(1) First of all it is a crisis in a man's experience. Nothing interests men more than the story of a critical and determining experience in the history of a soul. All the narratives that have
ACTS ix. 4 105
deeply affected mankind have turned upon some crisis in spiritual fortunes. The interest of the crisis may have lain in tracing the chain of outward circumstances which prepared or seemed to prepare for it. Or it may, on the other hand, have lain solely in a close scrutiny of the gradual and hardly perceptible inner movements which led to that moment big with change and renewal. But without that moment the story would have been hardly a human story at all. So naturally do we look for the great transforming moment in a life which is to satisfy us of its real humanity. So little can we accept as really human the life which unconsciously and without an effort accepts itself, which has never needed to challenge itself and to wring from itself the satisfying and renewing answer to its own insistent questioning. It is this moment of self-challenge which is really the conversion of a soul. There the life comes to itself, feels that there is a self after which it must seek, which will not simply come to it without seeking, that there is a self which it must make, which will not fall to it ready-made.
Tf I read in the newspaper the other day of a wonderful invention to be used in war. It was a homo, with such materials inside the shell, and so contrived as to explode at the touch of a ray of light ! The bomb might be placed anywhere and do no harm ; but let a ray of light fall upon it in particular, and on the instant, at the summons of the light, the thing would awake and burst.1
(2) But, in the second place, this crisis is a 'part of the soul's own growth. Conversion is a universal human need. But we have confused ourselves by confining the term to a particular kind of religious experience which is by no means common to all men, or even possible for all men, which is indeed, and perhaps fortunately, possible only for a few exceptional natures. And it is just this kind of conversion which is very often least worthy of the name. It is the effect of a momentary emotion, and is induced most readily in the most superficial natures. It is true that the appeals which produce such an emotion may sometimes find their way into the deep and silent nature and there leave the permanent lesson which will continue to do its work while life endures. But they are too often addressed to all that is most obviously of the
1 John A. Hutton, Guidance from Robert Browning in Matters of Faith, 47.
106 WHY PERSECUTEST THOU ME?
surface stuff of feeling. Too often they are so ignorant of the nature of the will in us and of the means of stirring it into action that it seems almost an accident if occasionally they do reach it. The secret of conversion lies in the character to which the appeal is addressed, and not in some conventional type of religious appeal. It is the inner history that matters. And nothing is of such slow growth as the trouble of the heart, the dissatisfaction with self. To force it is almost certainly to mar its efficaciousness, to rob it of its true value. Appeals from without may awaken it into activity for the first time, or they may bring it to a head and give it complete consciousness of itself. But it is in its slow working that the Spirit of God is wrestling with a soul. It is not in the message of a moment, but in the gradual lesson of an obscure and laborious effort, that the Divine Spirit comes to us. And yet that moment must not be denied its place in the spiritual life. It appears and reappears in the history of great souls.
^f This is the story of one of those profoundly significant events in history on which the whole complexion of future thought and the course of future progress turn. St. Paul is one of those Titanic figures of the past about whom everything was on the large scale, both for himself and for the world. Intellectually, his views of truth have become a fundamental statement of the creed of nineteen centuries ; practically, he is the master empire- builder of the kingdom of God in the world. He laid hold upon the largest conceptions of his time — the Hebrew religion and the Eoman Empire — and he transformed them into the Christian Church. But it was not by the natural development of his genius that he did this. Up to a certain moment in his career his powers were running to waste, spending themselves in the most futile ways. At that moment something occurred which revolu- tionized his whole life, an upheaval of the very foundations of the man. But the greatness of this man's nature ensured the thoroughness of the change in him. Such a man's conversion is a tremendous affair.1
Tf We may well question whether there was ever a conversion which could be rightly called instantaneous. There is often a sudden shock, a flash of light, a conscience smitten as with an arrow, a deciding moment ; but hundreds of forgotten things have been preparing for it. That blaze of lightning which bursts out of a thunder-cloud is instantaneous, but the atmospheric conditions which prepared it have been a long time gathering to form that