were gloated over. When in sight it was rushed toward with a cheer. This reversal of value scales involved a hitherto unknown separation of the soul from the mortal part, and a fuller, clearer conception of it as a spiritual body with heaven as a soul-home. Soul was no longer a mere harmony or so tenuous as to be liable, in Platonic phrase, to be blown away if men died on a gusty day. This gave individuality a transcendental value that it had never had before, and retrans- lated morality as other-world conduct. Love idealizes, and as the heart burns in memory of the dear dead they are trans- figured, and it was inevitable that the man Jesus should be- come to the soul the heavenly Christ. Finally, when the age of the apocalypse was well passed, it was this thanatic idea which inspired the organization of the visible Church as an earthly replica of trfe invisible New Jerusalem, where were stored up the treasures of the heart. What was at first a dream, a suggestion, perhaps a pious wish, became more real than anything else, and it is significant that just at the time when Alaric conquered Rome, the last hope of the world, Augustine wrote his City of God.
Thus the story of the Cross, which is the chief symbol of Christianity known by multitudes who know nothing else of Jesus, when relived and vitally participated in is the best of all the initiatives to maturity. The older, lower selfish self is molted and a new and higher life of love and service emerges. The pain is a birth-pang and the joy is that a new being is born. The Gospel story is the most adequate and classic, dramatic representation of the truest formulae of the most critical revolution of life, to successfully accomplish which is to make catharses of our lower nature and to attain full ethical maturity without arrest or perversion; this is the very meaning of adolescence. As Jesus, the totemic em- bodiment of the race, gathered, unified, and epitomized in his own life the many elements of the autosoteric motive that were before scattered and relatively ineffective and made thereby a new focus of history to which so many lines before converged, from which they have since diverged, so each youth can now, thanks to him, condense in his own life the essential experience of the race by sympathetic participation in this great psychopheme. His catabasis under the burden 338 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of sin explored and idealized every stage of the thanatic pathway we must all pass, and his anabasis of resurrection from the depths of humiliation, renunciation, and self-immola- tion to Deity itself is the Eternal Gospel, for it shows that human nature, in what Reischle calls its thymetic core, is sound, resilient, positive, and can not be overwhelmed. Now, having attained a sense of fundamental impulsion as by a higher power (which Jesus construed as sonship), feeling a mission, an inner call (such as he found in realizing the Mes- sianic ideals of his day), and seeking a sphere of influence as he would found a new heavenly kingdom, youth is truly adult and ready to enter upon his career.
Men will always differ concerning the proportion played by objective and subjective factors in the deification of Jesus, as to how much was given as historic data, and how much is due to human reaction upon them. The latter element, however, whether it be great or small, has an ineluctable basis which no higher or lower criticism can ever impair, and even if all the historic factors were to prove fallacious and be abandoned there remains a Christ born within. To cling to this is the new psychological orthodoxy. For weaker faith historicity is indispensable. But there are already strong souls for whom the very sibilance of the word suggests a lower and almost ophitic stratum of the religious consciousness. But if the latter pales there is now this consolation, that the smaller the nucleus of fact the greater, and, we may even say, the more divinely creative the soul of man, so far as it evolved from its conscious — reenforced by its larger unconscious — depths this supreme solution of its own greatest need. Just as the power of appreciation is only a less degree of the same qualities that create masterpieces or heroic deeds, so, whatever history loses, we must ascribe to the productive genius of the soul and substitute universal truth for particular facts. Thus the soul seasons itself by exploring both extremes of suffering and glory, reacts from depression to exaltation, from the cross to the crown, expands temporal to eternal dimensions. Thus the instinct of justice complements the agony of inno- cence by transcendent joy, and when it is lost in iniquity works out a program of salvation.
Again, literature, philosophy, and history abound in variant ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 339 editions of the same theme, which, although relative and partial compared with that of Christianity, illustrate certain features of the ephebic metamorphoses more fully and might be mosaicked into a new higher unity about this theme. Faust, e. g., passed through a very different curriculum of lust of knowledge, and of sense, sold his soul to sin, experienced the moral chaos of Walpurgis night, and at last, having learned the vanity of wealth and ambition and every egoistic impulse, found atonement and joy in humble service. Parsifal, roused from innocence by the suggestion of sinful love, developed a higher life and became, as some " young Germans " think, a " German Christ," representing a principle of Teutonic atone- ment that, as presented by Wagner, they conceive destined not only to supersede but even to save Christianity itself.
