out faith) confronts pain, loss, and death with a demand for the "damping of desire." The twice-born type of religious experience, on the other hand, asserts the goodness of being in the very teeth of suffering and evil. Black despair and alienation, James notes—the feelings that the world has become "unhomelike"—often become the prelude to conversion. The awareness of "radical evil," fear and trembling, and a bitter alienation from a God who allows evil and suffering to flourish thus underlie the spiritual intoxication that comes with "yielding" and "self-surrender." The experience of the twice-born is more painful but emotionally deeper than that of their counterparts, because it is informed by the "iron of melancholy." For this reason, religions that stress the importance of instantaneous conversion—a piety of "conquest," as Horace Bushnell reproachfully put it in his plea for "Christian nurture"—follow a "profounder spiritual instinct." Conversion confronts despair head-on and shakes those who experience it to the depths of their being, in a way that Bushnell's piety of love and "growth," centering on ritual and religious education, does not.

In the chapters on sainthood that follow his analysis of conversion, James presents sainthood as the highest type of the "strenuous life." The "general optimism and healthy-mindedness of liberal Protestant circles today," he notes, "make mortification for mortification's sake repugnant to us." James admits that great "vitality of soul" often finds "poor employment" in the lives of saints—endless fasting and prayer, exposure of the person to all sorts of unnecessary ordeals, renunciation not only of wealth and sensual gratification but of every conceivable amenity and human interest. Notwithstanding the narrow forms in which it often expresses itself, however, saintly asceticism, James thinks, gives expression to the "belief that there is an element of real wrongness in this world, which is neither to be ignored nor evaded, but which must be squarely met and overcome by an appeal to the soul's heroic resources, and neutralized and cleansed away by suffering." The "ultra-optimistic form of the once-born philosophy" tries to deal with evil by ignoring it, whereas the twice-born philosophy holds the "element of evil in solution" and is therefore "wider and completer." It represents a "higher synthesis into which healthy-mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine."

The inner assurance that comes with conversion, however poorly employed in saints, overrides everyday inertia and "inhibitions," as James

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