a general way. What
does the ordinary graduate understand about doubt? It is all classed
together, whether in adolescents or in hardened sinners, and one dose is
applied. What does the graduate know about sexuality, so closely allied
with certain forms of religious manifestations? What about ecstasy, in
its various forms, the numerous methods of faith cure thrust upon an
illiterate but credulous people, or the significance or insignificance
of visions and dreams?"[142]

It is, indeed, not too much to say that a theological training tends to
prevent a rational comprehension of religion in both its normal and
abnormal manifestations. Religious phenomena are not affiliated to
phenomena as a whole; they are treated as quite distinct from the rest
of life, possessing both an independent origin and justification. The
consequence is that what are usually called studies of religion move
round and round the same circle of ideas, and a revolution is mistaken
for progress. Genuine enlightenment has come to us from men who have
attacked the subject from a quite different point of view. They
recognised that whether the religious idea was accepted as true or
rejected as false, it could not be separated from that host of ideas and
beliefs which make up the psychological side of the social structure. It
was to be studied as a piece of natural history first of all. Whether it
involved more than this they left to be settled later. It cannot be said
that they belittled the _power_ of religion; on the contrary, the
investigations showed it to be one of the most potent of the forces that
shape social institutions. But they demonstrated the absurdity of
placing religion in a category of its own. As an objective fact, they
showed that religion was subject to the same forces that determine the
form of other objective facts. As a culture fact, they traced its
connection with corresponding phases of social development; and as a
psychological fact, they demonstrated its workings to be in harmony with
workings of normal psychological laws. Five thousand years of
theological study had left the world as ignorant of the nature of
religious phenomena as it was in the days of ancient Chaldea. Fifty
years of scientific study has served to make at least a broad path
through what was hitherto an impenetrable jungle.

What has been said holds with peculiar force of the subject of
conversion. This is not a phenomenon peculiar to Christianity, for
initiati