The Stammering Century

by Gilbert Seldes

  I suggest these variations on the theme of conversion merely because they have more currency at the moment than the sense of sin. All of them suggest the same conclusion and most of them can be traced to a discovery made centuries ago by religious leaders and fortified recently by psychology, namely that there are more things in the heaven and earth of our own minds than we are aware of. It is to the tangle of emotions lying in the hinterland of the mind that many religions appeal. We are timid and we would like to swagger. We are promiscuous and covet purity. We are austere and dream voluptuously. We are happy and the sadness of mortality overcomes us; we cannot reconcile ourselves to the circumstance that birth lies so close to death. These things lie under the surface of our consciousness and produce discords which we spend our lives trying to resolve.

  The return to harmony, the sensation of rightness may be achieved by conversion. The problem is answered, the music returns to its dominant. All this may be a response to our unconscious prayers but, with the intense feeling we have of our own significance, we like to ennoble our sense of deliverance. After we have landed, we magnify the waves which tossed us about. We blacken our sins when we pray for redemption. We thrill to the last-minute rescue. We can only triumph completely if our adversary is strong. If tragedy is to be great, the personality of the antagonists must rise to an absolute pitch of intensity. The action must become so developed that every imaginable force is put into play. Only then can a final impulse give the turn which the drama must take. In conversion this means that the sense of sin must be acute. One must need regeneration and not be able to live a moment longer without it. The triumph of Protestant doctrine is that it encourages precisely this tendency in man. The Catholic church encourages an easy-going and ritualistic absolution. Protestantism emphasizes the other side, and lets it be known that the one sheep that was lost and found again is more precious than the ninety-nine which never strayed. It was for the unrighteous that Christ died. Indeed, without them, his sacrifice would have been empty and men might well cry out, “Now is there nothing serious in mortality.” Ignobly conceived, as it usually was in revivals, this doctrine brings us only to the level of the melodrama with the heroine bound to the railroad track, or to the novel in which things grow impossibly black before the dawn. But, in essence, it gives a sense of tragedy in which magnificence and dignity are at their highest in the opposition of great forces, when evil must be all evil and good all good, in a supreme encounter.

  From Jonathan Edwards and his wife, from Finney and others, we have had reports on the state of bliss which comes when the struggle is ended. The sense of estrangement is over and, just as to them inanimate objects seem transfigured, the inner life is lived on a higher plane of almost rapturous serenity. The old personality has crumbled away. The stubborn will to remain one’s self and not to yield even to the highest, has at last broken down. The long struggle is over and the convert, becoming partly a saint, lives in a new world. I use the term higher because that is how it seems to the convert himself. He cannot conceive that he could have been changed except by a miracle, or that he has surrendered to anything less than a superhuman agency. Even if salvation has come from the depths of his own consciousness, he externalizes it and throws it like a huge shadow against the background of the infinite. He cannot allow that it is natural or unimportant. Part of his own drama is to insist that his personality was altered and sanctified by a spiritual flash of lightning. Conversion must be instantaneous. John Wesley himself never knew a single case in which deliverance from sin came gradually. Later revivalists often insisted that, if you could not say when you were converted, you were probably not converted. That instantaneous flash had to come to strike down the evil in man and to uplift the good. To pass from an interest in collecting postage stamps to an interest in collecting books, from one love affair to another, from selling bonds to selling motor cars, or to grow gradually less enthusiastic about tennis and more about solitaire—these are also changes in emotional excitement; but the change of conversion rejects all similarity with them. In conversion, the whole life we had denied takes possession of us. We live by a fresh system of values and everything is new and clean. But it may be noted that even if the lower self should suddenly rise up, the resulting freshness and changed habits of living would give a similar exaltation and might cause the victim, particularly if he had not been consciously working for such a change, to feel that a miracle had happened. The debauchee and the ascetic, changing places in the night, would each feel that something supernatural had occurred.

  In the ordinary meaning of conversion the new self is one to which the convert has aspired. He has been laden with sin and unworthiness and now he is delivered from evil and led no more into temptation. For a moment, the sense of being utterly without sin is dominant, and persuades the convert that his life is for once totally in harmony with a plan of existence nobler than his own. He feels himself in direct communion with the higher power to which he has prayed and which has saved him. In extreme cases he feels that no matter what happens, no matter what he does, he will sin no more. This is where the curtain falls on the completed play. It is the moment when the psychoanalyst dismisses his patient and the preacher gives the penitent a certificate or admits him to the Lord’s Supper. He has been born again.

