of experience a claim to 
 spiritual validity and worth which is denied 
 to others which do not readily conform to it. 
 Our single aim will be to do justice to an im- 
 mense group of spiritual phenomena which 
 are among the most real things in Christian 
 history or human experience. 
 
 Let us begin, then, with an honest attempt 
 to gain an adequate impression of the range 
 and reality of the phenomena under consid- 
 eration. For some of us, it may be, this will 
 be no easy task. The subject belongs to a 
 realm in which our minds do not move 
 freely, in which we feel ourselves aliens, un- 
 sympathetic and it may be antagonistic. 
 When we hear of conversions we think im- 
 mediately of revivals and the clatter of a 
 machinery which always jars upon our 
 nerves ; to us revivalism is but another name 
 for hysteria and unwholesome excitement. 
 And even the literature of spiritual autobi- 
 ography — the most indispensable of all data 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 19 
 
 for a subject such as this, — is to some of us 
 utterly distasteful. We shrink from these soul 
 anatomies as we shrink from the revelations 
 of the scalpel and the dissecting-room. I do 
 not stay to discuss the reasonableness or 
 otherwise of this attitude of mind ; I only 
 wish to point out that so long as we persist 
 in it we put ourselves out of court in an in- 
 quiry like the present. " The first thing to 
 bear in mind," as Prof. James bluntly puts 
 it, " is that nothing can be more stupid 
 than to bar out phenomena from our notice, 
 merely because we are incapable of taking 
 part in anything like them ourselves." ' The 
 religious inquirer, like the scientific inquirer, 
 must lay aside his prejudices ; he must, 
 as Prof. Huxley once said, sit down before 
 fact as a little child, prepared to give up 
 every preconceived notion and follow 
 humbly wherever it may lead him. 
 
 The fact of conversion may be studied in 
 two different ways : in itself, or in its practical 
 results ; as a fact of consciousness, or as a 
 fact for life. Reserving for the following lec- 
 
 1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 109. 
 
20 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 ture what has to be said concerning the fruits 
 of conversion it will be our aim now to bring 
 together some of the testimonies to the 
 reality of conversion as these are written in 
 the records of the religious consciousness. 
 
 I 
 And at once there opens before us a field 
 of vast and varied interest. How vast and 
 varied the field is perhaps no one realizes 
 who has not made some attempt to survey 
 and map it out. Most people know some- 
 thing of the great spiritual transformations 
 associated with the names of St. Paul and St. 
 Augustine, of John Bunyan and John Wesley ; 
 but how many of us have made any effort 
 seriously to estimate the significance of that 
 great mass of veritable human documents to 
 be found in the New Testament, in the rec- 
 ords of great religious awakenings like that 
 in America under Jonathan Edwards, or that 
 in England under Wesley and Whitefield, 
 and above all in the biographies and auto- 
 biographies, the hymns and prayers and con- 
 fessions, of religious men and women of all 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 21 
 
 Churches and in all ages? Whatever else 
 may be said about Prof. James's much dis- 
 cussed Gifford Lectures, they had at least 
 this merit, that by the concrete examples 
 with which they were so liberally loaded they 
 gave to many readers a new sense of the ex- 
 tent and reality of the world of religious ex- 
 perience. This is the world which we now 
 seek to enter. It is for us to observe, to col- 
 lect, to group, to interpret whatever facts are 
 available for our purpose. Is there testimony 
 adequate to establish the reality of those 
 various experiences — deliverance from the 
 sense of guilt, deliverance from the power of 
 evil habit, the joyful assurance of the favour 
 of God — which are included within the term 
 conversion ? The answer may be given for 
 convenience sake in fourfold form. 
 
 (i) We turn first to the New Testament 
 and to the conversion of St. Paul. There is 
 no necessity to speculate about the mecha- 
 nism of this great experience. /As Principal 
 Rainy says, 1 it is vain for us to inquire by 
 
 1 Lecture on St. Paul in The Evangelical Succession, Vol. I, 
 p. 18. 
 
22 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 what means the form of Christ and the words 
 of Christ reached the consciousness of Paul^ 
 One thing is plain : Paul saw the Lord, he 
 heard the Lord, he spoke with the Lord ; 
 through all his after life his certainty of these 
 things never wavered ; and behind this it is 
 not possible for us to go. But, whatever may 
 be our explanation, the experience itself re- 
 mains, and its profound significance both for 
 the Apostle and the world. We may say if 
 we choose, with Matthew Arnold, that 
 " Paul's conversion is for science an event of 
 precisely the same nature as the conversions 
 of which the history of Methodism relates so 
 many ; " 1 but surely Paul's conversion has 
 also "for science" this further significance 
 that, next to the Death and Resurrection of 
 our Lord, it is the most momentous event in 
 Christian history. How the Apostle himself 
 thought of it his own writings make abun- 
 dantly plain. // was the good pleasure of God 
 to reveal His Son in me ; thus and thus only 
 did Paul the persecutor become Paul the 
 Apostle. / was before a blasphemer^ and a 
 
 1 St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 36. 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 23 
 
 persecutor, and injurious ; howbeit I obtained 
 mercy : this is the testimony in every epistle. 
 That which happened to St. Paul on the road 
 to Damascus was no mere incident in the de- 
 velopment of his spiritual experience ; it was 
 a rending revolution which made all things 
 new, the origin and explanation of all that 
 followed it 
 
 Nor is St. Paul our only New Testament 
 witness to the reality of conversion. I shall 
 have occasion in a later lecture to speak of 
 the varieties of religious experience which 
 are revealed in the earliest manifestations of 
 Christian life ; but, striking and instructive as 
 these varieties are, there is underlying them 
 all a unity of consciousness which is one of 
 the most impressive things in the literature 
 of the New Testament. Open the apostolic 
 writings where we will, we find ourselves 
 everywhere in the presence of a life thrilling 
 through its every fibre with the joy of a great 
 deliverance ; bearing itself proudly yet 
 humbly, because conscious of strange new 
 powers, its own, yet not its own, but An- 
 other's ; uttering itself too in speech that, like 
 
24 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 itself, was new and strange, and yet withal, 
 too feeble for the task committed to it The 
 new life did not come to all who believed in 
 Christ in the same way, but to all it came, 
 and when it came, so poor and mean in its 
 presence did all other distinctions seem, that 
 they who received it were as brethren. 
 
 There is, perhaps, no truer index of the 
 depth and strength of the New Testament 
 consciousness of salvation than is to be found 
 in the rich and varied phraseology through 
 which it seeks expression. If any man is in 
 Christ — so do all the Apostles bear witness — 
 for him all life is become nobly new. The 
 soul passes into a new kingdom, and owes 
 allegiance to a new lord ; it is delivered out of 
 the power of darkness and translated into the 
 kingdom of the Son of God's love ; it is no 
 longer subject to the lusts of man but to the 
 will of God. Nay, more than that, if any 
 man is in Christ, he is passed from death 
 unto life, from the death of sin to the life of 
 righteousness ; he is born again, begotten of 
 God, born not of blood, nor of the will of the 
 flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God ; the 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 25 
 
 man he was, " the old man," has ceased to 
 be, and in his stead has arisen " the new 
 man," created in righteousness and holiness 
 of truth. In one word, if any man is in 
 Christ, he is a new creature ; the old things 
 are passed away ; behold they are become 
 new} Now all this is not to be dismissed as 
 the language of poetry or rhetoric ; it is the 
 speech of men in contact with reality, who 
 speak what they do know and bear witness 
 of that they have seen ; and it is surely a 
 reasonable thing to ask of thought which 
 aspires to be scientific that it shall take these 
 things into its reckoning. 
 
 (2) We turn from the Church of the first 
 days to the Church of the centuries. And if 
 after ages have witnessed nothing quite like 
 that which Ephesus and Rome and Corinth 
 saw; if there has been no second Paul to 
 cleave a lane of light through the world's 
 darkness ; if the gold has become dim, and 
 the silver dross, and the wine mixed with 
 water ; yet, on the other hand, there has 
 
 1 Col. 1:13; I Peter 4:2; 1 John 3 : 14 ; 1 Peter 2: 24; 
 1 John 3:9 ; John 1: 13; Eph. 4 ; 22-24 J 2 Cor « 5 : *7. 
 
26 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 never been a time when men had no ex- 
 periences of their own out of which to in- 
 terpret the deep things of the New Testa- 
 ment ; there has never been a time when 
 Drummond's words concerning "the con- 
 temporary activities of the Holy Ghost, and 
 the facts of regeneration, and the powers 
 which are freeing men from sin," had not a 
 meaning in them. The phenomena with 
 which these lectures deal belong not to one 
 century only but to all the centuries of 
 Christian history,, 
 
 Let me touch for a moment — and alas ! a 
 paragraph must serve where a lecture would 
 be insufficient — upon the witness to conver- 
 sion of the psalms and hymns and spiritual 
 songs of the Church. It is a curious fact 
 which has often been commented on, that 
 our best hymns maintain their place in the 
 worship of the Church, wholly irrespective 
 either of the theological position of their 
 authors, or the changing fashions of religious 
 thought. For every ten persons who now 
 read John Wesley's Sermons or Notes on 
 the New Testament there are probably ten 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 27 
 
 thousand who sing Charles Wesley's hymns. 
 Toplady's controversial writings, which once 
 made so great a noise in the world, have long 
 since fallen on sleep ; but " Rock of Ages " 
 is secure of immortality. Style, it is said, is 
 the great antiseptic, yet even Newman's win- 
 ning style will not preserve for our children 
 more than a very few of the many volumes 
 of the great Oxford scholar ; but will " Lead 
 Kindly Light " ever be forgotten ? What is 
 the explanation of facts like these ? It is cer- 
 tainly not to be found in any perfection of 
 literary form. There are some hymns indeed, 
 such, e. g. y as Cowper's 
 
 There is a fountain filled with blood 
 Drawn from Immanuel's veins ; 
 
 or John Wesley's translation of Rothe's 
 
 Now I have found the ground wherein 
 
 Sure my soul's anchor may remain — 
 The wounds of Jesus, 
 
 which, despite the harsh or incongruous met- 
 aphors with which they are disfigured, still 
 keep their place from generation to genera- 
 
28 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 tion. 1 What then is the explanation ? Surely 
 it is that such hymns are the direct and spon- 
 taneous expression of experience. "They 
 are," as one writer says, " but one degree re- 
 moved from the concrete fact." 2 And the rea- 
 son why intelligent Christian congregations 
 to-day do not tire of singing 
 
 I heard the voice of Jesus say, 
 Come unto Me and rest ; 
 
 or, 
 
 O happy day that fixed my choice 
 On Thee my Saviour and my God ! 
 
 is simply because they have themselves 
 shared in the experience out of which the 
 
 1 " A distinguished critic of our times, in his professorial 
 chair, is reported one day to have held out in one hand The 
 Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics, collected by Francis 
 Palgrave, and in the other The Book of Praise, collected 
 from all English Hymnody by Lord Selborne, and to have 
 asked ' Why is it that The Golden Treasury contains al- 
 most nothing that is bad, and why is it that The Book of 
 Praise contains almost nothing that is good ? ' " (Dean 
 Stanley in The English Poets, edited by T. H. Ward, Vol. 
 Ill, p. 255.) The " distinguished critic's " judgment is far 
 too sweeping, but there is sufficient truth in it to justify the 
 statement made above. 
 
 s The Religion of a Mature Mind, by G. A. Coe, p. 65. 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 2Q 
 
 song arose, and still find in it adequate and 
 satisfying expression of the great spiritual 
 realities of which they are conscious. 
 
 (3) It is, however, in the field of Christian 
 biography that the richest results await the 
 student of conversion. Indeed, I am em- 
 barrassed by the very abundance of the ma- 
 terial available. At most I can but present a 
 mere handful of illustrations, and the prob- 
 lem is so to select these that they shall sug- 
 gest to others the wealth and fertility of the 
 goodly land from which they are gathered. 
 For the present I omit altogether any refer- 
 ences to the familiar cases of St. Augustine, 
 Luther, Bunyan, Wesley and Chalmers ; and 
 I do so not because these are not wholly 
 revelant to our discussion — indeed the mere 
 mention of such names is sufficient to show 
 the significance to Christian history of the 
 fact of conversion — but because over-exclu- 
 sive attention to the evidence of a few out- 
 standing witnesses may conceal the range 
 and variety of the testimony by which in the 
 long run judgment must be determined. In 
 the examples which I adduce I shall leave 
 
30 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 the witness, whenever possible, to tell his 
 story in his own way and in his own 
 words. 
 
 I begin with John Donne, the poet-preacher 
 of St. Paul's, the story of whose life has been 
 told, in one of the gem-like biographies of 
 Izaak Walton. Donne's career has been 
 often compared with that of St. Augustine. 
 There was in him, says Trench, " the same 
 tumultuous youth, the same entanglement in 
 youthful lusts, the same conflict with these 
 and the same final deliverance from them ; 
 and then the same passionate and personal 
 grasp of the central truths of Christianity, 
 linking itself as this did, with all that he had 
 suffered and all that he had sinned and all 
 through which, by God's grace, he had vic- 
 toriously struggled." How or when the 
 great change took place we do not know, but 
 the change itself is there for all men to see. 
 " It was, therefore, no pious platitude, no bar- 
 ren truism, no phrase of conventional ortho- 
 doxy, but the profound conviction of a sinful, 
 sorrowing, forgiven, thanksgiving man, 
 when he speaks of ' the sovereign balm of 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 3 1 
 
 our souls, the blood of Christ Jesus.' " ' For 
 the rest it is enough to quote some lines of 
 his own, written in later years on a sick-bed : 
 
 Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun, 
 
 Which was my sin, though it were done before? 
 
 Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run 
 And do run still, though still I do deplore? 
 
 When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done ; 
 For I have more. 
 
 Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won 
 Others to sin, and made my sins their door ? 
 
 Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun 
 A year or two, but wallowed in a score ? 
 
 When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done 
 For I have more. 
 
 I have a sin of fear, that when I've spun 
 My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ; 
 
 But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son 
 Shall shine, as He shines now and heretofore ; 
 
 And having done that, Thou hast done ; 
 I fear no more. 
 
 John Donne passed away when the fires of 
 the Great Rebellion were smouldering 
 throughout England. During the Puritan 
 period which followed our conversion records 
 
 1 Lightfoot's Historical Essays, to which I am also in- 
 debted for the quotation from Archbishop Trench. 
 
32 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 steadily increase. We may take as thor- 
 oughly typical that of the great Protector, 
 Oliver Cromwell himself. "It is in these 
 years undated by history " — writes Carlyle 
 under the date 1623 — " that we must place 
 Oliver's clear recognition of Calvinistic 
 Christianity ; what he, with unspeakable joy, 
 would name his conversion ; his deliverance 
 from the jaws of eternal death. Certainly a 
 grand epoch for a man : properly the one 
 epoch ; the turning point which guides up- 
 wards, or guides downwards him and his ac- 
 tivity forevermore." The circumstances of 
 the crisis are unknown to us, but the charac- 
 ter and reality of it are writ large, both in 
 Cromwell's public and private life, and in 
 well-known words of his own in which long 
 afterwards he made reference to it : " You 
 know what my manner of life hath been. 
 Oh, I lived in and loved darkness, and hated 
 light; I was a chief, the chief of sinners. 
 This is true : I hated godliness, yet God had 
 mercy on me. O the richness of His mercy ! " 
 It is surely significant of much that at the 
 very root of all that Cromwell did for Eng- 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 33 
 
 land and for England's civil and religious 
 liberties, there lies this great experience in 
 his personal history — his consciousness of sin 
 and of the forgiving mercy of God. 
 
 From the seventeenth I turn to the eight- 
 eenth century, and to the great days of the 
 Evangelical Revival. And now our docu- 
 ments multiply fast. Here is one from that 
 great arsenal of facts, The Lives of Early 
 Methodist Preachers. Sampson Staniforth 
 was a Methodist soldier in the campaign of 
 Fontenoy, and tells his conversion in words 
 which, as Matthew Arnold says, bear plainly 
 marked on them the very stamp of good 
 faith : 
 
 " From twelve at night till two it was my 
 turn to stand sentinel at a dangerous post. 
 I had a fellow sentinel but I desired him to 
 go away, which he willingly did. As soon 
 as I was alone I kneeled down and deter- 
 mined not to rise, but to continue crying and 
 wrestling with God till He had mercy on me. 
 How long I was in that agony I cannot tell ; 
 but as I looked up to heaven, I saw the 
 clouds open exceeding bright and I saw Jesus 
 
34 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 hanging on the cross. At the same moment 
 these words were applied to my heart, ' Thy 
 sins are forgiven thee.' My chains fell off ; 
 my heart was free. All guilt was gone and 
 my soul was filled with unutterable peace. 
 I loved God and all mankind and the fear of 
 death and hell was vanished away. I was 
 filled with wonder and astonishment. I 
 then closed my eyes but the impression was 
 still the same. And for about ten weeks 
 while I was awake let me be where I would 
 the same appearance was still before my eyes 
 and the same impression upon my heart, 
 ' Thy sins are forgiven thee.' " l 
 
 It is a far cry from Sampson Staniforth and 
 the battle-fields of the Low Countries to Wil- 
 liam Cowper and the quiet lanes of Bucking- 
 hamshire. But the gentle poet of Olney has 
 his place among these records no less than 
 the plain soldier. And in the poet's case we 
 
 i The Early Methodist Preachers, Vol. IV, p. 22. It is 
 perhaps worth mentioning that Dr. Joseph Parker used to read 
 these simple, little, unpretentious biographies on Saturday even- 
 ings as the best preparation for the work of the coming day. 
 
 Matthew Arnold's reference to Staniforth will be found in 
 his essay, St. Paul and Protestantism. 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 35 
 
 are fortunate in possessing two accounts of 
 his conversion, one in prose, the other in 
 verse and both from his own pen. I quote 
 them both without comment : 
 
 " I flung myself into a chair near the win- 
 dow and seeing a Bible there ventured once 
 more to apply to it for comfort and instruc- 
 tion. The first verse I saw was the twenty- 
 fifth of the third chapter of Romans : ■ Whom 
 God hath set forth to be a propitiation 
 through faith in His blood, to declare His 
 righteousness for the remission of sins that 
 are past through the forbearance of God.' 
 Immediately I received strength to believe 
 and the full beams of the Sun of Righteous- 
 ness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency 
 of the atonement He had made, my pardon 
 sealed in His blood and all the fulness and 
 completeness of His justification. In a mo- 
 ment I believed and received the gospel. 
 . . . Unless the Almighty arm had 
 been under me I think I should have died 
 with gratitude and joy. My eyes filled with 
 tears and my voice choked with transport, I 
 could only look up to heaven in silent fear, 
 
36 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 overwhelmed with love and wonder. . . . 
 For many succeeding weeks tears were ready 
 to flow if I did but speak of the gospel or 
 mention the name of Jesus. To rejoice day 
 and night was all my employment. Too 
 happy to sleep much I thought it was lost 
 time that was spent in slumber." 
 
 And now here is the same story set to the 
 moving music of The Task : 
 
 " I was a stricken deer that left the herd 
 
 Long since : with many an arrow deep infixed 
 My panting side was charged, when I withdrew 
 To seek a tranquil death in distant shades. 
 There was I found by One who had Himself 
 Been hurt by the archers. In His side He bore, 
 And in His hands and feet, the cruel scars. 
 With gentle force soliciting the darts, 
 He drew them forth and healed and bade me 
 live." « 
 
 With the name of William Cowper is in- 
 separably associated that of John Newton. 
 
 1 See T. Wright's Life of IV. Cowper, and also an admi- 
 rable article by the late Arthur Moorhouse in the London 
 Quarterly Review, April, 1900. " However obsolete," says 
 Mr. Goldwin Smith, " Cowper's belief, and the language in 
 which he expresses it may have become for many of us, we 
 must take it as his philosophy of life." Undoubtedly we must. 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 37 
 
 Newton's own thrilling story I am compelled 
 reluctantly to pass over ; 1 but linked with it 
 are two other names which well deserve a 
 place in this brief chronicle. It was — as 
 every reader of the Force of Truth will re- 
 member — mainly to Newton that Thomas 
 Scott, whose famous Commentary was once 
 to be found in all the households of the 
 pious, owed his own soul. Eighty or ninety 
 years went by, and then (in 1864) we find 
 John Henry Newman making acknowledg- 
 ment in his Apologia of a like indebtedness 
 to Scott. " The writer," he says, speaking of 
 his early years, " who made a deeper impres- 
 sion on my mind than any other, and to 
 whom (humanly speaking) I almost owe my 
 soul, was Thomas Scott, of Aston Sandford." 
 Indeed, Newman's language concerning his 
 conversion could hardly have been more ex- 
 plicit had his place been in the great Evan- 
 
 1 His striking autobiographical poem beginning " In Evil 
 long I took Delight," should not be overlooked by those in 
 search of conversion documents. As Prof. Palgrave (who 
 includes it in his Treasury of Sacred Song) truly says, its 
 bare simplicity and sincerity suffice to range it among the most 
 powerful hymns in our language ; John Bunyan might have 
 been proud or thankful to own it. 
 
38 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 gelical Succession. On the same page of 
 the Apologia as that from which I have just 
 quoted he declares that the " outward con- 
 version " of which as a lad of fifteen he was 
 conscious, he is still more certain of than that 
 he has hands and feet. Nor did his lan- 
 guage on the subject ever change. As late 
 as 1885 we find him writing: "Of course I 
 cannot myself be the judge of myself ; but 
 speaking with this reserve, I should say that 
 it is difficult to realize or imagine the 
 identity of the boy before and after August, 
 18 16. . . . I can look back at the end of 
 seventy years as if on another person." 1 
 
 Thus far our illustrations have all been 
 drawn from the past. Will the records fail 
 us when we come to the life of to-day? 
 " Election, conversion, day of grace, coming 
 to Christ," writes Mr. Froude, " have been 
 pawed and fingered by unctuous hands for 
 now two hundred years. The bloom is gone 
 from the flower. The plumage, once shin- 
 ing with hues direct from heaven, is soiled 
 
 1 Letters and Correspondence of J. H. Newman, edited bj 
 Anne Mozley, Vol. I, p. 22. 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 39 
 
 and bedraggled. The most solemn of all 
 realities have been degraded into the pass- 
 words of technical theology." ' Is it really 
 so? Or is this simply the language of a 
 man who is writing with his eye off the facts ? 
 It would, I think, be a legitimate answer to 
 the critic who roundly asserts that conver- 
 sions have ceased, to bid him examine for 
 himself the results of such a work as is be- 
 ing carried on to-day in England by the 
 great Manchester Mission. We might also 
 put in as an entirely revelant bit of evidence 
 the mass of facts contained in such a book 
 as Down in Water Street by Samuel H. 
 Hadley, of the old Jerry McAuley Mission 
 in New York. 2 It seems best, however, to 
 keep to the track which has thus far been 
 followed, and to illustrate the present day 
 
 1 Bunyan, English Men of Letters series, p. 34. 
 
 2 Cf. the simple testimony of a Lancashire drunkard 
 quoted in Prof. W. T. Davison's Christian Interpretation 
 of Life : " Religion has changed my home, my heart, and 
 you can all see it has even changed my face. I hear some of 
 these London men call themselves Positivists. Bless God, I 
 am a Positivist. I'm positive God, for Christ's sake, has par- 
 doned my sins, changed my heart, and made me a new 
 creature." 
 
40 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 witness to conversion from contemporary 
 biography. 
 
 In 1889 the late revered Prof. Franz 
 Delitzsch of Leipsic, published a remarkable 
 11 Last Confession of Faith " from which I 
 take the following words: "The subjec- 
 tivity of science finds a wholesome check 
 in the office of a preacher and guardian of 
 souls. ... In the Muldenthal I was, as 
 a young man, a witness of soul-struggles 
 and spiritual victories, which rendered dis- 
 tasteful to me forever the overestimation 
 of science. Still does my spiritual life find 
 its root in the miraculous soil of that first 
 love which I experienced with Lehmann 
 Zopffel, Ferdinand Walther, and Burger; 
 still to me is the reality of miracles sealed by 
 the miracles of grace which I saw with my 
 own eyes in the congregations of this blessed 
 valley. And the faith which I professed in 
 my first sermons which I could maintain in 
 Niederfrohna and Lunzenau, remains mine to- 
 day, undiminished in strength and immeasur- 
 ably higher than all earthly knowledge." 1 
 
 » TAe Expositor, third series, Vol. ix. 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 4 1 
 
 Even more striking, perhaps, was the story 
 of his own conversion, told recently to the 
 young men in his theological class-room, by 
 a young Swiss professor — the late Gaston 
 Frommel. One of his courses on the History 
 of Dogma, had led some of the students at 
 Geneva to regard Christianity as a mere 
 product of evolution. To correct this mis- 
 apprehension he judged it necessary to offer 
 a "frank explanation": "To the question, 
 How do you succeed in maintaining the 
 affirmations of your religious consciousness 
 over against the frequently contrary affirma- 
 tions of science ? . . . the reply is easy. 
 My religious consciousness, in its sources and 
 its contents, is independent of my scientific 
 consciousness. And I add that, in my own 
 case, it was a long way anterior. I was a 
 Christian before I was a theologian : I did 
 not become a Christian because I was a 
 theologian ; I became a theologian because 
 I was a Christian." Then he described the 
 crisis in his spiritual history and the result : 
 " That day now lies a long way behind me in 
 the past ; but it shines there as the day of a 
 
42 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 new birth. And, in fact, all things thencefor- 
 ward became new to me. Doubtless, alas I 
 there have since been many failures, many de- 
 fects on my part, many interruptions of my 
 consecration, many breaches of Christian 
 fidelity, many faults and those very culpable. 
 They have not effaced the fact that I belonged 
 to Christ. It was but a first starting-point 
 which needed to be followed by many others. 
 But it was a starting-point. For that which 
 Christ then became for' me He has been ever 
 since. The assurance of forgiveness," the 
 certainty of salvation, the inward -witness of 
 His grace, He has faithfully bestowed day 
 after day. They are the strength of my life 
 and the sole reason of my ministry. " ' 
 
 It may, perhaps, be urged that both these, 
 and indeed most of my examples, are drawn 
 from the inner circle of ecclesiastical influence. 
 Without for a moment admitting the validity 
 of the objection, I will meet it so far as to 
 look elsewhere for my four final examples. 
 
 In the life story of Adeline Countess 
 
 1 1 am indebted for this delightful incident to a writer in The 
 Expository Times, December, 1907. 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 43 
 
 Schimmelmann — published in England in 
 1896 — that distinguished German lady gives 
 an account of her conversion. After weeks 
 of darkness and uncertainty, she seemed, she 
 says, to hear God saying to her : " My child, 
 thy salvation does not depend upon thy love 
 to Me, but upon My love to thee, just as thou 
 art." "Then," she says, "broke in upon 
 my heart a sun of joy in the beams of which 
 I still rejoice, and whose light will shine upon 
 me eternally. Now my cold heart began to 
 burn, not on account of my love to Christ, 
 but because of His love to me." 
 
