which Starbuck calls the volitional type and the type by
self-surrender respectively.

In the volitional type the regenerative change is usually gradual, and
consists in the building up, piece by piece, of a new set of moral and
spiritual habits. But there are always critical points here at which
the movement forward seems much more rapid. This psychological fact is
abundantly illustrated by Dr. Starbuck. Our education in any practical
accomplishment proceeds apparently by jerks and starts just as the
growth of our physical bodies does.

"An athlete ... sometimes awakens suddenly to an understanding of the
fine points of the game and to a real enjoyment of it, just as the
convert awakens to an appreciation of religion. If he keeps on engaging
in the sport, there may come a day when all at once the game plays
itself through him--when he loses himself in some great contest. In
the same way, a musician may suddenly reach a point at which pleasure
in the technique of the art entirely falls away, and in some moment of
inspiration he becomes the instrument through which music flows. The
writer has chanced to hear two different married persons, both of whose
wedded lives had been beautiful from the beginning, relate that not
until a year or more after marriage did they awake to the full
blessedness of married life. So it is with the religious experience of
these persons we are studying."[109]

[109] Psychology of Religion, p. 385. Compare, also, pp. 137-144 and
262.

We shall erelong hear still more remarkable illustrations of
subconsciously maturing processes eventuating in results of which we
suddenly grow conscious. Sir William Hamilton and Professor Laycock of
Edinburgh were among the first to call attention to this class of
effects; but Dr. Carpenter first, unless I am mistaken, introduced the
term "unconscious cerebration," which has since then been a popular
phrase of explanation. The facts are now known to us far more
extensively than he could know them, and the adjective "unconscious,"
being for many of them almost certainly a misnomer, is better replaced
by the vaguer term "subconscious" or "subliminal."

Of the volitional type of conversion it would be easy to give
examples,[110] but they are as a rule less interesting than those of
the self-surrender type, in which the subconscious effects are more
abundant and often startling. I will therefore hurry to the latter,
the more so because the differe