that peculiar manifestation of it which my companions seemed to have
experienced. I felt not a little twinge of conscience in assuming so
much, but I could not consent to prolong my mother's suspense and
grave concern at the exclusion of one of her children from the fold of
grace. I put down the doubts, accepted the conversion as logical
and real, and went forward with the others. I remember that at
the relation of our "experience" which followed as a rite on the
presentation of the convert for membership of the church, I was
the only one who told it calmly and audibly, all the others being
inaudible from their excitement and timidity, so that the presiding
elder was obliged to repeat to the audience what they said in his ear,
trembling, weeping with the emotion of the event. I felt as if I were
a hypocrite, and only the thought of my mother's satisfaction gave
me the courage to go through the ceremony. We were baptized, my
companions and I, in the little river in midwinter, after a partial
thaw, the blocks of ice floating by us in the water.

I must have been about ten or eleven when I went through this
experience, and I never got rid of the feeling of a certain unreality
in the whole transaction, but on the other hand I had the same feeling
of unreality in the system of theology which led to it. I tried to do
my best to carry out the line of spiritual duties imposed upon me. I
made no question that I was a bad boy, but the conception of total
depravity in the theological sense never gained a hold on me, and once
inside the church there seemed to be a certain safeguard thrown over
me. The sense of _ecstasy_ (which my Uncle William had experienced in
his religious relation, the "power" of the revivalists) I have since
known in conditions of extraordinary mental exaltation, and understand
it as a mental phenomenon, as the momentary extension of the
consciousness of the individual beyond the limitations of the bodily