 This is how the same event is described in 
 Mr. Frank *T. Bullen's delightful autobiog- 
 raphy, With Christ at Sea : " There was 
 no extravagant joy, no glorious bursting into 
 light and liberty such as I have since read 
 about as happening on such occasions ; it 
 was just a lesson learned, the satisfaction 
 consequent upon finding one's way after long 
 groping in darkness and misery — a way that 
 led to peace. I love that description of con- 
 version as the ' new birth.' No other defini- 
 tion touches the truth of the process at all, 
 
44 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 so helpless, so utterly knowledgeless, possess- 
 ing nothing but the consciousness of life just 
 begun, is the new-born Christian." 
 
 In a little pamphlet written on the Welsh 
 Revival of a few years ago, Mr. W. T. Stead, 
 the well-known journalist, describes in detail 
 a definite religious experience through which 
 he passed when a schoolboy twelve years of 
 age. Then come these words : 
 
 " Whatever may be the objective reality of 
 the altered relations which I then recognized 
 as existing between my soul and its Maker, 
 there is absolutely no question as to the abid- 
 ing nature of the change it affected in my 
 life. It is forty-three years since that Revival 
 at school. The whole of my life during all 
 these forty-three years has been influenced 
 by the change which men call conversion 
 which occurred with me when I was twelve. 
 My views as to many things have naturally 
 broadened much in these forty-three years. 
 But that was the conscious starting point of 
 everything that there has been in my life of 
 good or of service for my fellow creatures. 
 . . . My life has been flawed with 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 45 
 
 many failures, darkened with many sins, but 
 the thing in it which was good, which has 
 enabled me to resist temptations to which I 
 would otherwise have succumbed, to bear 
 burdens which would otherwise have crushed 
 me with their weight and which has 
 kept the soul within me ever joyfully con- 
 scious that, despite all appearances to the con- 
 trary, this is God's world, and that He and 
 I are fellow workers in the work of its reno- 
 vation — that potent thing, whatever you may 
 call it, and however you may explain it, came 
 into my life then, and abides with me to this 
 hour ; — my one incentive and inspiration in 
 this life ; my sole hope for that which is to 
 come." 
 
 And now to these confessions of a jour- 
 nalist, a seaman and a countess, let me 
 add the unforgettable testimony of James 
 Smetham, artist and letter-writer : 
 
 " Whatever I have studied of them," — he 
 writes, speaking of the epistles of St. Paul — 
 " and this has been for many years, and with 
 as much yearning eagerness and breathless 
 awe as I have felt in nothing except the 
 
46 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 words of the Lord Jesus, has tended to the 
 confirmation of the old evangelic interpreta- 
 tion of them, in which, perhaps, I should not 
 have seen my way so clearly but for their ac- 
 cordance with my own experience. All that 
 unutterable sense of sin, that terrible deadly 
 fight with evil, those strivings of the Spirit I 
 went through, and more ; all that deliver- 
 ance, that liberty of the gospel, that being 
 justified by faith in Christ, that peace with 
 God, that shedding abroad by the Holy 
 Ghost of the love of God in the heart, that 
 coming in of the ' new creation ' ; all the 
 shades and lights of experience since then. 
 Twenty-three years of such experience, which 
 inwardly is as great and as simple a fact as 
 the facts of seeing and hearing, make me un- 
 able to receive, even to perceive, any other 
 interpretation. And I have met with such 
 scores and hundreds who strike hands with 
 me in life and death on these great matters 
 that it is settled • without controversy ' to 
 me." ! 
 
 (4) I have lingered, it may be thought 
 
 1 Letters of James Smetham, p. 203. 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 47 
 
 unnecessarily long, over these personal testi- 
 monies. But I have done so advisedly be- 
 cause I know of no other way except the 
 multiplication of concrete examples by which 
 the strength of the case for the reality of con- 
 version as a fact of consciousness can be 
 brought home to us. And yet, be it remem- 
 bered, the recorded cases, of which I have 
 given a few illustrations, are but a tiny frag- 
 ment of the whole. Whenever a great wave 
 of spiritual power — such, e.g., as we associate 
 with the names of Edwards, and Wesley and 
 Moody, and Evan Roberts — has passed over 
 a people, it is always easy to find traces of 
 its influence in the records of national biog- 
 raphy. But behind these whose voices reach 
 us, is a great host of silent witnesses whose 
 faces no man can number, but whose con- 
 sciousness of " the powers that are freeing 
 men from sin " is no whit less real. Let me 
 illustrate what I mean. When Moody and 
 Sankey were conducting their wonderful mis- 
 sion in Great Britain and Ireland in 1873-5 
 — a mission by which Prof. George Adam 
 Smith once declared our people were stirred 
 
48 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 as they had not been since the days of Wes- 
 ley and Whitefield — one of the cities which 
 they visited was Birmingham, where the late 
 Dr. Dale was then exercising his ministry. 
 Now Dale was, of all men, the least likely to 
 be swept off his feet by a wave of mere relig- 
 ious excitement ; yet this is how he describes 
 what he saw : "I had seen occasional in- 
 stances before of instant transition from re- 
 ligious anxiety to the clear and triumphant 
 consciousness of restoration to God ; but what 
 struck me in the gallery of Bingley Hall was 
 the fact that this instant transition took place 
 with nearly every person with whom I talked. 
 They had come up into the gallery anxious, 
 restless, feeling after God in the darkness, 
 and when after a conversation of a quarter of 
 an hour or twenty minutes, they went away, 
 their faces were filled with light and they left 
 me not only at peace with God but filled with 
 joy. I have seen the sun rise from the top 
 of Helvellyn and the top of the Righi, and 
 there is something very glorious in it ; but 
 to see the light of heaven suddenly strike on 
 man after man in the course of one evening 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 49 
 
 is very much more thrilling." * It is men 
 and women such as these of whom I am 
 thinking when I speak of the great host of 
 silent witnesses to the fact of conversion. 
 They are to be found in all our Churches ; 
 every minister knows of them ; and their real, 
 if unrecorded, testimony is not the least part 
 of the case which Christianity presents to 
 science for inquiry and for judgment. 
 
 II 
 This hasty survey of a part of the wide 
 field which lies open to our observation will 
 have prepared the way for two or three very 
 brief generalizations. It is patent, I hope, 
 ' by this time, even to the most prejudiced, 
 that we are dealing with facts neither few nor 
 obscure. They are peculiar to no period ; 
 they are bound up with no artificially stimu- 
 lated conditions ; only wilful ignorance could 
 suggest that they are the offspring of youth, 
 or poverty, or superstition. When the late 
 Prof. Romanes was slowly feeling his way 
 back to the Christian faith and fold, it 
 
 1 The Congregationalist, March, 1875. 
 
50 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 was — with a scientist's instinct for facts — 
 upon the significance of these things that he 
 laid his finger: "Saint Augustine after thirty 
 years of age, and other Fathers," he says, 
 " bear testimony to a sudden enduring and 
 extraordinary change in themselves, called 
 conversion. Now this experience," he goes 
 on, " has been repeated and testified to by 
 countless millions of civilized men and 
 women in all nations and all degrees of cul- 
 ture." l 
 
 It may further be observed that, vast as is 
 the multitude of witnesses which we have 
 summoned, their testimony is essentially one. 
 If we can imagine them closeted in confer- 
 ence, though in nothing else they could 
 agree, they would speak with a single voice 
 of their debt to Christ, and to the divine 
 grace which has redeemed them. Nor does 
 this unity mean th t the multitude is simply 
 the echo of its le ders. Prof. James may 
 be claimed as an impartial witness, and 
 he declares unhesitatingly that, whatever 
 part suggestion and imitation may have 
 
 1 Thoughts on Religion, by the late G. J. Romanes, p. 162. 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 51 
 
 played in producing conversion experiences 
 in men and women in excited assemblies, 
 " they have at any rate been in countless in- 
 dividual instances an original and unbor- 
 rowed experience." ! 
 
 The hysteria, the strange " bodily effects," 
 the general emotional extravagances, by 
 which conversion has sometimes been at- 
 tended, may for our present purpose be 
 wholly disregarded. If we like to use the 
 psychological jargon of the hour, we shall I 
 suppose ascribe them to " the subject's hav- 
 ing a large subliminal region " ; if we are 
 wise perhaps we shall not greatly concern 
 ourselves about them at all ; but however 
 we explain them, they have, as Prof. James 
 says, no essential spiritual significance. 
 Their presence may make his conversion 
 more memorable to the convert, but they are 
 neither a proof of its reality, nor a guarantee 
 of its stability. On the other hand, they 
 must not be suffered to discredit the spiritual 
 realities of which they are the occasional ac- 
 cessory. They are in their very nature 
 
 1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 229. 
 
52 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 evanescent ; the one thing that matters is 
 what remains when they are gone. 1 
 
 And, finally, conversions have not ceased. 
 The things of which I have spoken in this 
 lecture are very old ; but they are also very 
 new. The experience which is written in the 
 New Testament, and in the lives of the saints 
 of sixty generations, is still being repeated in 
 our midst. Our witnesses are not of yester- 
 day only, but of to-day, of this day. Our 
 facts are not merely fossils dug from a dead 
 past ; they are facts of the present, warm, 
 fresh, living. 
 
 Ill 
 
 What then shall we say to these things? 
 One thing we must say, and must keep on 
 saying, and that is that they shall be reckoned 
 with. It is indeed a marvellous thing that 
 
 1 The sanity of great evangelistic leaders in this matter is 
 deserving of note. Mr. Moody, says Prof. G. A. Smith, 
 suffered no fools, and every symptom of the hysteria which 
 often breaks out in such movements, was promptly suppressed. 
 Dr. Dale notes the same fact. Prof. Coe, writing of the 
 strange " psychic manifestations " which --sometimes followed 
 the preaching of Wesley, says that perhaps nothing in his 
 careeV more clearly reveals his marvellous practical capacity 
 than his calm and for the most part, common-sense treat- 
 ment of such occurrences ; he had the wisdom to perceive 
 
AS A FACT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 53 
 
 science should concern itself about coral in- 
 sects and climbing plants, and yet should 
 take no thought for the facts of religious ex- 
 perience. It would be incredible, if it were 
 not true, that we still have assailants and 
 critics of Christianity in our midst for whom 
 the religious consciousness simply does not 
 exist; they discuss what they think the 
 claims of Christianity and pronounce judg- 
 ment against it, but the chief witness is never 
 called. Such grotesque travesties of justice 
 ought in the future to be laughed out of 
 court. Happily, there are signs of the com- 
 ing of a better day. It is good to be told 
 by a competent authority that " the natural 
 history of the religious consciousness as it 
 manifests itself in the life of the individual 
 has now taken its place among the sciences." x 
 
 that these apparently divine or demoniac possessions, were 
 matters aside from his main business. {The Spiritual Life, 
 p. 141.) Of his brother Charles it is said that on one occasion 
 he notified his congregation that any one who was convulsed 
 should be carried out, and that the notice ensured perfect 
 quiet. 
 
 1 Prof. W. R. Inge in a paper entitled " Ancient Faith and 
 Modern Thought ; Gains from Modern Psychology," read at 
 the Church Congress, Yarmouth, 1907. 
 
54 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 We may not always be able to acquiesce in 
 the findings of students of the psychology of 
 religion, such as James, and Starbuck and 
 Coe, but they have at least set a good ex- 
 ample to their fellow scientists throughout 
 the world by their serious handling of the 
 phenomena of the religious life. The sacred- 
 ness of fact is perhaps the supreme lesson 
 which modern science has impressed upon 
 the mind of this generation ; and at last 
 science is beginning to learn its own lesson 
 and to recognize that religion also has its 
 facts, and that a soul's consciousness of the 
 forgiveness of God and of fellowship with 
 Christ is just as worthy of our patient regard 
 as the conformation of a beetle or the doings 
 of an earthworm. 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE REALITY OF CONVER- 
 SION AS A FACT FOR LIFE 
 
LECTURE II 
 
 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 AS A FACT FOR LIFE 
 
 THE fact of conversion, it was stated 
 in the previous lecture, may be 
 studied in two different ways : in 
 itself, or in its practical results ; as a fact of 
 consciousness, or as a fact for life. It is this 
 latter aspect of the subject to which we must 
 now turn our attention. 
 
 And immediately we are on ground from 
 which the modern mind is most easily ac- 
 cessible, for we are all " pragmatists " now, 
 and perhaps a little inordinately vain of the 
 fact. We may have our doubts about re- 
 vivals, we may not find the lives of the 
 saints very appetizing fare, but we do believe 
 in goodness and are not disposed to be 
 hypercritical of anything that really makes 
 for it " What matter," Browning asks, 
 57 
 
58 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 " What matter though I doubt at every pore, 
 
 Head-doubts, heart-doubts, doubts at my fingers' 
 
 ends, 
 Doubts in the trivial work of every day, 
 Doubts at the very bases of my soul 
 In the grand moments when she probes herself — 
 If finally I have a life to show ? ' ' 
 
 Every heart vibrates to that string. The 
 question of questions for many of us to-day 
 is not so much, "Is it true?" but, "Suppos- 
 ing it to be true what is it good for ? what 
 difference will it make if a man believe it ? " 
 And if the answer be that neither if a man 
 believes is he the better, nor if he believes 
 not is he the worse, straightway our interest 
 is at an end. It is not my business just now 
 to discuss this temper of mind ; I only note 
 it and go on to observe that in the matter of 
 conversion we may accept this test of utility 
 with all joy. " In the absence of the heav- 
 enly quality in the life," says Prof. Coe, 1 
 " no experience of internal wonders is valid 
 evidence of the birth from above. . . . The 
 new heart is to be defined by its quality, not 
 by its history." Unquestionably. " The roots 
 
 1 The Religion of a Mature Mind, pp. 20S-210. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 59 
 
 of a man's virtue are inaccessible to us. No 
 appearances whatever are infallible proofs of 
 grace. Our practice is the only sure evi- 
 dence that we are genuinely Christians." ! 
 This is the criterion of a modern philos- 
 opher ; but it is also the criterion of the New 
 Testament. In religion it is never the 
 mechanism of a process, but always the ulti- 
 mate meaning of the process which is the 
 really significant thing. The value of con- 
 version — let it be said with all possible plain- 
 ness — depends not on how it happens, but 
 on what it effects. If finally it " have a life 
 to show," there is no further need of argu- 
 ment ; it has justified itself. 
 
 In applying this practical-utility test we 
 must endeavour to state the question with 
 perfect fairness. It may be said that relig- 
 
 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 20. " Im- 
 mediate luminousness, philosophical reasonableness and moral 
 helpfulness" says the same vigorous writer, " are the only availa- 
 ble criteria. Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of 
 the placidest cow and it would not now save her theology if the 
 trial of the theology by those other tests should show it to be 
 contemptible. And, conversely, if her theology can stand 
 those other tests, it will make no difference how hysterical or 
 nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when 
 she was with us here below." 
 
60 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 ious experiences which have little or nothing 
 in common with those described in the 
 previous lecture, nevertheless yield results 
 which will bear comparison with the best 
 that these can show. This is, of course, 
 true — and I may remind you of the em- 
 phatic repudiation which has already been 
 made of any claim to spiritual superiority for 
 one particular type of experience x — but it is 
 not to the point. The question is not 
 whether some other kind of experience bears 
 good fruit, but whether this kind bears it ; if 
 it does, the reality of conversion as a fact 
 for life is established ; it has absolute value ; 
 what may be its relative value is another 
 question. 
 
 If it bears fruit, I say ; but does it ? This 
 is the question to which we must now turn 
 our attention. 
 
 I 
 
 As in the preceding lecture, so in this, the 
 appeal will be to fact, and I shall not hesitate 
 once more to make very liberal use of con- 
 crete illustrations. But before coming to 
 
 »See p. 1 8. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 6 1 
 
 these we may spend a minute or two in 
 listening to the testimony of two or three 
 witnesses whom no one will suspect of un- 
 due bias in favour of evangelical Christi- 
 anity. 
 
 I have already quoted some significant 
 words of the late Prof. Romanes concern- 
 ing conversion ; l but the most significant 
 are still to come : " In all cases," he says, 
 " it is not a mere change of belief or opinion ; 
 this is by no means the point ; the point is 
 that it is a modification of character more or 
 less profound." 
 
 Prof. James is even more explicit : " The 
 best fruits of religious experience," he 
 declares, "are the best things that history 
 has to show. . . . And to call to mind 
 a succession of such examples as I have 
 lately had to wander through [in preparation 
 for his lectures, i. e.,"] is to feel encouraged 
 and uplifted and washed in better moral 
 air." 2 
 
 George Eliot's pen was not usually over- 
 
 1 See p. 50. 
 
 8 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 259. 
 
62 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 flowing with generosity when she wrote 
 about Evangelicalism ; too often, indeed, it 
 was dipped in gall. But there were things 
 in the religious world about her which even 
 she could not refuse to see, as her sketch of 
 Milby society will show : 
 
 " Whatever might be the weaknesses of 
 the ladies who pruned the luxuriances of 
 their lace and ribbons, cut out garments for 
 the poor, distributed tracts, quoted Scripture, 
 and defined the true Gospel, they had learned 
 this — that there was a divine work to be done 
 in life, a rule of goodness higher than the 
 opinion of their neighbours ; and if the no- 
 tion of a heaven in reserve for themselves 
 was a little too prominent, yet the theory of 
 fitness for that heaven consisted in purity of 
 heart, in Christlike compassion, in the sub- 
 duing of selfish desires. They might give 
 the name of piety to much that was only 
 puritanic egoism ; they might call many 
 things sin that were not sin ; but they had at 
 least the feeling that sin was to be avoided 
 and resisted, and colour blindness, which may 
 mistake drab for scarlet, is better than total 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 63 
 
 blindness, which sees no distinction of colour 
 at all. Miss Rebecca Linnet, in quiet attire, 
 with a somewhat excessive solemnity of 
 countenance, teaching at the Sunday-school, 
 visiting the poor, and striving after a standard 
 of purity and goodness, had surely more 
 moral loveliness than in those flaunting peony- 
 days, when she had no other model than the 
 costumes of the heroines in the circulating 
 library. Miss Eliza Pratt, listening in rapt 
 attention to Mr. Tryan's evening lecture, no 
 doubt found evangelical channels for vanity 
 and egoism ; but she was clearly in advance 
 of Miss Phipps giggling under her feathers 
 at old Mr. Crewe's peculiarities of enuncia- 
 tion. And even elderly fathers and mothers, 
 with minds, like Mrs. Linnet's, too tough to 
 imbibe much doctrine, were the better for 
 having their hearts inclined towards the new 
 preacher as a messenger from God. They 
 became ashamed, perhaps, of their evil tem- 
 pers, ashamed of their worldliness, ashamed 
 of their trivial, futile past. The first condition 
 of human goodness is something to love ; the 
 second, something to reverence. And this 
 
64 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 latter precious gift was brought to Milby by 
 Mr. Tryan and Evangelicalism." l 
 
 " I can assure my incredulous literary 
 friends," writes that great master of English 
 prose, Mark Rutherford, "that years ago it 
 was not uncommon for men and women sud- 
 denly to awake to the fact that they had been 
 sinners, and to determine that henceforth 
 they would keep God's commandments by 
 the help of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. 
 What is more extraordinary is that they did 
 keep God's commandments for the rest of 
 their lives." 2 
 
 II 
 
 Statements of this kind coming from such 
 witnesses can hardly fail to interest us, but 
 personal conviction of the reality of conver- 
 sion can be reached only by getting behind 
 all generalizations to the hard facts them- 
 selves. This is what we must now seek to 
 do. The rough system of grouping which 
 for convenience sake I adopt any one may 
 
 1 Janet's Repentance, Ch. X. 
 1 Catharine Furze, p. 358. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 65 
 
 fill out in further detail from his own reading 
 and observation. 
 
 (1) The facts most obvious and most 
 readily available and constituting perhaps 
 the largest class are those which illustrate 
 the power of conversion to free men from the 
 chains of evil habit and in many cases com- 
 pletely to annul the baser temptations of our 
 nature. Of this there is no better nor better 
 known example than that of Colonel Gar- 
 diner. The story of his remarkable conver- 
 sion, as told by Doddridge, is too familiar to 
 need repetition here ; it will be sufficient for 
 my purpose to quote the Colonel's own testi- 
 mony to its immediate effect upon his life : 
 " I was," he says, " effectually cured of all 
 inclination to that sin I was so strongly ad- 
 dicted to, that I thought nothing but shoot- 
 ing me through the head could have cured 
 me of it ; and all desire and inclination to it 
 were removed as entirely as if I had been a 
 sucking child ; nor did the temptation return 
 to this day." " I have heard the Colonel fre- 
 quently say," reports another witness, " that 
 he was much addicted to impurity before his 
 
66 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 acquaintance with religion ; but that, so soon 
 as he was enlightened from above, he felt the 
 power of the Holy Ghost changing his nature 
 so wonderfully, that his sanctification in this 
 respect seemed more remarkable than in any 
 other." l 
 
 But perhaps the most remarkable results of 
 conversion under this head are to be found 
 in the cases of reformed drunkards ; and 
 among these I know of none more striking 
 than that of an Oxford graduate, the son of 
 a clergyman, whose story is given among 
 the conversion documents collected by Prof. 
 J. H. Leuba and printed in the American 
 Journal of Psychology? Omitting many de- 
 tails, the essential facts, given in the writer's 
 own words, are these: "I was intended 
 from babyhood for the ministry, and had a 
 grammar school and university career, grad- 
 uating in Arts at Oxford in 1880. At fifteen 
 I was a confirmed smoker, and used to get 
 drunk often without the master being aware 
 of it. At eighteen I was sent to another 
 
 1 Quoted in Doddridge's Life of Gardiner. 
 a Vol. VII, p. 373. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 67 
 
 school. Here all the older boys, with one or 
 two exceptions, were habitual drinkers, if not 
 drunkards. About two and a half years of 
 this brought me up to the age at which I 
 should enter my university career. I went 
 to Oxford and gained my scholarship in the 
 usual way. A reckless, drunken and other- 
 wise impure life passed by quickly enough, 
 and I found myself a graduate, ready, as my 
 poor father thought, to take orders at once. 
 Alas ! nothing was further from my mind 
 than the ministry. I knew absolutely noth- 
 ing of God. 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 spend- 
 ing it in high carousal with any one who 
 would sit with me and drink it away. So I 
 lived, and would probably have gone on liv- 
 ing, had not God turned me around and com- 
 pelled me to go on another road. ... 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. 
 
68 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 A young lady friend sent me a copy of 
 Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual 
 World, asking me my opinion of it as a lit- 
 erary 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 to her what I 
 thought of it. It was here that God met me 
 face to face. . . . No words were spoken 
 to me ; my soul seemed to see my Saviour 
 in the spirit, and I rejoiced there and then in 
 a conversion so astounding that the whole 
 village heard of it in less than twenty-four 
 hours." 
 
 Thus far the story might have been included 
 among those given in the last lecture in proof of 
 the reality of conversion as a fact of conscious- 
 ness. Now for its value as a fact for life : 
 
 " The day after my conversion I went into 
 the hay-field to lend a hand with the harvest, 
 and came home drunk. Next morning I was 
 very low indeed ; still I felt that God was not 
 going to lift me up like that and then let me 
 fall into lower depths at once. About mid- 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 69 
 
 day I made on my knees the first prayer be- 
 fore God for twenty years. From that hour 
 drink has had no terrors for me; I never 
 touch it, never want it. So with every known 
 sin, the deliverance in each case being per- 
 manent and complete. I have had no temp- 
 tations since conversion, God seemingly 
 having shut out Satan from that course with 
 me ; he gets a free hand in another way, but 
 never on sins of the flesh." 
 
 It is not of course every day that such a 
 narrative finds its way into print ; yet what- 
 ever incredulous persons, literary or other- 
 wise, may think, transformations as sudden, 
 as complete, and as permanent, are contin- 
 ually taking place as the direct result of con- 
 version. Prof. James quotes the saying of 
 a medical man who declared that the only 
 
 I radical remedy he knew for dipsomania was 
 religio-mania. 1 Mr. S. H. Hadley says that 
 he has seen men who had gone the round of 
 various institutions, and tried every other 
 means all to no purpose, instantly cured by 
 Christ alone, and never touch or want a 
 
 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 268, note. 
 
70 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 drink till their dying day. 1 But the most 
 significant testimony of recent years is to be 
 found in a volume in the " Contemporary 
 Science Series," published only last year 
 (1907), The Psychology of Alcoholism, by 
 Dr. G. B. Cutten. The tenth chapter of the 
 book is entitled " Religious Conversion as a 
 Cure." The author, it will be remembered, 
 is not a theologian but a scientist, and here 
 are some of the things he says. First, he 
 quotes from the report of a meeting in 1901 
 of the New York Academy of Medicine. At 
 this meeting, which was attended by special- 
 ists who had had considerable experience in 
 dealing with alcoholic cases, neither drugs 
 nor medicines were mentioned as possible 
 cures. Two cures only were named ; one 
 was hypnotism, and the other religious con- 
 version. One of the speakers — a specialist, 
 Dr. Starr, — confessed that the only reformed 
 drunkards of whom he had knowledge, were 
 those who had been saved, not through 
 medical but through religious influence. Dr. 
 Cutten does not go so far as to exclude all 
 
 1 Down in Water Street, p. 20 1. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 7 1 
 
 other cures, but he agrees with Dr. Starr 
 in regarding religious conversion as the most 
 effective cure. " Were it desirable," he says, 
 " the Church could eclipse the patent medi- 
 cine advertisers with the thousands of testi- 
 monials which might be produced by alcohol- 
 ics cured by religious conversions." He 
 quotes another medical authority as saying 
 that were we not used to the phenomena of 
 religious revivals, the force of reforming 
 energy k which they bring with them would 
 strike us as little short of miraculous, and, 
 finally, he declares that in the opinions thus 
 expressed of the value of conversion most 
 authorities on alcoholism concur. 
 
