103: "Father and Son," by Edmund Gosse, 1907, p. 3. It would be equally one-sided to insist that all conversions must be of the sudden or cataclysmic type, and to ignore the tremendous significance of some sudden and dramatic experiences of conversion. Paul and Augustine are cases in point, and it will scarcely do to dismiss them with the remark that "Paul was probably a neurotic, and that Augustine was a sensualist with a highly developed nervous temperament."[104] The true nature of conversion may best be seen, as James suggests, in those experiences which are exaggerated and intense.[105] 104: Ames: "The Psychology of Religious Experience," p. 265. 105: "Varieties," p. 45. Conversions of the sudden and dramatic type have, as a matter of fact, exerted the most far-reaching influence in history. The secular historian is apt nowadays to magnify the influence of Paul upon the life of Europe, but the church historian must add that Paul, as apostle or theologian or missionary, cannot be understood apart from the experience at Damascus. Augustine's conversion inspired his thought and determined his theology. Of Luther, whose conversion may not have been of quite so dramatic a type, a recent writer says: "Indeed, the Reformation in Germany was the spiritual biography of Luther writ large, a spiritual experience materialized in institutions and intellectualized in confessions."[106] 106: H. H. Walker: _Harvard Theological Review_, April, 1913, p. 179. The psychologists unite with the historians in describing the broad objective effects of religion upon the field of history. Christianity in its Pauline form presented, in the West, a successful obstacle to the flood of Eastern thought and culture. When the structure of the Roman Empire was crumbling, it was Christianity in its Roman organization that resisted the disintegrating influences of the barbarian invasion. It was Christianity in its Calvinistic form that became "the seed-plot of modern democracy." "No student of American history," says a writer on the psychology of religion, "can fail to recognize the immense value of religion as a factor in our national development, keeping us in some measure true to the ideals of our fathers.... The fact that our moral conceptions have at all stood the strain of this rapid material development, and that political and social corruption and decay in America to-day are not hopeless and irremediable as they were in Rome during the last century of the Republic, is due, I believe, chiefly to the vitality of religion among us as a factor effectively conservative of our socially recognized values."[107] 107: W. K. Wright: "A Psychological Definition of Religion," _American Journal of Theology_, July, 1912, p. 406.