opposite direction, a corresponding series of steps leads from bad to worse-doubt deepens the despair, and despair, in turn, increases the doubt. She progressively walks, talks, and cries herself down to the point of death. It is important to note that doubt preceded the consciousness of it, and she was alarmed at its coming. The cumulative effect of the experiences is perhaps due to the interplay between the organic states and ideas. A physiological condition awakens the consciousness of its presence, and the idea induces a deepening of the somatic resonance. The respondent herself describes the misery as 'coming in successive waves.' Sensation and idea constantly interact, and each augments the other, until some external event breaks the chain, or until the limit of endurance is reached. One sees the same tendency in a small way in the frightened horse, which becomes more frightened as it runs; or in the hurt child, who cries because he is hurt, and then cries worse because he has cried. We have here, then, another great highway along which religious experiences sweep themselves beyond the limits of the normal and become pathological; a certain initiative of religious ecstasy, or of guilt, combined with an element of originality in temperament, tends to become automatically cumulative, until the emotional state chases everything but itself out of the field of consciousness.

PART II

LINES OF RELIGIOUS GROWTH NOT INVOLVING CONVERSION

CHAPTER XIV

SOURCES OF DATA

THERE are some Christian churches which have never taught the doctrine of conversion, but which look upon the attainment of spiritual life simply as a process of even and continuous development. It is for the purpose of gaining an insight into the nature of religious growth of the gradual and relatively uneventful kind that the present study sets out. We shall have to inquire, What are the lines along which individuals seem to develop? If there are no sharp points of transition, what are the essential characteristics of each period in the individual's religious life history? What, in bold outlines, are the differences between the faith of childhood and that of maturity, and what are the steps which mark the progress? What are the forces, both subjective and external, which determine the trend of development? The present study is consequently in part a supplement to the preceding, so that we shall have occasion incidentally to stop and inquire into the likeness and difference between the two types of experiences. It is primarily, however, an objective inquiry into the laws of growth shown by a comparative study of the religious lives of groups of persons.

The progress of this gradual-growth type is usually just as definite as that of the cases we have been studying. The persons are generally as capable of selfanalysis, but there are no sudden crises which mark the disappearance of an old life and the beginning of a

new.