inal
door, then. But just HOW anything operates in this region is still
unexplained, and we shall do well now to say good-by to the PROCESS of
transformation altogether--leaving it, if you like, a good deal of a
psychological or theological mystery--and to turn our attention to the
fruits of the religious condition, no matter in what way they may have
been produced.[151]

[150] Here, for example, is a case, from Starbuck's book, in which a
"sensory automatism" brought about quickly what prayers and resolves
had been unable to effect. The subject is a woman. She writes:--

"When I was about forty I tried to quit smoking, but the desire was on
me, and had me in its power. I cried and prayed and promised God to
quit, but could not. I had smoked for fifteen years. When I was
fifty-three, as I sat by the fire one day smoking, a voice came to me.
I did not hear it with my ears, but more as a dream or sort of double
think. It said, 'Louisa, lay down smoking.' At once I replied. 'Will
you take the desire away?' But it only kept saying: 'Louisa, lay down
smoking.' Then I got up, laid my pipe on the mantel-shelf, and never
smoked again or had any desire to. The desire was gone as though I had
never known it or touched tobacco. The sight of others smoking and the
smell of smoke never gave me the least wish to touch it again." The
Psychology of Religion, p. 142.

[151] Professor Starbuck expresses the radical destruction of old
influences physiologically, as a cutting off of the connection between
higher and lower cerebral centres. "This condition," he says, "in
which the association-centres connected with the spiritual life are cut
off from the lower, is often reflected in the way correspondents
describe their experiences.... For example: 'Temptations from without
still assail me, but there is nothing WITHIN to respond to them.' The
ego [here] is wholly identified with the higher centres whose quality
of feeling is that of withinness. Another of the respondents says:
'Since then, although Satan tempts me, there is as it were a wall of
brass around me, so that his darts cannot touch me.'" --Unquestionably,
functional exclusions of this sort must occur in the cerebral organ.
But on the side accessible to introspection, their causal condition is
nothing but the degree of spiritual excitement, getting at last so high
and strong as to be sovereign, and it must be frankly confessed that we
do not know just why or ho