and of religion that will make it again central in the soul.1 » We have many suggestive beginnings, e.g., in the story of relations between re- ligion and abnormal states of mind, by Murisier, A. Roemer, Familler, Mantegazza, Karl Holl, Hermann Gunkel, Heinrich Weinel, and in an unpublished treatise on religious pathology, by J. Moses; on the psychology of faith, by Vorbrodt, Payot, and Bazaillas; on miracles, by Schinz; on sin, by Kierkengaard and Schinz; on worship, by Hylan; on sects, by Sighele; on inspiration, by Partridge; on prophecy, by Cornell; on death, by C. Scott and Bordeau; on immortality, by Runze, Gratacap, James, McConnell, Royce, Fiske, and many others; on the religious consciousness, by Hartmann, Harnack, Baldensperger, Inge, Granger, Grasserie, Sabatier, Kinast, E. Koch, Flournoy, M. Jastrow, Leuba, Otto Ziemssen, and here, perhaps, we should include Goldwin Smith, Mallock, Haeckel, Ostwald and Metchnikoff; on natural and anthropological religion, by Miiller, Baring-Gould, D'Alviella, Lefevre, 328 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Youth needs a record of that life, the greatest yet, the most truly and philosophically historic, that will represent it as the culmination of the entire series of organic forms of existence, the species in one typical individual, as the revealer of a new and higher cosmic consciousness, advancing the hu- man ideal and opening the way to the higher destiny of man. When this evolution is a little more evolved by a natural growth, the new does not suffer from or discredit the old, but, as in Scripture, is the revelation of what is prophesied but concealed in it; and when the theme of the present chapter is adequately understood, I believe that the Scripture itself will be seen to be primarily addressed to youth, whose need far exceeds that of all other stages of life.
In whatever sense Christ is divine, his humanity is peda- gogically first, according to every known principle of educa- tion; and divinity is a surplusage after his humanity has been filled to the utmost and all that is possible made out of and ascribed to it, not so much as Aristotle wrote his physics and then added a metaphysics as after or supplemental physics, but as Jesus himself grew by degrees into full Messianic con- sciousness, or as Scripture, as history shows, became the Bible by its own intrinsic merit. The truly superhuman factor is, in philosophic terms, the objectivization of what subjectivism can not yet fully appropriate. Indeed, not only great religious movements and awakenings, but psychology itself, consists in realizing in the immanent here and now all prophecies, dreams, standpoints, and ideals that have seemed remote, supernal, and alien, and in the deepening insight that all that has ever occurred will surely recur if the conditions can be made the same. Thus every higher stage of development in- volves not only re-interpretation but re-revelation on a higher plane, and religious advancement is the consummation of huvon Czobel, Brinton, Hatch, Thiele, Gamble, Lippert, Wernle, Drummond, Saus- saye, Strada, Stokes, Seeley, Wm. Mackintosh; on regeneration, by Daniels, Lan- caster, Starbuck, James, He"cler, and the school of Ritschl, R. Smith, Moberly; on Biblical psychology, by Delitzsch, Karl Fischer; on the psychology of Paul, by Simon, not to mention the philosophies of religion, since Schleiermacher and Hegel, and the many recent attempts to interpret the God idea in mere psychological terms. To this psychological aspect of religion a new journal (already announced) and a book in preparation will be devoted.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 329 man development. It is far too drastic a test to be safe for most of the best of us to ask, if all metaphysical and transcen- dent elements were eliminated from a faith; if all of the so- called historic factors and all miracles should fade, what have we left? But just this very many young men are doing for their ideal and for personal immortality, and the consolation is that this " exercise " reveals to them that it is a most precious and growing residuum, that must be no longer ignored. The realm of nature has vastly increased not only in extent, but what is far more important, in intent, so that most of what was called supernatural now lies well within it, but so en- riched, substantialized, and dignified that we hardly recognize it. Psychic influence in the cause and cure of many diseases; rapt states of trances, exciting and mental exaltations; the deepened knowledge of what love is and means, that biology has suggested; the laws of heredity; sin as decadence, de- generation, and pessimism; vicariousness as evolved in phi- losophy, therapeutics, and esthetics since Aristotle's doctrine of catharsis; the sacrament of communion, with its many roots deep in the remotest past of human instinct Church service and ritual, directly traceable, in its highest historic antiquity, as Neale has shown, to some of the best sources; Church organization and polity as analogous, feature by feature, with Plato's ideal republic; even orthodoxies in their prime as perhaps the most economic of all psychic methods of coopera- tion and service, faintly echoing that greatest of all human affirmative theories, and even foreshadowing its philosophical correlate, a spiritual monism — these and many more are at least secure.
