faith and right relations toward God and man, becomes his. From man's side obedience is the great factor in regeneration, and is equally applicable to all temperaments and all individuals; from God's side, with the surrender of the personal will, comes the inner spirit so necessary to perfect service.

The point of greatest hope for the social reformer lies in the fact that regeneration in its truest and widest sense finds a place in the physical history of every individual. This has been shown by the investigation of President Hall and his students of the physical place of conversion in the normal life. With adolescence comes the entrance of the individual into a field of moral and social responsibility, and the life that is wisely directed need never be divorced from the pursuit of correct ideals. Conversion is here the willing recognition and response to these larger demands which come to be made upon the individual. Says President Hyde:*

Right and wrong are relations. Right is the recognition that there is something greater and higher than ourselves which we recognize and address and obey in every act of conscious and deliberate rectitude. . . . Every wrong act, on the contrary, is an attempt to deny that there is any system of relations larger and worthier than myself. . . . Conversion is a normal transition from a life centered in a little physical environment into which the individual is born to a life that is responsive to a larger environment of social obligations. . . . The change tends to correspond physically with the period of greatest bodily growth; physiologically with the advent of puberty; psychologically with the ramification of nervous tissue and the ability to grasp general ideas; socially with the emancipation from dependence upon parental authority and the entrance into wider personal relations.

Professor Starbuckt describes regeneration in two aspects: First, "The person emerges from a smaller limited world of existence into a larger world of being." Second, "In its other aspect conversion is the surrender of the personal will to be guided by the larger forces of which it is a part." These definitions of regeneration, while not sufficiently explicit as to the spiritual element involved, yet show how naturally at the period of adolescence comes the recognition of the larger

*God's Education of Man.

↑ The Psychology of Religion.

world and the larger life about it, and with the recognition an impulse to conform one's life to the larger order of things. That this experience of need for adaptation to larger social and religious demands of a new life is felt even among the rudest savages is shown by Mr. Daniels* in his article on "The New Life." Here is shown that the advent of puberty and the new social adjustment is recognized among both sexes by the strictest religious ceremonies and extreme tests of fitness for social duty. Unfortunately, we allow these adolescent impulses to die, or by our neglect to teach the gospel of social duty the religious life narrows itself down to a routine of self-salvation and a conforming of itself to standards which it finds about it. The man has been regenerated to Christ obedience, but has not been taught what that obedience is.

Yet, with all its misapplications and the failure of the Church to understand, here lies the supreme factor of social progress; adequate as the introducer of that individuality generally recognized as necessary to progress; adequate because of its universal applicability to all men, whatever their tastes, temperaments, or education. It is conducive to the highest hope to learn that there are periods in every life when within the heart of the individual these better ideals lie, seeking expression and needing only wise and sympathetic direction and the touch of the Master's spirit to make them burst forth into bloom.

"The city of God" has been the dearest dream of the race since before the days when the patriarchs counted themselves "as pilgrims" looking for the "city which was to come"-a city constructed not by human skill, whose government was something better than that imposed by a selfish and sinful age, whose social ideals were something better than their dreams, whose "builder and maker was God." The idea seems to be with every son of man, however distorted it may become. The Jews looked for it as something which would be superimposed from without, and not as something which must arise from regenerated individual hearts, and Jesus rebuked

* American Journal of Psychology, vol. vi, No. 1.

them. The Christian Church has warped the truth until it seems to have but an individual and selfish end. But the idea is there. The impulse for that perfect condition, the dream of the perfect state, is the heritage of all; this not in the direction of an abstract social good, but in the impulse to conform one's own life to the highest social and Christian ideal.

