r him in the transaction on the Cross. He had
nothing, therefore, to do but to accept the peace thus made possible and
thereafter to be spiritually at rest.

Now since the whole of the meaning of the Cross for Christianity from
St. Paul until our own time is involved in this bare statement and since
our theologies have never been able to explain this whole great matter
in any doctrinal form which has secured universal consent, we must
simply fall back upon the statement of the fact and recognize that here
is something to be defined in terms of experience and not of doctrine.
The validating experience has come generally to be known as conversion,
and conversion has played a great part in evangelical Protestantism ever
since the Reformation. It has become, indeed, the one way in which
religion has been made real to most members of evangelical churches. So
sweeping a statement must be somewhat qualified, for conversion is far
older than Luther;[4] it is not confined to Protestantism and the
Protestant churches themselves have not agreed in their emphasis upon
it. Yet we are probably on safe ground in saying that religion has
become real to the average member of the average Protestant Church more
distinctly through conversion than anything else.

[Footnote 4: But rather in the discipline of the Mystic as an enrichment
of the spiritual life than as a door to the Communion of the Church.]

Conversion has of late come up for a pretty thoroughgoing examination by
the psychologists, and their conclusions are so generally familiar as
to need no restatement here. William James, in a rather informal
paragraph quoted from one of his letters, states the psychologist's
point of view more simply and vividly than either he or his disciples
have defined their position in their more formal works. "In the case of
conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be
supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks, but I am sure
that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power
gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflict
of two self-systems in a personality up to that time heterogeneously
divided, but in which, after the conversion crisis, the higher loves and
powers come definitely to gain the upper hand and expel the forces which
up to that time had kept them down to the position of mere grumblers and
protesters and agents of remorse and discontent. This broader view w