  What the revivalist made of this delicate and intricate process is something of a miracle in itself. The two terms of James’ analysis are still there, uneasiness is represented by our feeling of guilt for the sin of Adam, which is theoretically imputed to all of us. The solution is in repentance and acceptance of Christ as mediator. The Christian argument is closely knit and entirely logical within itself. There can be no other explanation of man’s unhappiness than some great sin against the Almighty and there can be no release from this sense of our own depravity by any agency less divine than Christ, or by any sacrifice less precious than his death. The scientific attack on Genesis in the last century was therefore more important than any question of literal truth or divine inspiration. If Genesis falls, the whole system of salvation falls with it, and man becomes infinitely less hopeful than he ever has been in the dourest doctrines of Calvin. If Genesis, on any interpretation, remains and the divinity of Christ is challenged, the position is equally bad. For if Christ is not divine, he could not have taken upon himself the burden of sin from the time of Adam until the time of the Last Judgment. Nor can there be any virtue in Christ’s atonement if it did not save us from actual hell hereafter. To be conscious of sin is absolutely the essential step. Without this sense we cannot know the agony of being separated from God, which means that we cannot know God’s power, or his goodness, or his glory. The churches based on ritual make this knowledge of God available to their adherents by way of the scriptures and the fulfillment of individual religious obligations—prayer, reading, and hearing God’s word, observing holy days and doing ordained penance—and emphasize, in addition, the necessity of a pious and virtuous life. The evangelizing churches employ the drama of conversion. Being good and being devout are not enough; one must first be nailed on the cross of natural despair and agony, and then, in the twinkling of an eye, be miraculously released. The mystic power to save, which the High Church places in baptism and holy communion, is rejected; its discipline is not considered sufficient and the succession of the priesthood which alone can make it effective is challenged. The terrible example of Aaron Burr is always held up. According to the story, this grandson of Jonathan Edwards was made uneasy by a revival at Princeton and communicated his anxiety to Dr. Witherspoon who assured him that revivals were fanatical and that the established ritual was sufficient:

  “Burr proceeded to drink in with avidity the reasonings of the French and English infidels, which were much in vogue at the time. These prepared him for the profligate habits which distinguished him through life, which procured his arraignment at the bar of his country for high treason, which involved him in his fatal duel with Hamilton, and which made him ever after an outcast and a
vagabond on the earth. It causes a shudder to think that possibly that deprecating remark as to the revival made him the libertine, the duelist, the plotter against his government, the heartless seducer, and the victim of a supreme selfishness that he was. And it is an illustration of the sad consequences that may follow the utterance of one word against revivals.”

  Nor is the unaided endeavor of man himself considered sufficient to bring him grace. To the revivalist, crowding the penitents and urging them on to a decision, the spectacle of a man working for salvation and trusting to his own efforts is an abomination; it is setting up his will against the will of God. Whatever means of our own we are conscious of—the strength of our will, the power of our intellect—are the arms of Lucifer. Will and intellectual pride must be broken down. We must abdicate our own pretense and accept the grace of God. We find the extreme version of this theory in the sects which believe that men must wait passively and never do anything to bring down the blessing of salvation, because whatever they do is an impertinence and casts a doubt upon the omnipotence of God. Other men become aware of the limitations of their intellect, as did John Humphrey Noyes. Some, like Finney, find that even self-scrutiny stands in the way of the holy spirit. But if man’s work alone is insufficient, he has still much to do. He must repent of his sins and be willing to put his faith in Christ. The doctrine that man was not able to win salvation which was preached by Edwards was rejected by later revivalists who pounded and shouted and declared that man was able to do whatever God required of him. They only insisted that all he could do was not enough without Christ. They therefore were continually exalting and belittling the will in an alternation of extremes. The one thing they did not do was to control it. It is not surprising that half of the cults which sprang from the revivals were glorifications of the will.

  To make the drama of salvation acute, the revivalists insisted upon the utter abasement of man before he could rise to the supreme heights in Christ. They were always holding man at the extremes of his potentialities and naturally they wanted the metal on which they worked to be as ductile as possible. They were well aware that moral regeneration without Christ could occur. The case of John B. Gough, the famous drunkard, has been cited as an example of conversion in which neither Christ nor God is mentioned. But in general such regeneration was dismissed as unsatisfactory. When the emotions were touched, one had proofs in pentecostal shoutings and orgiastic dances. Proofs became extremely important. Young Christians were supplied with little cards on which ten evidences of conversion were listed:

  1. A full surrender of the will of God.

  2. The removal of a burden of sin gradually or suddenly.

  3. A new love to Christians and to Jesus.

  4. A new relish for the word of God.

  5. Pleasure in secret prayer, at least at times.

  6. Sin or sinful thoughts will cause pain.

  7. Desire and efforts for the salvation of others.

  8. A desire to obey Christ in his commands and ordinances.

  9. Deep humility and self-abasement.

  10. A growing desire to be holy and like Christ.

  And gradually, as revivalism grew in extent and the desire to gather in more and more sheaves became prominent, proofs of conversion grew to be more important than conversion itself.

