Conversion has of late come up for a pretty thoroughgoing examination by the psychologists, and their conclusions are so generally familiar as to need no restatement here. William James, in a rather informal paragraph quoted from one of his letters, states the psychologist's point of view more simply and vividly than either he or his disciples have defined their position in their more formal works. "In the case of conversion I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks, but I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power gained over life by a truth always known. It is a case of the conflict of two self-systems in a personality up to that time heterogeneously divided, but in which, after the conversion crisis, the higher loves and powers come definitely to gain the upper hand and expel the forces which up to that time had kept them down to the position of mere grumblers and protesters and agents of remorse and discontent. This broader view will cover an enormous number of cases psychologically and leaves all the religious importance to the result which it has on any other theory."[5] [Footnote 5: Letters of William James, Vol. II, p. 57.] In Luther, Augustine and St. Paul, and a great fellowship beside, this stress of the divided self was both immediate and intense. Such as these through the consciousness of very real fault--and this is true of Augustine and St. Paul--or through a rare spiritual sensitiveness and an unusual force of aspiration--and this is true of many others--did not need any conviction of sin urged upon them from the outside. They had conviction enough of their own. But all these have been men and women apart, intensely devout by nature, committed by temperament to great travail of soul and concerned, above all, for their own spiritual deliverance. But their spiritual sensitiveness is by no means universal, their sense of struggle not a normal experience for another type of personality. The demand, therefore, that all religious experience be cast in their particular mould, and that religion be made real to every one through the same travail of soul in which it was made real to them, carries with it two very great dangers: first, that some semblance of struggle should be created which does not come vitally out of experience; and second, that the resultant peace should be artificial rather than true, and therefore, should not only quickly lose its force but really result in reactions which would leave the soul of the one so misled, or better perhaps, so mishandled, emptier of any real sense of the reality of religion than to begin with. _Protestantism Found Its Authority in an Infallibly Inspired Bible_