no matter how much higher some one else's centre
may be. A small man's salvation will always be a great salvation and
the greatest of all facts FOR HIM, and we should remember this when the
fruits of our ordinary evangelicism look discouraging. Who knows how
much less ideal still the lives of these spiritual grubs and
earthworms, these Crumps and Stigginses, might have been, if such poor
grace as they have received had never touched them at all?[126]

[126] Emerson writes: "When we see a soul whose acts are regal,
graceful and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can
be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel and say: Crump is a better
man, with his grunting resistance to all his native devils." True
enough. Yet Crump may really be the better CRUMP, for his inner
discords and second birth; and your once-born "regal" character though
indeed always better than poor Crump, may fall far short of what he
individually might be had he only some Crump-like capacity for
compunction over his own peculiar diabolisms, graceful and pleasant and
invariably gentlemanly as these may be.

{235} If we roughly arrange human beings in classes, each class
standing for a grade of spiritual excellence, I believe we shall find
natural men and converts both sudden and gradual in all the classes.
The forms which regenerative change effects have, then, no general
spiritual significance, but only a psychological significance. We have
seen how Starbuck's laborious statistical studies tend to assimilate
conversion to ordinary spiritual growth. Another American
psychologist, Prof. George A. Coe,[127] has analyzed the cases of
seventy-seven converts or ex-candidates for conversion, known to him,
and the results strikingly confirm the view that sudden conversion is
connected with the possession of an active subliminal self. Examining
his subjects with reference to their hypnotic sensibility and to such
automatisms as hypnagogic hallucinations, odd impulses, religious
dreams about the time of their conversion, etc., he found these
relatively much more frequent in the group of converts whose
transformation had been "striking," "striking" transformation being
defined as a change which, though not necessarily instantaneous, seems
to the subject of it to be distinctly different from a process of
growth, however rapid."[128] Candidates for conversion at revivals are,
as you know, often disappointed: they experience nothing strik