Hence, he suggests a premonition at thirteen (the first adolescent awakening), a second start at seventeen, with a maximum at twenty, and concludes that " when the approaching change first heralds itself the religious consciousness also tends to awaken. Again, when the bodily life is in most rapid transition the religious instincts likewise come into a new and greater life. Finally, when the fermentation o youth begins to settle into the calmness of maturity, once more religion makes its claim to be counted in the life." On the basis of facts so far at hand this latter must be regarded as conjectural. We do not know whether larger numbers would round the curves or deepen their indentations for certain youthful years, so it is unsafe yet to infer how the ages of, e. g., fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen differ from each other. Again, not only are theological students usually composed of those early converted, but we have no percentages based even on church attendance of any religious community, race, or creed, while the curves show only the age distribution of certain miscellaneous or homogeneous groups of converts, and those mostly males. They abundantly demonstrate, however, the great religious impression- ability of the middle teens, and suggest that the child revivalist, Hammond, whose largest percentage of conversions for both sexes is at ten, cultivates precocity.
on only fifty-one cases, and I have followed his curves in presenting percentages, so that the numbers in his column are almost twice too large. His cases were carefully selected from a larger number, representing all ages, with much regard to the fulness of the record. The column of Rev. L. A. Pope, of the Baptist Church of Newburyport, Mass., includes both sexes and all ages in his church, but here again, as women generally preponderate in the membership lists of all churches, and as they seem to be converted earlier than men, his data represent, no doubt, an age too young for the average male. Dr. Starbuck's column for females is based on eighty-six selected cases, here presented in percentages. The last two columns are compiled from the covenant book of Rev. E. P. Hammond, whose speciality is revival work with children, which he kindly loaned me for the purpose. They represent the converts in two series of meetings in two small cities. From our col- umns of males, it appears that sixteen is the age of most frequency, while for Ham- mond this age is reduced to ten for both sexes.
1 Geo. A. Coe: The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900, p. 39 et seq.
292 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Out of 598 young people, Lancaster found 518 who freely reported new religious inclinations, mostly between twelve and twenty, and he concludes that " religion before this age was a mere form. Now it becomes full of meaning. It is a new interest, and very many speak of it as a sudden awakening. It is often • spontaneous, like the interest in art or music, or the love of nature. Where no set forms have been urged, the religious emotion comes forth as naturally as the sun rises."
It is thus no accidental synchronism of unrelated events that the age of religion and that of sexual maturity coincide, any more than that senescence has its own type or religiosity.1 1 Much as I detest priority claims, I can not resist the temptation, in view of the criticism and even ridicule to which I was at first subjected for it, to state here that I know of no attempt to demonstrate that adolescence was the age of religious im- pressionability in general, and of conversions in particular, prior to the second of twelve public Harvard lectures which I gave in Boston, February 5, 1881, which was in good part based on data I had collected by correspondence, by study of the records of the Fulton Street (New York) noon prayer-meeting, and upon the analogy between the changes normal at this age and these specific religious expe- riences. This conclusion was briefly restated in an article printed some two years later in the Princeton Review,1 and has been amplified with a growing mass of data in my teaching in the field ever since, as all my pupils know. At least five of them — Burnham,3 Daniels,3 Lancaster,4 Lueba,5 and Starbuck,6 and others — have made valuable contributions to the subject, as also have Coe,7 and James.8 1 The Moral and Religious Training of Children and Adolescents. Reprinted in the Ped. Sem., June, 1891, vol. i, pp. 196-210.
a The Study of Adolescence. Ibid., pp. 174-195.
3 The New Life: A Study of Regeneration. Am. Jour, of Psy., October, 1893, * Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence. Ped. Sem., July, 1897, vol. v, 5 A Study in the Psychology of Religious Phenomena. Ibid., April, 1896, 6 A Study of Conversion. Am. Jour, of Psy., January, 1897, vol. viii, pp. 268-308. Some Aspects of Religious Growth. Ibid., October, 1897, vol. ix, pp.
