gets to its religious centre,
and the latter remains inactive in perpetuity.

In other persons the trouble is profounder. There are men anaesthetic
on the religious side, deficient in that category of sensibility. Just
as a bloodless organism can never, in spite of all its goodwill, attain
to the reckless "animal spirits" enjoyed by those of sanguine
temperament; so the nature which is spiritually barren may admire and
envy faith in others, but can never compass the enthusiasm and peace
which those who are temperamentally qualified for faith enjoy. All
this may, however, turn out eventually to have been a matter of
temporary inhibition. Even late in life some thaw, some release may
take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the
man's hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling. Such
cases more than any others suggest the idea that sudden conversion is
by miracle. So long as they exist, we must not imagine ourselves to
deal with irretrievably fixed classes. Now there are two forms of
mental occurrence in human beings, which lead to a striking difference
in the conversion process, a difference to which Professor Starbuck has
called attention. You know how it is when you try to recollect a
forgotten name. Usually you help the recall by working for it, by
mentally running over the places, persons, and things with which the
word was connected. But sometimes this effort fails: you feel then as
if the harder you tried the less hope there would be, as though the
name were JAMMED, and pressure in its direction only kept it all the
more from rising. And then the opposite expedient often succeeds. Give
up the effort entirely; think of something altogether different, and in
half an hour the lost name comes sauntering into your mind, as Emerson
says, as carelessly as if it had never been invited. Some hidden
process was started in you by the effort, which went on after the
effort ceased, and made the result come as if it came spontaneously. A
certain music teacher, says Dr. Starbuck, says to her pupils after the
thing to be done has been clearly pointed out, and unsuccessfully
attempted: "Stop trying and it will do itself!"[108]

[108] Psychology of Religion, p. 117.

There is thus a conscious and voluntary way and an involuntary and
unconscious way in which mental results may get accomplished; and we
find both ways exemplified in the history of conversion, giving us two
types,