whisperings of the devil, to her, as to me, consequently, an ever-present spirit, perpetually tempting me to repeat, and so make myself responsible for the wickedness in them. I remember with great vividness a caricature of Mrs. Trollope in a satirical illustrated edition of her travels in America, representing her sitting in a large armchair surrounded by negroes on their knees, one of whom was represented as saying, "De Lord lub Missee Trollope," an expression which my mother stigmatized as impious and not to be repeated, but which perhaps for that very reason would recur to me in thought, and which I set myself to pray against as the very whisper of the devil in my ears. And naturally, the more I tried to put it out of my head, the more it got fixed there, and it was long a source of great misery to me that I could not keep the devil away from my ears. I was never allowed a candle to go to bed with, and as I slept in the huge garret, covering the whole house, I used to shut my eyes when I left the kitchen, where we all sat in the evening, and groped my way to bed without ever again opening my eyes until the next morning, for fear of seeing the devil on my way. Awful spiritual presences haunted me always in the dark, when I passed a churchyard or an empty and solitary house. Such a house stood in the pasture where I used to drive the cow, and when it happened that she had not come home at nightfall, and I had to go to find her, the panic I endured from the necessity of searching around this old house no one can imagine but a boy naturally timid and accustomed to see ghosts and evil spirits in the dusk. But I kept my fears to myself and always made a conscientious search.

The peculiar ideas concerning conversion and regeneration, held in common by all the branches of the adult-Baptist churches, were in my mother's mind an obsession. Conviction of sin, repentance, the public confession, profession of faith, and baptism were the necessary degrees to regeneration, and, looking back on the tortures to which my mother was subjected by those theological problems and the daily anxiety she endured until each of us had passed through the gates of salvation into the narrow way, I must wonder at that divine maternal instinct which made her rejoice at my birth, as I know she did.

The whole community in which we lived, with the exception of a small Episcopal church, had the same ideas of conversion and regeneration, and a prominent feature in our social existence was the frequent recurrence of the great revival meetings in which all the rude eloquence of celebrated and powerful preachers, Baptist, Methodist, and of other sects, was poured out on excited congregations. There were "protracted meetings," or campaigns of prayer and exhortation, lasting often a fortnight, at which all the resources of popular theology were employed to awaken and maintain their audiences in a state of frenzy and religious delirium, during which conviction of sin was supposed to enter the heart more effectually. The tortures of hell alternated with the delights of heaven, in imagery calculated to drive the timid and conscientious young folks to insanity, at these meetings, to which, once awakened, the subject of conviction went three times a day, until the hysteria, the prolonged excitement so produced, came as a sign of acceptance. As each new convert rose on the "anxious seat[1]," where he or she went when the first feeling of conviction came, and afterwards made the declaration of salvation found, the shouts and cries of "Glory to God," the sobbing and groans of the congregation were redoubled, and the exhortations of the preacher renewed, to the still unconvicted to come forward to the anxious seat where they would become subject to the concentrated and personal prayers of the whole assembly. These meetings were the substitutes for all other social diversions or emotions. There was a revival preacher by the name of Knapp, whose lurid eloquence in this vein made him famous, and whose imagery was equal in ghastliness to anything that the Catholic Church could produce. I remember one of his most dramatic bits, borrowed from a much earlier preacher, a passage in his description of hell. In hell, he said, there was a clock, which, instead of "tick," "tick," said, "Eternity," "Eternity," and when the damned, weary of their tortures down in the depths, came up to see what time it was, they heard the sentence of the clock, and turned in despair to go down into the depths again as far as they could.

[Footnote 1: The front line of seats next the pulpit, set apart for those who had "found conviction."]

To these meetings my mother used to send me, giving me a holiday from school for all the time the protracted meeting lasted. But conviction never came. I was honest with myself, and though the frenzied and ghastly exhortations harried my soul with dread, and I longed for the coming of the ecstasy which was the recognizable sign of the grace of God, I could not rise to the participation in it which the most material and hysterical of the congregation enjoyed, and day after day I went home saddened by the conviction that I was still one of the unregenerate. The sign never came, but several years later I went to make a visit to my brother Charles, who had then removed to Plainfield, N.J., where he practiced medicine, and was one of the main supports of the church in a community where the sect was large enough to have a constant worship, which it never had in Schenectady. Here I came under the influence of a beloved brother of my mother, one of the most earnest and humble Christians I have ever known, and here were gathered others of the denomination at a protracted meeting, at which some of my friends of my own age became seriously inclined, and we drifted together into the profession of Christian faith. But here there was nothing of the ghastly terrors of the great revival agitations. My uncle was a man of the world, had been all his early life a sailor, and had taken late to what, in his experiences of men and the vicissitudes of life, he considered the only reality, the duty of making known to his fellows the importance of the spiritual life. To fit himself for the ministry, he taught himself Hebrew and Greek as well as Latin, and many years later was chosen as one of the New Testament revisers for the American revision committee. But to him the profession of religion was an act of the reason, not of revival excitement, and in his ministrations he shunned carefully all the frenzied exhortation of the revivalists. Associated with him in the ministry and leading the meetings was another of the Sabbatarian pastors, Elder Estee, a grave and earnest man like my uncle, who inspired me with great confidence.

As I look back from the standpoint of one who reposes in the evolutionary philosophy, in which the accidental and ecstatic disappear, upon this phase of psychology, in which hysteria becomes an element of moral reform, it seems to me worth while to record the experience of one subjected to the forces which were counted as such powerful aids to the spread of Christianity,—of one either under the influences of the pomp of ceremony, the stimulus of music, the purely sensuous stimulants to devotion,—or in the crude form of that ecstatic exaltation in which the individual is carried into a supersensuous state, in which perception, reason, and even responsibility to a great extent are, if not suspended, so far made abnormal that analysis becomes impossible. The term for this latter condition amongst revivalists was "the power," and it was distinctly a phenomenon sought for as the evidence of divine grace. The uncle of whom I have spoken had once during his prior religious experience felt the "power," and described it as an emotion which for the time lifted him above the consideration of his surroundings, and left him subsequently indifferent to that very curious shame which generally accompanies the early yielding to the revivalist urgency of acknowledging the necessity of change of