 Facts like these may well make the most 
 hardened sceptic rub his eyes; but among 
 patient workers in our great city missions, 
 though they will be read with quiet thankful- 
 ness, they will create no surprise ; they know 
 that thus has it been from the beginning: 
 " He breaks the power of cancelled sin." Of 
 all words that the hand of man ever penned, 
 in the Bible or out of it, I know of none with 
 such strange power to move the heart as 
 
72 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 those of St. Paul to the Corinthians : " Forni- 
 cators, idolaters, adulterers, thieves, covetous, 
 drunkards, revilers, extortioners — and such 
 were some of you : but ye were washed, ye 
 were sanctified, ye were justified in the name 
 of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the Spirit of 
 our God." l 
 
 (2) But the fruits of conversion — its value 
 as a fact for life — are to be seen not only in 
 the changed lives of downright evil men, but 
 in the difference it has made in men whose 
 lives were always outwardly irreproachable. 
 Indeed, Mr. R. H. Hutton comments on the 
 curious fact, as he thinks it, that the high 
 doctrine of conversion, though it may have 
 won its greatest number of apparent triumphs 
 over persons of Colonel Gardiner's type, " has 
 
 1 1 Cor. 6 : 10, IX. " It seems to me," says Dean Church, 
 " that the exultation apparent in early Christian literature, 
 beginning with the Apostolic Epistles, at the prospect now at 
 length disclosed within the bounds of a sober hope, of a great 
 moral revolution in human life, — that the rapturous confidence 
 which pervades these Christian ages, that at last the routine 
 of vice and sin has met its match, that a new and astonishing 
 possibility has come within view, that men, not here and there, 
 but on a large scale, might attain to that hitherto hopeless thing 
 to the multitudes, goodness, — is one of the most singular and 
 solemn things in history." {The Gifts of Civilization, p. 156.) 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 73 
 
 derived all its authority from men of a very 
 different type indeed, men like St. Paul and 
 John Wesley, whose whole life has been in 
 some sense profoundly religious, and in whom 
 the convulsive change called conversion, has 
 represented not a change from a life of reck- 
 less pleasure or license to a life of faith, but 
 only a change from one type of faith to an- 
 other type of faith." 1 A later writer in the 
 Spectator 2 goes still further: What need, 
 he asks, could such a man as Wesley have 
 of conversion? Well, but, setting all else 
 aside, is it not manifest that but for that 
 golden hour on May 24th, 1738, there 
 would have been no world-wide Methodism, 
 the eighteenth century would have lost one 
 of its greatest names? The Wesley whom 
 we know, the man who turned England up- 
 side down and left his mark deep and broad 
 over the whole English-speaking world, was 
 (as he himself always affirmed) the child 
 of the great experience which came to him in 
 
 '"The Metaphysics of Conversion," in Contemporary 
 Thought and Thinkers, Vol. I, p. 369. 
 •In an article, "Christianity and Conversion," Sept. 8, 1906. 
 
74 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 the little room in Aldersgate Street. The 
 same is true of Thomas Chalmers and the 
 Apostle Paul. " Chalmers in his early days 
 preached morals alone, and with no moral 
 result. He became rilled with the love of 
 Christ and with that power behind him en- 
 graved the ethical precepts on the heart of 
 Scotland." 1 Saul of Tarsus was a gifted 
 young rabbi who would doubtless have made 
 for himself a name among his own people ; yet, 
 but for that which happened on the Damascus 
 road, none would remember him to-day, the 
 world's history would run in other channels. 
 
 (3) In multitudes, too, distinguished from 
 their fellows neither by a bad preeminence in 
 evil nor by any far-shining gifts of intellect, 
 conversion has been the door into a fuller and 
 richer life both mental and moral. The late 
 Hugh Price Hughes's biographer tells us that 
 his conversion was " the prelude of a singular 
 bursting forth of his mental powers. The 
 opening of the doors of the spirit was also 
 that of the mind." 2 This has been, if not, as 
 
 1 The Eternal Religion, p. 102, by J. Brierley. 
 
 * Life of Hugh Price Hughes, by his Daughter, p. 31. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 75 
 
 Hughes himself was wont in after life to in- 
 sist, the normal, at least, a very common ex- 
 perience in the lives of humble and unedu- 
 cated men and women: the quickening of 
 the spiritual life has broken up the deep 
 slumber of the mind and set ajar its long- 
 closed doors. The supreme illustration of 
 this on the large scale is to be found in Wes- 
 ley's wonderful Journals, and in the tireless 
 zeal with which he laboured to satisfy the de- 
 mands of the hunger and thirst after knowl- 
 edge which he himself had done so much 
 to create. It is worthy of note, too, that 
 Moody's great educational institutions, which 
 have done so much for the widening of the 
 outlook of thousands of humble Christian 
 workers all over the North American conti- 
 nent, were the immediate outcome of his fer- 
 vent evangelism. 
 
 Should not the great access of human glad- 
 ness which conversion has brought into 
 life also be reckoned unto it for righteous- 
 ness ? John Bunyan, eager to talk to the 
 very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands 
 of the mercy of God to him ; John Wesley, 
 
76 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 changed from a convict seeking to shorten 
 his sentence by good conduct into a free man 
 rejoicing in his freedom ; Billy Bray, the " ex- 
 cellent little illiterate English evangelist " of 
 Prof. James's Lectures, hearing one foot 
 say " Glory " and the other answer " Amen," 
 all the time that he is walking — these are but 
 three in a vast and happy throng of human 
 souls around whom there gathers, like a radi- 
 ant, fostering, cheering air, the abundant joy 
 of faith and hope and love and praise. When 
 Moody and Sankey left Birmingham at the 
 close of the mission referred to in the previ- 
 ous lecture, 1 Dr. Dale declared that some of 
 the most remarkable results of their visit were 
 to be found among those who had long been 
 members of Christian Churches. " I hardly 
 know," he said, " how to describe the change 
 which has passed over them. It is like 
 the change which comes upon a landscape 
 where clouds which have been hanging over 
 it for hours suddenly vanish and the sunlight 
 seems to fill both heaven and earth. There 
 is a joyousness and an elasticity of spirit, and 
 
 1 See p. 47. 
 
 fc 1 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 77 
 
 a hopefulness, which have completely trans- 
 formed them." 1 A London journalist who 
 was once told off to report for a daily paper 
 the proceedings of an immense gathering of 
 members of the Salvation Army drawn from 
 all parts of the world, declared that what im- 
 pressed him above everything else was the 
 crowd's quenchless rejoicing; never before 
 had he found himself in the midst of such a 
 throng of happy human faces. Now I ven- 
 ture to say that gladness such as this, pass- 
 ing though it may be, is no mean part of 
 this world's good. And if it be true, as Rob- 
 ert Louis Stevenson tells us, that there is no 
 duty we so much underrate as the duty of 
 being happy, that the goodness of God knocks 
 at our sullen heart in vain, then a religious 
 experience which has power thus to stab the 
 spirit broad awake is a fact for life of the 
 most real kind. 
 
 Or, look at the more tangible results, in 
 the shape of difficult right deeds, for which 
 after conversion, men and women have 
 found themselves sufficient. To one class of 
 
 1 Article quoted above, p. 380. 
 
78 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 the facts only can I now refer. Restitution, 
 it will be freely admitted, is one of the most 
 difficult of human duties; perhaps nothing 
 in our eyes witnesses more conclusively to 
 the working of a new spirit within a man 
 than his resolve, at all costs, to confess, and 
 as far as may be, to repair an ancient wrong. 
 Now, with instances of this kind our conver- 
 sion records abound. Here is one from 
 Prof. Leuba's collection : "At a meeting I 
 offered myself voluntarily for service to God. 
 Quicker than thought the Spirit admonished 
 me that I had wronged a man and I must 
 confess and right that wrong. I had an 
 awful struggle with myself for a year. Every 
 time I prayed this thing would come up. I 
 debated with myself and with the Lord and 
 tried to convince myself that I need not do 
 this. I saw no way out of it, nor how to 
 make right the wrong, as I was strapped 
 with debts, and prospects were very gloomy. 
 God at last gave me the grace and courage 
 to overcome my pride and write to the man;" 
 and in the end full restoration was made. 
 Here is another example from Mr. S. H. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 79 
 
 Hadley's experience : " Brother Hadley," 
 said one of the Water Street converts to him 
 one day, " the devil is after me ; I robbed the 
 poor box of ten dollars in the old life, and the 
 devil tells me that because ' I done time f or it,' 
 it is mine, but Jesus says \ No, pay it back,'" 
 and he handed him five two dollar bills. 1 A 
 still more striking illustration is given in one 
 of Henry Drummond's addresses to students : 
 " I knew a man who led a woman astray. 
 He was fast and evil then, but a year or two 
 after he was changed and became what he is 
 — one of the most prominent men in the re- 
 ligious world. But through all his success 
 and apparent blessings there was the stain 
 and the shadow of that woman's life upon him. 
 Only three people ever knew about it, and it 
 was twenty years ago. He preached all 
 through England and Scotland and Ireland 
 in the hope, I fervently believe, that that 
 woman might hear him and be saved. 
 Every prayer he prayed he prayed for her. 
 Not long ago I was in London at a meeting 
 which he was addressing and after the meet- 
 
 1 Down hi Water Street, p. 131. 
 
80 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 ing a woman walked up to him with bent 
 head, weeping. I saw them alone as they 
 stood. That was the woman he had searched 
 for in the restitution of twenty years." ! If 
 then — and illustrations of this kind might be 
 multiplied almost indefinitely — conversion 
 can after this fashion prove itself a power 
 which makes for righteousness, for the 
 straightening out of the twisted strands of 
 life, may we not once more insist upon its 
 significance as a fact for life ? 
 
 (4) Thus far we have sought for the fruits 
 of conversion, for the most part, in the life of 
 the individual. The facts are not less arrest- 
 ing when we turn to the history of communities 
 and nations. We are sometimes told that 
 the next revival will be ethical ; and it is de- 
 voutly to be wished that the prophets may 
 prove right, for an ethical revival is always 
 needed. But if the implication is that the 
 revivals of the past have not been ethical, it 
 is necessary to protest. Every great relig- 
 ious awakening has set forward, in the largest 
 meaning of the word, the salvation of the 
 
 1 See G. A. Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, p. 479. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 8l 
 
 people ; it has given them a keener moral 
 vision, a more vigorous conscience, higher 
 ideals both of private and of public duty ; and 
 it has set free some of the mightiest and 
 most enduring of all the forces which to-day- 
 are making for social well-being and national 
 righteousness. This is the verdict which the 
 facts justify and demand. Thus, e.g., it was 
 the unanimous testimony of all observers 
 during the recent revival in Wales that not 
 only were all the grosser vices reduced to 
 the vanishing point, but the subtler sins of 
 unforgiving rancour, non-payment of debts, 
 dishonest work were abated. In nothing 
 was the leader of the movement clearer and 
 more emphatic than in his insistence that in- 
 juries must be forgiven and debts must be 
 paid. 1 Besides the hosts of rejoicing con- 
 verts with which Moody's work in Great 
 Britain filled all the Churches, there sprang 
 up in its track a multitude of charities, phi- 
 lanthropies, associations, whose helping, heal- 
 ing ministry has not ceased to this day. 
 Henry Drummond did not hesitate to say 
 
 'See Mr. Stead's pamphlet referred to above, p. 6l. 
 
82 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 that in Scotland, so far-reaching was, and is, 
 the influence of that work, that any one who 
 knows the inner religious history of the 
 country must regard this time as nothing 
 short of a national epoch. 1 
 
 The same watchful solicitude for the moral 
 ahd social obligations of religion marked the 
 "Great Awakening" in New England under 
 Jonathan Edwards : " Because of God's 
 great goodness and His gracious presence in 
 the town of Northampton during the late 
 spiritual revival," — so runs in substance the 
 preamble to the Covenant which Edwards 
 drew up and which the people of Northamp- 
 ton subscribed — " the people present them- 
 selves before the Lord, to renounce their evil 
 ways and to put away their abominations be- 
 fore His eyes. They solemnly promise and 
 vow before the Lord, in all their concerns 
 with their neighbour, to have a strict regard 
 to rules of honesty, justice, and uprightness ; 
 not to overreach or defraud him in any mat- 
 ter, or, either wilfully or through want of 
 
 1 Dwight L. Moody, p. 81. See also G. A. Smith's chapter 
 on " The Great Mission." 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 83 
 
 care to injure him in any of his honest posses- 
 sions or rights ; and to have a tender respect, 
 not only to their own interest, but to his ; and 
 particularly never to give him cause of of- 
 fense by wilfully or negligently forbearing to 
 pay their just debts ; whenever they may be 
 conscious of having in the past wronged 
 their neighbour in his outward estate, never 
 to rest till they have made that restitution 
 which the rules of moral equity require. 
 They promise to avoid all backbiting, evil 
 speaking and slandering, as also everything 
 that feeds a spirit of bitterness or ill-will, or 
 secret grudge ; not to ridicule a neighbour's 
 failings, or needlessly insist on his faults ; to 
 do nothing in a spirit of revenge. And 
 further, they will not allow their private in- 
 terest or honour or the desire for victory 
 against a contrary party to lead them into 
 any course of which their consciences would 
 reproach them as hurtful to religion or the 
 interests of Christ's kingdom ; and particu- 
 larly, in public affairs, not to allow the in- 
 terest of party or the desire of worldly am- 
 bition to lead them counter to the interests 
 
84 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 of true religion. Those who are young 
 promise to allow themselves in no diver- 
 sions or pastimes, meetings or companies, 
 which would hinder a devout spirit engaged 
 in religion, to avoid everything that tends to 
 lasciviousness, and which they believe will 
 not be approved by the infinitely pure and 
 holy eye of God. They finally consecrate 
 themselves to perform with great watchful- 
 ness the duties entailed by family relation- 
 ships, whether parents and children, hus- 
 bands and wives, brothers and sisters, mas- 
 ters, mistresses and servants." l 
 
 Nor was John Wesley one whit behind his 
 great Puritan contemporary in his stern re- 
 solve to recognize no profession of conver- 
 sion which did not bear fruit in life. There 
 is a very instructive incident in the life of 
 John Nelson, one of the early Methodist 
 preachers. A woman whom Nelson had dis- 
 missed from the Society about twelve months 
 before for misbehaviour stood charged at the 
 York Assizes with a capital crime. Nelson 
 
 1 1 quote from Prof. A. V. G. Allen's Jonathan Edwards, in 
 the •• American Religious Leaders " series, p. 156. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 85 
 
 being at that time in the York Circuit was 
 subpoenaed to appear at the Crown bar to as- 
 sign his reasons for having put this woman 
 out of the Methodist Society. Nelson read 
 the Rules of the Society in Court, and at the 
 end of that rule which forbids contracting a 
 debt without any probability of being able 
 to pay it, he stopped and said, " My lord, 
 this was my reason for dismissing this 
 woman from the Society to which I belong." 
 The Judge arose and said, " Good morality, 
 Mr. Nelson ; " and then being seated again 
 desired him to read the rest of the rules. 
 After hearing them, his lordship said em- 
 phatically to the Court, "Gentlemen, this 
 is true Christianity." ! When Matthew 
 Arnold 2 indulges in one of his characteris- 
 tic little jibes at the expense of a company 
 of Cornish revivalists who, he says, "will 
 have no difficulty in tasting, seeing, hearing, 
 and feeling God, twenty times over, to-night, 
 and yet may be none the better for it to-mor- 
 row morning," he may be saying nothing 
 
 1 The Early Methodist Preachers, Vol. I, p. 165. 
 
 2 In his St. Paul and Protestantism. 
 
86 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 literally inaccurate, but he conveys a wholly 
 untrue and unjust impression of the results 
 of religion in that Methodist county. The 
 Cornishman's faith has made him every way 
 a better man, and I shall appeal to another 
 English man of letters to reverse Arnold's 
 unfavourable judgment. " You seem a very 
 temperate people here," Mr. Augustine Bir- 
 rell once observed to a Cornish miner ; " how 
 did it happen ? " The miner replied, solemnly 
 raising his cap, " There came a man amongst 
 us once, and his name was John Wesley." l 
 But there is no need of further witness. 
 Wesley's sound English sense, his strongly 
 ethical nature, his healthy hatred of Anti- 
 nomianism in all its forms so stamped them- 
 selves upon the whole Evangelical Revival 
 that to-day writers of all schools, even those 
 who are furthest removed from his religious 
 faith, freely acknowledge the greatness of the 
 moral revolution which he wrought in the 
 life of England. 2 
 
 1 Res Judicata, p. 129. 
 
 2 See, e.g., the striking tributes of John Morley {Nineteenth 
 Century, Feb., 1892) and Goldwin Smith (CowJ>er, « English 
 Men of Letters " series, p. 45). 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 87 
 
 III 
 
 The truth of these things may be admitted ; 
 indeed, it can hardly be denied ; l but, it may 
 be urged, there is much else to be taken into 
 account before we finally assess the value of 
 conversion as a fact for life. If there are 
 real are there not also sham conversions ? 
 
 1 And yet it has been denied and never with more personal 
 vehemence than in that recent remarkable autobiography 
 Father and Son : " After my long experience," says the writer, 
 " I have surely the right to protest against the untruth (would 
 that I could apply to it any other word ! ) that evangelical re- 
 ligion or any religion in a violent form, is a wholesome or val- 
 uable or desirable adjunct to human life. It divides heart 
 from heart. It sets up a vain, chimerical ideal in the barren 
 pursuit of which all the tender, indulgent affections, all the genial 
 play of life, all the exquisite pleasures and soft resignations of 
 the body, all that enlarges and calms the soul, are exchanged 
 for what is harsh and void and negative. It encourages a 
 stern and ignorant spirit of condemnation; it throws altogether 
 out of gear the healthy movement of the conscience ; it invents 
 virtues which are sterile and cruel ; it invents sins which are 
 no sins at all, but which darken the heaven of innocent joy 
 with futile clouds of remorse." Those who have followed the 
 writer's painful but absorbing story will not be altogether un- 
 prepared for this outburst with which it closes. Much, how- 
 ever, as we may sympathize with Mr. Gosse, it is none 
 the less to be regretted that a man of such wide reading and 
 catholic tastes did not remember that outside the little world 
 whose narrow ways cramped his youthful years, there lay 
 another world where men live under a larger sky and breathe a 
 freer air and with a better right to name themselves " evangel- 
 ical." 
 
88 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 If there are religious experiences under which 
 all life suffers a change " into something rich 
 and strange," are there not others, to all out- 
 ward seeming the same, which work no 
 gracious renewal ? Nay, more, is it not a 
 mournful fact that the worst moral failures 
 are sometimes found among those most open 
 to religious appeal, that it is sometimes but 
 a very short step from the most intense re- 
 ligious emotion to the fiercest animal pas- 
 sion ? These things, alas ! are so, and for the 
 Christian Church the lesson is obvious : she 
 must be as diligent to tnoralize as to evangelize, 
 as patient to teach as she is eager to convert. 
 Nevertheless, though the moral failures 
 which follow on the back of conversion were 
 much more numerous than they are, the 
 argument of this lecture would remain sub- 
 stantially intact. It is worthy of note, by 
 the way, that Prof. James and Prof. Star- 
 buck are both thoroughgoing optimists con- 
 cerning the results of conversion. All the 
 more striking instances of conversion says 
 the former, have been permanent. 1 Starbuck, 
 
 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 257. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 89 
 
 after investigating a hundred cases, came to 
 the conclusion that " the effect of conversion 
 is to bring with it a changed attitude towards 
 life which is fairly constant and permanent, al- 
 though the feelings fluctuate." "In other 
 words, persons who have passed through con- 
 version, having once taken a stand for the re- 
 ligious life, tend to feel themselves identified 
 with it, no matter how much their religious en- 
 thusiasm declines." ' But though it were not 
 so, and the percentage of breakdowns should 
 turn out to be much larger than the psychol- 
 ogists' rosy estimate allows for, we should 
 still be without one jot or tittle of excuse for 
 dismissing the subject with a pitying smile. 
 " Men lapse from every level — we need no 
 statistics to tell us that." But it is the rise 
 rather than the fall which is the spiritually 
 significant thing ; it is in it we get the true 
 measure of the divine force at work in hu- 
 man life for its redemption. And even when 
 the results of conversion are poor and disap- 
 pointing, when one who has been converted 
 remains on a lower moral plane than another 
 
 1 The Psychology 0/ Religion, pp. 355-360. 
 
90 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 who has passed through no such experience, 
 we have still to remember what the one 
 would have been if even such poor grace as 
 he has received had never touched him at 
 all, what the other might become if his 
 larger, richer nature were visited from on 
 high. And, finally, however conversion has 
 failed, its failures do not cancel its achieve- 
 ments ; what it has done it has done ; its 
 record stands for all men to read ; by it, it 
 claims and is content to be judged. 
 
 IV 
 
 Again I ask, what shall we say to these 
 things? If the change we call conversion 
 reported itself only to my own individual 
 consciousness, then, though it would be a fact 
 for science to take note of and account for — 
 especially since the witness of my conscious- 
 ness is confirmed by that of multitudes 
 around me — its significance to others would 
 be of a wholly different kind from that which 
 belongs to it when it comes bearing with it 
 such outward and visible signs. It is signs 
 such as these which are Christianity's one 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 91 
 
 answer to them that bear witness against it. 
 Through age after age it stands in the 
 world's great judgment hall and cries aloud, 
 " Believe me for the very works' sake ; " if 
 that plea fails, it has no more that it can say. 
 Men do indeed speak sometimes of " prov- 
 ing" Christianity, as if it were a kind of 
 mathematical problem through which, step 
 by step, you could work your way down to 
 the triumphant Q. E. D. at the bottom. But 
 you cannot prove Christianity; Christianity 
 must prove itself. The gospel, Paul says, is 
 a power of God ; it is a divine force, and 
 therefore, as some one has well said, its proof 
 must be not logical but dynamical ; it is 
 demonstrated not by argument but by what 
 it does. When John sent two of his disciples 
 to Jesus, saying, " Art Thou He that cometh, 
 or look we for another?" we read that 
 Jesus said — no, we do not read that Jesus 
 said anything ; what we read is this : "In 
 that hour He cured many of diseases and 
 plagues and evil spirits ; and on many that 
 were blind He bestowed sight." Then " He 
 answered and said unto them, Go your way, 
 
92 THE REALITY OF CONVERSION 
 
 and tell John what things ye have seen and 
 heard." There is the real, silencing answer ; 
 not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in 
 demonstration of the Spirit and of power. 
 
 I am not afraid to trust Christianity any- 
 where. It will hold its own with the solitary 
 thinker in his study ; it will stand the cross- 
 fire of experts in the witness box ; it will state 
 the case for itself on paper to any man and 
 await without fear the result. But if we 
 would see it in the greatness of its strength 
 we must see it at work. While it only ar- 
 gues others will argue back again ; when it 
 gets to work it puts all its adversaries to 
 silence. "And seeing the man which was 
 healed standing with them, they could say 
 nothing against it." Of course they could 
 not ; the God that answereth by healed men, 
 He must be God. It is easy — alas 1 that it 
 should be so easy — for men like Prof. Hux- 
 ley to make merry over certain incidents 
 in the gospel story, but while the gospel it- 
 self remains the one thing on earth which has 
 power to cast out the devils, and to tame the 
 wild lusts and passions of the human heart. 
 
AS A FACT FOR LIFE 93 
 
 no weapon that is formed against it can 
 prosper. 
 
 " Saints of the early dawn of Christ, 
 
 Saints of Imperial Rome, 
 Saints of the cloistered Middle Age, 
 
 Saints of the modern home ; 
 Saints of the soft and sunny East, 
 
 Saints of the frozen seas, 
 Saints of the isles that wave their palms 
 
 In the far Antipodes ; 
 Saints of the mart and busy streets, 
 
 Saints of the squalid lanes, 
 Saints of the silent solitudes, 
 
 Of the prairies and the plains ; 
 Saints who were wafted to the skies 
 
 In the torment robe of flame, 
 Saints who have graven on men's thoughts 
 
 A monumental name ; " — 
 
 compassed about with so great a cloud of 
 witnesses, we ask again, has Christ failed, 
 or can Christianity die ? 
 
LECTURE III 
 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
LECTURE III 
 
 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 THE preceding lectures have, I trust, 
 helped to convince us that we are in 
 this inquiry in contact with reality. 
 But if they have done this, they must at the 
 same time have done more : they must have 
 revealed the exceeding variety and com- 
 plexity of the facts before us. It is enough 
 to mention St. Paul and St. Augustine, 
 Sampson Staniforth and William Cowper, 
 the miners of Cornwall and the reclaimed 
 drunkards of Water Street, to show what 
 wide reaches of religious experience are cov- 
 ered by the term conversion. For one man 
 conversion means the slaying of the beast 
 within him ; in another it brings the calm of 
 conviction to an unquiet mind ; for a third it 
 is the entrance into a larger liberty and a more 
 abundant life ; and yet again it is the gather- 
 ing into one of the forces of a soul at war 
 within itself. The late Dr. John Watson — 
 97 
 
98 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 my lamented and distinguished predecessor 
 in this lectureship — has classified conversions 
 as moral, spiritual, intellectual, and practical. 1 
 It matters comparatively little what principle 
 of classification we adopt, or whether we 
 adopt any at all — the best is imperfect ; — what 
 does matter is that we steadfastly resist all 
 attempts to " standardize " conversion. There 
 are types of conversion to which many do 
 conform; there is none to which any must 
 conform. There is but one Father's house, 
 but it is reached by many roads ; each man 
 must travel as he can, and no man must dic- 
 tate the going of his neighbour. Attention 
 has been drawn in a previous lecture to the 
 striking unity which underlies the many mani- 
 festations of the consciousness of salvation, 
 alike in the first days and in later Chris- 
 tian history. In the present lecture our aim 
 will be to note the not less striking diversities 
 of form in which the conversion experience 
 reports itself. 
 
 1 In a sermon on " Conversion " in The Inspiration of Our 
 Faith. See also the chapter on " Regeneration " in The 
 Doctrines of Grace, by the same writer. 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 99 
 
 I 
 
 If we were to make careful inquiry into the 
 early religious history of the members of an 
 ordinary evangelical Christian Church to- 
 day, we should probably find that they could 
 be divided roughly according to a simple 
 threefold classification. In the first place, 
 there are those whom F. W. Newman calls 
 the " once-born," 1 children of God from their 
 birth, who have never left the Father's house, 
 nor ever known the want and darkness of the 
 far-off country. At the opposite extreme to 
 these are those whose religious life began in 
 a great and sudden upheaval ; they are the 
 " twice-born," and to them the day of their 
 natural birth is not more plainly marked in 
 the calendar than is the day of their spiritual 
 re-birth. And, finally, between these two 
 extremes, at various points along the line 
 which unites them, is to be found almost 
 every kind of religious experience, from the 
 long and slow growth of some, to the fierce, 
 volcanic outbursts which mark the life of 
 others. 
 
 'See The Soul, Ch. III. 
 