Dante, " the voioe of ten silent centuries," whose work " best expresses the heart of medieval Catholicism/' is read in a new light and invested with a new and higher charm, as an allegory of adolescence, more ethical, richer, and more concrete than Hegel's phenomenology, and with all its differ- ences, still best studied as a Pilgrim's Progress for the cul- tured. The many professorships established to teach Dante can do best service by studying what the ephebic revolution, of which it is on the whole the fullest consummate literary char- acterization, really is, and means, and the needs of the sub- jective processes of whatever else this " divine," and of all secular books most frequently edited, masterpiece may be. Rich, learned, titled, the author was overwhelmed by mis- fortune and transformed by love. He " held heart-break at bay for twenty years " to write a spiritual biography in the true language of the soul, and uttered himself as few7 have ever done. His soul, tempered by an amazing range and in- tensity of typical human experience, slowly, and exhausting nearly all the many stages of the process, passes through the hell of torture, grief, and fear, sees the true and hideous nature of every sin revealed in its fit retributive penalty through all the long descending way of blood and tears, learns the dialect of anger and blasphemy, till at the center of the earth's gravity he clambers down Satan's shaggy sides, inverts himself, and is suddenly transported four thousand miles to the other side of the earth on the Easter morn, 340 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE under the southern cross, while the love planets incite to glad-. ness, and his blackened face is washed by the tears of grati- tude and a deep new joy. The mountains of purgatory, the highest in the world, and the only land in the new hemisphere, with all its rich and varied landscape, are before him, but steep and uncertain as the Hill Difficulty. Each terrace, with new penitential expiation and comforting promises, marks pro- gressive growth in grace and clearer vision, till at Lethe the guilt of remembered sin and pain is washed away, and on the summit the shadowy " sweet pedagogue," who had hitherto guided him, commits him to the care of his old love, purified and transfigured, with whom, now fully regenerate, he com- mences the ascent through the nine heavens of Paradise to the ineffable rose of dawn, and of the blessed at the apex of the empyrean, lifted through every crystalline sphere by gazing fixedly into the eyes of his celestial love, while his mind, dull with false human doctrine, is opened to the awful mysteries of divine science.
We have no space to characterize but only to name the legends of the Holy Grail, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, the Nibelung Hoard or Rheingold, the Golden Fleece, Prometheus, Hercules, Theseus, Ulysses, CEdipus, Orestes, Iphigenia, Samson, Beowulf, Hamlet and other Shakespeare story roots, and scores of ethnological radicles from the Indie wars with King Balin, the Sakuntala, and the legends of the descent of fire, to the Kalevala and Hiawatha, and many more. They are in differing degree, either warp or woof, nothing but allegories of the birth of sex and its higher meaning, or are at least replete with allusions to which only the psychology of adolescence can furnish the true key. They are quite as adequate ethnic expressions of conversion as are many of the in- dividual experiences of it in Starbuck, Leuba, Coe, and James. The history of ancient philosophy is a very different rendering of a part of the same theme, and shows the same sequence as its only unity. First came the early Greek oneness with nature, represented in the Homeric world, which had no state, church, school, Bible, literature, science, inventions, but where all was solvent in personalities and in the natural relation between men, with the rich nursery mythology of Hesiod, which was not broken by the Ionic, nor hardly by all the early schools. This harmony was ruptured by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. But their solution of the tension was partial, and after the decay of the Greek state, and the bankruptcy of the ancient culture, a sense of incubation gave place to the Alexandrian parusiamania as the transcendental world grew paramount, and thus paved the way to the ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 341 contempt of reason, the passionate cultivation of ignorance, and the repagination and repeasantization of Europe by monasticism in the nascent period of the new consciousness brought by Christendom as it slowly came to wield the accumulated resources of the Western world.
Savage initiation ceremonies — creeping through the effigy of a sacred cow in token of a new birth; torture, mutilation, and ascetic mortification of the flesh in the interest of a larger tribal or yet higher spiritual consciousness; inductions to civic and natural as superposed on private and family membership and duties; burial and resurgence from baptismal waters; renunciation of the old Adam and the putting on of the new Christ, and all the vast repertory of solemn, artistic, symbolic, allegorical, and metaphysical rites, descriptions, similitudes, pilgrimages of man's soul — all witness by their very abundance to the manifold significance of this change in human life, although each is inadequate, often pathetically so, and often even repulsively gross from the standpoint of the higher psychology which seeks to grasp its vast range and scope for all the past, present, and future of man's body and soul.
Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, consciousness is a very poor witness to what takes place in the abysses of soul-life. It struggles to reflect, describe, realize what is going on below its threshold and beyond its ken. It strives for clarification, self-expression, and feels that otherwise its in- tegrity is threatened with dissolution. It has many an inkling, perhaps even in the form of dreams, automatisms, psychic tensions, and various invasions from subjacent meristic strata that witness to the fact of a ferment, that it is powerless to explain, although the curtain sometimes seems to rift or lift a little. This is one reason why the remembered religious experiences of individuals are so pitifully fragmentary and puerile, and often so absurdly mistaken as to cause, process, issue, and object. To the individual it means so much, and to all others so little. This is why there often seem breaks in character and reversals of motive that appear so abrupt; why trivial incidents loom up so large in the mist; why they grow so in the telling as the years go by, as if they really expressed the experiences that once found in them some momentary and accidental vent; hence, too, their intensity under the great subliminal stress. The value of collections of individual narrations is that, by tabulation, comparison, etc., the fragments may be so ordered and systematized by indue- 342 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE tion as together to furnish a basis of illation to the larger unconscious life, on which consciousness floats, to sound and dredge it, explain the tides and currents, map its depths and shallows, study the known and unknown primal forms of life that inhabit it, and better learn to navigate it. Consciousness is of the individual; the substratum on which it is developed is of the race. Subconscious processes are better compacted, older, more inerrant. By their brooding and incubation the conscious person communes with the species, and perhaps even the genus to which he belongs; receives messages from and perchance occasionally gives them to it; appeals to mighty soul powers not his own, but which are so wise, benignant, and energetic that he is perhaps prone to the pathetic fallacy of interpreting the subhuman as superhuman, if, like the English Psychic Researchers, he has no intimation of the wisdom, depth below depth, that has been organized into our bodies, brains, automatisms, and instincts, which is vastly and incomparably greater than all that is in the consciousness of all men now living combined, and if he deems the surface phe- nomena in his own sapient soul to be its essential experience. This is the larger self, if such an anthropomorphizing, selfidolatrous term may be used, with which we are continuous. It is beneath, and not above us, immanent and not transcen- dent, and if only rightly interpreted it is veridical in a sense and degree our voluble ratiocination knows not of. Its best evolution is by the methods of lysis and not those of crisis. It answers prayers because it made them. What successfully appeals to it and receives its sanction, we call sacred, divine, biblical, and its messages are revelations. It is cosmocatop- tric, and the most central of all biologic changes which we are now considering, and the motifs of the choicest human documents are due to its initiative and control.
V. But if there are now happily many approximations to larger interpretations of conversion, there are still many reductive tendencies. In fact and nature, all the adolescent decade is none too long for its full development, even in favored cases, (i) There are still theologians who deem it instantaneous, as if the soul were shocked into righteousness by a fulminating, convulsive change like the perhaps epileptic Paul. An aura more or less describable, a spasm, and presto, ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 343 all is changed, as if the old soul were torn out and another inserted in its place. It is all the work of the Holy Spirit, which, we have been told, does not necessarily work in time. According to this paroxysmal view, the process is miraculous, but, in fact, it seems so only because its continuity is so shattered in consciousness. Even where the change seems gradual, there must be a moment, we are told, when the powers of good become stronger than those of evil, and then the lever tips, and though it does so ever so slowly there is a mathematical and epochful moment, especially in saltatory temperaments, full of latent reflexibility, when it crosses the absolute horizontal and dips the other way. In practise, however, most would concede hours, perhaps days, weeks, and even months, to the processes. But the intemperate haste for speedy results is string. The danger of delay, the sympathy that would shorten the period of pain and struggle, the haste to get it well over and to pass on to the cultivation of the fruits of the Spirit and the Christian graces as a post-graduate course, all act as accelerants. No informed mind can for a moment doubt the vast good that sudden conversions have wrought, or that this method has reclaimed many otherwise unreached. There are innumerable ways, all perhaps good, and every new form means more feet led in the way of salva- tion. But for most, and those probably on the whole the best, the religious change is a growth rather than a conquest.
(2) Again, there is a tendency to intensify the symptoms of this change to acute form, to represent depravity as total, the danger great, the conflict with sin bitter, to appeal to fear, to represent God as angry and hardly restraining himself from inflicting condign punishment, to encourage violence in storming the heavenly kingdom, to agonize in prayer, and to maximize the joy and rapture of deliverance, etc. Many nar- ratives of conversion told by exhorters and by converts about themselves are not only sensational and yellow but twice exaggerated, first from temperamental and environmental causes, and still more from telling and retelling them. Here the convert meets at the outset of the new life a very strong temptation to make himself interesting. How subtly, yet un- consciously, he feels his way along lines of most approval in the callow stage of the first prayer-meetings, while trying to 344 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE formulate some account of the tumult he has passed through that shall establish its legitimacy and impress and help others. He would be truthful, but who can describe feelings, especially of an utterly new kind and degree? Perhaps he would prefer silence and retirement awhile for orientation, it is all so thymetic and pectoral, and to grow calm from the msenadic muse that seized and transported him into another world. But the new form of his dimorphic personality can not be deemed securely established till he has " borne witness," so he develops the legend or idyl of his allotropism, and into it weaves the life story of his romance first with Apollyon and then with the Holy Ghost. At such an hour and place, and in such a setting of circumstances, his soul took its one flight from death to life. The grand event of his entire existence is in the past, and so hot was the battle that the great fatigue of early senescence begins prematurely to settle.