  It would be unfair not to mention again the fact that an earnest revivalist seriously believed in his conversions and believed that no matter how a man was brought to confess Christ, his confession was justified. It was a work of God, as Edwards said, greater than the whole seven days of creation. Some of them must really have believed that without hysteria there could be no genuine conviction of sin or regeneration. And yet it is easy to see that, as they substituted hysterical outbursts for the reasoned conversion of the soberer churches, hysteria itself became important without thought of its meaning. The revivalists naturally chose those methods by which they could excite the emotions and bring on crisis upon crisis of hysteria. People were struggling for conviction, their lives were desperately divided by an inner conflict, and they knew that acceptance of Christ gave peace. It is easy to see how they would whip themselves up into a frenzy of anxiety and eagerness and despair to imitate the frenzy they saw about them. The “jerks” themselves became a ritual.

  The revivalists were always happy to work with the nervously unbalanced. Finney speaks of converting (curing) an insane woman and, throughout the literature of revivalism, we frequently find the deranged, the maniacal, the slow-witted, and the psychopathic. Such defectives were excellent kindling for the fire, peculiarly susceptible to the stirring up of primal fears in the depths of consciousness and to the imagery which appeals to the visceral centers. The phrases of revivalism seem at times to consist of nothing but reference to food and to sex. In the same way revivalists attacked the young and particularly the adolescent. The period of puberty with its stirrings of unsuspected forces, when the mind is filled with misgivings about the future, the evangelist found extremely receptive to his labors.

  So much has been made of the parallel between the religious and the sexual impulses that it may be worth while to note a few corrective observations. An obvious one is that conversions are not limited to the period of adolescence. There are notable converts, like the brothers Wesley, who experienced it after thirty. But even if we think of these as intellectual or moral conversions, we have numerous records of emotional crises in full manhood. And there are countless conversions when the dominant motive is probably the fear of death. It is not possible to reject the connection between sexual excitement and religious hysteria; the evidence is too strong. Nor is it entirely an accident that the libertine, Casanova, passed as an abbot. And the Matthiases and Smiths and Cochranes we have met, all found some extreme form of religious excitement easily convertible to the uses of seduction. There is nothing alarming in this connection. It would seem to indicate only that the two emotions lie so close together at the very center of our being, and are both so concerned with tremendous objects, that they often work together and are sometimes interchanged. That at least would be a devout explanation were a zealot ever to admit the connection. A less favorable statement is made by Baring-Gould: “The religious passion verges so closely on the sexual passion, that a slight additional pressure given to it bursts the partition and both are confused in a frenzy of religious debauch.” That libertines have used religion as a means, and that the religious have abused the sexual nature, are accepted facts. Yet it is not possible to delimit the phenomenon of conversion, by saying that it is always the result of a sexual disorder. After a long statistical study, Professor Edwin D. Starbuck, a pupil of James, could only formulate the tentative law that conversions are most likely to occur during periods of great bodily growth and suggest that conversion and puberty supplement each other, but do not actually coincide. James summarizes the results of this inquiry which indicates “how closely parallel in its manifestations the ordinary ‘conversion’ which occurs in young people brought up in evangelical circles is to that growth into a larger spiritual life which is a normal phase of adolescence in every class of human beings. The age is the same, falling usually between fourteen and seventeen. The symptoms are the same,—sense of incompleteness and imperfection; brooding, depression, morbid introspection, and sense of sin; anxiety about the hereafter; distress over doubts, and the like. And the result is the same,—a happy relief and objectivity, as the confidence in self gets greater through the adjustment of the faculties to the wider outlook. In spontaneous religious awakening, apart from revivalistic examples, and in the ordinary storm and stress and moulting-time of adolescence, we also may meet with mystical experiences, astonishing the subjects by their suddenness, just as in revivalistic conversion. The analogy, in fact, is complete; and Starbuck’s conclusion as to these ordinary youthful conversions would seem to be the only sound one. Conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child’s small universe to the wider intel
lectual and spiritual life of maturity.”