IOO VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 Of the first of these — the " once-born," as 
 Newman calls them — it does not fall within 
 the province of these lectures to speak, and 
 I must content myself with an expression of 
 regret that evangelical Christianity has not 
 been more ungrudging in its recognition of 
 their presence among us and of their stand- 
 ing in the Christian Church. I believe, with 
 Dr. Dale, that the Holy Spirit's action on the 
 spiritual nature of a child commences very 
 early, and that where He is not resisted, the 
 work of renewal is as gradual as the unfold- 
 ing of any of the higher faculties of our 
 nature. If, as Dale thinks, " renewal " is not 
 the right word to use in such a case, let us 
 say that, as the natural life develops, the 
 divine Spirit simply crowns and perfects it 
 with the life that comes from God. " There 
 are not a few who can testify that ' from their 
 childhood,' they knew, not ' the Scriptures ' 
 but God Himself ; they came to know Him 
 they cannot tell how ; they knew Him just 
 as they knew the blue sky or their mother's 
 love ; they knew Him before they could 
 understand any name by which in our im- 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION IOI 
 
 perfect human speech we have endeavoured 
 to affirm His goodness, His power, or His 
 glory." Probably, too, as Dale suggests, the 
 number of such persons might be indefinitely 
 increased if we did not imply in so much that 
 we say to them that they belong to the 
 devil and have to be brought to Christ, 
 while the truth is, that they belong to Christ 
 and have to be kept from the devil. 1 
 
 Our immediate concern, however, is with 
 those varieties of the conversion experience 
 which would entitle their possessors to a 
 place in the second or third of the classes 
 which have just been described. And, first, 
 before considering any of our later records it 
 will be well to take the evidence of the New 
 Testament itself 
 
 II 
 
 Among the first believers, says Benjamin 
 Jowett, conversion was " almost always sud- 
 den"; 2 "sudden conversions," says Prof. 
 
 1 In a series of papers on the relation of children to the 
 Church in The Congregationalist, 1873. 
 
 * Essay " On Conversion and Changes of Character " in St. 
 Paul's Epistles to the Thessalonians, Galatians and Romans, 
 Vol. II, p. 103. 
 
102 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 Leuba, " seem to have been the rule." ' And of 
 course such general summaries admit of easy 
 if partial, justification. It is easy, too, to ex- 
 plain (as Jowett does) why, in the circum- 
 stances that then existed, conversions should 
 have been for the most part sudden. None 
 the less we shall do well to receive such 
 statements with caution. >'" St. Paul was not 
 the only man to be converted in New Testa- 
 ment days. Every child can tell the story 
 of what befel on the Damascus road ; but 
 who of us can date with certainty the su- 
 preme crisis in the life of St. Peter ? When 
 we remember how many of the first converts 
 to Christianity were gathered from among 
 those devout persons, who, though not Jews 
 themselves, had yet found in Judaism what 
 the old and dying faiths of the world could 
 not give, we are sure there must have been 
 others besides young Timothy whose con- 
 version was sudden only in this sense that 
 the fruit which for long had been slowly ri- 
 pening fell at a touch into the husbandman's 
 basket. 
 
 Article quoted above, p. 318. 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 103 
 
 But even if we allow that most of the first 
 Christians were brought to Christ by sudden 
 conversion, this is by no means to say that 
 the New Testament presents us with but a 
 single type of conversion. The Acts of the 
 Apostles alone should be sufficient to deliver 
 us from the tyranny of a type. Over against 
 the story of Saul of Tarsus, with its dazzling 
 accompaniments of marvel and mystery — the 
 voice from heaven, the light above the bright- 
 ness of the sun, the three days without sight 
 or food, or drink — stands the simple narrative 
 of the Ethiopian eunuch, reading the Hebrew 
 Scriptures as he rode in his chariot, hearing 
 the truth that was preached to him by Philip, 
 and greeting it with eager rejoicing. It 
 needed the roar and crash of the earthquake, 
 that shook the foundations of his prison 
 house, to bring conviction to the soul of the 
 Philippian jailor; but in the same city was 
 one whose heart opened to her Lord without 
 noise or violence, as when day breaks over a 
 silent summer sea. 
 
 There is a still further suggestion of the 
 diversity of the Spirit's operations in the 
 
104 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 variety of New Testament metaphor by which 
 these are described. The most familiar is, of 
 course, that of the new birth; but while it 
 would be sheer pedantry, or worse, to com- 
 plain of the prominence which Christian the- 
 ology has always given to this term, on the 
 other hand, it may not be out of place, in 
 justice to the many-sidedness of the scriptural 
 conception to remind ourselves that this is 
 not the only figure under which is set forth 
 the nature of the change wrought in man by 
 God. Thus, e. g. t it is described as a resur- 
 rection from the dead, a change from dark- 
 ness to light, from slavery to freedom, or, 
 still more simply, as conversion. 1 There is, 
 as Dr. Newton Clarke says, 2 good reason why 
 regeneration should be the favourite name 
 for describing, from the divine side, the be- 
 ginning of the divine life in man ; but if any 
 man, conscious of the reality of the change, 
 finds some other figure truer to the facts of 
 his own experience, let him not hesitate to 
 
 1 E. g., Eph. 2 : I ; I Pet. 2:9; Rom. 6 : 22 ; James 5 : 19. 
 See J. B. Mayor's note on " Regeneration," Epistle 0/ James, 
 p. 186. 
 
 3 Outlines of Christian Theology, p. 396. 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 105 
 
 use it; the warrant for his freedom is the 
 New Testament itself. Even our familiar and 
 comprehensive " conversion " is not the only- 
 legitimate name ; perhaps it is not in every 
 case the best possible name for the experi- 
 ence it describes. Conversion is the turning 
 round of the soul from evil to good, from sin 
 to God. But the writer of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews preferred to speak rather of our be- 
 ing " enlightened " ; 1 so that instead of speak- 
 ing of a man's conversion we might speak 
 with equal accuracy, and in some cases per- 
 haps with more perfect fitness, of his " illu- 
 mination," the diffusion of divine light 
 through the sin-darkened soul. 2 
 
 Manifold, however, as are the types of con- 
 version exhibited or suggested by the New 
 Testament, we should be mistaken in sup- 
 
 1 Heb. 6:4; 10 : 32. 
 
 2 Cf. Dora Greenwell's account of the conversion of Lacor. 
 daire: "This wondrous spiritual change appears from his 
 own account of it, to have come to him as a strong mental il- 
 lumination, enabling him to see that Christianity was a living 
 fact ; and his words in speaking of it seem to recall the literal, 
 almost matter-of-fact simplicity of the statement of the blind 
 man in Scripture,— « This one thing I know, that whereas I 
 was blind now I see ' " (p. 9)- 
 
106 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 posing that even these exhaust all possible 
 varieties of the experience. One considera- 
 tion alone will be sufficient to make this 
 clear. When the New Testament was written 
 Christianity was a new thing in the world. 
 The type, of character with which to-day we 
 have grown so familiar, the character, I 
 mean, not wholly and deliberately Christian, 
 and yet in the main moulded by Christian 
 ideals, was at that time unknown. When 
 among ourselves to-day a man definitely takes 
 upon himself the vows of Christian disciple- 
 ship, and joins himself to the company of 
 Christ's followers, he is not, except in rare 
 instances, conscious of any violent break with 
 the beliefs of his past life ; the change is not 
 in the substance of his creed, but in its 
 quickening power ; in becoming a Christian 
 he is, after all, but taking a step for which, in 
 a certain very real sense, all the past has been a 
 preparation; for, as Benjamin Jowett truly 
 says, Christianity is not only part and parcel of 
 the law of the land, it is part and parcel of 
 the character of each one, which even the 
 worst of men cannot wholly shake off. But 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 107 
 
 in the world of the New Testament, except in 
 so far as Judaism was a preparation for 
 Christianity, nothing like this was either 
 known or possible. When the converts did 
 not use the synagogue as a bridge, they 
 passed straight out of heathenism into Chris- 
 tianity, with the complete dislocation of their 
 whole life, intellectual as well as moral, which 
 such a change must have involved. Is it 
 not, therefore, reasonable to expect that the 
 long course of Christian history will some- 
 times present us with forms of conversion 
 which are but very dimly if at all fore- 
 shadowed in the brief records which reflect 
 the life of the first believers ? 
 
 Ill 
 
 St. Paul was not the only man, I said a 
 few minutes ago, to be converted in New 
 Testament days. But Paul was converted, 
 and his conversion was after the manner so 
 well known to us. Moreover, conversions of 
 the Pauline — i. e., of the sudden, explosive — 
 type have never ceased in the Church from 
 
108 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 that day till this. Let us hear what Prof. 
 James has to say on the matter. After giv- 
 ing two or three illustrations, he says, " 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 ex- 
 perience. . . . There is too much evi- 
 dence of this for any doubt of it to be pos- 
 sible. . . . Were we writing the story 
 of the mind from the purely natural history 
 point of view, with no religious interest what- 
 ever, we should still have to write down 
 man's liability to sudden and complete con- 
 version as one of his most curious peculiar- 
 ities." l Indeed, this is a fact so well estab- 
 lished that it may seem superfluous to labour 
 the point further ; a few very brief illustra- 
 tions, however, may be given in a word or 
 two. John Calvin, who very rarely reveals 
 the secrets of his own soul, in his preface to 
 his Commentary on the Psalms, tells how 
 God drew him from his obstinate attachment 
 to the superstitions of the Papacy by " a 
 
 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 226-230. 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 109 
 
 sudden conversion." ! " I was," says Lacor- 
 daire, "unbelieving in the evening, on the 
 morrow a Christian, certain with an invin- 
 cible certainty." 2 " I was converted," says 
 the Oxford graduate whose story I referred 
 to in the previous lecture, " in my own bed- 
 room in my father's rectory house at pre- 
 cisely three o'clock in the afternoon of a hot 
 July day." "About a quarter before nine," 
 wrote Wesley in his Journal. " Most conver- 
 sions of alcoholics," says Dr. G. B. Cutten, 
 " are of a sudden nature." 3 One of the 
 most striking and original figures in the 
 wonderful history of the Free Church of 
 Scotland during the last century is that of 
 John Duncan — " Rabbi Duncan " as he was 
 often called. In him, says his biographer, 
 " we behold the most sceptical of men trans- 
 formed in a moment into the most believing 
 of men." 4 He presents, as Prof. Knight 
 puts it, " the picture of a strong man sud- 
 
 > See T. M. Lindsay's History of the Reformation, Vol. II, 
 
 P-97- 
 
 s Dora Greenwell's Lacordaire, p. 1 1. 
 
 3 The Psychology of Alcoholism, p. 288. 
 
 * Memoir of John Duncan, by David Brown, p. 508. 
 
IIO VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 denly arrested, struck down in his mid-career 
 of linguistic study and speculative daring, by 
 the realities of the unseen world ; " his was 
 "one of those swift upheavals of experience 
 which attest the agency of a Higher Power 
 working on the spirit of man," and which 
 " may be often quoted as a proof of the 
 genuineness of such a process whatever may 
 be our theory of its method or rationale." x 
 There are some, it may be, who will listen 
 to narratives of this kind with feelings bor- 
 dering on incredulity. They have no ex- 
 periences of their own with which they can 
 even approximately relate them, and they are 
 tempted, in consequence, to dismiss them as 
 fanciful and unreal. But facts are not fairy 
 armies which vanish into thin air at the 
 waving of a magician's wand; and in this 
 case the facts are so numerous and so well 
 authenticated that to attempt to ignore them 
 is simply to put the fool's cap on our own 
 head. And if, instead of ignoring, we will 
 patiently investigate these sudden conver- 
 sions, two points in regard to them will, I 
 
 1 Colloquia Peripatetica, by W. Knight, pp. xliv, xlviii. 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION III 
 
 think, become clear to us. First, while no 
 divine significance attaches to the manner 
 of conversion but only to the results of it, 
 and while sudden conversions are often fol- 
 lowed by disappointing reactions, on the 
 other hand, the lives of multitudes, lifted at 
 once and permanently to a higher level, re- 
 main to attest the reality of the experience ; 1 
 and, secondly, it seems unquestionable, 
 however we may explain it, that there are 
 some whose one chance of better things lies 
 in some sudden, soul-shattering experience, 
 which overturns the life from its foundations. 
 Mansoul will not yield to its besiegers; it 
 must be carried by sudden storm. Here for 
 some is their only hope — in one dead lift of 
 resolution. 2 And this, it may be said in pass- 
 
 lu However sudden," says Jowett, "were the conversions 
 of the earliest believers, however wonderful the circumstances 
 which attended them, they were not for that reason the less 
 lasting or sincere." (Essay quoted above, p. 104.) 
 
 2 " No doubt there are many persons and some social 
 classes," says Mr. R. H. Hutton, " for whom there is far more 
 chance of ' conversion,' in Messrs. Moody and Sankey's sense 
 than of any gradual change." (See Essay quoted above.) Cf. 
 Dr. Cutten's statement concerning alcoholics : " Few, if any, 
 cures are recorded among conversions of the more deliberate 
 type" (p. 289). 
 
112 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 ing, is the justification, in part at least, of the 
 methods of the revivalist. They may not 
 appeal to all ; some they may even alienate ; 
 but the Church is debtor to all, and through 
 the revivalist she seeks to discharge her debt 
 to those whose temperament makes salvation 
 by crisis a necessity ; storm and stress, up- 
 heaval and convulsion, are for them the ap- 
 pointed way into life. Human nature, 
 rightly interpreted, reveals the need as 
 plainly as history records the fact of sudden 
 conversion. 
 
 IV 
 
 If, however, the facts compel the recogni- 
 tion of the reality of sudden conversion, no 
 less plainly do they declare that this is but 
 one type among many. The utmost that we 
 have any right to insist on is, not the neces- 
 sity but the possibility of sudden conversion, 
 not that men must but that men may in a 
 moment be delivered from the bondage and 
 guilt of sin. To assume, as is sometimes 
 done, that the highest kind of religious ex- 
 perience must always be able to date its be- 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 113 
 
 ginning by the clock is to contradict the 
 testimony both of Scripture and of experi- 
 ence. With some the change is swift, start- 
 ling, dramatic ; the tide of the new life comes 
 in like the waters of our English Solway, 
 with a rush and a roar, carrying all before it 
 in one mighty sweep. With others the 
 change is long and slow, so long and slow 
 that they are never able to date it, or to 
 speak of it as a single, definite act. Some- 
 times the light breaks as in our land comes 
 the dawn, soft and gray and with long twi- 
 light ; sometimes as in eastern climes, where 
 day leaps on the earth full born. But here, 
 again, the facts are their own best expositors ; 
 once more, therefore, I turn to the records of 
 Christian biography. In the examples which 
 follow we shall note an almost entire absence 
 of those well-marked emotional characteris- 
 tics which are so conspicuous in many of 
 our conversion narratives. "I do not re- 
 member," says John Livingstone — a name 
 well known in Scottish evangelical circles and 
 linked with many pious memories of the 
 Kirk of Shotts and a marvellous work of 
 
114 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 grace there in the seventeenth century — " I 
 do not remember any particular time of con- 
 version, or that I was much cast down or lift 
 up." ' Reference was made in a previous 
 lecture to the very explicit language of John 
 Henry Newman concerning his conversion. 2 
 His biographer, however, points out that 
 though it was to evangelical teaching that he 
 owed his spiritual life, yet " he had not been 
 converted in that special way which it laid 
 down as imperative, but so plainly against 
 rule as to make it very doubtful in the eyes 
 of normal Evangelicals whether he had really 
 been converted at all." " I speak of conver- 
 sion," Newman himself wrote — this was in 
 182 1 — "with great diffidence, being obliged 
 to adopt the language of books. For my own 
 feelings, as far as I remember, were so differ- 
 ent from any account I have ever read, that 
 I dare not go by what may be an individual 
 case." 3 After one of Moody's memorable 
 
 1 See J. Walker's Scottish Theology and Theologians, p. 168. 
 
 1 See p. 37. 
 
 s Transcribing the memorandum in 1826, he adds: "In the 
 matter in question, that is, conversion, my own feelings were 
 not violent, but a returning to, a renewing of, principles, under 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 115 
 
 meetings in Scotland in the early seventies, 
 six young Edinburgh students went back to 
 their hotel to discuss far into the night the 
 remarkable scene they had just witnessed: 
 " Some one started the question whether it is 
 usual to remember the date and the incidents 
 of one's own conversion. At such a moment 
 it was easy to be confidential, and it turned 
 out that we were equally divided, three re- 
 membering the circumstances in which their 
 spiritual life began, and three not." l The 
 following from Charles Kingsley's Life needs 
 no comment : "June 12, 1841 — My birth- 
 night. I have been for the last hour on the 
 seashore, not dreaming, but thinking deeply 
 and strongly, and forming determinations 
 which are to affect my destiny through time 
 and through eternity. Before the sleeping 
 earth and the sleepless sea and stars I have 
 devoted myself to God ; a vow never (if He 
 gives me the faith I pray for) to be recalled." 2 
 
 the power of the Holy Spirit, which I had already felt and in 
 a measure acted on when young." (Letters and Correspond- 
 ence, Vol. I, pp. 122-124.) 
 
 1 G. A. Smith's Life of Henry Drummond, p. 65. 
 
 •Vol. I, p. 35. 
 
Il6 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 Very different, and perhaps still more striking, 
 is the story of a Japanese Christian related 
 by Dr. Dale. He was a man of considerable 
 intellectual culture and great intellectual ac- 
 tivity and vigour. He had been a Con- 
 fucian, and for many years had studied Con- 
 fucianism carefully, but failed to find in it 
 what he wanted. The rest shall be told in 
 his own words : " Just then a Japanese con- 
 vert to Christianity gave me a Chinese Bible, 
 and asked me to read it. He told me that 
 the translation was a great achievement of 
 scholarship, and that I should be charmed 
 with its literary beauty. I found that he was 
 right ; the translation is admirable. I read 
 page after page till I came to the thirteenth 
 chapter of Paul's First Epistle to the Cor- 
 inthians, beginning, 'If I speak with the 
 tongues of men and of angels, but have not 
 love, I am become sounding brass or a 
 clanging cymbal.' I read the whole chapter, 
 I was arrested, fascinated. I had never seen 
 or heard or dreamt of a morality like that. I 
 felt that it was above the reach of the human 
 race, that it must have come from heaven, 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 117 
 
 that the man who wrote that chapter must 
 have received light from God — from God, 
 about whose existence I had been speculat- 
 ing. And then I read the Gospel of John, 
 and the words of Christ filled me with 
 wonder. They were not to be resisted. I 
 could not refuse Him my faith." And so he 
 became a Christian. 1 
 
 The same evidences of variety meet us 
 when from the manner of conversion we turn 
 to the motives and agencies which lead up 
 to it and help to bring it about. Saint Cy- 
 prian, it is said, was brought to God by the 
 
 1 The Living Christ and the Four Gospels, pp. 42-45. 
 To the examples given in the text may be added the following 
 reference to John Newton from Sir J. Stephen's Essay on the 
 Evangelical Succession : " There is a natural history of relig- 
 ious conversions. It commences with melancholy, advances 
 through contrition to faith, is then conducted to tranquillity, and 
 after a while to rapture, and subsides at length into an abiding 
 consolation and peace. No epoch in this mental progress can 
 be passed over by the narrator of any such change without rais- 
 ing some suspicion of its genuineness in those who have 
 studied the human heart, rather as it is described in pious 
 books, than as it works in pious men. But, braving all such 
 suspicions and strong in conscious sincerity, Newton acknowl- 
 edged, without the least reserve, that he had overleapt all 
 these stages. His heart of oak had been rent by no poignant 
 sorrow nor had it been agitated by any tumultuous joy, from 
 the beginning to the end of his spiritual course. With no 
 
Il8 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 reading of the book of Jonah. 1 Principal 
 Lindsay remarks on the number of true 
 mediaeval conversions due to a vision of the 
 Virgin Mary. 2 Once and again, in the 
 Duomo of Florence, Savonarola referred to 
 his conversion : " A word did it," he used to 
 say ; but what the word was his closest friends 
 never knew. 3 It was the sight of a tree, dry 
 and leafless in the winter, that first kindled 
 in Brother Lawrence the high thoughts of 
 God that cut him loose from the world. 4 
 Lacordaire, on the other hand, was wont to 
 
 vehement internal conflict whatever he shed the skin of a dis- 
 solute seaman and sheltered himself in that of a devout clergy, 
 man. He gave up bad habits of life for an infinitely better 
 course, with abundant good sense, seriousness and deliberation, 
 but with very little passion or excitement. Ill as such an 
 anomaly squared with the prepossessions of those for whom he 
 wrote, he would not deviate by an hair's breadth from the 
 simple truth, nor affect any feeling which he had not really ex- 
 perienced, either to propitiate the good-will of his teachers or 
 disciples or to do homage to their religious theories." 
 
 1 R. F. Horton's Minor Prophets, (Century Bible), p. 197. 
 
 2 Lecture on St. Bernard, in The Evangelical Succession, 
 Vol. I, p. 175. Cf. the curious record of the sudden conversion 
 to Roman Catholicism of a freethinking French Jew quoted by 
 Prof. James (p. 223). 
 
 3 Villari's Life and Times of Savonarola, Bk. I, Ch. I, 
 footnote. 
 
 4 The Practice of the Presence of God, first conversation. 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 119 
 
 declare, that in his case, no man, no book, 
 no sudden or striking appeal or event was 
 the chosen agent of his conversion ; he only 
 knew that after nine years of doubt he heard 
 the voice of God and answered to His call. 1 
 " I was engaged to be married and she died," 
 said a young communicant once to Dr. Alex- 
 ander Whyte. 2 "In many souls," says 
 Bishop Paget, "the first impulse of conver- 
 sion may be the sense of some unearthliness, 
 some elevation above all worldly ways and 
 thoughts, in Christian life." 3 " Once in an 
 American Church," says Tennyson's biog- 
 rapher, "the clergyman yielding to some 
 sudden impulse, recited, much to the scandal 
 and indignation of his congregation, 'The 
 Charge of the Light Brigade.' Some days 
 later a man called on him and said, ' Sir, I 
 am one of the survivors of the Balaclava 
 charge. I have led a wild, bad life, and 
 haven't been near a church, till by accident 
 and from curiosity I went into your church 
 
 'Dora Greenwell's Lacordaire, p. IX. 
 
 * Bible Characters, Stephen to Timothy, p. 113. 
 
 a Studies in the Christian Character, p. be. 
 
120 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 last Sunday. I heard you recite that great 
 poem and it has changed my life : I shall 
 never disgrace my cloth again.' ■ So,' said 
 the clergyman, in a letter to the poet, * though 
 I may have lost my congregation, I have 
 saved a soul by your poem.' " l Verily, the 
 wind bloweth where it listeth, and we hear 
 the sound thereof, but cannot tell whence it 
 cometh or whither it goeth. 
 
 V 
 
 If, then, such is the great variety of form 
 in which the fact of conversion clothes itself, 
 there is one very obvious inference which we 
 must not fail to draw. I do not propose at 
 this point to go behind the great diversities 
 of experience to which the facts bear witness 
 and seek an explanation of them. Modern 
 psychologists may be right when they tell us 
 that sudden conversion is connected with 
 " the possession of an active subliminal self," 
 and that it is in those in whom certain peculi- 
 arities of temperament — pronounced emo- 
 tional sensibility and so forth — unite that 
 
 ^Hallam Tennyson's Life of his Father, p. 717. 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 121 
 
 religion finds the best subjects for trans- 
 formations of the striking and dramatic kind. 
 This may be so, but after all the particular 
 form which conversion takes is a matter 
 rather of psychological than religious sig- 
 nificance and interest. If it be said that a 
 man such as St. Paul was certain to be con- 
 verted, if at all, in some such way as is re- 
 corded in the Acts of the Apostles, religion 
 has no interest in disputing the statement, 
 for the significance of St. Paul's conversion 
 lies not at all in the manner of it, but wholly 
 in the results of it ; and, as some one has 
 remarked, the divine Presence would have 
 been just as decisively certified if Saul had 
 become a disciple with the calmness of Mat- 
 thew, or Zacchaeus or Timothy. Why in one 
 case conversion should clothe itself in certain 
 emotional habiliments which in another are 
 wholly wanting, is, I repeat, a question not 
 so much for religion as psychology and we 
 may with a good conscience leave it to the 
 psychologists to thrash out at their leisure. 
 
 But the diversity itself, however little we 
 may concern ourselves with explanations of 
 
122 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 it, calls for the most emphatic and unequivo- 
 cal recognition on the part of all teachers 
 and preachers of evangelical Christianity. 
 Probably nothing has done more to foster 
 the antipathy with which in some quarters 
 the doctrine of conversion is still regarded 
 than the vulgar notion that (as Dr. Wash- 
 ington Gladden puts it) there is a mill to go 
 through, and that everybody must go in at 
 the hopper and come out at the shoot, that 
 unless you have had the regulation expe- 
 rience your conversion is not genuine. 1 It 
 may be said that this is a gross perversion of 
 evangelical doctrine, that evangelical Chris- 
 tianity has always recognized the manifold 
 varieties of experience which mark the soul's 
 return to God. In a measure the protest is 
 just, and yet it is impossible for Christian 
 teachers to disclaim all responsibility for the 
 prevalent misconceptions. To begin with, 
 our teaching itself, all protests notwithstand- 
 ing, has not always been above reproach. 
 When, e.g., Jonathan Edwards writes in his 
 
 1 See chapter on Conversion in How Much is Left of the 
 Old Doctrines ? 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 1 23 
 
 Diary, " The chief thing that now makes me 
 in any measure question my good estate is 
 my not having experienced conversion in 
 those particular steps wherein the people of 
 New England, and anciently the dissenters 
 of old England used to experience it," 1 he 
 reveals unconsciously the peril which always 
 besets the evangelist. With all Dr. Dale's 
 loyalty to Moody he could not be blind to 
 the risks involved in the stress which the lat- 
 ter laid upon the necessity of sudden conver- 
 sion ; for although Moody never denied that 
 the soul might pass from darkness into light 
 by a gradual transition, he assumed the other 
 to be the normal experience, and that the 
 supreme change would almost always be in- 
 stantaneous. 2 Even when the reality of 
 other forms of religious experience is not 
 openly questioned, the acknowledgment of 
 it is sometimes so grudging and halting that 
 a definite denial would not alter the impres- 
 sion. 3 But whether with litde reason or 
 
 1 Allen's Jonathan Edwards, p. 35. 
 1 Life ofR. W. Dale, by his Son, p. 321 . 
 3 E.g., " I would not," says John Owen, " bind others by 
 any experience of my own, unless it be confirmed by a general 
 
124 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 with much in the language of evangelical 
 leaders the misconceptions to which I re- 
 ferred just now do undoubtedly exist. It 
 would be easy to multiply illustrations. In 
 one of Gladstone's early religious discussions 
 he spoke of the Evangelical Revival as an 
 attempt of men who felt themselves de- 
 frauded of the great living powers enshrined 
 in the gospel covenant to recover those 
 powers, and, "as it were, to ensure the pos- 
 session and enjoyment of them by compress- 
 ing their whole agency into a short and 
 single crisis." "This device," he went on, 
 " so short, so cheap, so simple, has long ago 
 become full of cracks and fissures." In a 
 similar vein Mr. R. H. Hutton speaks of 
 revivalists who he assumes are in the habit 
 of teaching that " there can be no true re- 
 rule ; for one man may have an experience that another hath 
 not. But yet," he goes on, taking away with one hand what 
 he had just given with the other, " I think this I can say 
 that God generally takes possession of souls in a cloud. That 
 is, there is some darkness upon them ; they cannot tell what 
 their state is. Sometimes they have hopes, and sometimes fears, 
 sometimes they think things are well, and sometimes they are 
 cast down again. This is the way whereby God generally 
 enters into all souls." (James Moffatt's Golden Book of John 
 Owen, p. 142.) 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 125 
 
 ligion without some sudden spiritual crisis, 
 such as John Wesley, e.g., dated in his own 
 case as having happened precisely at a 
 quarter before nine on 24th May, 1738." x 
 Prof. James stumbles into the same pit : 
 "For Methodism," he says, "unless there 
 has been a crisis of this sort [z. e., "an acute 
 crisis of self-despair and surrender followed 
 by relief "] salvation is only offered, not ef- 
 fectively received, and Christ's sacrifice in so 
 far forth is incomplete. . . . 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." 2 If, then, 
 students of religion as understanding and as 
 sympathetic as these manage so completely 
 to miss their way in the interpretation of 
 evangelical doctrine, is it any marvel if the 
 average " outsider " finds in the mill with its 
 hopper and shoot a sufficient figure of the 
 conversion process? It is our business to 
 
 1 See Essay quoted above. 
 
 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 227-8. 
 
