(3) The question arises, Which is the normal experience? The matter has been put somewhat bluntly by the late Professor James,[14] as to whether the 'twice-born' or the 'once-born' present the natural type of Christian experience. Is it true, he asks, that the experience of St. Paul, which has so long dominated Christian teaching, is really the higher or even the healthier mode of approaching religion? Does not the example of Jesus offer a simpler and more natural ideal? The moral experience of the Son of Man was not a revolution but an evolution. His own religion was not that of the twice-born, and all that He asked of His disciples was the childlike mind.[15] Paul, the man of cities, feels a kindred turbulence within himself. Jesus, the interpreter of nature, feels the steady persuasiveness of the sunshine of God, and grows from childhood in stature, wisdom, and favour with God and man. It is contended by some that the whole Pauline conception of sin is a nightmare, and rests upon ideas of God and man which are unworthy and untrue. 'As a matter of fact,' says Sir Oliver Lodge, 'the higher man of to-day is not worrying about his sins at all, still less about their punishment; his mission, if he is good for anything, is to be up and doing.'[16] {173} This amounts to a claim for the superiority of the first of the two types of religious consciousness, the type which James describes as 'sky-blue souls whose affinities are with flowers and birds and all enchanting innocencies than with dark human passions; . . . in whom religious gladness, being in possession from the outset, needs no deliverance from any antecedent burden.'[17] The second type is marked by a consciousness, similar to St. Paul's, of the divided self. It starts from radical pessimism. It only attains to religious peace through great tribulation. It is the religion of the 'sick soul' as contrasted with that of 'healthy-mindedness.' But, morbid as it may appear, to be disturbed by past sin, it is really the 'twice-born' who have sounded the depths of the human heart, and have been the greatest religious leaders. And so far from the sense of the need of repentance being the sign of a diseased mind, the decreasing consciousness of sin in our day may only prove the shallowness of the modern mind. What men need of religion is power. And there is a danger of people to-day losing a sense of the dynamic force of the older Gospel.[18]