DISCOVERY 



71 



minutes while he went inside a church. M. Ratis- 

 bonne entered the church himself to look at it while 

 he was waiting. Suddenly he passed through an 

 experience he was unable afterwards to describe, in 

 which he saw a vision of the Virgin. His friend found 

 him prostrate on the ground, weeping. He felt the 

 most ardent joy in the bottom of his soul. He asked 

 for a priest. He felt that a bandage had fallen from 

 his eyes, and he had acquired a knowledge and a faith 

 of the truth, of which he could give no account. 



This account shows the characteristic feature of 

 suddenness which makes conversion such a striking 

 mental event. Modern psychology explains such 

 suddenness as due to the fact that the mental processes 

 which resulted in the conversion were unconscious. 

 We must suppose that, if we could have examined the 

 unconscious mind of the convert before the event, we 

 would have found that he had already begun to believe 

 in Christianity, but that the change was repressed 

 i)ecause of its conflict with the feelings and sym- 

 pathies of his earlier life. The moment of the con- 

 version was the moment when this repressed conviction 

 became strong enough to overthrow the resistance to 

 it, so that for the first time it became present to con- 

 sciousness. Such unconscious processes, though they 

 are banished from the conscious mind, can express 

 themselves in dreams. The violently emotional 

 dream which M. Ratisbonne had dreamed during 

 the previous night shows that his unconscious mind 

 was seriously occupied with the question of Christianity, 

 although his conscious mind was not. His anti- 

 pathy to priests may also be an indication of uncon- 

 scious leanings towards Christianity. A violent and 

 unreasonable prejudice against something is often 

 a method by which the mind compensates for an 

 imconscioui attraction towards it. It is typical of the 

 results of conversion that M. Ratisbonne felt that he 

 had suddenly acquired a new knowledge, but was 

 unable to give any account of the mental processes 

 which led up to it. The psychologist explains this as 

 the result of the fact that the mental processes leading 

 up to it were unconscious, not that they were absent 

 altogether. 



A second fact which seems unmistakably to emerge 

 from recent work in psychology is the very large part 

 ])layed in human activity by the love-instinct. That 

 this is the case in religion is no new- discovery of modern 

 psychology'. The fact that human and religious love 

 are intimately related to one another has been guessed 

 by many persons who have used their knowledge of 

 this relationship either to depreciate religious en- 

 thusiasm or to exalt human love. The best example 

 of the second of these two attitudes is probably 

 Coventry Patmore. This is the theme of many of his 

 poems. In one of his prose w6rks he says: " There 



comes a time in the life of everj'one who follows the 

 Truth with full sincerity when God reveals to the 

 sensitive Soul the fact that He and He alone can satisfy 

 those longings, the satisfaction of which she has hitherto 

 been tempted to seek elsewhere." In another passage 

 he speaks of " that human love which is the precursor 

 and explanation of and initiation into the divine." ' 



An American psychologist says: " Religion is at its 

 best when its earthly image is most spotless and un- 

 tarnished, and love is at its best where religion is 

 purest and most undefilcd. Just as this relationship 



OR. s. iKiui), oi- vii:nna. 



seems to degrade religion only to those whose ideals 

 or cults of love are low or unde\'eloped, so those who 

 dispraise religion have not realised how indispensable 

 it is to perfect love. How central this thought was 

 to Jesus many parables and sayings attest. True 

 piety is earthly love transcendentalized, and the saint 

 is the lover purified, refined, and perfected." ' 



The first indication of the intimate psychical con- 

 nection between human love and the mystics' love of 

 God is the frequency in their writings of language 

 drawn from human love. Many of the mystics have 

 found a congenial mode of self-expression in the Song 

 of Solomon, which is purely a love song. Blosius 

 prays in the following words: "0 my beloved, my 



' The Rod, the Root, and the Flower, Coventry Patmore. 

 - The Psychology of Adolescence, by Prof. G. Stanley Hall, 

 vol. ii, p. 294. 