126 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 make all such perversions, whether of the 
 learned or the unlearned, for ever impossible ; 
 and it can be done only by the unequivocal 
 recognition of all the facts to which Christian 
 history and experience bear witness. 
 
 There are, moreover, urgent practical 
 reasons for this step. The value of conver- 
 sion, it has been said more than once, de- 
 pends not on how it happens but on what it 
 affects. The manner of it is wholly without 
 religious significance. But when stress is 
 laid on this or that type of experience, im- 
 mediately attention is diverted from the pri- 
 mary to the secondary ; the true order of 
 things is inverted ; the incidental is exalted 
 above the essential, the emotional above the 
 ethical, the psychological above the religious. 
 Not only so, but this exaltation of type may 
 easily become the minister of a subtle spirit- 
 ual pride. Sudden conversion does undoubt- 
 edly, by its very nature, give to him who has 
 experienced it a more intense and immediate 
 sense of the reality of divine things ; and 
 when with this there mingles the thought 
 that the very manner of the change is itself a 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 127 
 
 mark of the special favour of heaven, the soil 
 is made ready for that spiritual censorious- 
 ness which is the ugliest weed that grows in 
 the garden of God. The worst danger, how- 
 ever, of our undue emphasis, is the disap- 
 pointment which it inflicts on earnest seekers 
 whose temperament practically shuts them 
 out from any such experience as we appear 
 to declare essential. There are many ways 
 by which sinful man may return to God ; but 
 when we speak, or seem to speak, as if there 
 were but one, the way by which we came 
 ourselves, then to him who would come, but 
 knows he cannot come by our way, we seem 
 to say he cannot come at all. On every 
 ground, therefore, as well for the sake of 
 those whom she has already won as for those 
 whom she seeks to win, the Church must 
 open her eyes to the manifold diversities of 
 the Spirit's working in the human heart. 
 
 Prof. Henry Drummond once stated, in 
 a meeting of Christian workers in Scot- 
 land, that in all his wide experience of revival 
 movements, he had seen very few evidences 
 of that agonizing conviction of sin which 
 
128 VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 
 
 was so characteristic a feature of similar 
 movements in the past. Did it mean, he 
 asked, that the Holy Spirit was in any way 
 modifying the method of His operation? 
 The question may well set us thinking. Are 
 there not depths in Christ's saying concern- 
 ing the Holy Spirit which we have not yet 
 plumbed, " He, when He is come, will con- 
 vict the world in respect of sin, and of right- 
 eousness, and of judgment " ? " Conviction 
 of sin " we know ; what of " conviction of 
 righteousness " ? And yet are there not 
 many to-day for whom the religious life be- 
 gins, not so much in a sense of their own sin 
 and guilt and need, as rather in the con- 
 sciousness of the glory and honour of Christ ? 
 It is what they find within themselves which 
 brings some men to Christ ; it is what they 
 find in Him which brings others. Some are 
 driven by the strong hands of stern neces- 
 sity ; some are wooed by the sweet constraint 
 of the sinless Son of God. Some are crushed 
 and broken and humbled to the dust, and 
 their first cry is " God be merciful to me a 
 sinner " ; some when they hear the call of 
 
VARIETIES OF CONVERSION 1 29 
 
 Christ leap up to greet Him with a new light 
 in their eyes and the glad confession on their 
 lips, " Lord, I will follow Thee whithersoever 
 Thou goest." ' 
 
 Hear then the conclusion of the whole mat- 
 ter. Conversion is the soul's return to God ; 
 wherefore let every man journey by the road 
 which lies open to him. Many will come by 
 the Slough of Despond, and the Wicket-gate, 
 and the Hill Difficulty ; but that is not the 
 only road to the Celestial City. Many will 
 come by ways worn by the feet of multi- 
 tudes, and some by a lonely way, pilgrims of 
 whose progress no man has yet written. 
 But any road is the right road that reaches 
 the goal at last. On the east three gates, 
 on the north three gates, on the south three 
 gates, on the west three gates ; and all the 
 gates lead into the city. 
 
 1 1 have made use in this paragraph of a few sentences from 
 my book The Teaching of Jesus, pp. 142-3. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 
 THE RATIONALE 
 OF CONVERSION 
 
LECTURE IV 
 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 WE have now had steadily before us 
 during three lectures the fact of 
 conversion. We have passed in 
 review and have sought to estimate the sig- 
 nificance of a vast mass of human testimony ; 
 and we have reached this threefold conclu- 
 sion : that conversion is an experience very 
 manifold in its character, as real in its way as 
 the facts of hearing and sight, and of deep 
 moral significance alike for the individual 
 and for the race. We have now to approach 
 the subject from a somewhat different point 
 of view. There are, according to Prof. 
 James, three great tests of the value of all re- 
 ligious opinions and experiences : immediate 
 luminousness, philosophical reasonableness, 
 and moral helpfulness. 1 The application of 
 
 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 1 8. 
 !33 
 
134 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 the first and third of these tests to the subject 
 of conversion has already been made ; it re- 
 mains now to apply the second, that, viz., 
 of philosophical reasonableness. In other 
 words, is it possible convincingly to connect 
 this experience — whether of the sudden and 
 explosive, or of the quiet and gradual type — 
 with other experiences of common life ? Can 
 we knit it up with our thinking in other 
 spheres, or must we be content to leave it, for 
 all save those who have passed through it, a 
 blank unintelligibility — a fact indeed, but a 
 fact standing in no discoverable relation to 
 other facts, a huge erratic boulder of whose 
 presence in our life thought can offer no ex- 
 planation ? 
 
 There are doubtless some who will listen 
 to questions of this kind with ill disguised 
 impatience ; to them all such inquiries are 
 wholly beside the mark. " What," they will 
 ask, " is the good of seeking to rationalize 
 an experience like conversion ? Let a man 
 get converted and he will want no explana- 
 tions ; rather, he will have the only kind of 
 explanation that is worth troubling about." 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 135 
 
 Nor is the rough and ready judgment with- 
 out its truth, for it is the certainties of expe- 
 rience alone which lie beyond the question- 
 ings of the intellect. When a man falls back 
 on his spiritual consciousness and says, 
 " Whereas I was blind, now I see," argument 
 is powerless to dislodge him. Onlookers may 
 dispute as they will as to how he received 
 his sight, their controversies are of no real 
 concern to him : " the witness in himself he 
 hath." It must be admitted, too, that when 
 all has been said conversion remains very 
 much " a psychological or theological mys- 
 tery." Analogies and parallels may help us ; 
 they may enable us in some fashion to repre- 
 sent the idea to our minds, and to relate it 
 with other more or less familiar ideas of 
 experience ; but they remain still only illus- 
 trations, not explanations; life keeps the 
 secret of its beginnings in the spiritual as in 
 the natural world. Nevertheless, if there are 
 any facts within our reach that can help us to 
 a more intelligent understanding of the fact 
 of conversion, we shall surely do well to take 
 note of them. It is always the duty of the 
 
I36 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 Church to make its faith reasonable to reason- 
 able minds ; and if there are common human 
 experiences which have power to light up 
 and make more intelligible to us this great 
 experience of religion we ought not to fail to 
 enlist them in our service. 
 
 I 
 
 To begin with, we have a number of curious 
 and striking "conversions out of church," as 
 they have been called. Heathen as well as 
 Christian writers acknowledge the necessity 
 of a conversion or new birth. 1 There are, 
 Dr. Dill tells us in his work on Roman So- 
 ciety, well attested cases of individual con- 
 version under pagan preaching. Polemon, 
 the son of a rich Athenian, was a very disso- 
 lute youth, who squandered his wealth on low 
 pleasure. Once, coming from some revel, he 
 burst with his companions into the lecture 
 room of Xenocrates, who happened to be dis- 
 coursing on temperance. Xenocrates calmly 
 continued his remarks. The tipsy youth lis- 
 tened for a while, then flung away his gar- 
 
 1 See J. B. Mayor's Epistle 0/ James, p. 189. 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 137 
 
 land, and with it also his evil ways ; in after 
 years he became himself the head of the 
 Academy. Plutarch's conception of the phil- 
 osophic gathering, says the same authority, 
 is perhaps the nearest approach which a 
 heathen ever made to the conception of the 
 Christian Church. He turned away in dis- 
 gust from the showy declamation of the 
 sophist whose chief object was to dazzle his 
 audience by a display of rhetorical legerde- 
 main on the most trivial or outworn themes, 
 and made a profession of philosophy a real 
 priesthood for the salvation of souls. When 
 his discussion was over, instead of the subtle 
 and frivolous questionings with which hearers 
 were wont to display their own cleverness, he 
 urged those in moral difficulty to remain be- 
 hind and lay bare to him their faults and 
 spiritual difficulties. 1 
 
 It is, however, in certain well-known auto- 
 biographies of our own time that we find the 
 most suggestive of the parallels to which I 
 refer. In Sartor Resartus, e. g., Thomas 
 Carlyle describes what he calls his conversion, 
 
 1 Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, pp. 3^7,413. 
 
138 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 or new birth, when he " authentically took 
 the Devil by the nose," and when he began 
 to achieve the convictions, positive and neg- 
 ative, by which the whole of his later life was 
 governed. " Nothing in Sartor jResarlus," 
 he says, " is fact ; symbolical myth all, except 
 that of the incident in the Rue St. Thomas 
 de l'Enfer, which occurred quite literally to 
 myself in Leith Walk, during three weeks of 
 total sleeplessness. ... I remember it 
 well, and could go straight to about the 
 place." : What was the nature of the inci- 
 dent which is thus authenticated ? One para- 
 graph will perhaps be sufficient to show : 
 " All at once, there rose a Thought in me, 
 and I asked myself ' What are thou afraid of ? 
 Wherefore, like a coward, dost thou forever 
 pip and whimper, and go cowering and trem- 
 bling ? Despicable biped ! what is the sum- 
 total of the worst that lies before thee ? 
 Death ? Well, Death ; and say the pangs of 
 Tophet too, and all that the Devil and man 
 may, will or can do against thee ! Hast 
 -thou not a heart ; canst thou not suffer what- 
 
 1 CarlyWs Early Life, by J. A. Froude, Ch. VII. 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 1 39 
 
 soever it be; and as a Child of Freedom, 
 though outcast, trample Tophet itself under 
 thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it 
 come, then ; I will meet it and defy it 1 ' And 
 as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of 
 fire over my whole soul ; and I shook base 
 fear away from me forever. I was strong, of 
 unknown strength ; a spirit, almost a god. 
 Ever from that time, the temper of my misery 
 was changed : not Fear or whining Sorrow 
 was it, but Indignation and grim fire-eyed 
 Defiance. . . . It is from this hour that 
 I incline to date my spiritual new-birth ; per- 
 haps I directly thereupon began to be a 
 man." ' 
 
 From Thomas Carlyle let us turn to John 
 Stuart Mill, whose Autobiography records a 
 
 » Sartor Resartus, Bk. II, Ch. VII. " Blame not the word," 
 he writes of conversion later on, " rejoice rather that such a 
 word signifying such a thing, has come to light in our Modern 
 Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. The Old 
 World knew nothing of Conversion ; instead of an Ecce Homo, 
 they had only some Choice of Hercules. It was a new-attained 
 progress in the Moral Development of man ; hereby has the 
 Highest come home to the bosoms of the most Limited : what 
 to Plato was but an hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is 
 now clear and certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and 
 the poorest of their Pietists and Methodists." (Ch. X.) 
 
I40 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 similar mental crisis : " It was in the autumn 
 of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as 
 everybody is occasionally liable to ; unsuscep- 
 tible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; 
 one of those moods when what is pleasure 
 at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent ; 
 the state, I should think, in which con- 
 verts to Methodism usually are, when smitten 
 by their first ' conviction of sin.' " Through 
 all the months of that dreary winter the cloud 
 hung over him. He seemed to himself like 
 a ship stranded at the beginning of its voy- 
 age and without sail. All the fountains of 
 desire were dried up within him. Neither 
 friends nor books availed him aught. He be- 
 gan to wonder, if, on such terms, life could 
 be long endured. Gradually, however, the 
 cloud lifted. The first ray of light came 
 through the reading of Marmontel's Memoires. 
 But it was in the poems of Wordsworth that 
 he found the best medicine for his troubled 
 soul. These did for him what the works of 
 other and greater poets were powerless to 
 do : "I felt myself," he says, " at once better 
 and happier as I came under their influence, 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 141 
 
 and "the result was that I gradually, but 
 completely, emerged from my habitual de- 
 pression, and was never again subject to it." x 
 In another of these " conversions out of 
 church," Wordsworth is again the chosen in- 
 strument, and I take the following from 
 " Mark Rutherford's " Autobiography : " One 
 day, a day I remember as well as Paul must 
 have remembered afterwards the day on which 
 he went to Damascus, I happened to find 
 amongst a parcel of books a volume of poems 
 in paper boards. It was called Lyrical Bal- 
 lads, and I read first one and then the whole 
 book. It conveyed to me no new doctrine, 
 and yet the change it wrought in me could 
 only be compared with that which is said to 
 have been wrought on Paul himself by the 
 divine apparition. ... It excited a 
 movement and a growth which went on till 
 by degrees all the systems which enveloped 
 me like a body gradually decayed from me 
 and fell away into nothing. . . . God is 
 nowhere formally deposed, and Wordsworth 
 would have been the last man to say that he 
 
 1 Autobiography, Ch. V. 
 
142 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 had lost faith in the God of his fathers. But 
 his real God is not the God of the Church, 
 but the God of the hills, the abstraction Na- 
 ture ; and to this my reverence was transferred. 
 Instead of an object of worship which was 
 altogether artificial, remote, never coming 
 into genuine contact with me, I had now 
 one which I thought to be real, one in which 
 literally I could live, move, and have my be- 
 ing, an actual fact present before my eyes. 
 God was brought from that heaven of the 
 books, and dwelt on the downs in the far- 
 away distances, and in every cloud-shadow 
 which wandered across the valley. Words- 
 worth unconsciously did for me what every 
 religious reformer has done, — he re-created 
 my Supreme Divinity ; substituting a new 
 and living spirit for the old deity, once alive, 
 but gradually hardened into an idol." 
 
 One further example — and this the last — 
 may be found in George Gissing's powerful 
 if somewhat sombre volume The Private Pa- 
 pers of Henry Ryecroft. One whose long 
 hard years in London streets had obscured 
 happy early memories of quiet rural beauty 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 1 43 
 
 found himself one glorious day in spring 
 amid the flowers and sunshine of Devon : " I 
 had stepped into a new life. Between the 
 man I had been and that which I now be- 
 came there was a very notable difference. 
 In a single day I had matured astonishingly ; 
 which means, no doubt, that I suddenly 
 entered into conscious enjoyment of powers 
 and sensibilities which had been developing 
 unknown to me. To instance only one 
 point : till then I had cared very little about 
 plants and flowers, but now I found myself 
 eagerly interested in every blossom, in every 
 growth of the wayside. ... To me the 
 flowers became symbolical of a great release, 
 of a wonderful awakening. My eyes had all 
 at once been opened ; till then I had walked 
 in darkness and knew it not." 
 
 And now again, I think, I hear the prot- 
 estations of those to whose objections we 
 were listening a few minutes ago. Is not all 
 this, it will be asked, the very superfluity of 
 naughtiness? Conversion is an experience 
 specifically and exclusively Christian, and to 
 seek to explain it by dragging in experiences 
 
144 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 of a wholly different order — intellectual, aes- 
 thetic, or whatever be the right name for 
 them — like those just related, is mere wanton- 
 ness. Well, of course, if conversion is an ex- 
 perience so specifically and exclusively Chris- 
 tian that nothing in life presents any sort of 
 parallel to it, there is an end of the matter ; 
 there is and can be no such thing as a ra- 
 tionale of conversion ; we are only wasting 
 time in talking about it. But surely this is a 
 conclusion to which we shall not readily al- 
 low ourselves to be shut up. We may feel 
 no necessity to relate the experiences of re- 
 ligion with life's other experiences ; to us 
 they may be so entirely self-luminous that 
 we need light from no other quarter by 
 which to interpret them. But all men are 
 not as we are, and we owe it to our faith and 
 to our fellows to keep open any and every 
 approach by which it may win its way to 
 them. Let us not, therefore, grow impatient 
 of analogies, however far short they fall, that 
 have in them any promise of help. You re- 
 member our English poet's plea for the re- 
 ligions of mankind : 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 145 
 
 ** Which has not taught weak wills how much they can? 
 Which has not fall'n on the dry heart like rain ? 
 Which has not cried to sunk, self-weary man : 
 Thou must be born again / " 
 
 And in like manner even these "conver- 
 sions out of church" — pale ghosts of the 
 moonlight as we may think them in compari- 
 son with the real thing — may serve to make 
 more credible to some the Church's gospel of 
 a new life in Jesus Christ. 
 
 II 
 
 And yet experiences such as these of Car- 
 lyle and Mill and the rest, interesting and 
 suggestive as they are, will not carry us far 
 towards the goal we are in search of. If we 
 are to gain for our conception of conversion 
 some degree of the philosophical reason- 
 ableness which Prof. James postulates as a 
 necessity for any doctrine that is to be worthy 
 of all acceptation, it must be through the dis- 
 covery of some general and well recognized 
 law under which our conversion phenomena 
 may be grouped. 
 
 Now we are all familiar with the way in 
 
146 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 which a man's whole life organizes itself, so 
 to speak, around some idea, or group of 
 ideas, which happens for the moment to be 
 in the ascendancy. His thoughts, his inter- 
 ests, his anxieties, are all determined by the 
 character of the ruling idea which for the 
 time exercises authority over him. When, 
 e. g. } — to borrow one of Prof. James' happy 
 illustrations — the President of the United 
 States, with paddle, gun, and fishing rod 
 goes camping in the wilderness for a 
 vacation he 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. 1 Similarly, we know 
 how the entering in of some new and regnant 
 idea may end in a complete and permanent 
 readjustment of a man's whole life, of all his 
 thoughts and ways. This is the meaning of 
 Dr. Chalmers' famous phrase, " the expulsive 
 
 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 193. 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 147 
 
 power of a new affection." The new idea 
 has power to create a new centre of personal 
 activity and (to use again the phrase which 
 was used just now) to organize the whole 
 life about itself. Illustrations may be found 
 on every hand. Some years ago a crisis oc- 
 curred in the political life of England. The 
 leading statesman of the day introduced in 
 the House of Commons a measure which led 
 to an immediate and disastrous division in 
 the ranks of his own party. What was the 
 result? For many of those who broke the 
 party bond, opposition to the ill-starred 
 measure became the governing principle of 
 their political life ; it forced them into new 
 alliances ; it modified their relation to most 
 of the other political questions of the hour ; 
 it shifted, consciously or unconsciously, the 
 bias of their thinking and in the end many 
 of them became politically new men. 
 
 But it is within the sphere of personal re- 
 lations that we find the most signal examples 
 of what I have been saying. Great is the 
 power of ideas ; but it is when these ideas are 
 incarnated for us in living men and women 
 
148 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 that they put forth their full might. A 
 youth is pushed to the brink of some ter- 
 rible temptation ; one thought steadies and 
 saves him : " How shall I do this great 
 wickedness and yet keep her love ? " A girl 
 is giddy and idle and vain ; she becomes a 
 mother, and the feeling of motherhood creates 
 a new centre about which a new life builds 
 itself up ; the love of a little child has re- 
 deemed her. Our great imaginative writers 
 understand the meaning of these things. 
 What, e. g., are the moral recoveries of Jean 
 Valjean in Les Mis Arables, and of Sidney 
 Carton in The Tale of Two Cities, and of the 
 selfish old peer in the child's story of Little 
 Lord Fauntleroy> but so many instances of 
 the redeeming might of human love ? ! It 
 is strange, sometimes, at how light a touch 
 the door of the spirit opens, and lo ! God is 
 there : /'.' A man now old and nearing his 
 end one Sunday November afternoon, when 
 he was but twenty years old, met a woman 
 
 1 1 am indebted for these three examples to Bishop Gore. 
 See his appendix to Lux Mundi on " The Christian Doctrine 
 of Sin." 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 1 49 
 
 in a London street and looked in her face. 
 Neither he nor she stopped for an instant ; 
 he looked in her face, passed on, and never 
 saw her again. He married, had children, 
 who now have children, but that woman's 
 face has never left him, and the colours of the 
 portrait which hangs in his soul's oratory are 
 as vivid as ever. A thousand times has he 
 appealed to it ; a thousand times has it sat in 
 judgment; and a thousand times has its 
 sacred beauty redeemed him."y For some 
 this is perhaps a hard saying, and they are 
 not able to receive it ; and yet who does not 
 know how along unseen wires another's soul 
 may flash its mystic message to his own and 
 make for him the dawning of a better day ? 
 
 " Only — but this is rare — 
 
 When a beloved hand is laid in ours, 
 
 When jaded with the rush and glare 
 
 Of the interminable hours, 
 
 Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear, 
 
 When our world : deafen'd ear 
 
 Is by the tones of a loved voice caress' d — 
 
 A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, 
 
 And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. 
 
 , Mark Rutherford's Miriam's Schooling, p. 1 19. 
 
150 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, 
 And what we mean, we say, and what we would, 
 
 we know. 
 A man becomes aware of his life's flow, 
 And hears its winding murmur ; and he sees 
 The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze. " 
 
 It is in the line of experiences such as these 
 that conversion finds its place. It is the su- 
 preme illustration of the re-organization of 
 life about a new centre, the crowning ex- 
 ample of redemption by a person. Again I 
 say, I do not mean that herein lies the whole 
 philosophy of conversion, but enough to save 
 the doctrine from the charge of irrationality. 
 If by the admission into his political creed of 
 some new article of faith, a man's whole out- 
 look is changed and in the end he becomes 
 politically another self, who will set limits to 
 the change which a new thought of God may 
 work through all the reaches of his being ? 
 If we read in a work of fiction how some man 
 looked for the first time into a woman's face 
 and knew that for him life from that hour 
 was charged with a new purpose, we should 
 
 1 The Buried Life, by Matthew Arnold. 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 151 
 
 not put down the book with a gesture of im- 
 patience, because we know that such things 
 do happen. Why, then, should it seem a 
 thing incredible that by the sudden crossing 
 of a human life by the Son of God, old things 
 should pass away, all things should become 
 new? It is this personal commerce of the 
 soul with Christ Himself in conversion that 
 calls for special emphasis. I have heard of 
 one whose whole life was changed through 
 the weekly reading during three months of 
 the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians. 
 And when we remember what vital moral 
 forces are stored within the compass of those 
 few verses, we find nothing in the story to 
 stumble at. But in conversion the soul is 
 dealing not merely with moral ideas, how- 
 ever mighty, but with Christ Himself. It is 
 brought within the sphere of those personal 
 relations through which, as we have seen, the 
 supreme transformations of life are wrought. 
 A very simple illustration will show what is 
 meant. There lived once a young girl whose 
 perfect grace of character was the wonder of 
 those who knew her. She wore on her neck 
 
152 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 a gold locket which no one was ever allowed 
 to open. One day, in a moment of unusual 
 confidence, one of her companions was al- 
 lowed to touch its spring and learn its secret. 
 She saw written these words — " Whom hav- 
 ing not seen, I love." That was the secret of 
 her beautiful life. And that, too, be it said is 
 the secret of Christianity : it is redemption 
 through a Person. Religion is not magical, 
 it is reasonable ; and when once we have 
 learned to think of it, not so much in terms 
 of a creed to be believed as rather of a per- 
 sonal relationship to be shared, immediately 
 we realize the true nature of the forces which 
 through it are set free, and the consequent 
 reasonableness of the Church's doctrine of 
 conversion. 
 
 Ill 
 But how, it may be asked, can we defend 
 the doctrine of sudden conversion? That 
 character should be slowly modified under 
 the steady impact of the forces of the spirit- 
 ual world — that we can understand ; but that 
 in a single day, a single hour, without warn- 
 ing or preparation, the government of a 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 1 53 
 
 man's life should pass into other hands, and 
 he himself become literally a new creation — 
 this is altogether beyond our comprehension. 
 And when, e.g., we find a man saying, as 
 Lacordaire does, " I was unbelieving in the 
 evening, on the morrow a Christian, certain 
 with an invincible certainty," we can only 
 throw up our hands in despair, and ask with 
 Nicodemus, " How can these things be ? " 
 As we shall see in the next lecture, sudden 
 conversion is a phenomenon concerning 
 which modern psychology has suggestions of 
 its own to offer. Passing these by for the 
 moment, however, let us see if in the direc- 
 tion already indicated there be not help 
 awaiting us. 
 