(3) Very strong in the past have been the tendencies to normalize the processes, to order the stages, to convention- alize it all, to set up one or more orthodox and theological types that should be accepted as current coin, and so to pre- scribe its onset, progress, and outcome. Where this has been done, attempts to erect new standards have caused the greatest disturbance, like threatening the validity of titles, or disturb- ing social rank and classes. Candidates are cross-examined on the precise nature of their subjective evidences of personal piety. This tends to throw the stress of the test upon belief even more than feeling, because it is more examinable and inclines to the undue emphasis of doctrinal soundness. But recent studies abundantly show that profoundly religious and even exceptionally Christian lives are led by those who have almost any or almost no belief. Lives have been described, which few could for a moment doubt were such, in which no real belief in any article of the creed, even God or another life, as Leuba shows, could be found. Many pious souls, whom the Church could ill afford to lose, are utterly incapable of assimilating dogma of any kind. They have a more vital charge to keep. Service in the present life absorbs all their energies, and they have no time to care for another. " One life at a time " is their unspoken motto. They are sure of another life if there is one and if that is best, and if not, why, ADOLESCENT PSYCHOLOGY OF CONVERSION 345 they mean to so wear themselves out in Christian work that eternal sleep will be no whit less welcome. As to God, it is a far cry. How can we know? The world is lawful, beau- tiful, full of things to do and undo. Let theologians busy themselves about such great, curious, and technical questions, and the workers will wish and hope they are right. If he exists, he will neither feel toward nor treat us differently whether we know much or nothing of him. If his nature accords with the character men give him, he wants us to do good to our fellow beings, and this such Christians chiefly love to do whether he is or no, for they have experienced the great conversion from love of self to love of others, although how, or by what agency, they neither know nor care.
E. M. Robinson well portrays the different and characteristic ways in which youth enter the religious life. Some plunge in with definite decision, settling once for all the problem of their relations to God and of right and wrong; some wade in deliberately and cautiously, step by step; some run in a little way and then come out again, till at last they swim off; some are forced in, and being in, may stay or frantically struggle to get out; while some simply sit on the beach and let the tide rise about them and float them off. It would also seem from Coe's seventy-seven cases that the sanguine or prompt and weak temperament is most favorable, the melancholic or slow and intense next, and the choleric and phlegmatic least predisposed to conversion; that expectation plays an important role and that each type has its own way. If something is expected which the tempera- ment makes impossible, there is, of course, disappointment. For some it may be guided by external ritual, and for others be purely spontane- ous. It may be almost solely ethical in the sphere of will and conduct, or emotional and with the motivation of natural affection. Its stages may slowly devolve through a lifetime or be almost momentary. The change it works may be superficial or profound, complete or partial; attended by innumerable symptoms or none; transient or permanent; arrested at any stage for a time or for good; or may be so unconscious and gradual as to be unsuspected. It may be genuine, without any rag of creed, in those who never heard of the Christian name or knew that the necessity was even urged upon men.
(4) It may suffer displacement up and down the age scale. Its true place is in adolescent years. Rightly under- stood, it gives fulness and completeness to the moral changes of these years as nothing else can do. At this time, as we saw, are the great temptations, most incipient criminality and vice, Gl 34^ THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE and all races, even the lowest, focus all their educational efforts here. It is especially the religious teacher's great op- portunity. This is its nascent period. Thus both pre- and post- maturity involve waste. If too early, it is sure to be super- ficial and incomplete, and dwarfed afterward by childish asso- ciations. To repeat John Stuart Mill's well-worn simile, such children are like too early risers, conceited all the forenoon of life and stupid and uninteresting all its afternoon and even- ing. Precocious revivalism is a little like teaching school children the duties and responsibilities of married life. At their very best, falsetto notes like the piping of treble are always found in the later utterances, if not in the lives of those prematurely regenerated. When infant voices that have shown no sign of mutation are encouraged to confess or pray in the terms prescribed for the very young by a child revival- ist, " I am covered with sin," " the leprosy of sin is in my soul," " I come to Thee a poor lost sinner," " although I am but a child I am very wicked," something is very wrong with the child, its teacher, or both. It is usually the latter that most needs our prayers. Indeed, to teach such a litany of de- pravity before its day seems actually immodest and suggestive. Conversion at too tender an age, at best, is like vaccina- tion with the mild form of smallpox, in that it gives immunity against graver forms of religious infection later when passion wakes and needs its full and undeflowered force. Perhaps this is the grossest case of the vast educational waste of trying to pick open buds before they are ready to unfold, or teaching with effort and labored supervision what will almost or quite come of itself later when interest and need arise, like the propitious moment when the Holy Spirit knocks at the door of the heart. This is one of the causes of the traces of religious infantilism so often found in the lives of otherwise mature adults.