ay. Every time I would call
on God something like a man's hand would strangle me by choking. I
thought I would surely die if I could not get help. I made one final
effort to call on God for mercy if I did strangle and die, and the last
I remember at that time was falling back on the ground with that unseen
hand on my throat. When I came to myself there was a crowd around
praising God."

A crowd around praising God! For all substantial purposes this last
might be the description of a state of affairs in Central Africa instead
of an occurrence in a country that claims to be civilised. It is not
surprising that so great an authority as Sir T. S. Clouston gives an
emphatic warning against revival services and unusual religious
meetings, which should "on no account be attended by persons with weak
heads, excitable dispositions, and neurotic constitutions."[159]
Unfortunately it is precisely these classes for whom they possess the
greatest attractions, and from whom the larger number of chronicled
cases are drawn. The excitement of the revival meeting is as fatal an
attraction to them as the dram is to the confirmed alcoholist; and if
the ill-consequences are neither so immediately discernible nor as
repulsive in character, they are none the less present in a large number
of cases. The emotional strain to which the organism is subjected
occurs, as the ages of the converts show, precisely at the time when it
is least able to bear it safely. The main characteristic of adolescence
is instability, physical, emotional, and intellectual. It is a time of
stress and strain, of the formation of new feelings and associations and
desires that crave for expression and gratification. The instability of
the organic conditions is evidenced by the large proportion of nervous
disorders that occur during adolescence. Adolescent insanity is a
well-known form of mania, although it is usually of brief duration. Sir
T. S. Clouston, in his _Neuroses of Development_, gives a long list of
complaints attendant on adolescence, and Sir W. R. Gowers, dealing with
1450 cases of epilepsy, points out that "three-quarters of the cases of
epilepsy begin under twenty years, and nearly half (46 per cent.)
between ten and twenty, the maximum being at fourteen, fifteen, and
sixteen." Of hysteria, the same writer points out that of the total
cases 50 per cent. occurs from ten to twenty years of age, 20 per cent.
from twenty to thirty, and only 10 per cent. from th