The simple and essential outlines of “conversion” have been obscured because chiefly studied in the Churches among people whose prepossessions and superstitions have rendered it a highly complex process, and mixed up with questions of right and wrong living which, important as they are, properly form no part of religion. The man who waits to lead a decent life until he has “saved his soul” is not likely to possess a soul that is worth saving. How much ignorance prevails in regard to “conversion,” even among the leaders of religious opinion, and what violent contrasts of opinion—in which sometimes both the opposing parties are mistaken—was well illustrated by a discussion on the subject at the Church Congress at Sheffield in 1922. A distinguished Churchman well defined “conversion” as a unification of character, involving the whole man,—will, intellect, and emotion,—by which a “new self” was achieved; but he also thought that this great revolutionary process consisted usually in giving up some “definite bad habit,” very much doubted whether sudden conversion was a normal phenomenon at all, and made no attempt to distinguish between that kind of “conversion” which is merely the result of suggestion and auto-suggestion, after a kind of hysterical attack produced by feverish emotional appeals, and that which is spontaneous and of lifelong effect. Another speaker went to the opposite extreme by asserting that “conversion” is an absolutely necessary process, and an Archbishop finally swept away “conversion” altogether by declaring that the whole of the religious life (and the whole of the irreligious life?) is a process of conversion. (_The Times_, 12th October, 1922.) It may be a satisfaction to some to realise that this is a matter on which it is vain to go to the Churches for light. Footnote 84: Dean Inge (_Philosophy of Plotinus_, vol. II, p. 165) has some remarks on Plotinus in relation to asceticism. Footnote 85: Jules de Gaultier (_La Philosophie officielle et la Philosophie_, p. 150) refers to those Buddhist monks the symbol of whose faith was contained in one syllable: _Om_. But those monks, he adds, belonged to “the only philosophic race that ever existed” and by the aid of their pure faith, placed on a foundation which no argumentation can upset, all the religious philosophies of the Judeo-Helleno-Christian tradition are but as fairy-tales told to children. Footnote 86: We must always remember that “Church” and “religion,” though often confused, are far from being interchangeable terms. “Religion” is a natural impulse, “Church” is a social institution. The confusion is unfortunate. Thus Freud (_Group Psychology_, p. 51) speaks of the probability of religion disappearing and Socialism taking its place. He means not “religion,” but a “Church.” We cannot speak of a natural impulse disappearing, an institution easily may. Footnote 87: