and reverence that fold so necessarily about imposture, it relates as
one tells of a friend and his assistance, of a happy adventure, of a
beautiful thing found and picked up by the wayside.

So far as its psychological phases go the new account of personal
salvation tallies very closely with the account of "conversion" as it
is given by other religions. It has little to tell that is not already
familiar to the reader of William James's "Varieties of Religious
Experience." It describes an initial state of distress with the
aimlessness and cruelties of life, and particularly with the futility of
the individual life, a state of helpless self-disgust, of inability to
form any satisfactory plan of living. This is the common prelude known
to many sorts of Christian as "conviction of sin"; it is, at any rate, a
conviction of hopeless confusion. . . . Then in some way the idea of
God comes into the distressed mind, at first simply as an idea, without
substance or belief. It is read about or it is remembered; it is
expounded by some teacher or some happy convert. In the case of all
those of the new faith with whose personal experience I have any
intimacy, the idea of God has remained for some time simply as an idea
floating about in a mind still dissatisfied. God is not believed in,
but it is realised that if there were such a being he would supply the
needed consolation and direction, his continuing purpose would knit
together the scattered effort of life, his immortality would take
the sting from death. Under this realisation the idea is pursued and
elaborated. For a time there is a curious resistance to the suggestion
that God is truly a person; he is spoken of preferably by such phrases
as the Purpose in Things, as the Racial Consciousness, as the Collective
Mind.

I believe that this resistance in so many contemporary minds to the idea