7 The Spiritual Life.
8 Varieties of Religious Expression. London, 1902. So partial is James's comprehension of this relation that while he states (page 199) that "conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon," he still so far illustrates the old view- point as to say (page 12) "religious life depends just as much upon the spleen, the pancreas, and the kidneys," as on sex. Although the most brilliant litterateur and stylist in philosophy since Schopenhauer, unless it be Nietzsche, whose diathesis his ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 293 Nor is religion degraded by the recognition of this intimate relationship, save to those who either think vilely about sex or who lack insight into its real psychic nature and so fail to realize how indissoluble is the bond that God and nature have wrought between religion and love. Perhaps Plato is right, and love of the good, beautiful, and true is only love of sex transfigured and transcendentalized; but the Gospel is better, which makes sex love at the best the type and symbol of love of God and man. This new insight into the parallelisms be- tween religion and love and the concomitant or complemental variations of these two is perhaps chief of the many contri- butions made and impending by modern psychology to piety, and is one of the most sublime and fruitful themes of our day, which Kant would very likely have added to the starry heavens and moral Jaw within as a third object of supreme awe, reverence, and interest. As Weismann subordinates the entire soma as a mere servant of the germ, as the biology of sex makes reproduction the consummation of life, — the raison d'etre of all the secondary sexual qualities, — and as the psy- chology of sex selection finds in it the caput Nili of all the arts of animal and human courtship, the most unitary and desiderated as well as the most intense psychic experience, so so resembles, our leading American in this field, a most copious and judicious quoter and such a masterly describer of his own even flitting and evanescent subjective psychic processes, with both person and page invested with such irresistible charm, his method, and many if not most of his positions here, seem to do no less violence to fact than do his dicta concerning sex. Most of the cases and experiences which constitute so large a part of his volume are abnormal and some teratological, from which true religion, I believe, saves its followers. These pathological varieties of religious experience can explain piety itself no more than the mental and physical freaks of hysteria explain true womanhood, the Wiertz museum explain art, or the effects of music on the insane show its real nature. That God is proven by an hal- lucinatory sense of presence, that the religion of the healthy-minded is mind cure, that immortality is demonstrated by ghostly telepathy, and that the lurid experiences of pious Streberthum, saturated by affectation, impressionism, and the passion to be unique and interesting, described in colors laid on with a trowel and all marked by an abandon and superlativeness that throws scientific caution and moderation to the winds, and which, at the best, are only a few of the most superficial phenomena of the adolescent ferment — this seems to me the babel of Babylon or of Walpurgis night, and not the music of the heavenly city. True, the psychopathic temperament has advantages, but they are at best only literary, and it is itself essentially both anti-religious and anti-scientific. Many if not most of these "experiences" are the yellow literature of religious psychology.
294 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE religion at his highest potence is union with God, to which everything in the religious life leads up as its goal or makes its point of departure. Love is the greatest thing in the world for both the religionist and the amorist. Its praise is in su- perlatives, for all else is dross. We must love with all our mind, might, and strength. Both furnish in their sphere the strongest motive both to assert and to renounce the will to live. They are exalted and degraded together, and the best work of each is to keep the other pure. Religion is at its best when its earthly image is most spotless and untarnished, and love is at its best where religion is purest and most undenled. Just as this relationship seems to degrade religion only to those whose ideals or cults of love are low or undeveloped, so those who dispraise religion have not realized how indis- pensable it is to perfect love. How central this thought was in the mind of Jesus many parables and sayings attest. True piety is earthly love transcendentalized, and the saint is the lover purified, refined, and perfected. To have attained this insight, to have organized it into life, cult, and a Church, is the supreme claim of Jesus upon the gratitude, reverence, and awe of the human heart. No such saving service has ever been rendered to our race, and we can see no room in the future for any other to be compared with it. His diagnosis of the chief danger that threatened our race was sure and true, and the remedial agencies are the best yet in sight.
Perhaps few masterpieces in literature have been so much wiser than the author himself knew than the Platonic Symposium. The guests decide not to drink, and they dismiss the flute girl and devote themselves to post-prandial discourse concerning love. Phaedrus al- most chants of it as a mighty god, creating order out of chaos, quicken- ing the sense of honor and dishonor in youth, irresistible in war if men who are lovers stand side by side,^ sending Orpheus to Hades to rescue his love, etc. Pausanias distinguished the older and baser Aphrodite of the body from the purer Eros of the soul. The gods allow lovers all liberties, and at their very perjuries great Zeus smiles. Aristophanes, assuming that love is the greatest and best thing in the world, invents the serio-comic myth of primeval androgynous monsters with four hands and four feet, back to back, terrible in wars against the gods. To humble their pride, they were split like a sorb apple or an egg with a hair, and the skin gathered in a knot at the navel. The two halves, man and woman, have ever since desired and sought their other moiety, and would be molten over again into one ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 295 as of yore. Agathon sings of a deity who sets her feet, not like Ate, upon hard skulls, but walks on the soft hearts of man, who has taught mankind arts and medicine, and is the pilot, defender, savior, and glory of gods and men. Last of all, Socrates describes procreation as the principle of immortality in mortals. It is for immortality that even animals die for their offspring. But if the conceptions of the body are so loftily interpreted, what shall we say of those of the soul? Love is of the mind and not of the body, of ideas and not of physical forms. It would bring to the birth fair thought to improve the young and infect them with the passion for beauty in all and not in one, till, as the soul draws near the eternal sea of beauty and is smitten with the boundless love of wisdom, ever using all kinds of beauty as stepping-stones up to absolute knowledge, it forgets food and drink and the body, pants with ecstasy, is absorbed, translated, and would lose itself in contemplation and close in again with its divine source. The pangs of philosophy and those of love unite, rea- son and passion fuse. Truly, before this mystic idealism, we may well feel that current conceptions of love are either a very rudimentary bud or else a crumbling ruin, but yet that the purest love and the highest truth were created for each other, and that if the world is at root real and sane, it will culminate in their union.