 And, first of all, let us ask, if sudden con- 
 versions do really involve such a break with 
 experience as is often assumed. Are they so 
 entirely disparate from all else that we know 
 that their very isolation may justly create a 
 prejudice against them ? In reply, I will ask 
 you to consider some weighty words of Ben- 
 jamin Jowett : " If," he says, " while acknowl- 
 edging that a great proportion of mankind 
 
154 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 are the creatures of habit, and that a great 
 part of our actions are nothing more than the 
 result of habit, we go on to ask ourselves 
 about the changes of our life, and fix our 
 minds on the critical points, we are led to 
 view human nature in a way more accordant 
 with the language of Scripture. We no 
 longer measure ourselves by days or by 
 weeks ; we are conscious that at particular 
 times we have undergone great revolutions 
 or emotions; and then, again, have inter- 
 vened periods, lasting perhaps for years, in 
 which we have pursued the even current of 
 our way. Our progress towards good may 
 have been in idea an imperceptible and 
 regular advance ; in fact we know it to have 
 been otherwise. We have taken plunges in 
 life ; there are many eras noted in our exist- 
 ence. . . . Changes in character come 
 more often in the form of feeling than of 
 reason, from some new affection or attach- 
 ment, or alienation of our former self, rather 
 than from the slow growth of experience, or 
 a deliberate sense of right and duty." l 
 
 1 Essay quoted above, pp. 119, 121. 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 155 
 
 When, moreover, conversion is given the 
 place which rightly belongs to it — within the 
 sphere of personal relations, i. e.> — the most 
 elementary knowledge will teach us that 
 within that sphere the time factor is of all 
 factors the least considerable. When two 
 souls really touch that may happen with 
 which neither many words nor the ticking of 
 the clock have aught to do. " Love at first 
 sight " is often a thoughtless phrase, lightly 
 used ; but love at first sight is more than a 
 phrase, it is a fact, it is a real experience in 
 human life. And sometimes, with all rev- 
 erence be it spoken, there is love at first 
 sight betwixt the soul and its Lord. Is not 
 this the simple fact which lies behind some of 
 the stories of the life of Jesus? Take, e.g. % 
 the call of Nathaniel to be a disciple. A few 
 short verses tell the whole story. Here is a 
 man who, so far as we know, had never seen 
 Jesus before. A friend brings him into His 
 presence, and at a word, he capitulates. 
 Prejudices — and prejudices we know he had 
 — are swept aside, and in a moment — so at 
 least it would seem — the decision of a life- 
 
156 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 time is taken. How unreasoning and un- 
 reasonable it all sounds ! What depth of 
 conviction, we ask, could there be in one who 
 suffered himself to be swung clean round in 
 such so easy fashion ? But, waiving for the 
 moment the question of the completeness of 
 the evangelist's narrative — though many 
 things must have passed between Jesus and 
 Nathaniel which John has not recorded — we 
 may be quite sure that that which won the 
 disciple to the Master's side and grappled 
 him to Him as with hooks of steel, was not 
 merely something which Jesus said, and which 
 another listening could report ; rather it was a 
 something which went forth from Him, forth 
 from His eyes, from His heart, from His whole 
 being, a subtle magnetic something which 
 cast its spell about Nathaniel and bound him 
 for ever to the Man of Nazareth — that touch 
 of soul with soul to which all things are pos- 
 sible. There are moments in which the 
 work of a lifetime is done ; there are expe- 
 riences which crowd eternity into an hour, or 
 which stretch an hour into eternity ; and such 
 an hour, such a moment, was it in the life of 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 157 
 
 Nathaniel when first he stood in the presence 
 of Jesus. 
 
 I quoted just now some words of Benjamin 
 Jowett. Let me add to them the words of 
 another whose still greater distance from the 
 evangelical interpretation of Christianity gives 
 to his judgment a peculiar significance. 
 " There is no single thing," says F. W. New- 
 man, " which more strikes me as indicating a 
 defective philosophy current concerning the 
 Soul, than the incredulity and contempt 
 which is cast upon sudden conversions. Sud- 
 den political revolutions are never treated as 
 incredible or marvellous. It is readily under- 
 stood that in a State two or three different 
 powers are struggling together with inde- 
 pendent force ; and often with alternate suc- 
 cess. At last a party which was depressed 
 rises in sudden might, deposes that which 
 held the chief power, and assumes the helm. 
 Many moralizers seem not to be aware, that, 
 similarly, in the narrow compass of one man's 
 bosom two or three powers are often striving 
 together for mastery. Rather they know of 
 nothing but ' Reason and Passion ' ; and as 
 
158 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 Reason acts gently and very steadily, and 
 only Passion by violent impulse, they can un- 
 derstand indeed that a man may fall into dire 
 sin all in a moment, but not how he can rise 
 out of it all in a moment. This is because 
 they know nothing of the forces of the Soul, 
 which are in fact true Passions themselves. 
 . . . Indeed the remark may be made on 
 all intuitive impressions, — that they are at 
 first sudden and impulsive. The beauty of a 
 scene, of a statue, of a human face, strikes us 
 with impetus. Not that we discern it always 
 at first sight : we may have needed some 
 familiarity with it before we see it in the right 
 position, and gather up into a single whole 
 that on which the effect depends : but at last 
 we catch it all in a moment, and perhaps 
 wonder why it never so affected us before." l 
 
 IV 
 
 One word only remains to be spoken, and 
 that is the word not of a theologian but of a 
 poet. Students of Robert Browning have 
 
 » The Soul, Ch. 2. 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 1 59 
 
 often called attention to the persistence with 
 which he dwells on the spiritual significance 
 of those rare moments by which the souls of 
 men are visited, when a light from heaven 
 above the brightness of the sun shines about 
 their path and the very voice of God is heard. 
 Almost anything may serve to be the medium 
 of the divine message. "There are some 
 mortals on this earth to whom nothing more 
 than a certain summer morning very early, 
 or a certain chance idea in a lane ages ago, 
 or a certain glance from a fellow-creature, 
 dead for years, has been the Incarnation, the 
 Crucifixion, the Resurrection, or the Descent 
 of the Holy Ghost." 1 This is the faith of 
 Robert Browning, and at its root it is one 
 with the Church's doctrine of conversion. 
 Indeed, one enthusiastic expositor of the poet's 
 teaching does not hesitate to declare that his 
 teaching on conversion is " his supreme mes- 
 sage to our time " ; it is this that ranks him 
 with the prophets — "his impassioned confi- 
 dence that the soul may, in one grand mo- 
 ment, leap sheer out of any depth of shame 
 
 1 Miriam's Schooling, p. 118. 
 
l6o THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 or subtle bondage, and leap to the breast of 
 God." l 
 
 " Oh, we're sunk enough here, God knows ! 
 
 But not quite so sunk that moments, 
 Sure tho' seldom, are denied us, 
 
 When the spirit's true endowments 
 Stand out plainly from its false ones, 
 
 And apprise it if pursuing 
 Or the right way or the wrong way, 
 
 To its triumph or undoing. 
 
 " There are flashes struck from midnights, 
 
 There are fire-flames noondays kindle, 
 Whereby piled-up honours perish, 
 
 Whereby swollen ambitions dwindle, 
 While just this or that poor impulse, 
 
 Which for once had play unstifled, 
 Seems the sole work of a lifetime 
 
 That away the rest have trifled." a 
 
 Or take those great lines from The Ring and 
 the Book in which the Pope passes judgment 
 on Guido — Guido the infamous : 
 
 1 See Mr. J. A. Hutton's admirable little volume, Guidance 
 from Robert Browning in Matters of Faith, to which through- 
 out the whole of this section of my lecture I am greatly in- 
 debted. Dr. Washington Gladden makes a similar application 
 of the poet's teaching in his How Much is Left of the Old Doc- 
 trines? See also Prof. Corson's book referred to below. 
 
 2 Cristina. 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION l6l 
 
 "For the main criminal I have no hope 
 Except in such a suddenness of fate. 
 I stood at Naples once, a night so dark 
 I could have scarce conjectured there was earth 
 Anywhere, sky or sea or world at all : 
 But the night's black was burst through by a blaze — 
 Thunder struck blow on blow, earth groaned and 
 
 bore, 
 Through her whole length of mountain visible : 
 There lay the city thick and plain with spires, 
 And, like a ghost disshrouded, white the sea. 
 So may the truth be flashed out by one blow, 
 And Guido see, one instant, and be saved." 
 
 Still more striking is the lovely story of Pippa, 
 the little silk-winder of Asolo. It is New Year's 
 day, her one holiday in the whole long year — 
 
 " To-morrow I must be Pippa who winds silk 
 The whole year round, to earn just bread and milk : 
 But, this one day, I have leave to go, 
 And play out my fancy's fullest games ; " 
 
 and so she wanders forth into the sunshine, 
 singing as she goes. First she passes, in the 
 morning, the house on the hillside, where the 
 guilty pair, Ottima and her lover Sebald, are 
 met ; then, at noon she reaches the house to 
 which this day Jules the sculptor will bring 
 home his bride ; in the evening she is near 
 
162 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 the turret on the hill above Asolo where 
 dwell Luigi and his mother ; and at night she 
 passes the palace by the Duomo in which 
 Monsignor the Bishop is conferring with his 
 Intendant. Pippa does not know it, but to 
 each of these a great crisis has come ; each is 
 standing at the parting of the ways ; " Ottima 
 and Sebald unrepentant, with a crime behind 
 them ; Jules and Phene, two souls brought 
 strangely face to face by a fate which may 
 prove their salvation or their perdition ; 
 Luigi, irresolute, with a purpose to be per- 
 formed ; Monsignor, undecided, before a 
 great temptation." 1 And as Pippa passes, 
 singing, something in the song wakens within 
 each the slumbering better self, and each is 
 saved. Let Sebald speak for the rest. 
 
 " God's in His heaven, 
 All's right with the world ! " 
 
 — this was Pippa's song, and this is Sebald's 
 answer : 
 
 " That little peasant's voice 
 
 Has righted all again. Though I be lost, 
 
 1 Arthur Symons' Introduction to Browning, p. 48. 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 1 63 
 
 I know which is the better, never fear, 
 
 Of vice or virtue, purity or lust, 
 
 Nature or trick ; I see what I have done, 
 
 Entirely now ! Oh, I am proud to feel 
 
 Such torments — let the world take credit thence— 
 
 I, having done my deed, pay too its price ! 
 
 . . . God's in His heaven ! " 
 
 This is what the poetry of Browning says 
 everywhere, that as Prof. Corson puts it 
 — " not through knowledge, not through a 
 sharpened intellect, but through repentance, 
 through conversion, through wheeling into a 
 new centre its spiritual system, the soul at- 
 tains to saving truth." l 
 
 Nor does Browning ever forget — how 
 could he ? — that the master forces of life are 
 personal ; hence what he shows us is not con- 
 version simply, but conversion through per- 
 sonality. One illustration must suffice. Take 
 the story of Giuseppe Caponsacchi in The 
 Ring and the Book. Caponsacchi was a 
 priest, and withal a coxcomb and a fribble ; 
 the Church's holy hands had left unchanged J 
 the worldling's withered heart. Then Pom- ' 
 pilia — Guido's wronged but stainless girl- 
 
 1 Introduction to Browning, p. 58. 
 
1 64 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 wife — crossed his path, laid her commands 
 on him, and trusted him ; and Caponsacchi 
 became a new man. This is how he tells 
 what happened to his judges : 
 
 "'Thought?' nay, Sirs, what shall follow was not 
 
 thought : 
 I have thought sometimes, and thought long and 
 
 hard. 
 I have stood before, gone round a serious thing, 
 Tasked my whole mind to touch and clasp it close, 
 As I stretch forth my arm to touch this bar. 
 God and man, and what duty I owe both, — 
 I dare to say I have confronted these 
 In thought : but no such faculty helped here. 
 I put forth no thought, — powerless, all that night 
 I paced the city : it was the first Spring. 
 By the invasion I lay passive to, 
 In rush'd new things, the old were rapt away ; 
 Alike abolished — the imprisonment 
 Of the outside air, the inside weight o' the world 
 That pulled me down. Death meant, to spurn the 
 
 ground, 
 Soar to the sky, — die well and you do that. 
 
 Sirs, I obeyed. Obedience was too strange, - 
 This new thing that had been struck into me 
 By the look o' the lady, — to dare disobey 
 The first authoritative word. 'Twas God's. 
 I had been lifted to the level of her, 
 
THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 1 65 
 
 Could take such sounds into my sense. I said 
 ' We two are cognizant o* the Master now ; 
 She it is bids me bow the head ; how true, 
 I am a priest ! I see the function here ; 
 I thought the other way self-sacrifice : 
 This is the true, seals up the perfect sum. 
 I pay it, sit down, silently obey.' " 
 
 Browning, it is plain, is not afraid of sud- 
 den spiritual upheavals ; he believes in them ; 
 the tiniest spark may fire the brain, and in 
 the shock which follows 
 
 " God unmakes but to remake the soul 
 He else made first in vain." 
 
 In all this, once more let it be said, there 
 is no clearing up of the mystery of conver- 
 sion. When we compare what happens in 
 conversion with the sudden re-direction that 
 is given to a life by some chance incident, 
 we are but comparing one mystery with an- 
 other, and each remains a mystery still. Of 
 many of these changes, perhaps no other 
 reason can be given than that Nature and the 
 Author of Nature have made men capable of 
 them. And yet, at the same time, this cor- 
 relating of the experiences of religion with 
 
166 THE RATIONALE OF CONVERSION 
 
 some of the familiar experiences of life may 
 not be in vain. It may teach us to see in the 
 phenomena of the spiritual world, not the 
 portents of some almighty magician, but the 
 activities of the same divine mind which is at 
 work in all our life. Mysterious they will 
 still remain, but not more mysterious than 
 many other things before which we daily 
 stand with thankful hearts and bowed heads 
 — thankful yet silent : 
 
 / was dumb, I opened not my mouth ; 
 
 Because Thou didst it. 
 
LECTURE V 
 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY 
 OF CONVERSION 
 
LECTURE V 
 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 REFERENCE was made in a former 
 lecture to the claim upon science of 
 the facts of the religious conscious- 
 ness, and to the response which that claim is 
 winning to-day from many distinguished stu- 
 dents of psychology. 1 The movement to 
 which I refer, recent as it is, is attracting at- 
 tention in so many quarters, and promises to 
 yield such an abundant literary crop, that it 
 seems worth while pausing to ask what aid 
 it can give us in our interpretation of the 
 facts which form the subject matter of these 
 lectures. 
 
 I 
 Let me begin with a brief account of the 
 aims, methods, and results of the new psy- 
 chological study of religion. It assumes that 
 religion is a real fact of human experience, 
 
 1 See p. 54. 
 169 
 
170 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 and that it develops according to law. 
 " Here," it says, in effect, " in the experiences 
 of men and women about us is a great mass 
 of ascertainable states of consciousness. 
 These it is the business of science to observe 
 with all the precision that modern psycholog- 
 ical methods render possible. To under- 
 stand religion we must study it in its present 
 manifestations." In making this inquiry the 
 psychologist is concerned solely with the 
 facts as such ; their ultimate significance lies 
 wholly without the scope of his judgment. He 
 rejects equally the position of those to whom 
 conversion is an absolutely supernatural 
 event with nothing cognate to it in ordinary 
 psychology, and of those who see nothing in 
 it but hysterics and emotionalism, an abso- 
 lutely pernicious pathological disturbance. 
 His one aim is to trace in the facts of the 
 spiritual life the working of those same 
 orderly processes which experience has 
 taught him to look for everywhere ; and 
 while he does not forget that the laws of the 
 spiritual world are peculiar to their own 
 sphere, and are therefore not necessarily one 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 171 
 
 with those which obtain in other spheres, he 
 nevertheless believes that the facts have an 
 order which in due time will reveal itself to 
 the patient seeker. 
 
 In pursuing his inquiry the psychologist 
 claims for his own the whole field of religious 
 experience. Hitherto, however, it is upon the 
 phenomena of conversion that his most abun- 
 dant labours have been bestowed, and it is, 
 of course, with the results of these alone that 
 we are at this moment concerned. Keeping 
 before him the whole series of manifestations 
 just preceding, accompanying, and imme- 
 diately following conversion, the psychologist 
 seeks to discover the mental and spiritual 
 processes which are at work therein. As we 
 might expect, his attention is especially drawn 
 to the manifold varieties of conversion which 
 were the subject of an earlier lecture, and, as 
 we shall see in a moment, he believes he holds, 
 from the human side, the only clue to the 
 problem which they present to us. 1 
 
 1 These paragraphs are merely a summary of the aims of the 
 psychological study of religion as these are set forth in the 
 writings of Coe, Starbuck, and James. 
 
172 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 In order to obtain the facts which form the 
 raw material for the investigation, various 
 methods have been adopted. The biogra- 
 phies and autobiographies of religious persons 
 have been examined (every one will remem- 
 ber how largely these figure in the lectures 
 of Prof. James); individual converts have 
 been interrogated as to their experiences, 
 and the results recorded. Prof. Coe tells us 
 that he had a number of persons placed un- 
 der careful scrutiny with a view to securing 
 objective evidence as to temperament, the 
 observers being guided by a carefully pre- 
 pared scheme of temperamental manifesta- 
 tions. 1 In some cases further aid was sought 
 by means of interviews with friends or ac- 
 quaintances of the persons under examina- 
 tion. The method most commonly adopted, 
 however, is that of the questionnaire, as it is 
 called. By means of an elaborate and care- 
 fully prepared list of questions (examples of 
 which may be seen in many of the works re- 
 ferred to in this lecture) a detailed description 
 is obtained from hundreds of persons of their 
 
 » The Spiritual Life, p. 109. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 1 73 
 
 conversion experiences, the motives that led 
 up to it, the circumstances that attended it, 
 and the effects that followed from it. These 
 descriptions are then analyzed and the re- 
 sults are grouped and massed in various 
 ways so as to exhibit averages and tendencies 
 in religious life. 
 
 The movement, as I have said, is still but 
 in its infancy. One of the first to break 
 ground in this new field was Prof. Leuba, 
 whose article on "The Psychology of Re- 
 ligious Phenomena," appeared in The Ameri- 
 can Journal of Psychology, in April, 1896. 
 Prof. Starbuck's similar but much more 
 elaborate investigations — The Psychology of 
 Religion — were published in 1899. In 1900 
 came Prof. G. A. Coe's Spiritual Life, 
 and in 1902 Prof. James' Varieties of Re- 
 ligious Experience, which my predecessor in 
 this lectureship (Dr. Watson) once spoke of 
 as " the most scientific book on the phenom- 
 ena of the religious consciousness which has 
 ever been published." All these, it will be 
 observed, are the work of American students. 
 From Prof. Henri Bois of Montauban, I ob- 
 
174 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 serve, have just come two volumes, one on 
 the Welsh Revival, the other on the Psychol- 
 ogy of Revivals ; but of these I am not able 
 to speak. 1 British scholarship, so far as I am 
 aware, has not yet entered the field. 2 
 
 And what are the results of this study of 
 conversion by the methods of psychology? 
 I can answer the question only in the baldest 
 and most summary fashion. Keeping stead- 
 ily in view their task of coordinating specific 
 inner states and tendencies and specific ex- 
 ternal circumstances, students of the psychol- 
 ogy of religious experiences believe they have 
 reached at least two well-established con- 
 clusions. In the first place, they tell us, that 
 when in conversion a man's personality is 
 changed, it is, as Prof. James would say, 
 his psychological idiosyncrasies which give 
 the particular shape to his metamorphosis. 
 Suppose converting influences brought to 
 
 1 See a short notice by Dr. James Stalker in The Expository 
 Times, January, 1908. 
 
 * I have not overlooked Mr. Frank Granger's Soul of a Chris- 
 tian; but though, like R. L. Stevenson's Child World, it is 
 " full of a number of things," and these often very interesting, 
 it does not seem to me to add materially to the discussion. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION J 75 
 
 bear upon one in whom these three facti 
 combine : pronounced emotional sensibility, 
 tendency to automatisms, and susceptibility 
 to hypnotic suggestion — if he yield, you may 
 confidently predict that such a man will ex- 
 perience a transformation of the sudden and 
 striking order. In the degree, however, in 
 which these characteristics are wanting, the 
 likelihood of his passing through a change of 
 this marked character is reduced, no matter 
 what the depth and reality of his religious con- 
 victions. In a word — such is Prof. Coe's 
 conclusion — the varying emotional aspects 
 of our religious experiences are to be ascribed 
 not to the inscrutable ways of God, but to 
 ascertainable differences in men's mental 
 constitutions. 1 Prof. James reaches prac- 
 tically the same conclusion, though he states 
 it somewhat differently: " What makes the 
 difference between a sudden and a gradual 
 convert is not necessarily the presence of 
 divine miracle in the case of one and of some- 
 thing less divine in that of the other, but 
 rather a simple psychological peculiarity, the 
 
 1 The Spiritual Life, p. 140. 
 
176 TViE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 fpitt, namely, that in the recipient of the more 
 instantaneous grace we have one of those 
 subjects who are in possession of a large re- 
 gion in which mental work can go on sub- 
 liminally, and from which invasive expe- 
 riences, abruptly upsetting the equilib- 
 rium of the primary consciousness, may 
 come." l 
 
 Another matter upon which modern psy- 
 chology pronounces with equal confidence is 
 the intimate correspondence which has been 
 shown to exist between conversion and those 
 momentous physical and mental changes 
 which mark the passing of childhood into 
 youth and manhood. Returns of the various 
 ages at which conversion takes place have 
 been secured on a considerable scale by 
 different investigators, and though, of course, 
 the results do not always agree, certain con- 
 clusions stand out with well-defined clearness : 
 that conversion takes place usually between 
 the ages of ten and twenty-five, most fre- 
 quently about sixteen or seventeen, very 
 rarely after thirty, and on an average, some- 
 
 1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 237. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 177 
 
 what earlier in girls than in boys. 1 In other 
 words, the critical period in religious devel- 
 opment is seen to coincide in a very remark- 
 able degree with the storm and stress of ado- 
 lescence. Indeed, many psychologists, be- 
 lieving that man is naturally religious, look 
 upon the religious anxieties of youth as one 
 of the normal manifestations of the adolescent 
 period. The well-known uneasiness and fer- 
 ment of the physical life have their correlate 
 in the scarcely less familiar upheavals and 
 agonies of the spiritual. 
 
 II 
 This brief outline, woefully inadequate as 
 it is, may serve to indicate some of the re- 
 sults for religion of recent psychological re- 
 search. What, now, is to be our attitude, as 
 Christians, towards this new study ? To say 
 that we will not oppose it will probably only 
 provoke from science the prompt retort, 
 "Thank you for nothing 1" Certain it is, 
 whether we like it or dislike it, the study will 
 
 1 Elaborate statistics and diagrams may be found in the 
 works of Starbuck and Coe. See also Pratt's Psychology of Re- 
 ligious Belief, p. 2 1 8. 
 
17 g THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 go on as long as it holds out to the inquirer 
 the smallest promise of reward for his labours. 
 Nothing short of an absolute conviction that 
 he was ploughing the sands of the seashore 
 would or ought to induce him to stay his 
 hand. But, indeed, religion not only has no 
 interest in opposing the application of the 
 methods of psychology to the facts of the 
 spiritual life, she had every reason for wel- 
 coming and encouraging it. Has it not been 
 a just ground of complaint with us that science, 
 which is so quick to seize upon all other facts, 
 has treated our facts — the facts of the re- 
 ligious consciousness — with cold disdain ? It 
 would be strange indeed, therefore, if now 
 that in real earnest and according to her own 
 proper methods she is taking up the task, re- 
 ligion were to cry " Hands off ! " or to persist 
 in regarding her as an unauthorized intruder. 
 Nor need we fear lest, in passing through 
 the hands and under the eyes of the psychol- 
 ogist, spiritual facts should lose any of their 
 essential significance. What happens in 
 conversion is not less divine after science has 
 given such account of it as it can than it was 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 1 79 
 
 before. Suppose, e. gJ we accept the psy- 
 chologist's conclusions as to the possible sub- 
 jects of a sudden and striking religious trans- 
 formation, are we therefore shut up to the 
 further conclusion that the whole change is 
 explicable in terms of emotional sensibility 
 and so forth? Certainly not. The utmost 
 that has been proved is that a certain type of 
 man is necessary to a certain type of con- 
 version ; but (as Prof. Coe well says) the 
 substance of the experience as far transcends 
 its emotional forms as a man transcends the 
 clothes he wears. 1 Or, suppose again, science 
 should succeed in demonstrating the concomi- 
 tance which it believes to exist between con- 
 version and the crisis of adolescence, would 
 the legitimate inference be that conversion is 
 merely a product of physical factors ? Again 
 we answer, certainly not. All that science is 
 
 1 So also Prof. James : " His possession of a developed 
 subliminal self, and of a leaky or pervious margin, is thus a 
 conditio sine qua non of the Subject's becoming converted in the 
 instantaneous way. But if you, being orthodox Christians, ask 
 me as a psychologist whether the reference of a phenomenon 
 to a subliminal self does not exclude the notion of the direct 
 presence of the Deity altogether, I have to say frankly that as 
 a psychologist I do not see why it necessarily should." (P. 342.) 
 
180 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 seeking to prove is the concomitance of two 
 groups of facts and (to quote Prof. Coe 
 again) this particular instance of such con- 
 comitance between mental and physical facts 
 is no more fitted to give comfort to ma- 
 terialism than any other instance of the cor- 
 relation of brain states with mental states. 1 
 What science looks for among the facts of 
 the spiritual world is that which it looks for 
 everywhere — the signs of law and order. If 
 these should be found here also, will the facts 
 therefore be less truly God's facts ? .Are we 
 going to commit ourselves once more to the 
 old and stupid notion, "the more law and 
 order the less God," l that it is only the ab- 
 normal that is divine, that the moment you 
 can account for anything that moment you 
 withdraw it from the sphere of the divine ac- 
 tivity? Things are what they are, however 
 they came to be what they are ; and divine 
 things are not less divine because the history 
 of their development turns out to be different 
 from what we once thought it. The world in 
 
 1 The Spiritual Life, p. 47. 
 ' The phrase is Dr. Bowne's. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION l8l 
 
 which we live is not the world that Dante 
 and Milton knew, but it is still God's world. 
 The Bible that we read is different from the 
 Bible of the Reformers, but it is still God's 
 Word. And if in the facts of conversion and 
 regeneration our children are led to trace the 
 sequence of laws which are hidden from our 
 eyes, why should we doubt that still behind 
 all there is the same divine Lord who worketh 
 all things according to the good pleasure of 
 His will? 
 
