"For three months it seemed as if God's Spirit had withdrawn from me. Fear took hold of me. For a week I was on the border of despair" (16).
"A sense of sinfulness and estrangement from God grew daily" (15).
"Everything went wrong with me; it felt like Sunday all the time" (12).
"I felt that something terrible was going to happen" (14).
"I fell on my face by a bench and tried to pray. Every time I would call on God something like a man's hand would strangle me by choking. I thought I would surely die if I could not get help. I made one final effort to call on God for mercy if I did strangle and die, and the last I remember at that time was falling back on the ground with that unseen hand on my throat. When I came to myself there was a crowd around praising God."
A crowd around praising God! For all substantial purposes this last might be the description of a state of affairs in Central Africa instead of an occurrence in a country that claims to be civilised. It is not surprising that so great an authority as Sir T. S. Clouston gives an emphatic warning against revival services and unusual religious meetings, which should "on no account be attended by persons with weak heads, excitable dispositions, and neurotic constitutions."[159] Unfortunately it is precisely these classes for whom they possess the greatest attractions, and from whom the larger number of chronicled cases are drawn. The excitement of the revival meeting is as fatal an attraction to them as the dram is to the confirmed alcoholist; and if the ill-consequences are neither so immediately discernible nor as repulsive in character, they are none the less present in a large number of cases. The emotional strain to which the organism is subjected occurs, as the ages of the converts show, precisely at
the time when it is least able to bear it safely. The main characteristic of adolescence is instability, physical, emotional, and intellectual. It is a time of stress and strain, of the formation of new feelings and associations and desires that crave for expression and gratification. The instability of the organic conditions is evidenced by the large proportion of nervous disorders that occur during adolescence. Adolescent insanity is a well-known form of mania, although it is usually of brief duration. Sir T. S. Clouston, in his Neuroses of Development, gives a long list of complaints attendant on adolescence, and Sir W. R. Gowers, dealing with 1450 cases of epilepsy, points out that "three-quarters of the cases of epilepsy begin under twenty years, and nearly half (46 per cent.) between ten and twenty, the maximum being at fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen." Of hysteria, the same writer points out that of the total cases 50 per cent. occurs from ten to twenty years of age, 20 per cent. from twenty to thirty, and only 10 per cent. from thirty to forty.[160]
The peculiar danger, then, of the modern appeal for conversion is that it is couched in a form likely to do the minimum of good and the maximum of harm. Where religion exists as a normally operative factor of the environment—as in lower stages of culture—the danger is avoided, because no special machinery is required to bring about religious conviction. The general social life secures this. But at a later stage, when the religious and secular aspects of life become separated, with a growing preponderance of the latter, religion must be, as it were, specially and forcibly
introduced. Whether for good or ill, it is a disturbing force. It strives to divert the developing organic energies into a new channel. To effect this, it plays upon the emotions to an altogether dangerous extent, in complete ignorance of the nature of the passions excited. In the older form of the religious appeal, that in which fear was the chief emotion aroused, it is now generally conceded that the consequences were wholly bad. But under any form the emotional appeal is fraught with danger, since the tendency is for it to bring out unsuspected weaknesses in other directions. Sir W. R. Gowers wisely points out that "mental emotion—fright, excitement, anxiety—is the most potent cause of epilepsy," which is accounted for by bearing in mind "the profoundly disturbing effect of alarm on the nervous system, deranging as it does almost every function of the nervous system." Persons with predispositions to nervous disorders may pass with safety through the period of adolescence so long as their circumstances provide opportunities for healthy occupation with no undue emotional strain. But let the former be lacking, and the latter danger is always present. The hidden weakness develops, and injury more or less permanent follows. There is hardly a qualified medical authority in the country who would deny the truth of what has been said, although many do not care to speak out in relation to religious matters. But all would doubtless agree with Dr. Mercier that "every revival is attended by its crop of cases of insanity, which are the more numerous as the revival is more fervent and long continued."[161]
Something must be said on the moral character of