ripen in silence, you get a case of which you can never give a full
account, and in which, both to the Subject and the onlookers, there may
appear an element of marvel. Emotional occasions, especially violent
ones, are extremely potent in precipitating mental rearrangements. The
sudden and explosive ways in which love, jealousy, guilt, fear,
remorse, or anger can seize upon one are known to everybody.[100]
Hope, happiness, security, resolve, emotions characteristic of
conversion, can be equally explosive. And emotions that come in this
explosive way seldom leave things as they found them.

[99] Jouffroy is an example: "Down this slope it was that my
intelligence had glided, and little by little it had got far from its
first faith. But this melancholy revolution had not taken place in the
broad daylight of my consciousness; too many scruples, too many guides
and sacred affections had made it dreadful to me, so that I was far
from avowing to myself the progress it had made. It had gone on in
silence, by an involuntary elaboration of which I was not the
accomplice; and although I had in reality long ceased to be a
Christian, yet, in the innocence of my intention, I should have
shuddered to suspect it, and thought it calumny had I been accused of
such a falling away." Then follows Jouffroy's account of his
counter-conversion, quoted above on p. 173.

[100] One hardly needs examples; but for love, see p. 176, note, for
fear, p. 161 ; for remorse, see Othello after the murder; for anger see
Lear after Cordelia's first speech to him; for resolve, see p. 175 (J.
Foster case). Here is a pathological case in which GUILT was the
feeling that suddenly exploded: "One night I was seized on entering
bed with a rigor, such as Swedenborg describes as coming over him with
a sense of holiness, but over me with a sense of GUILT. During that
whole night I lay under the influence of the rigor, and from its
inception I felt that I was under the curse of God. I have never done
one act of duty in my life--sins against God and man beginning as far
as my memory goes back--a wildcat in human shape."

In his recent work on the Psychology of Religion, Professor Starbuck of
California has shown by a statistical inquiry how closely parallel in
its manifestations the ordinary "conversion" which occurs in young
people brought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a
larger spiritual life which is a normal phase of adolescence