Bacon, Hobbes, and Newton, who inaugurated the " English way " of separating by water-tight compartments in their own minds their religious from their scientific life and thought, prepared the way for the antagonisms between faith and knowledge so conspicuous in Spencer, Tyndall, and Huxley; and favored by the current and per- verse dualism of mind as over against matter, and by the influences of the French Revolution, this " modern calamity " was not mitigated by a national philosophy broad enough to embrace religion and science as in Germany. This antagonism is utterly obsolete from the standpoint of the new psychology, the chief and highest function of which, I believe, is to be the elaboration not merely of reconciliation or consensus, but of an union and identity so complete that we shall GO 33° THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE no longer suspect God to be a hypocrite who says one thing in his Word and does another in his works, and we shall realize that science must be taught in our theological schools for logic, for facts, for reverence, and for true theories; while religion, the oldest and most absorbing of human interests, will not only have a place in every col- lege and university, but its spirit will pervade the laboratory and observatory.
The care of souls is not yet an art. Pastors and the leaders of religious organizations for young men do not yet understand the needs of this yeasty stage of intense emotion and narrow mentality, nor how different is the religion of a youth and a mature man. They do not realize the viciousness of a conversion that teaches the child to assume the airs, prayers, and preachments of adults, when in fact he can be only a candidate for full humanity. We still lack real ductores dubitantium who can preside wisely over the parturition of the higher mental life of religion, holding the needs of youth to be the highest of all needs, and the duty to serve it by renouncing every obstacle and helping it to an ever higher maturity, to be the chief duty of man, and believing that what ought to be is the surest of all things to be. I could not lose heart even if I accepted Fair- bairn's conclusion that but very few people in the world have yet been true Christians, but that the glory of this religion is yet to be achieved. Therefore, in the name of youth, I postulate and await without a shadow of doubt or fear (i) broader conceptions of the human soul, which in this field lives far more by feeling and instinct than by reason, that faith, the greatest of all its faculties, be rescued from present neglect and degeneration; (2) loftier ideas of Scripture that shall make it not a fetish, but the true and living logos of the human heart and will, never finished and complete in the past, but a never-ending progressive revelation of which the prophets and Jesus gave us only the beginning; and (3) eternal warfare upon ortho- doxies and all dogmatic finalities, which are only the petrifactions of faith, intimately connected in ways psychology is only just be- ginning to see with the devitalization of life and mind caused by past or present sinful excesses. If at any time in life, belief in God, immortality, and a future state is grown into without special reve- lation, it is now. Miracles seem to be more a continuation or aug- mentation of natural processes when the latter seem themselves most impressive, and if there is any time when he is a poor Christian who can not believe in Jesus without their aid or can not be philosophically true to himself, if he bases all upon them, it is at this stage of life. If rightly conceived and taught, the human soul is so constituted that it can never for a moment doubt the basal verities of religion, and the energies of the ephebic age will be, as they should by its very nature, more and more affirmative, and instead of tragic negation we shall have only the normal and organic processes of eliminating broken- down tissue when it has done its work.