Knowing that regeneration is a force connected with the need and even with the physical development of every individual, knowing it to be the ultimate social force, the Church should be the supreme power in coming social progress. In spite of the dreams of the worldly-wise, the Church is the only organization which can lead to the ultimate triumph of the social ideal, because all true progress must begin with the regeneration of the individual. The Church must learn, however, to make her appeal such as will commend itself to the highest conviction of all men, of every temperament. She must practice the altruistic spirit and teach it. She must think less of salvation for selfish ends in another life, and more of salvation to brotherly love and social responsibility in this life. She must distinguish between regeneration and its phenomena, demanding not adherence to a set feeling or experience, but recognizing the regenerated man, wherever he may be, in him who seeks and obeys the Christ spirit and ideals. She must speak not for a single class, high or low, but she must be alive with interest at every point where she can assist men to social realization. With the adoption of a sane view of regeneration, and a recognition of its true significance for human life, the Church will move onward to new power. She will bring at last the fulfillment of that kingdom foretold by Jesus Christ, as humanity, catching the inspiration of her renewed spirit, swings into line for the new era of human attainment.

Ralph I Hewelling.

ART. VIII.-JOHN WESLEY'S CONVERSION.

WESLEY'S greatness was due to his capacity for God. His supreme service to the Anglo-Saxon peoples was due to the fact that the most self-poised man of the modern world became the most God-centered man of the modern Church. No conversion better illustrates the gradual evolution of the Christian life and the impossibility of subjecting it to mechanical and legal tests, the relation of the natural to the supernatural and the interpretation of the human by the divine, the importance of salvation by grace through faith and the line of the Forward Movement for the twentieth century, than does the story of John Wesley's struggle into the Christian life. No Church father or theologian is so modern as John Wesley, save only Paul and John.

The conflicting views as to the date of Mr. Wesley's conversion are in part due to the fact that the man who guided the greatest emotional movement since the Reformation was a man whose emotional nature was originally weaker than Darwin's, and was never nourished into a normal and healthy life. So wholly a child of reason was Wesley in his boyhood that when asked at the table if he would have certain food he would often reply, "I will think of it," and later take or reject the food according to the reason then dominant in his mind. His unfortunate courtships and his still more unfortunate married life show that his emotional nature never reached the stage of development where it became the safe supplement to bare reason in the guidance of his conduct. Wesley's service to mankind is due to the fact that the greatest rationalist of his age became the strongest believer in the supernatural and like a prophet of old recognized the presence of God in the daily life around him; that the most methodical man of his age guided to practical issues the most turbulent religious movement of modern times; that the classicist in religion molded the most romantic manifestation of Protestantism.

Three dates are named for John Wesley's conversion: (1) Infancy, (2) twenty-two, (3) thirty-five. The difficulty in using Wesley's own testimony as to the date of his conversion is due to the fact that his views upon the subject changed and Wesley was sincere enough to say at each period of his life exactly what he believed at that time. Undoubtedly during his childhood he believed that he was a Christian. When he was a student at the Charterhouse and at Oxford he hoped he was a Christian and his Journal states the grounds on which he based that hope. Tyerman and several other biographers think that Wesley was converted at twenty-two, when he accepted the call to the ministry; and there is at least one expression in Wesley's Journal which gives color to that view. It is certain that the experience at twenty-two marks a crisis in his life. After Wesley's striking experience at Aldersgate Chapel, at thirty-five years of age, he undoubtedly believed that he had not been a Christian until that period. Indeed, the Journal gives positive proof that seven months after the Aldersgate experience Wesley believed that he was still an unsaved man. When Wesley published his Journal, in advanced life, he allowed the record to stand as he had written it. But he added notes to the Journal expressing doubts of its statements, and published a sermon in which he drew a distinction between a servant of God and a child of God, and maintained that at least he was a servant of God previous to the Aldersgate experience. Whether in his mature judgment Wesley placed the beginning of his Christian life at twentytwo, or dated it back to his childhood, is not settled; although I think Wesley's final testimony favors the childhood date. As Wesley's views changed and the record is conflicting, let us analyze his statements, compare them with such other facts as may be known, and thus attempt to discover the beginning and the progress of his Christian life.

I. Wesley's Childhood Piety.-The religious instruction of the Wesley children began by each child being taught the Lord's Prayer as soon as it could pronounce the words, and being trained to repeat the prayer morning and evening. In