 It is only fair to add that psychologists 
 who are most active in this new field of in- 
 quiry energetically repudiate the idea that 
 these conclusions can in any way affect the 
 reality of the divine agency in conversion. 
 Let Prof. Coe speak both for himself and 
 his fellow workers.: " Empirical methods do 
 not reduce the facts of the religious life to the 
 plane of the natural as contrasted with the 
 supernatural. Every question arising in the 
 psychology of religious experience may be 
 understood in this way : Under what cir- 
 cumstances does the divine Spirit work such 
 or such a change in the minds of men ? That 
 
182 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 the Holy Spirit does observe antecedents and 
 wait for conditions to ripen ; that He does 
 not vouchsafe the same blessings to all indi- 
 viduals or to all ages of life ; and that we 
 have it in our power either to prepare the 
 way for His revelations or to hinder them — 
 all this is current belief among Christians. 
 Now, these are the very uniformities that 
 need investigating. In fact, psychology can 
 only render more precise and complete what 
 is already recognized in a partial way in the 
 practice of the religious life. Yet the results 
 will not be doctrinal in the ordinary sense of 
 the term. They will be merely statements of 
 uniformities existing between certain ante- 
 cedents and certain consequents and will 
 leave entirely open the vast field of questions 
 regarding the divine purposes towards men 
 and regarding man's real nature and 
 destiny." ' 
 
 III 
 While, however, it is our plain duty to 
 abandon all attempts in the name of religion 
 
 1 The Spiritual Life, p. 17. See also p. 1 18; Cutten's Psy- 
 chology of Alcoholism, p. 317, and the passage from James 
 quoted above. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 183 
 
 to browbeat science and all equally foolish 
 fears of it, this does not mean that we are to 
 shut our eyes and open our mouths and take 
 whatever science, or science falsely so called, 
 may be pleased to give us. Least of all has 
 so young a science as the psychology of re- 
 ligion any right of complaint if its first ad- 
 vances are met with a mild and reasonable 
 scepticism. Without entering into detailed 
 criticism two or three brief notes may be 
 added to show the need at this stage of a 
 cautious if sympathetic attitude. 
 
 (1) To begin with, there is the fact already 
 alluded to, the extreme youth of the science 
 itself. Perhaps, indeed, it would not be un- 
 fair to suggest that as yet it is not a science 
 but only the hope of one. When Prof. 
 Leuba wrote his article on " The Psychology 
 of • Religious Phenomena," as recently as 
 1896, he declared that the manifestations of 
 the religious life were a domain in which psy- 
 chological science had not then planted its 
 standard. When Prof. Starbuck, then a 
 student of Harvard, first set on foot his sta- 
 tistical inquiries into the religious ideas and 
 
1 84 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 experiences of the people around him, the 
 results of which have since been given to 
 the world, even Prof. James (as he himself 
 has confessed) damned the whole project with 
 faint praise. 1 "This is not a sphere," says 
 Prof. Coe, " in which claims to scientific in- 
 fallibility become even plausible." 2 More- 
 over, the investigators are as yet compara- 
 tively few ; American students, as I have 
 said, have hitherto had the field almost to 
 themselves. Any one who has the slightest 
 acquaintance with the literature of the subject 
 must have been struck with the way in which 
 the writers lean one upon another. Before 
 the results of their labours can be accepted 
 with complete confidence we must be able 
 to check them by the findings of other work- 
 ers in other parts of the same field. 
 
 (2) We cannot help feeling, too, that the 
 questionnaire method which figures so largely 
 in these investigations is a somewhat rickety 
 foundation for the weight of conclusions 
 which it is made to bear. It might, indeed, 
 
 1 See his Preface to Starbuck's Psychology of Religion. 
 * The Spiritual Life, p. 119. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 1 85 
 
 seem that nothing could be more simple and 
 straightforward, when we desire to know the 
 facts of religious experience, than to go di- 
 rect to religious people themselves and let 
 them describe in their own way their own 
 inner life. A little reflection, however, will 
 show us that comparatively few persons are 
 equal to the task of accurate self-observation 
 and portrayal. So far from being an art 
 which comes naturally to every one, it needs 
 long and careful cultivation before it can be 
 trusted. \ A man may be both intellectually 
 honest and religiously sincere, and yet as 
 soon as he attempts to read off in detail the 
 facts of his own inner life he may be the un- 
 conscious victim of all manner of subtle self- 
 deceptions : the conventionalities of religious 
 formulae, the tricks of memory, the processes 
 of self-praise and self-blame — all mean so 
 much to be deducted from the face value 
 of his account. That the students of the 
 psychology of religion are themselves aware 
 of these drawbacks to their method is 
 true ; whether, in their conclusions, they 
 have sufficiently allowed for them is a 
 
1 86 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 question on which opinions are likely to 
 differ. 
 
 (3) But the most serious criticism, from 
 the point of view of religion, of the psycho- 
 logical study of religious experience is — to 
 put it bluntly — that it is just the religious 
 element in the experiences which it analyzes 
 about which psychology has nothing to say. 
 Prof. James calls his book " The Varieties 
 of Religious Experience," and yet it would 
 hardly be unfair to say that he does not deal 
 with religious experience at all. A man may 
 fill reams of paper in discussing the emotional 
 factors which combined to make possible the 
 experience which befel St. Paul on the road 
 to Damascus, but if he ignore the central 
 facts of divine forgiveness and fellowship 
 which became the strength of the Apostle's 
 life and the source of all his activities, he has 
 left out the only elements in the experience 
 to which a Christian at least would give the 
 name " religious " at all. And, with all his 
 cleverness, it must be confessed this is what 
 Prof. James seems to have done. This 
 unconcern about everything save the mere 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 187 
 
 fringes of religious emotionalism, comes out 
 in various ways. Critics of Prof. James' 
 book have often complained of the unhappy 
 prominence which he gives to abnormal and 
 sometimes grotesque developments of the re- 
 ligious life. But if we remember the psy- 
 chologist's point of view this is only just what 
 we might expect. Prof. Leuba, e.g., says 
 plainly that in selecting the material by 
 which to illustrate his conclusions he limited 
 himself " to sudden and well-marked cases," 
 for this reason, "that violent psychic phe- 
 nomena by their very emphasis bring to light 
 what remains obscure in less intense and 
 slower events." 1 Exactly; but a "sudden 
 and well-marked" case of conversion has 
 Per se no more religious value than any other 
 kind of conversion, and the only reason why 
 it is of more worth to the psychologist is that 
 it throws into sharper relief the purely psy- 
 chic factors which are his first and last con- 
 cern. A short paragraph from one of 
 Prof. James' lectures will, I think, put this 
 beyond dispute : " To find religion," he says, 
 
 1 Essay referred to above, p. 312. 
 
 y 
 
1 88 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 " is only one out of many ways of reaching 
 unity ; and the process of remedying inner 
 incompleteness and reducing inner discord is 
 a general psychological process, which may 
 take place with any sort of mental material 
 and need not necessarily assume the religious 
 form. In judging of the religious types of 
 regeneration which we are about to study, it 
 is important to recognize that they are only 
 one species of a genus that contains other 
 types as well. For example, the new birth 
 may be away from religion into incredulity ; 
 or it may be from moral scrupulosity into 
 freedom and license ; or it may be produced 
 by the irruption into the individual's life of 
 some new stimulus or passion, such as love, 
 ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic de- 
 votion. In all these instances we have pre- 
 cisely the same psychological form of event, 
 — a firmness, stability, and equilibrium suc- 
 ceeding a period of storm and stress and in- 
 consistency. In these non-religious cases the 
 new man may also be born either gradually 
 or suddenly." 1 iThe meaning of this is un- 
 
 1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 175. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 189 
 
 mistakable, and it abundantly confirms what 
 has already been said, viz., that psychology 
 deals only with those elements in religious 
 experiences which are common to them and 
 other experiences, but that that in them which 
 gives them their distinctive character and 
 their whole value — the religious element, i. e. t 
 —lies wholly outside its province. 
 
 IV 
 
 Must we conclude, therefore, that faith has 
 in this matter nothing to learn from science ? 
 I do not think so. I proceed, therefore, in 
 this closing section of my lecture, very briefly 
 to indicate some of the gains by which psy- 
 chology promises to enrich religion. 
 
 (1) It is something that we have secured 
 so stalwart a witness to the fact that man is 
 essentially a religious being. There was a 
 time, and that not so long ago, when even to 
 well-instructed men it seemed a sufficient ac- 
 count of religion to set it down as an inven- 
 tion of priests. In Gibbon's eyes all religions 
 were equally useful for the statesman and 
 equally false for the philosopher. Psychology 
 
190 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 has done its part in helping to make an end of 
 all such crudities of thought for the future. 
 We know now that religion is not a some- 
 thing imposed by authority from without; 
 it is from within, a growth of the spirit, as 
 native to the soul of man as his sense of 
 wonder or his instinct for society. Set your- 
 self to answer the question, " What is man?" 
 and psychology will say to you that if you 
 answer the question in any way that leaves 
 out the religious manifestations of arrival at 
 adult life, you beg the answer by ignoring 
 the most palpable facts. 1 Many of you will 
 recall a striking essay in which Mr. John 
 Fiske, speaking as an evolutionist, declares 
 his belief that of all the implications of the 
 doctrine of evolution with regard to man, 
 the very deepest and strongest is that 
 which asserts the everlasting reality of re- 
 ligion. 2 It is a kindred testimony which in 
 its own different fashion is born by modern 
 psychology. 
 
 (2) But it is, probably, in the field of 
 
 « The Spiritual Life, p. 54. 
 
 * Through Nature to God, p. 191. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 191 
 
 practical Christian work that the value of the 
 new study of religion will be most clearly- 
 seen. Take, e. g. t its insistence on the inti- 
 mate relation between general temperamental 
 characteristics and particular types of re- 
 ligious experience. The sudden, explosive 
 conversion, and the conversion which is 
 rather a process than an event, have each 
 alike their psychological justification ; by in- 
 ference, so likewise have the religious 
 methods adopted to bring each about. 
 Once this truth is clearly seen and firmly 
 grasped we may expect that it will work 
 out a twofold result of great practical 
 importance. On the one hand, it will help 
 to remove a very real stumbling-block from 
 the feet of some for whom a single type of 
 conversion, and that for them an impossible 
 type, has the authority of a universal stand- 
 ard. And, on the other hand, evangelists 
 and other Christian workers will realize, with 
 a certain sense of relief, that the strongly 
 marked experiences of many converts are not 
 to be sought for in all; and further, they 
 will learn to look with thankful rather than 
 
192 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 with suspicious eyes on methods of Christian 
 work which seek the same goal but reach it 
 by different paths. 1 
 
 (3) Not less timely is the new emphasis 
 with which psychology proclaims to us the 
 significance for religion of the period of 
 adolescence. The general findings of inves- 
 tigators in this matter have already been 
 given. " Conversion," says Starbuck, " is a 
 distinctively adolescent phenomenon " ; and 
 he even goes so far as to add that if it has 
 not occurred before twenty the chances are 
 small that it will ever be experienced. 2 Now, 
 in a way, we have always known these 
 things. We have always known that youth 
 is the formative period, that in youth all the 
 great life choices are made. Most men 
 settle what their life-work is to be before 
 they are out of their teens ; and, what is of 
 
 1 I take the opportunity, in this connection, of calling atten- 
 tion to a pamphlet entitled Christian Training and the Revival 
 as Methods of Converting Men, by the President of Oberlin 
 College, Dr. H. C. King. The clearness with which Dr. 
 King sees, and the firmness with which he handles, some of 
 the most urgent practical problems of the modern Church is be- 
 yond praise. 
 
 2 The Psychology of Religion, p. 28. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 1 93 
 
 equal and sometimes greater importance, 
 most men have chosen their life partner be- 
 fore they are half way through their twenties. 
 It is only natural, therefore, that the crises of 
 personal religious history should be looked 
 for within this same period. Just as— if I 
 may borrow a homely illustration — when it 
 is desired that the fire in a furnace should 
 burn more briskly, we open the draught door 
 and thereby admit the oxygen which has all 
 along been enveloping the furnace and only 
 waiting for an opportunity to be used in the 
 work of combustion, so physical changes oc- 
 curring at adolescence while they do not pro- 
 duce religion, do, nevertheless, open new 
 doors whereby the ever-present divine Spirit 
 may enter the mind and heart more fully 
 than ever before. 1 In a way, I say, we have 
 always known this. Now comes psychology 
 to strengthen our convictions with the con- 
 firmations of science, to tell us that it is in 
 the yeasty days of youth that the Church's 
 great opportunity comes, and to warn us, 
 with a new solemnity of emphasis, of the 
 
 1 The illustration is Prof. Coe's. 
 
194 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 risks we run if the opportunity be let 
 slip. 
 
 (4) Finally, psychology is teaching us the 
 need of a more patient and individual study 
 of the nature of the soul to which, through 
 the offices of religion, we seek to minister. 
 As long ago as 1873 Henry Drummond read 
 an essay before a Theological Society in 
 Edinburgh in which he maintained that the 
 study of the soul in health and disease ought 
 to be as much an object of scientific study 
 and training as the health and diseases of the 
 body. " To draw souls one by one, to but- 
 tonhole them and steal from them the secret 
 of their lives, to talk them clean out of them- 
 selves, to read them off like a page of print, 
 to pervade them with your spiritual essence 
 and make them transparent, this," he said, 
 " is the spiritual science which is so difficult 
 to acquire and so hard to practice." l We 
 have been too apt to assume that earnestness 
 could compensate for ignorance, that a warm 
 heart could make good the deficiencies of an 
 untaught hand. One trembles to think of 
 
 1 The New Evangelism, pp. 191-3. 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 1 95 
 
 the souls that have perished at the birth be- 
 cause, in that supreme hour, they had no 
 better care than uninstructed zeal could give. 
 Souls that are sick have need of a physician, 
 of a physician fitted alike by sympathy and 
 skill to divine their needs and to minister to 
 them. But alas ! the physicians of religious 
 perplexity have too often been Job's com- 
 forters, without understanding; and so the 
 souls in doubt who, as one has well said, 
 should have been gathered to the heart of the 
 Church with as much pity and care as the 
 penitent or the mourner, have been scorned 
 and cursed and driven away. But, as the 
 more accurate, if less familiar, rendering has 
 it, He that is wise winneth souls. Souls have 
 to be won, and wisdom is needed to win 
 them. Have the physicians of the soul less 
 need to know than the physicians of the 
 body? If the progress of medical science 
 has put out of date the untrained midwife of 
 bygone days, shall the Christian Church be 
 any longer content to commit her most deli- 
 cate and difficult work to the clumsy hands 
 of the ignorant ? It is idle to point to the 
 
I96 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 
 
 successes of the unskilled practitioner: the 
 most worthless patent medicine on the market 
 can produce its little sheaf of testimonials. 
 What we have to remember is the multitude 
 who need, whom ignorance by its uncouth 
 methods may easily alienate and repel, but 
 whose needs it can never meet. We must 
 not, indeed, exaggerate the worth of any 
 worker's power or skill. Whenever souls 
 are won there is always another Agent at 
 work, besides the human agent ; and it is 
 marvellous to behold what great things He 
 can do even with the most imperfect tools. 
 The poor words we speak with stammering 
 lips may be the thin wire along which is 
 borne to some receptive soul the very word 
 of God Himself. Yet these things in no way 
 lessen our responsibility to bring our best 
 into the service of God and man ; and that 
 service demands always not zeal only but 
 knowledge also, and not least the knowledge 
 of men. As the physician studies the body, 
 and the educationalist the mind, each seeking 
 to perfect himself in the laws of physical and 
 mental life, so must he to whom is committed 
 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 197 
 
 the care of souls give all diligence to show 
 himself a workman that needeth not to be 
 ashamed. /In one word, we must study the 
 patient. It is time to put away our crude 
 empiricism, our clumsy surgery, and to be no 
 longer mechanics only but artists./ It is your 
 business, John Wesley used to say to his 
 helpers, to save as many souls as you can ; 
 and to that end, he went on, you will need 
 all the sense you have, and to have all your 
 wits about you. Only as the Church hears 
 and obeys this message to-day can she hope 
 that her words will be for the healing of the 
 nations. 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 PRESENT DAY PREACH- 
 ING AND CONVERSION 
 
LECTURE VI 
 
 PRESENT DAY PREACHING AND 
 CONVERSION 
 
 THE subjects of the foregoing lectures 
 appeal to all who love Jesus Christ 
 and look for the coming of His 
 kingdom among men. In this closing lec- 
 ture I speak more directly to my brethren in 
 the ministry. I have no new things to say 
 to them ; I do not pretend to have seen any- 
 thing which they have not seen, and seen 
 with clearer eyes than mine. Nevertheless, 
 I make bold to speak to them, and for this 
 reason, that among all the books and ad- 
 dresses on preaching which I have read or 
 heard, I do not remember one in which, given 
 simplicity and sincerity in the writer or 
 speaker, there was not something that spoke 
 directly to my own heart. And, in any case, 
 I could not have undertaken to speak on the 
 subject of conversion at all, unless I had also 
 
202 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 felt free to draw out some of its implications 
 for those who, like myself, are engaged in 
 the work of preaching the gospel. What 
 follows may be wholly commonplace; but 
 after all, the commonplace is the preacher's 
 staple commodity, the vivifying of the com- 
 monplace his great business. It is for him to 
 bring back the blood to those poor pale 
 ghosts we call our beliefs, that they may lay 
 on us warm, compelling hands of life and 
 power. The important question, therefore, 
 concerning what is urged in this lecture, is 
 not whether it is new, but whether it is vital ; 
 if it is not, it is only so much dead lumber ; 
 if it is, it may vitalize. 
 
 I 
 First of all, then, let us remind ourselves 
 that conversion is the great end of preaching. 
 "Your business," said Wesley, "is not to 
 preach so many times, and to take care of 
 this or that society, but to save as many 
 souls as you can." This is a great saying, 
 and, provided it be not too narrowly inter- 
 preted, it is worthy of all acceptation. But all 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 203 
 
 converts do not register themselves in an in- 
 quiry-room at the close of a Sunday evening 
 service, nor are the methods of the revivalist 
 the only means by which men may be saved. 
 Indeed, in this matter, all methods are wholly 
 secondary. The first question for the preacher, 
 like the first question in the old Scottish 
 Shorter Catechism, is concerned wholly and 
 solely with "the chief end " : what am I here 
 for ? Till that is settled nothing is settled ; 
 when that is settled other things settle them- 
 selves. To this end was I born, and to this 
 end came I into the world, that by all means I 
 might save some — when that conviction burns 
 like a fire in a man's soul, we may safely 
 leave him to himself and to God. " The 
 Salvation of the Hearer the Motive of the 
 Preacher " is the title of one of Newman's 
 famous sermons, and when that thought 
 guides the preacher's pen as he sits down to 
 the preparation of his sermon, and moves his 
 lips as he stands up to deliver it, he will need 
 little instruction about methods : he has seen 
 the true goal ; he will not miss the way 
 thither. 
 
204 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 We must take care not to confuse the real 
 question with other questions superficially 
 akin to it, but essentially distinct from it. In 
 all great centres of population throughout the 
 English-speaking world to-day the Christian 
 Churches are anxiously pondering the prob- 
 lem of the non-churchgoing multitudes 
 around them, through whose indifference and 
 alienation they seem powerless to break. 
 And no one, with even the smallest knowl- 
 edge of the facts, can hide from himself either 
 the urgency or the magnitude of the problem. 
 After all, whatever our preaching may be, it 
 can do nothing for those who are not there 
 to listen to it. Nevertheless, when we have 
 got the crowd — and experience shows that 
 with a little sanctified ingenuity and daring 
 the crowd can be got — the question still re- 
 mains : what are we going to do with it ? 
 The great French preacher Ravignan said 
 once to Lacordaire, " I hear that you had 
 such a crowd at your last sermon that the 
 people were sitting even on the top of the 
 confessionals." "Ah, perhaps," said the 
 other ; " but you managed to make them go 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 205 
 
 into the confessionals." There is the supreme 
 task of the preacher — not simply ±0 attract, 
 but to convince and to convert. There must 
 be hooks and stings in the word so that it 
 cannot be shaken off. /The message is not 
 meant to be admired but to do something. 
 Men are sinners, and we must summon them 
 to repentance ; they are prodigals, and we 
 must call them home ; they are aliens and 
 we must persuade them to put away their en- 
 mity and be at peace with God : our preach- 
 ing must do these things./ As Lacordaire 
 would say, it must get men not merely into 
 the church but into the confessional. It has 
 been said of Spurgeon that when he preached 
 he always remembered that hearts might be 
 changed for ever as the words were uttered. 
 Hugh Price Hughes, who, though he did not 
 belong to the same order of preachers as 
 Spurgeon, was nevertheless one of the most 
 effective preachers who ever stood in a 
 Christian pulpit, always used to declare that 
 a preacher is, first of all, neither an expositor 
 nor a teacher, but an advocate : his congre- 
 gation is the jury from whom it is his busi- 
 
206 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 ness to win an individual and immediate 
 verdict for Christ. As a complete theory of 
 the art of preaching doubtless this leaves 
 something to be desired. But this at least 
 may be said for it : it keeps the end to be 
 sought steadily in view ; it may not always 
 choose the best possible route, but it gets us 
 there. Now the trouble with much modern 
 preaching, to speak quite frankly, is that it for- 
 gets what it is meant to do. It is interested in 
 its own methods and processes ; it prizes and 
 perfects them for their own sake ; and so, while 
 it makes many pleasant excursions, and leads 
 us into many by-paths of delight, yet, since 
 it has forgotten the goal, it never arrives. 
 
 A keen and sympathetic observer of the 
 religious life of England, and himself a dis- 
 tinguished Free Churchman, declared a few 
 years ago that, so far as his experience 
 went, evangelical preachers in the Free 
 Churches had practically ceased to pray for 
 the unconverted or to plead with them. We 
 have had volumes on preaching of recent 
 years full of ripe wisdom and good counsel, 
 but completely ignoring the problems of the 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 207 
 
 evangelist ; for anything they say to the con- 
 trary, a preacher's first and last and only 
 business might be with those who have al- 
 ready surrendered themselves to Christ. 
 And who has not heard — nay, who among 
 us has not at some time or other caught him- 
 self making — the distinction between a " ser- 
 mon " for which no sweat of brain and heart 
 is too great, and a " simple evangelistic ad- 
 dress," which, with the help of a few anec- 
 dotes, may be put together in half an hour? 
 A "simple evangelistic address" indeed! 
 As if the simple evangel were not the 
 preacher's supreme concern ! As if to preach 
 the gospel of the love of God in Jesus Christ, 
 and so to preach it that men shall commit 
 themselves to it, were not a work to task a 
 man's best strength and drain his very life- 
 blood I " We were well pleased to impart 
 unto you," wrote St. Paul, " not the gospel 
 of God only, but also our own souls : " l the 
 whole man, brain and heart, was in and with 
 the message. What, one wonders, would 
 the Apostle have thought about our " simple 
 
 1 I Thess. 2 : 8. 
 
208 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 evangelistic addresses " ? It is preaching such 
 as his which tells ; and it tells because it costs. 
 Nor is it in the pulpit only that we need 
 the re-discovery and full restoration of the 
 evangelistic ideal. The whole Church has 
 need to read again its great commission : 
 "Go, make disciples of all the nations." 
 The first duty — not the whole, but the first 
 duty — of the Church is the duty of evangeli- 
 zation. Its chief end is, like its Master and 
 Lord, to seek and to save that which is lost ; 
 and however it may excel as a social club 
 or as an ethical school, if it fails in this it has 
 missed its chief calling. The intellect must 
 be trained, the conscience enlightened, the 
 character built up, and all this is part of the 
 Church's proper work ; but it is all subse- 
 quent and subordinate to the work of saving 
 the lost. "Our business," Hugh Price 
 Hughes used to say, " is not to coddle the 
 saints, but to collar the sinners." The lan- 
 guage is distinctly uncanonical — unpardon- 
 ably so, some may think — but the saying has 
 the root of the matter in it, none the less. 
 We have no right to underrate the impor- 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 209 
 
 tance of preaching to the converted ; the com- 
 plaint — the wholly just complaint, I believe — 
 is that they get so much more than their 
 share. Let any one look round among our 
 Churches to-day, and say if everywhere there 
 is not a call for a more earnest and persistent 
 endeavour, the meaning of which could not 
 be misunderstood even by the most preju- 
 diced and unbelieving, to bring in " the out- 
 sider " ; and for a ministry aflame with apos- 
 tolic zeal to save. " Christianity," says the 
 author of Ecce Homo, " would sacrifice its 
 divinity if it abandoned its missionary char- 
 acter and became a mere educational institu- 
 tion. Surely this Article of Conversion is the 
 true articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesice. 
 When the power of reclaiming the lost dies 
 out of the Church, it ceases to be the Church. 
 It may remain a useful institution, though it 
 is most likely to become an immoral and 
 mischievous one. Where the power remains, 
 there, whatever is wanting, it may still be 
 said that 'the tabernacle of God is with 
 men.'" 
 
 » Ecce Homo, Ch. XXI. 
 
2IO PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 II 
 
 The supreme work of the preacher is the 
 work of winning men for God : this is the 
 first article in the preacher's working creed. 
 And the second is like unto it : all men can 
 be won. We must believe in the recover- 
 ability of man at his worst. When we de- 
 clare, " Christ Jesus came into the world to 
 save sinners," it must be with no kind of re- 
 serves. To falter here will be to find our 
 sword-arm wither when we are in the hottest 
 of the fight. Unless we can be sure that we 
 have a gospel for everybody we can never 
 be sure that we have a gospel for anybody. 
 
 Now, this is a faith which, if it is to be 
 kept, will have to be fought for. There is a 
 drift of thought, and a still stronger drift of 
 fact, which make steadily against it. The 
 undoubted truths of heredity are being em- 
 phasized and magnified, to the exclusion of 
 almost all other truths. Doctrines of man 
 and of man's responsibility are in the air and 
 in our current literature which, if we receive 
 them, mean the drugging and stupefying of 
 the soul. /It is not the reality of sin men 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 211 
 
 doubt to-day so much as its remedy^ When 
 we find a writer like Mr. John Morley gravely 
 rebuking Emerson because he makes so little 
 of " that horrid burden and impediment on 
 the soul which the Churches call sin, and 
 which, by whatever name we call it, is a very 
 real catastrophe in the moral nature of 
 man," ' it has, perhaps, almost ceased to be 
 necessary for Christian teachers any longer 
 to protest that what they call sin is no inven- 
 tion of theology but one of the most sternly 
 real facts of human experience. The pity of 
 it is that this deepening consciousness of the 
 reality of moral evil is, in so many minds, 
 tinged with despair. The grievous hurt of 
 mankind none can deny; but where, men 
 ask, can healing be found? The world is 
 sick, and alas ! its sickness is unto death. 
 The despair may voice itself in the blunt 
 denials of agnosticism — " there is no substi- 
 tute for a good heart, and no remedy for a 
 bad one," — 2 or in the musical quatrains of 
 pessimism : 
 
 1 Essay on Emerson, Miscellanies, Vol. I. 
 
 * The Service of Man, by J. Cotter Morison, p. 2l6. 
 
