SUDDEN CONVERSIONS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LIX, Issue 18265, 5 December 1922, Page 12

SUDDEN CONVERSIONS.

DEAN INGE'S DOUBTS.

'A STORM OF CRITICISM.

'A pronouncement that sudden .conver*ion to Christianity is rare in the church, made by Dean Inge at the Church Congress, at Sheffield recently, ". evoked a storm of criticism from several speakers. " So far as we can judge," the Dean aaid, " sudden conversion is not an event in every religious life. We have all known men and women whose characters j were beautiful in childhood, and only more beautiful, not different, in later i years. Sometimes we think it hardly fair. ' The Devil has obviously forgotten them. " They are, I suppo.se, the sky-blue I souls of whom William James speaks. They cannot say that in a certain year they were converted." There were others, he said, who thought they were on tho right road, but who had ! left an account open with the world, tho i flesh, and the Devi). They wore glad not i to hive to judge them. (Laughter.) There were, too, the narrow and formal " correct livers," who were neither spiritual nor amiable. He supposed they •were the ninety and nine just persons who needed no repentance, He doubted very much, in fact, whether sudden conversion was a norma! experience at all. He believed it was very rare in the church. Dr. W. Brown, tho Wilde Reader- in Mental Philosophy at Oxford, said he did not agree with Dean Inge's assertion that conversion was not a necessary and essential constituent of religious experience. Conversion meant the turning from the naturalistic to the distinctly religious point of view. "Tho roar of the Dean of St. Paul's has made me quake exceedingly," said the Rev. Spencer Elliott, a Sheffield vicar, amid laughter. " What is this deprecating of the idea of sudden conversion ? We might as well deprecate any idea of sudden mam"fhe Bishop of Chelmsford declared that he would have deemed his life wasted if he had belonged to a ministry which did not produce conversion to God. Dean Inge practically inferred that in the Church of Engjarid'they did not preach that kind of conversion. If that was so alas for the.£liurch of England. (Cheers.) Cheering also greeted the Archbishop of York's remark: "They are doing a great disservice to their fellowmen who would seek to impose any particular time, method or way in which the essential movement of the upwards toyard God is achieved."