Catholic lands, for example, and in our own Episcopalian sects, no such
anxiety and conviction of sin is usual as in sects that encourage
revivals. The sacraments being more relied on in these more strictly
ecclesiastical bodies, the individual's personal acceptance of
salvation needs less to be accentuated and led up to.

[102] No one understands this better than Jonathan Edwards understood
it already. Conversion narratives of the more commonplace sort must
always be taken with the allowances which he suggests:

"A rule received and established by common consent has a very great,
though to many persons an insensible influence in forming their notions
of the process of their own experience. I know very well how they
proceed as to this matter, for I have had frequent opportunities of
observing their conduct. Very often their experience at first appears
like a confused chaos, but then those parts are selected which bear the
nearest resemblance to such particular steps as are insisted on; and
these are dwelt upon in their thoughts, and spoken of from time to
time, till they grow more and more conspicuous in their view, and other
parts which are neglected grow more and more obscure. Thus what they
have experienced is insensibly strained, so as to bring it to an exact
conformity to the scheme already established in their minds. And it
becomes natural also for ministers, who have to deal with those who
insist upon distinctness and clearness of method, to do so too."
Treatise on Religious Affections.

But every imitative phenomenon must once have had its original, and I
propose that for the future we keep as close as may be to the more
first-hand and original forms of experience. These are more likely to
be found in sporadic adult cases.

Professor Leuba, in a valuable article on the psychology of
conversion,[103] subordinates the theological aspect of the religious
life almost entirely to its moral aspect. The religious sense he
defines as "the feeling of unwholeness, of moral imperfection, of sin,
to use the technical word, accompanied by the yearning after the peace
of unity." "The word 'religion,'" he says, "is getting more and more
to signify the conglomerate of desires and emotions springing from the
sense of sin and its release"; and he gives a large number of examples,
in which the sin ranges from drunkenness to spiritual pride, to show
that the sense of it may beset one and crave relief as urgently as