Christianity gives a yet higher interpretation of love — the greatest power of the soul fixed upon the greatest object, God, and next to him, man. Those both pray and serve best who love most. To the Christian, God himself is love, and without the Pauline charity or love, all is sounding brass or tinkling cymbals. The very end and essence of both moral and re- ligious culture is to conceive and cultivate love in the purest, loftiest, and most all-comprehending way. We saw in Chap- ter VI how often in fact the sting of sin lies in the sphere of sex, and phallic worship shows how religion itself can grovel. If true love is the religion of the flesh, true religion is the love of the spirit.
Some of the similarities and covariants of religion and love best seen at adolescence may be enumerated as follows: i. Both suggest death, and may not only risk, but court, fly to, despise, and triumph over it. In the subordination of this life to the next and to posterity, both alike are reductives of individuality. To modern biology the soma, or all that can become a corpse, is a set of thanatic organs which the deathless germ plasma has developed as its tool, and is a specialized and therefore a degenerate thing com- pared with the genetic elements, which are continuous from the first form of life to the last. They seem to whisper to the soul of youth 296 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE that he is only a link in an endless chain that connects his forebears with posterity. Instead of the latter, religion now tells of the post- mortem self, and that the present life is cheap and mean as immor- tality is slowly brought to light. Greatly as the fear of death is now increased, it also fascinates, and, as we saw, even the suicide-curve rises sharply. Scott1 found that of over two hundred cases, eighty- nine had brooded on death during the early teens, as if this back- ground thought was needed to bring out the resources of love. Plato taught that the philosopher who is in love with general ideas is really seeking death, so enamored is he of the transcendental. Some religions, not satisfied with accepting death with joy as the inevitable, court annihilation or would be dissolved into a mere diffusive power to get in closer rapport with the universe; so love in its extreme hyperbole prompts its victim to wish to become the air that surrounds, the breeze that fans, or the ornament that adorns his beloved.2 2. True love and religion both make the soul highly sensitive to nature. The flowers, the stars, the wind, the sea, all remind the love- sick swain of his Dulcinea; but to the religious soul they are mere asseverations and texts, and not substitutive, because the mistress appears sensibly, while God is hidden. All the poetry and metaphors of love show the great importance of its scene-setting in nature, and of the subtle symbolism and the rich material of comparison, that pervades her whole domain. What could the amorist do, as we saw in Chapter XII, without the moon, the azure sky which reflects his mistress's eyes or the depth of her soul, the breeze that takes messages, the snow that mirrors her purity; when she is absent, how tender his heart becomes toward all these items of the environment with which she has been associated, either in his experiences with her or in his fancy. So, too, religion glorifies nature. Stars sing of God's love, the firmament shows his work, the spring his bounty, the world is full of his design and provision, everything that pleases under the sky is a token of special providence to the newly reborn lover of God, who is assured that nothing ill can befall him for he is in his Father's house. It is He who makes the birds sing or the sparrow fall; who arrays the lilies, and endows animals with their wondrous instinct; that numbers our hairs, names the stars, and makes the most common joys of life and the simplest bounties of nature mementoes and 1 Psychology of Puberty and Adolescence. Proc. of the N. E. A., 1897, p. 848.
2 Anger, too, may now prompt such feelings as in lovers' quarrels. A girl of fifteen, offended by those she loves, goes to her room, locks herself in, lies on the bed, folds her arms across her breast, breathes quietly, imagines that she is dead, that the family rush in, regret that they parted in anger, kiss her passionately, the neighbors gather and say, "Poor girl, to have died so young! " and the coffin is heaped with flowers; she knows the text of the clergyman and what he will say; the lid is screwed down, and only when the clods begin to fall on the coffin does she feel better, and gets up and goes down-stairs with every trace of bad feel- ing removed.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 297 keepsakes, so that in the normal soul love of nature and love of God are inseparable.
3. Both have their fanaticisms. The medieval knight wore the color or the favor of his chosen one, sang her praises as fairest and best in the world, and if another dared dispute and assert the super- lativeness of his own mistress, only the wager of battle could decide. So races have fought for their faith, and required autos da fe of others, and the conqueror has forced the conquered to unwillingly confess the supremacy of his Deity and do homage to him. There is but one supremely good and beauteous to whom all must bow. Allah is one and above all, Jehovah is God and there is no other, have been battle cries; and the Lord from heaven has looked down with com- placency upon the slaughter of those who denied him, and has given strength to the arm of his defender and shown some special sign of favor when the victory was won. Proclaim Jesus, preach the glory of his life everywhere till the world shall acknowledge it, is the en- thusiasm of the courtship methods of militant Christianity.