212 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 " And that inverted Bowl they call the sky, 
 Whereunder crawling, coop'd, we live and die, 
 
 Lift not your hands to // for help — for It 
 As impotently moves as you or I." 
 
 — in either case it means that there is no gos- 
 pel for the bad man. And the edge of this 
 doctrine of despair sometimes rests even on 
 the Christian Church, and darkens the minds 
 of Christian men. We set limits to the 
 grace of God both in our own lives and in the 
 lives of others. There are our besetting sins, 
 e. g., our rough manners, our quick temper, 
 our sullen gloom — we are sometimes sorry 
 for them, but they are too old to be cured 
 now, we think; we must put up with them 
 as best we can. And as for the godless mul- 
 titudes that swarm in our great towns and 
 cities — the thriftless, the drunken, the un- 
 clean — what else is there to hope for but 
 their gradual extinction before the onward 
 march of a better social order ? Damned be- 
 fore they were born, their lives mortgaged to 
 the devil before the title deeds were put into 
 their own hands — who can do anything for 
 these ? So the question is urged, and some- 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 213 
 
 times faith is sorely put to it to find an 
 answer. Yet an answer must be found, and 
 found by the preacher, for it is that for 
 which and by which he lives which is at 
 stake. When men talk about necessary sins 
 or hopeless classes, like Christian he must 
 put his fingers in his ears and flee ; for him 
 to make such language his would be 
 to surrender the very citadel of his faith, 
 and to make the grace of God of none 
 effect. 
 
 How, then, shall we keep our feet out of 
 the fatalistic net? It will mean much for us 
 to wait continually on the ministry of our 
 evangelical Greathearts, and mark the sub- 
 lime confidence with which, linking together 
 the depths and the heights, never forgetting 
 that it is for the sake of the depths that the 
 heights have been revealed, they proclaim 
 the whole gospel to all men. " Though thou 
 hast raked in the very kennels of hell," cries 
 Spurgeon, " yet if thou wilt come to Christ 
 and ask mercy, He will absolve thee from 
 all sin." And through all the forty years of 
 his unparalleled apostolate that note of holy 
 
214 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 daring is never silent. Or, open Wesley's 
 Journals; almost any page will do, for every 
 page is " bordered with a pale edge of fire — 
 the spiritual passion of the great apostle's 
 soul." "The next day" [Monday, Sept. 18, 
 1738], he writes, "I went to the condemned 
 felons in Newgate and offered them free 
 salvation." "Full seldom," we have been 
 told, 
 
 " Full seldom doth a man repent, or use 
 Both grace and will to pick the vicious quitch 
 Of blood and custom wholly out of him, 
 And make all clean, and plant himself afresh." 
 
 But not " full seldom," full often, had Wesley 
 seen divine grace and human will join hands 
 and " make all clean " ; why then, should he 
 despair even of condemned felons in a New- 
 gate cell ? 
 
 But it is to the New Testament we turn to 
 take the band from off our heart and bid us 
 breathe free. In all that wonderful book 
 there is nothing more wonderful than its 
 calm sense of power in the presence of the 
 worst evils of the world. It saw them in all 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 215 
 
 their dread might, and steadfastly refused to 
 bow to them ; on the contrary, it made a 
 show of them openly and triumphed over 
 them in Christ. Its great word, its one 
 theme, is salvation ; and salvation means 
 healing — healing for the grievous hurts of 
 sin. It is surely significant that the first 
 mention of sin in the New Testament is in a 
 prophecy of its destruction : " Thou shalt 
 call His name Jesus ; for it is He that shall 
 save His people from their sins." The 
 writers of the New Testament know nothing 
 either of necessary sins or of hopeless classes. 
 There is no ugly twist in the soul which the 
 grace of God cannot straighten out ; there 
 are no men and women so far gone that it is 
 vain to seek to do anything for them. Christ 
 does not get rid of " difficult cases " by send- 
 ing them to the incurable ward ; in the great 
 hospital of ailing souls " Despairing of none 1 " 
 is the motto alike of the Physician Himself 
 and of all who serve under Him. The least 
 — the last — the lost: some one has pointed 
 out how often these three words were on the 
 lips of Jesus, and always those of whom they 
 
2l6 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 speak upon His heart. 1 What can He do for 
 them ? In one of our English cathedrals is a 
 window which is the cathedral's chief glory 
 and pride. It was the work of a youth, and 
 made, it is said, from gathered pieces of 
 glass which the window artist of the cathe- 
 dral had rejected. And this is the miracle 
 of Jesus ; this is what He does with the 
 world's poor leavings : He makes the least 
 to be greatest, and the last to be first, and the 
 lost to be found. We preach, admonishing 
 every man and teaching every man in all wis- 
 dom, that we may present every man perfect 
 in Christ. 
 
 Ill 
 
 That men can be won, that the work of 
 preaching is the work of winning men : 
 these are the first principles of the preacher's 
 faith. But once again it must be insisted 
 that identity of aim does not necessarily in- 
 volve identity of method. We must expect 
 to find men, as loyal as ourselves to the su- 
 
 1 1 owe this reference and the illustration which follows to a 
 sermon preached in Edinburgh some years ago by Rev. C. S. 
 Home. 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 217 
 
 preme ends of the Christian ministry, who 
 yet doubt the expediency, or even the legiti- 
 macy, of methods of work which we adopt 
 without hesitation. No unprejudiced ob- 
 server will question the part, the really serv- 
 iceable part, that revivals have played in the 
 past history of the Church. Nor is there any 
 good reason to suppose that the day of the 
 revival is over. A distinguished American 
 professor published a few years ago a very 
 interesting volume in which he spoke of re- 
 vivalism as though it were a spent wave. 
 "The strength of the old-time revival lay 
 largely in the forces of which social psychol- 
 ogy takes cognizance. It moved men in 
 masses, stirring a whole congregation, a 
 whole city, a whole state at once." Nothing 
 of that kind happens now, he said : the re- 
 vival and with it the revival type of conver- 
 sion are perceptibly on the wane. 1 The ink 
 on the printed page was scarcely dry when 
 the great Revival broke out in Wales; so 
 little can even the wisest among us forecast 
 through what channels the life-giving waters 
 
 1 Coe's Religion of a Mature Mind, p. 264. 
 
218 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 will pour themselves. That revivals in the 
 future will have their own distinguishing 
 characteristics, and that these will not simply 
 reproduce the characteristics of past revivals, 
 is only what history and experience would 
 lead us to expect. With no less confidence 
 may we anticipate that so long as human na- 
 ture remains what it is, so long will there be 
 those who can most effectively aid their fel- 
 lows through the special agency of a revival, 
 so long will there be those for whom the day 
 of revival will be the day of their visitation 
 from on high. These things are manifest ; 
 to refuse to see and say them is to show one- 
 self wilfully blind to the Spirit's work among 
 men. But not less plainly must it be said 
 that these are not the only signs of His pres- 
 ence. Only a small minority of the dis- 
 ciples of Christ, it has been said, have entered 
 upon the Christian, life through the door of 
 revival agencies. 1 We need concern our- 
 selves about no arithmetical proportion in ad- 
 mitting in general the truth of the claim 
 which lies behind statements of this kind. 
 
 1 Coe's Religion of a Mature Mind, p. 262. 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 2IQ 
 
 The fact to be recognized is the existence of 
 multitudes to whom all our " special services " 
 and huge " evangelistic campaigns," no mat- 
 ter how carefully they may be organized, or 
 how enthusiastically they may be carried 
 through, are nothing and less than nothing. 
 We have done great things by these means 
 in the past, and we shall do great things by 
 them again in the future, but if we imagine 
 that in them lies the solution of the whole 
 problem of evangelization we are living in a 
 fool's paradise.*^ 
 
 As these lines were being written, two kin- 
 dred statements from opposite sides of the 
 Atlantic came together into my hands. " In 
 all lines of attempts to stir public interest," 
 says the President of an American College, 
 " there is a growing feeling that the immense 
 convention has been rather overdone. The 
 aim now is, rather, thoroughly to enlist a 
 much smaller number of strong thoughtful 
 men and work out upon the community 
 through them." An experienced English 
 journalist and politician reads the situation 
 at home in precisely the same way. How, 
 
220 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 he asks, must the supporters of a fiercely 
 controversial measure, at this moment before 
 the House of Commons, secure victory for 
 their cause ? Not, he says, by passing reso- 
 lutions, or making speeches to huge and al- 
 ready convinced audiences, but "by small 
 meetings in the open air, or by talking to in- 
 dividuals or small groups of twos and threes." 
 This is the method of Christian work for 
 which Henry Drummond so earnestly pleaded. 
 We must recover our faith in the individual ; 
 the art of dealing with him must be re-learned. 
 11 Every atom in the universe can act on 
 every other atom, but only through the atom 
 next it." Jesus findeth Philip. What is the 
 next thing we read about Philip? Philip 
 findeth Nathaniel It was so at the begin- 
 ning ; it must be so again ; it must be so al- 
 ways, if the kingdom of heaven is ever to 
 prevail. 
 
 In all these matters Christian men must 
 cultivate a wise tolerance. It is not neces- 
 sary that we adopt each other's methods ; it 
 is necessary that we do not judge each 
 other. The scorn of other men's labours into 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 221 
 
 which we sometimes suffer ourselves to be 
 betrayed is a sin against the gospel which we 
 preach. It is time for the pastor and the 
 evangelist to understand and appreciate each 
 other. The old taunts of " Sensation ! " on 
 the one side, and " Stagnation 1 " on the other, 
 must be buried forever. We are all called 
 by all means to save some. " Means " which 
 do really " save " need no other justification ; 
 they may not be such as we can use ; but 
 they may save some whom our means will 
 never reach ; and therein let us rejoice. 
 
 IV 
 
 All things to all men : but this is by no 
 means the only apostolic word for the guid- 
 ance of the preacher in his work of winning 
 men; "It pleased God," St. Paul says, "by 
 the foolishness of preaching to save them 
 that believe." l I quote the words in the fa- 
 miliar but misleading rendering of the Au- 
 thorized Version. The Revised Version has 
 " the foolishness of the preaching," — a trans- 
 lation which may put us on our guard 
 
 1 I Cor. I : 21. 
 
222 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 against the misconception of the earlier ren- 
 dering, but which is not, it is to be feared, very 
 intelligible in itself. Yet the Apostle's words 
 are wholly without ambiguity, however diffi- 
 cult they may be to translate without the aid 
 of a paraphrase: " It pleased God," he says, 
 " by the folly (as the wise world calls it) of 
 the message proclaimed, 1 to save them that 
 believe." In other words, men are to be 
 saved by the word of the gospel, by the 
 preaching of Christ— His life and His death, 
 all that He was and all that He is. To be 
 saved and to come to the knowledge of the 
 truth are, for St. Paul, only different ways of 
 saying the same thing. 
 
 Statements such as these, then, define and 
 limit the kind of truth with which the preacher 
 has to do. Truth is of various kinds — mathe- 
 matical, scientific, economic; but the truth 
 with which he is concerned is saving truth, the 
 truth of the gospel, truth " as truth is in Jesus." 
 " I long to see you," Paul told the Romans, 
 
 1 ftrfpuyfid which means not the act of preaching (xTJpu£i?) 
 but the message proclaimed. See Findlay on I Corinthians in 
 The Expositor's Greek Testament, 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 223 
 
 " that I may impart unto you some spiritual 
 gift." 1 I do not suggest that this is a com- 
 plete definition of the aims of the Christian 
 ministry ; I would be the last to seek to rule 
 out everything that does not come within the 
 four walls of a single text. Nevertheless, if 
 we acknowledge the authority of the New 
 Testament at all, we must admit that the 
 teaching of saving truth, the imparting of 
 spiritual gifts, is the great end of preaching. 
 11 Thou art a minister of the Word," wrote 
 William Perkins beside his name on all his 
 books, " mind thy business." 2 
 
 Are we preachers to-day minding our 
 business ? We are doing many things ; are 
 we doing, as we might and as we ought, the 
 one thing for the sake of which we are what 
 we are and where we are ? It is not, I hope, 
 an uncharitable thing to say, that, speaking 
 generally, the preacher who can do anything 
 else better than he can preach is in his wrong 
 place ; he ought to be doing that other thing 
 
 1 Romans I : II. 
 
 3 For a brief account of this Puritan divine, see Dr. John 
 Brown's Puritan Preaching in England, pp. 7 1-83. 
 
224 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 which he can do better. One of our English 
 religious newspapers, a short time ago, had 
 the following reference to a minister who had 
 
 just been settled in a new charge : " Mr. 
 
 is one of the best political speakers in Eng- 
 land . . . but he is also an excellent 
 preacher, and his ministry at prom- 
 ises to be very helpful and influential." 
 The intention of the writer was obvious ; but 
 a more left-handed kind of compliment it 
 would be difficult to conceive. It reminds 
 one of Gibbon's account of the Emperor 
 Gallienus : "He was a master of several 
 curious but useless sciences, a ready orator, 
 an elegant poet, a skilful gardener, an excel- 
 lent cook, and a most contemptible prince." 1 
 But men such as these, who win the first 
 prizes in other men's departments and are 
 only third-rate men in their own, be they 
 preachers or princes, have plainly missed 
 their way. And, perhaps, there is no one 
 whom we may more justly pity than the 
 minister of the gospel who is famous for his 
 schemes or his books or his politics or for 
 
 * Decline and Fall, Ch. X. 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 225 
 
 anything that is his, but in whose ministry 
 the hungry can find no food, and the sorrow- 
 ing no comfort. 
 
 Look at the question from another point 
 of view. Can any one glance over the 
 Church advertisement sin the Press of any of 
 our great cities to-day, without feeling that 
 the Apostle's principle of " all things to all 
 men" is being strained to the breaking 
 point ? We can all understand and sympa- 
 thize with the motives which lie behind these 
 things. Earnest men feel that they must do 
 something, that indeed they ought to do 
 anything, that will sting and startle the mul- 
 titudes out of their indifference. But in our 
 eagerness to get a hearing for the gospel, let 
 us not forget that it is the gospel for which a 
 hearing is to be got. Newspaper topics, 
 questions of the hour, and such like, may on 
 occasion serve some useful end ; they may 
 help, like the ringing of a bell, to gather the 
 crowd ; but there is nothing that people tire 
 of much sooner than the sound of a bell, and 
 unless the bellman has something to say, the 
 crowd will soon scatter again. " Our preach- 
 
226 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 ers," wrote Dr. Tholuck once from Germany 
 to Dr. Pusey, " having got rid of the Chris- 
 tian doctrines, are now insisting with much 
 earnestness upon the importance of taking 
 regular exercise." 1 From very different 
 motives some among us are repeating to-day 
 the same tragic blunder. But does any sane 
 man seriously suppose that barren futilities 
 of this kind can avail us aught ? It is 7iotfit 
 that we should forsake the word of God and 
 serve tables. Every one will remember John 
 Ruskin's magnificent protest against the 
 folly of the wasted hours we spend rummag- 
 ing in the waste paper basket of literature, 
 while the world's great masterpieces lie un- 
 opened : " Will you go and gossip with your 
 housemaid or your stable boy when you may 
 talk with queens and kings ; or flatter your- 
 self that it is with any worthy consciousness 
 of your own claims to respect that you jostle 
 with the hungry and common crowd for 
 entree here, and audience there, while all the 
 while this eternal court is open to you, with 
 its society, wide as the world, multitudinous 
 
 1 Quoted in Liddon's Some Elements of Religion, p. 23. 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 227 
 
 as its days, the chosen, and the mighty of 
 every place and time?" 1 And shall we 
 who are the ambassadors of Christ, whose 
 high prerogative it is to speak to men of 
 Him — the Incarnate Son, the Revealer of the 
 Father, the Saviour of men — of life and 
 death, of the soul and eternity, shall we turn 
 aside to find our texts in the newspapers and 
 to make our pulpit a sounding-board for the 
 voices of the market-place and the street? 
 Verily, not for these things was committed 
 unto us the word of reconciliation. 
 
 And even from the point of view of gain- 
 ing the ear of the crowd, it may turn out 
 that some of our attempted short-cuts are 
 really a longer way round than the old 
 paths. I know nothing to give a man pause 
 in this matter like a study of John Wesley's 
 texts as these are recorded in his Journals. 
 The common people of England in the 
 eighteenth century were ignorant and brutal 
 to a degree of which to-day happily we have 
 little experience. Yet from among these 
 very people, speaking to them on subjects 
 
 1 Sesame and Lilies. 
 
228 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 which led straight to the very heart of the 
 Christian gospel, Wesley gathered in the 
 open air, during a ministry of over fifty 
 years, crowds such as perhaps have never 
 waited on the words of any speaker. To do 
 the work of an evangelist Wesley knew that it 
 is more important to have a great theme 
 than a novel theme. Do not the greatest and 
 most fruitful ministries of our own time point 
 the same lesson? Spurgeon in London, 
 Alexander Maclaren in Manchester, Alex- 
 ander Whyte in Edinburgh — to name but 
 three examples — all bear witness to the power 
 of a ministry which is built on the word of 
 God to win and hold the ear of the multi- 
 tude. " Sir, we would see Jesus : " this is 
 still the demand which they who come up to 
 worship make of the Lord's apostles ; if we 
 cannot meet it the one reason for our apos- 
 tleship is gone ; we have torn up our charter, 
 we have forfeited our right to be. We may 
 still go on discussing questions of the hour 
 and feeding the souls of the hungry with 
 little half-baked expositions of great social 
 problems, but our work will be done, and it 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 229 
 
 will not be long before the savourless salt 
 cast forth of God is trodden under foot of 
 men. 
 
 One other thing still is needful that our 
 word may be made mighty to the winning of 
 men for God. In all true preaching, Phillips 
 Brooks has told us, 1 there are two essential 
 elements — truth and personality ; if either of 
 these be wanting, what remains is not 
 preaching. We were well pleased to impart 
 unto you, not the gospel of God only, but also 
 our own souls ; this is what preaching meant 
 to St. Paul ; it must not mean less to us. Of 
 the nature of the truth given to us to speak 
 something has already been said ; let my last 
 word be concerning the preacher himself. 
 
 And what I would urge is that we should 
 press into this holy service every gift of mind 
 and of heart with which God has enriched 
 us. It is the tragedy of so many lives that 
 their daily calling makes no demand on the 
 soul's best powers ; if these are not to fust 
 
 1 Lectures on Preaching, p. 5. 
 
230 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 in them unused, other claims must intervene. 
 But there is nothing that the preacher has or 
 is that in his preaching he may not turn to 
 account. Physical gifts, intellectual gifts, 
 gifts of speech, the magnetism that draws 
 men, the strength that moulds them — he may 
 harness them all to the work of his life; 
 they may all be his allies and helpers when 
 he stands before men to speak to them of 
 God. 
 
 The day has happily gone by — the wonder 
 is that it ever should have been at all — when 
 it is any longer necessary to insist that for 
 the best work of an evangelist there must be 
 the trained mind as well as the warmed 
 heart. 1 But are there not other gifts besides 
 
 1 It is a pleasure, in this connection, to recall Henry Drum- 
 mond's tribute to his friend Moody. In Whittier's Life there 
 is the following reference to the great evangelist : " Moody and 
 Sankey are busy in Boston. The papers give the discourses of 
 Mr. Moody which seem rather commonplace and poor, but the 
 man is in earnest. ... I hope he will do good, and be- 
 lieve that he will reach and move some that could not be 
 touched by James Freeman Clarke or Phillips Brooks. I can- 
 not accept his theology or part of it at least, and his methods 
 are not to my taste. But if he can make the drunkard, the 
 gambler and the debauchee into decent men, and make the lot 
 of their weariful wives and children less bitter, I bid "him God- 
 speed." These words, wrote Drummond, " are broad, large- 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 23 1 
 
 those of the intellect concerning the use of 
 which in religious work some of us are still 
 unreasonably shy ? Two examples will illus- 
 trate my meaning. I remember speaking 
 once with a Professor of the United Free 
 Church of Scotland — a man of sane and well- 
 balanced judgment — about Henry Drum- 
 mond and his remarkable work among the 
 Edinburgh students, " Drummond," he said, 
 11 simply charmed men into the Kingdom. 
 When he spoke he cast such a spell about 
 some that for the time they seemed half- 
 dazed ; when they recovered it was to find 
 themselves within the Kingdom. But," he 
 
 hearted, even kind. But they are not the right words. They 
 are the stereotyped charities which sweet natures apply to any- 
 thing not absolutely harmful and contain no more impression of 
 the tremendous intellectual and moral force of the man behind 
 than if the reference were to the obscurest Salvation Army zea- 
 lot. I shall not endorse, for it could only give offence, the re- 
 mark of a certain author of world-wide repute when he read 
 the words : • Moody ! why, he could have put half a dozen 
 Whittiers in his pocket, and they would never have been 
 noticed ; ' but I shall endorse, and with hearty goodwill, a 
 judgment which he further added. « I have always held,' he 
 said, — and he is a man who has met every great contemporary 
 thinker from Carlyle downward— ' that in sheer brain-size, in 
 the mere raw material of intellect, Moody stands among the 
 first three or four great men I have ever known.' " 
 
232 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 added seriously, "there was no mistake 
 about it ; they were there / " There is of 
 course a touch of purposeful exaggeration 
 in the description which will deceive nobody, 
 but it does undoubtedly point to one secret, 
 on the human side, of Drummond's marvel- 
 lous success as an evangelist. My second 
 example is the late Hugh Price Hughes. 
 Mr. Hughes possessed in an extraordinary 
 degree that quality of masterfulness, that 
 power to impose one's own will on others, 
 which always marks out the born leader of 
 men. I have seen him, almost by the sheer 
 might of his own right arm, bring a hostile 
 assembly clean round to his own way of 
 thinking. And when he preached he drew 
 without stint on this great power of moulding 
 men. Are we to conclude, then, as men 
 sometimes did, that the visible results which 
 followed his evangelistic appeals were simply 
 another example of the way in which his im- 
 perious personality dominated wills weaker 
 than his own ? I do not see that, either in 
 the case of Drummond or of Hughes, we are 
 shut up to any such conclusion. If the 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 233 
 
 Spirit of God could come upon, or (as the 
 literal meaning is) could " clothe itself with " 
 a Gideon or a Zechariah, 1 with the " much 
 learning" of a Paul or the eloquence of an 
 Apollos, why not also with the magnetism of 
 a Drummond, or the masterfulness of a 
 Hughes? That in all such cases there is 
 danger lest the work should be of man rather 
 than of God, and so should come to nought, is 
 true ; but the danger is always there when- 
 ever God works through men. In no case 
 does the reality of a conversion depend on 
 the nature of the human agency by which it 
 is effected ; that can be determined only by 
 the fruits which follow. Apply this test to 
 the work of men like Drummond or Hughes, 
 and the serviceableness of their own peculiar 
 gifts needs no demonstration. For ourselves 
 the lesson is plain: we must lay in God's 
 hand all that is ours, for who can tell with 
 what unworthy human powers the divine 
 Spirit may elect to clothe itself ? 
 
 But, above all, for the work of winning 
 men we need a re-birth of spiritual passion. 
 
 l See Judges 6 : 34 ; 2 Chron. 24 : 20 (R. V. raarg.). 
 
234 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 Some one has pointed out the striking con- 
 trast between the dominant interest with 
 which St. Paul says " I must see Rome," 
 and that which the words would ordinarily 
 reveal. The Apostle was eager to visit the 
 imperial city only because he was eager to 
 preach there also the gospel of Christ. Every 
 other ambition of his life had passed into 
 this. All the waters of his soul had gathered 
 themselves into one mighty flood to be 
 poured through the narrows of this single pur- 
 pose : "To preach unto the Gentiles the un- 
 searchable riches of Christ." The urgency of 
 his message burned like a fire in his bones ; his 
 passion to win men was the divine constraint 
 which gave him no rest. " By the space of 
 three years," he told the Ephesian elders, " I 
 ceased not to admonish every one night and 
 day with tears." When his friends, foresee- 
 ing danger and death, besought him not to 
 go up to Jerusalem, " What do ye," he said, 
 11 weeping and breaking my heart ? for I 
 am ready not to be bound only but also 
 to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord 
 Jesus." And above all, when he thought of 
 
PREACHING AND CONVERSION 235 
 
 his brethren, his kinsmen after the flesh, his 
 heart's desire and supplication to God for 
 them was that they might be saved ; nay, he 
 was even ready for their sakes to wish him- 
 self anathema from Christ. 1 
 
 There is something in a passion like this 
 which subdues and awes us ; and is this not 
 the very heart of preaching? "The voice 
 said, Cry." Men do not listen because we do 
 not cry ; we are ineffectual because we are 
 cold ; we do not move because we are not 
 greatly moved. " We may not have lost 
 the message and yet we may have lost 
 the right way of delivering it. It would be 
 possible so to read or to speak even a great 
 or true doctrine that not a soul would believe 
 a word you said. The first business is the 
 Cry. No man goes about the streets whis- 
 pering • Fire ! Fire ! Fire 1 ' he would be 
 passed by with a smile as an innocent luna- 
 tic." Surely of all vain and helpless things 
 in this sublunary world the take-it-or-leave-it 
 kind of preaching — the preaching that does 
 
 1 This paragraph is borrowed from my Memoranda Paulina, 
 P- IS4- 
 
236 PREACHING AND CONVERSION 
 
 not urge and press its message upon men — 
 can have the least to say for itself. We are 
 not lecturers, seeking to please or instruct ; 
 we are preachers, whose business is to con- 
 vince and persuade ; and we cannot afford, 
 when we ought to be girding ourselves for a 
 resolute grapple with the conscience and the 
 will, to let the sermon dribble out in a neat 
 epigram or an eloquent peroration. The pic- 
 ture which Christian saw in the Interpreter's 
 house should hang on the walls of every 
 preacher's study ; and this was the fashion 
 of it : "It had eyes uplift to Heaven, the best 
 of Books in his hand, the law of truth was 
 written upon his lips, the world was behind 
 his back ; it stood as if it pleaded with men, 
 and a crown of gold did hang over its head." 
 It stood as if it pleaded with men ; and the 1 
 Church's great revival will come when on the 
 lips of all her ministers is heard once more 
 the great apostolic note of appeal, We be- 
 seech you on behalf of Christ % be ye reconciled 
 to God. 
 
&MMMM 
 
 Date Due 
 

 
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