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CHAPTER I
CONVERSION AND GROWTH IN GRACE
THE term ‘Conversion’ is used in many different senses. It
does not always designate a critical reorientation of personality
as a result of which it begins to function in a new way because it
has entered into a new kind of relationship with God and life.
A conversion may be said to occur, for example, when a person
moves from one conception of faith to another: from
Protestantism to Catholicism, or vice versa. Again, it is possible to
experience a conversion that involves the form of the religious
life although no change occurs in the personal attitude towards
the believer’s Church or denomination. During periods of
revival conversions occur wherein religious subjectivity is
replaced by an objective disposition. The centre of emphasis is
transferred to the Church and the sacraments.
If we define faith functionally and see the religious life as a
specific form of action, then it cannot be merely a set of opinions
or an affair əf the emotions. It can be nothing less than the total
expression of a personality in conscious relationship with God.
And if it is that and no less, then conversion must be an
experience in which is involved the individual’s whole religious
function: the conscious life’s religious beginning.
What is meant, then, by a religious conversion in this sense?
Few people have examined the problem of religious conversion
more carefully than William James,! who writes: ‘To become
converted, born again, to receive Grace, all these are
expressions which designate the sudden or gradual process,
through which a hitherto sundered personality is united,
experiences peace of conscience and happiness as a result of its
firmer grasp of the religious realities.” The process thus described
has definite consequences for the life of the person who
undergoes it because it marks a clear boundary between the past and
the present.
If James’s definition of conversion is correct, it becomes
difficult to understand some of the senses in which the term is
used in religious literature, even when it is applied to the inner
1 The Varieties of Religious Experience, New York, 1911.
199
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