t, this writer surely makes it too exclusive.
It corresponds to the subjectively centered form of morbid melancholy,
of which Bunyan and Alline were examples. But we saw in our seventh
lecture that there are objective forms of melancholy also, in which the
lack of rational meaning of the universe, and of life anyhow, is the
burden that weighs upon one--you remember Tolstoy's case.[106] So there
are distinct elements in conversion, and their relations to individual
lives deserve to be discriminated.[107]

[105] A restaurant waiter served provisionally as Gough's 'Saviour.'
General Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, considers that the
first vital step in saving outcasts consists in making them feel that
some decent human being cares enough for them to take an interest in
the question whether they are to rise or sink.

[106] The crisis of apathetic melancholy--no use in life--into which J.
S. Mill records that he fell, from which he emerged by the reading of
Marmontel's Memoirs (Heaven save the mark!) and Wordsworth's poetry, is
another intellectual and general metaphysical case. See Mill's
Autobiography, New York, 1873, pp. 141, 148.

[107] Starbuck, in addition to "escape from sin," discriminates
"spiritual illumination" as a distinct type of conversion experience.
Psychology of Religion, p. 85.

Some persons, for instance, never are, and possibly never under any
circumstances could be, converted. Religious ideas cannot become the
centre of their spiritual energy. They may be excellent persons,
servants of God in practical ways, but they are not children of his
kingdom. They are either incapable of imagining the invisible; or
else, in the language of devotion, they are life-long subjects of
"barrenness" and "dryness." Such inaptitude for religious faith may in
some cases be intellectual in its origin. Their religious faculties
may be checked in their natural tendency to expand, by beliefs about
the world that are inhibitive, the pessimistic and materialistic
beliefs, for example, within which so many good souls, who in former
times would have freely indulged their religious propensities, find
themselves nowadays, as it were, frozen; or the agnostic vetoes upon
faith as something weak and shameful, under which so many of us today
lie cowering, afraid to use our instincts. In many persons such
inhibitions are never overcome. To the end of their days they refuse
to believe, their personal energy never