w such sovereignty comes about in one person
and not in another. We can only give our imagination a certain
delusive help by mechanical analogies.

If we should conceive, for example, that the human mind, with its
different possibilities of equilibrium, might be like a many-sided
solid with different surfaces on which it could lie flat, we might
liken mental revolutions to the spatial revolutions of such a body. As
it is pried up, say by a lever, from a position in which it lies on
surface A, for instance, it will linger for a time unstably halfway up,
and if the lever cease to urge it, it will tumble back or "relapse"
under the continued pull of gravity. But if at last it rotate far
enough for its centre of gravity to pass beyond surface A altogether,
the body will fall over, on surface B, say, and abide there
permanently. The pulls of gravity towards A have vanished, and may now
be disregarded. The polyhedron has become immune against farther
attraction from their direction.

In this figure of speech the lever may correspond to the emotional
influences making for a new life, and the initial pull of gravity to
the ancient drawbacks and inhibitions. So long as the emotional
influence fails to reach a certain pitch of efficacy, the changes it
produces are unstable, and the man relapses into his original attitude.
But when a certain intensity is attained by the new emotion, a critical
point is passed, and there then ensues an irreversible revolution,
equivalent to the production of a new nature.

The collective name for the ripe fruits of religion in a character is
Saintliness.[152] The saintly character is the character for which
spiritual emotions are the habitual centre of the personal energy; and
there is a certain composite photograph of universal saintliness, the
same in all religions, of which the features can easily be traced.[153]

[152] I use this word in spite of a certain flavor of
"sanctimoniousness" which sometimes clings to it, because no other word
suggests as well the exact combination of affections which the text
goes on to describe.

[153] "It will be found," says Dr. W. R. Inge (in his lectures on
Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, p. 326), "that men of preeminent
saintliness agree very closely in what they tell us. They tell us that
they have arrived at an unshakable conviction, not based on inference
but on immediate experience, that God is a spirit with whom the human
spirit can hold