Finally, we reach the point where the religious emotions, produced either alone or by contagion, effect the greatest of spiritual miracles: that “conversion” or revulsion of the soul which ancient India, no less than Christendom, likened to a New or Second Birth. It would appear that, when this mysterious change does not take place by the solitary work of the Divine on the human spirit, it does so by the attractive power of another human soul, which has itself already undergone the great transformation. It is the _living_ Saint who conveys spiritual _life_. He need not be a very great or far advanced soul in the spiritual realm. Many a simple person with no exceptional gifts has “turned to the wisdom of the just” the hearts of strong men, whom the most eloquent and thoughtful of preachers have failed to move by a hair. But the greater the saint, the greater naturally must be his power. It was the contagion of Divine Love, caught from him who felt it most of all the sons of men, which moved the little band in the upper chamber of Jerusalem—who moved the world. It is worthy of notice that when a man so powerfully influences another as to “convert” him in the true sense, _i.e._ to bring him to the higher spiritual life, it very often happens that at the same time he “converts” him in the lower sense, to the doctrines of the special Church to which he himself belongs. The man has received the impulse of religion from that particular direction. It has come to him colored by the hues of his friend’s piety, and he accepts it, doctrines and all, as he finds it. The matter has been one of emotional contagion, not of critical argument on either side. It is impossible to form the faintest estimate of the good—the highest kind of good—which a single devout soul may accomplish in a lifetime by spreading the holy contagion of the Love of God in widening circles around it. But just as far as the influence of such men is a cause for thankfulness, so great would be the calamity of a time, if such should ever arrive, when there should be a dearth of saints in the world, and the fire on the altar should die down. A Glacial Period of Religion would kill many of the sweetest flowers in human nature; and woe to the land where (as it would seem is almost the present case in France at this moment) the priceless tradition of Prayer is being lost, or only maintained in fatal connection with outworn superstitions.