the subject from this
point of view will, I think, show that conversion is only normal in the
sense that in an environment where religious influences are powerful
each person is normally exposed to it. Those on whom the religious
influence fails to operate experience the change from childhood to
adolescence, on to complete maturity, without their nature evincing any
lack of completeness. This is the vital truth of which Professor James
loses sight, and it is ignored by the vast majority of writers who treat
of the subject.

Leaving, for a while, the statistical view of conversion, we may turn to
its other aspects. By the more advanced of religious teachers to-day the
developments attendant on adolescence are taken as supplying no more
than a favourable occasion for directing mind and emotion to definite
religious conviction. Here the connection is admittedly more or less
accidental. But by the great majority of theologians there is assumed a
direct supernatural influence in the states of mind developed during
adolescence. In more primitive times the connection is of a yet closer
character. Puberty does not at this stage represent what a modern would
call an awakening of the religious consciousness, but a direct
impingement of supernatural influence. From one point of view this
conception still remains part of all religious systems, however overlaid
it may be with modern ideas concerning sexual maturity. And we have, as
a mere matter of historic fact, a whole series of customs commencing
with the initiatory customs of savages and running right on to the
modern practice of confirmation.

In a previous chapter it was pointed out what is the savage state of
mind in relation to the beginnings of sex life as it is manifested in
both boys and girls. Adolescence does not, to the primitive mind, serve
as an occasion for the creation of an interest in the religious life, it
is the sign of direct supernatural influence. One consequence of this is
the rise of more or less elaborate ceremonials marking the initiation of
youth into direct communion with the spiritual forces that govern tribal
life.[148] Among the Polynesians tattooing forms part of the religious
ceremony, and during the time the marks are healing the boy is taboo to
the rest of the tribe, owing to his having been touched by the gods.
With the North American Indians the following ceremony seems
characteristic:--

"When a boy has attained the age of fourteen or fif