In his last year at Andover Willis experienced religion and joined the church. Any one who has witnessed one of those spiritual epidemics, called “revivals,” in some school or college needs no description of the kind of pressure brought to bear on the thoughtless but easily excited young consciences there assembled. At the first rumor of an unwonted “seriousness” abroad, occasioned perhaps by the death of a fellow-student, by a general sickness, or the depression of gloomy weather in a winter term, the machinery is set in motion. Daily prayer-meetings are held, in which the elders play part,--the movement at Andover was taken in hand by the “Seminarians,” that is, the students of the Divinity School;--the unregenerate are visited in their rooms by classmates who are already church members, and are prayed with and urged to attend the meetings and submit themselves to the outpourings of the Spirit. Under this kind of stimulus there follows a great awakening. Many are “under conviction,” the air becomes electric, and there is a strange spiritual tension which is felt even by the resisting. Momentous choices are made in an instant and under the stress of contagious emotions. The awful issues of eternity are set before a roomful of boys in the midst of prayers and sobs and eloquent words, exhorting the sinner not to let pass this opportunity of salvation,--perhaps his last. And then the movement subsides, leaving an impression which endures with some, and with others quickly wears off. Those who believe that the Christian character and the Christian life are the result of nurture and slow endeavor look with distrust upon these sudden conversions. The hardened sinner may need some such violent call to repentance, but there is a sort of indecency in this premature forcing open of the simple and healthful heart of a boy, substituting morbid self-questionings, exaggerated remorse, and the terrors of perdition for his natural brave outlook on a world of hope and enjoyment. The story of Willis’s conversion is fully told in his letters home, and it reads like a chapter of “Doctor Johns.” In 1821, being then fifteen years of age, he had written to his father:-- “I can plainly see an answer to prayer in the delay of my admission to the church. I prayed that God would, if I was in danger of making a hasty step, by some means or other prevent it. I doubted, till it became almost a certainty, whether it was proper. I doubted myself, my pretensions to a change of heart; and my very heart seemed to sink under me every time I thought of the solemn engagement I was unhappy, extremely unhappy, when in Boston, and have been, I might say, miserable ever since.” And again in 1822:-- “As to becoming a Christian, it is morally _beyond my power_. I have not an objection against it that would weigh a feather, and yet I feel no more solicitude than I ever did about my eternal welfare.”