Intellectual seems far more eradicable than moral error. Here ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 33 1 we must be far less optimistic, for the sting of sin is deeper than mind, and the causes of doubt will be removed long before those of wrong conduct. Ethical conversion and mental reconstruction will, perhaps, be forever needful in some form at this age, but they will be more normal, complete, and salutary when no longer infected by dogmatic surds.
IV. The external types, norms, and symbols of conver- sion show it to be the very core of a true philosophy of human history. Many analogies of this change are, and more may be, drawn from the metamorphosis of insects, and here biology supplies the best heuristic. Most non-oceanic grubs will later fly. In the worm stage their sole business is to eat and grow. The external skin at length hardens into chitin, which pre- vents further growth. The larva then chooses some appro- priate place and attachment, where it passes into a quiescent state, perhaps remaining long through drought and winter. In preparing for this pupa state some insects secrete or spin a protection. They now undergo a more or less radical trans- formation and acquire legs and wings. When the changes are complete the old skin cracks, and the insect slowly ex- tricates itself part by part, and, leaving the cast-off skin or exuviae, emerges in adult or imago form,, for a life destined chiefly for reproduction, and usually very brief in compari- son with the earlier developmental stages. For those who love to grope in obscure regions by the aid of symbols, pre- adolescence is the larva state chiefly for growth. The brain, which developed from the ectoderm, and consciousness, born of touch, tend to harden, like the derma, till growth is ar- rested, and the impupation in habit, creed, becoming overspun with acquired knowledge and convention, progresses New life is growing meanwhile within, and if it has vigor enough and the chitin be not too rigid and impacted, the old conscious- ness with its customs is sloughed off, and the soul enters, more or less transformed, its mature imago stage, to live for the race and not for self.
Spring, and the resurrection of the world of plant and ani- mal life from the death of winter, and all the innumerable cults, rites, legends, based on this prefigure it. Dawn van- quishing night equips other apperceptive organs for it. All nature, life, and letters abound in tropes and metaphors of 332 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE it, the collection of which would make an important con- tribution to our theme. Baths, lustrations, and aspersions among savage and civilized races; a banquet for the famish- ing; successful operation for congenital blindness and deaf- ness; discharge of debt; freedom from prison and tyranny; ransom, emancipation from slavery; cure of disease by a great physician; sudden wealth; the bursting forth of fountains in the desert; the substitution of love for fear and hate; the quickening of seed and growth out of the dark earth; efflores- cence, fruitage, harvest; marriage to a celestial bridegroom; impregnation by the spermatic logos; emergence from the womb, and the new mode of larger and more independent life; rescue from shipwreck; finding a haven in storm; protection in danger; transition from the life of the body to that of the soul; change of allegiance from a bad to a good prince — all these, every one and countless more, are only efforts which abound in the hymns, theologies, and ceremonies of all faiths to describe some aspect of the law that necessitates this change of dynasty and of constitution in the city of " Man-soul."
The best myth is a deeper and broader expression of hu- man nature and needs than reason or history has yet at- tained, and is thus the shape revelation might be expected to take. Where it is an individual expression of universal instincts, it is the highest use of the imagination. Plato's myth of the den (Rep. vii, i), which describes men sitting in a cave, chained, with their backs to the light, studying and measuring shadows of outer things and events cast on the wall before them, and then freed and turned about, or converted, and led out to see real objects, and at last, as their eyes grew stronger and their minds less bewildered, shown the sun itself, had much to do in giving both the term and concept to the early Christian idea of conversion. Some think the myth of the reversal of all cosmic process, the old growing young and the dead rising at the end of the cosmic cycle (Politicus, 268), also contributed.
