Let us not seek to defend freedom on inadequate grounds, or contend for a spurious liberty. No view of the subject should indeed debar us from acknowledging 'changes in heart and life,' but a misunderstanding of the doctrine of freedom may tend to paralyse moral initiative. The attempt to sunder the will and the understanding and discover the source of freedom in the realm of the emotions, as the voluntarists seek to do, cannot be regarded as satisfactory or sound philosophy. In separating faith and knowledge the Ritschlian school tends to make subjective feeling the measure of truth and life; while recent psychological experiments in America with the phenomena of faith-healing, hypnotism and suggestion, claim to have discovered hitherto unsuspected potencies of the will. This line of thought has been welcomed by many as a relief from the mechanical theory of life and as a witness to moral {91} freedom and Christian hope. But so far from proving the sovereignty and autonomy of the will, it discloses rather the possibilities of its abject bondage and thraldom. No one can doubt the facts which Professor James and others, working from the side of religious psychology, have recently established, or discredit the instances of conversion to which the annals of the Christian life so abundantly testify. But even conversion must not be regarded as a change without motives. There must be some connection between motive, character and act, otherwise the new spiritual experience would be simply a magical happening lacking all moral significance. If there were no continuity of consciousness, if I could be something to-day irrespective of what I was yesterday, then all we signify by contrition, penitence, and shame would have no real meaning. Even the grace of God works through natural channels and human influences. The past is not so much obliterated, as taken up into the new life and transfigured with a new value.