James, Varieties of Religious Experience, 12—“The two main phenomena of religion, they will say, are essentially phenomena of adolescence, and therefore synchronous with the development of sexual life. To which the retort is easy: Even were the asserted synchrony unrestrictedly true as a fact (which it is not), it is not only the sexual life, but the entire higher mental life, which awakens during adolescence. One might then as well set up the thesis that the interest in mechanics, physics, chemistry, logic, physiology and sociology, which springs up during adolescent years along with that in poetry and religion, is also a perversion of the sexual instinct, but this would be too absurd. Moreover, if the argument from synchrony is to decide, what is to be done with the fact that the religious age _par excellence_ would seem to be old age, when the uproar of the sexual life is past?” (_c_) From the fact that the word “conversion” means simply “a turning,” every turning of the Christian from sin, subsequent to the first, may, in a subordinate sense, be denominated a conversion (Luke 22:32). Since regeneration is not complete sanctification, and the change of governing disposition is not identical with complete purification of the nature, such subsequent turnings from sin are necessary consequences and evidences of the first (_cf._ John 13:10). But they do not, like the first, imply a change in the governing disposition,—they are rather new manifestations of a disposition already changed. For this reason, conversion proper, like the regeneration of which it is the obverse side, can occur but once. The phrase “second conversion,” even if it does not imply radical misconception of the nature of conversion, is misleading. We prefer, therefore, to describe these subsequent experiences, not by the term “conversion,” but by such phrases as “breaking off, forsaking, returning from, neglects or transgressions,” and “coming back to Christ, trusting anew in him.” It is with repentance and faith, as elements in that first and radical change by which the soul enters upon a state of salvation, that we have now to do.