One of the dominant motives in this coming reorganiza- tion of philosophy and history is the coordination of the biologic changes of adolescence in the microcosmic individ- ual and its macrocosmic analogue in the forces which center in the era of dawning Christianity, when both national and ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 333 personal selfishness merged into a higher human consciousness of universal brotherhood founded the new kingdom of man. Adam in Eden perhaps thus represented prepubertal inno- cence, ideally environed and sheltered, forbidden the prema- ture exercise of genetic function or knowledge of it, and his probation stands for that which is always essential for the attainment of full maturity. Eve is the romantic first dream of an ideal mate born from the development of part of his own body, as woman can not fully exist for man before. His temptation is the constant danger, and his fall the eternal tragedy, of prematurity and the penalty it entailed on all man- kind; while the whole is the symbol of the arrested develop- ment of our race due to violation of the biologic law of youth- ful probationary restraint, from which heavenly love incarnate later saves us.
Again, the Bible story as a whole, whatever else it is, is also conversion " writ large." Abraham was a desert sheik, nomad, and breeder of herds and men. The promise that if he kept Jehovah's commands his seed should be as the stars of heaven; the Sodomite episode; the rivalries, jealousies, migration; the later apprenticeship in Egypt; the nomad life in the desert; the revelation of the law; the work of Moses, the great organizer of external righteousness; the evolution of the theocracy and a temporal king; the growing impurity of life and worship, are the prelude. With the prophets comes the awakened conscience, intensified by its captivity (for ex- ternal calamity always favors a sense of guilt), a deepening conviction of sin, uncleanness, and misery, portending doom and deepening toward despair. Then dawns the hope, light, and joy of Bethlehem, which slowly spreads over the world. All these are typical of nothing so much as the moral vicissi- tudes of the adolescent period, of which Adam marks the dawn, and the mature Christ the somewhat belated, but all the more complete, culmination which had to end in supreme self-sacrifice that the pilgrimage from selfhood to Altruria be entirely accomplished.
The story of Jesus's life, psychologically treated, whatever else it may be, is also another abridged and variant edition of the same import. There is the glimpse of an early life of natural growth in favor of God and man. At the age of 334 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE early Oriental puberty he is already characteristically ponder- ing the highest themes with deepening sense of wrong and human need, a glimmering, conscious, higher mission strug- gling with temporal ambition, a long conflict of the noblest adolescent idealism that ever was with the hard, inveterate conservatism of a decadent age and senescent man, with bigotry, hypocrisy, and shame, ending in defeat, the self- effacement of a shameful death, then the inevitable resurgam motive, at first incredulous and apparitional, with ascension or sublimation as the climax, but which later became the very substance of the Christian faith and the corner-stone of belief in both Jesus's deity and our regeneration. As he conquered death, so we may rise to the higher life of the race if the self or flesh perishes. Indeed, the story of the Cross, psycho- logically considered, is both provocative and regulative of the soul's widest and most comprehensive oscillation from pain to joy, these two sovereign masters of life. The soul once well cadenced to this rhythm can never fall a victim to pes- simism. In this masterpiece of pathos we find hunger, thirst, homelessness, garments parted, betrayal, desertion by dis- ciples, the solitary struggle in Gethsemane, all the incidents of passion week and of the " stations " on the way to Cal- vary, all cumulative and more effective than in any of the great dramatic unities. Every item is a pathogenic pity- fetish. Many young converts in our returns are chiefly affected, e. g., by the nails, some almost to the point of stig- matization. Some press nails against their hands to deepen their sympathy, and one describes how a painful wound in the center of the palm " brought me to Jesus." * The spear is less prominent, but every item and detail of its thrust is sometimes exquisitely if not neurotically felt. With some the thorns are the apex of the pathos, with others the scourging, the prayer, " If it be possible," or, again, the innocence and purity of the victim.
This conquest of the world by pain and grief is still seen in many a revival, where all this holy drama has been set in scene and been made to live again for the imagination by word-painting so vivid that men have not only groaned and 1 See my article on Pity. Am. Jour, of Psy., July, 1900, vol. xi, p. 534 et seq.
ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 335 swooned, but had visions that made the whole seem transport- ingly realistic. The spotlessness of the sufferer, who, while deserving supreme good, is called to endure supreme evil, makes pathos far greater than where the innocent suffer for the sins of their ancestors, a theme which has played its great role of havoc in the world of tragic sin, guilt, and atonement.
What was the mental state of Jesus's followers when he died and while he yet lay in the tomb? The world-order which the Jews thought rewarded virtue and punished vice in this world was upset. The truth they relied on was branded as folly and crime. Their hero was forsaken by Jehovah, despite his agonizing prayer. The world must have seemed the sport of malign chance or of a personal power of evil, and death the end of all. It is doubtful whether, like the disciples of Socrates, they could have organized victory out of such a defeat. Dispersion, denial, miserablism, and absolute despair must have followed, and the teachings of Jesus might have been forgotten.
The resurrection reversed all this, and created perhaps the greatest of all revolutions in history. While psychology has nothing to do with its objective validity save so far as this bears upon the intensity of belief in it, the latter is the car- dinal psychic fact of early Christendom. Conviction may be of every degree, from the faintest suggestion up to cataleptic certainty. In the Homeric world mortality was feebly held to, but it was better to lead a life of a mean man on earth than to be ruler in the realm of the dead. However it came about, faith in the resurrection became absolute, and every- thing was vain without this, its chief affirmation. The great- est of all the fears that prey upon the soul of man is that of the king of terrors, just as the chief struggle of all creatures is to survive. Perhaps no possible testimony could now vali- date such an event in court, but the vital fact was the utter belief in it, and this was the burden of the glad tidings pro- mulgated by the first preaching. The very suggestion of it would have been a welcome relief to the tension of despair, but the conviction that death and its cause, sin, had been van- quished, and Satan even overcome in his stronghold, was an evangel of unspeakable rapture. Bringing immortality to light was the discovery of a vaster and far more glorious con- 336 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE tinent, the road to which was open to all. Heaven was now first definitely established, and made real and organized. The scope of justice, before limited to this world, was thus extended to a superior realm, which must be included henceforth in all moral judgment. Thus the key to the apostolic and early patristic period is the conception of Jesus as the death-killer and " the first fruits of them that slept." He had raised others, and made the tomb a portal. In the presence of the transcendent world this one shriveled. Hence the exhilara- tion and even inebriation caused by the sudden removal of de- pression which set bondmen free. Pentecost took off old fet- ters, and as the mind was turned loose in new paradisal pastures it gamboled in many forms, that seemed to the staid religionist as pathological. It was an age of expansion for each sense and faculty; there were ecstasies, trancoidal states, visions, and prophecies; ebullitions that expressed themselves in meaningless jargon and unknown tongues. As Weinel and Gunkel have shown, there was folly and madness after the outpouring of the Holy Ghost which soon came to have its bacchantes if not its sibyls raving with froth and foam. There were exuberant vaticinations, gifts, licenses, till it became necessary to forbid gazing up into heaven expecting Jesus's second coming, and to carefully test and distinguish between spirits good and bad, true and false, and especially to show forth fruits of the spirit and proclaim the glad tidings. Thus the story of the descent of the Holy Ghost represents the normalization of these effervescences.
So in order was " other-worldness " that heaven was longed for and many would gladly have left all and migrated thither. The present life was neglected, despised, demeaned. Reason was as filthy rags compared to vision. Martyrdom — which Tertullian said all Christians should strive to attain at last, which Cyprian almost fulsomely eulogized, and which crowned many otherwise unknown lives — was longed and prayed for, courted and provoked. Many agonized whether they could be counted worthy of it. It was a prize, a supreme honor, a diploma " summa cum laude." This contemplation of death was no speculative thanatopsis, nor was it desired as a mere euthanasia, but even its accompaniments, the charnel- house worms, skulls, skeletons, and all its most terrible forms ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 337