4. Lovers, almost from the lowest creatures that are sexed, are nest-builders. They make bowers not only for their young, but for their mates, or a cottage for two, the greater the love the smaller it may be, decorated with abundant flowers, keepsakes, mementoes, and manifold ornaments; this is the way in which love expresses its in- stincts of shelter, protection, and symbiosis or life together. If not this, there are trysting-places hallowed by association, and where for either alone thoughts of the other are most vivid, and consecrated by memories. So religion builds its towers, altars, chapels, dolmens, stonehenges, cathedrals, and shrines, where God comes down to dwell and meet the worshiper. These are richly dight with the products of man's esthetic faculties, so akin is beauty to both piety and love. The temple, too, must be symbolic of its inhabitant; its arches must be lofty; its spire must point upward; the light must speak with all the symbolism of color; and its permanence must suggest the per- durable, if not the eternal.
5. Religion, like love and the sea, ebbs and flows, and modes of abnegation are as characteristic as those of aggression and assertion. The uncertain lover may wear, perhaps exhibit, himself with every token of depression, humiliation, and despair; neglect his toilet, seek solitude, and may mutilate himself, or court death either to excite pity or in sheer despair of winning his mistress's favor. Erotic litanies abound in expressions of love-melancholy, a passion to serve, to be humiliated by the loved one. There are expressions of absence of all worth by comparison with her merits. So the religionist immolates and disfigures his body, offers up his possessions, magnifies all his sins and shortcomings as if there were no good in him, and all to win divine sympathy or favor, and in the hope that infinite goodness will be drawn out to gloriously supplement every imperfection. Per- haps all hope vanishes, and even death is sought because life is in- tolerable without divine as without human love.
58 298 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE 6. The soul is especially cadenced in both love and religion by rhythm, which is potent for both. The lover vents his passion in poetry and song, perhaps becomes for a time a serenading troubadour, and many a dull soul has broken into verse as many birds do into song only once in life, and that at the mating season. The dance in many races originated in the service of religion, and when it lapses, is prone to fall to the service of passion. The Christian Church largely sang and marched its way into the hearts of the pagan world of the West. Music is the language of the feelings as speech is of the intellect, and the theme of by far the most music of the world is either love or religion. The melodies of the one often strangely fit the words of the other, while song and hymns have always been one of the potent aphrodisiacs of religious affection, and will remain so as long as man is thumic or pectoral and must have emotion.
7. Not only do both abase, but both exalt the self. The accepted lover is proud, ecstatic, and fearless, and counts himself the happiest of men. There are no human ills or dangers that he has not the strength to cope with. He respects his own virtue, beauty, and grace, because he is the chosen one among many. So the soul new-born to religion walks on air, his face shines with the joy of acceptance, and his sense of freedom from guilt brings purity and faith that he can prevail with God, with whom he stands in a specially favorable rela- tion, and perhaps has some private insight or revelation. This, too, is the germ of most of the exalted types of religious insanity.
8. Both animal and human courtship have their most varied and accurately prescribed forms of etiquette and ceremony. They con- sist often -of a series of acts so exceptional, even in animals, as to almost seem like the customs and manners of another world. The manner of approach, address, the modes of winning favor, of soliciting marriage, gifts, tonsure, and dress, are elaborated with superfine punctilio; violation of usage in minor details often gives offense and endangers alienation. So in wooing the favor of the divine, there are elaborate rituals, litanies, modes, postures, costumes, forms of phrase, times and places to be scrupulously observed, and often a cycle of more or less formalized acts for prayer and charity, and a repetition of phrases and ceremonial righteousness generally.
9. The late painful studies of sexual aberration show us that almost any act or object can be focused on by those who are perverted or impotent, to inflame the body and soul with lust. Long lists of non- phallic erotic fetishes could be made out from the literature — which shall be nameless here — rings, tresses, handkerchiefs, and every article of dress or ornament, any one of which may and has become the only object capable of arousing genesic states. The very name assigned them, amatory fetishes, is significant. So in the history of religions, men have made idols of almost every object in nature which has been focused on to arouse crude and perverse religious feelings and sentiments. There is almost nothing that has not been wor- shiped, and there is a long catalogue of even scatological religious ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 299 rites. Nearly every act and attitude have somewhere been regarded as worship, and also have elsewhere been used as passional provoc- atives. In both, the normative, central experience is undeveloped or weakened and lost, and something more eccentric has been uncon- sciously seized upon by the soul, which must have something to wor- ship and to love, however unworthy. Thus there is a correspondence that works out in great detail between amatory fetishism and the several forms of idolatry, which resemble each other in many aspects of their symbolisms.