to Plainfield, N.J., where he practiced medicine, and was one of the main supports of the church in a community where the sect was large enough to have a constant worship, which it never had in Schenectady.  Here I came under the influence of a beloved brother of my mother, one of the most earnest and humble Christians I have ever known, and here were gathered others of the denomination at a protracted meeting, at which some of my friends of my own age became seriously inclined, and we drifted together into the profession of Christian faith.  But here there was nothing of the ghastly terrors of the great revival agitations.  My uncle was a man of the world, had been all his early life a sailor, and had taken late to what, in his experiences of men and the vicissitudes of life, he considered the only reality, the duty of making known to his fellows the importance of the spiritual life.  To fit himself for the ministry, he taught himself Hebrew and Greek as well as Latin, and many years later was chosen as one of the New Testament revisers for the American revision committee.  But to him the profession of religion was an act of the reason, not of revival excitement, and in his ministrations he shunned carefully all the frenzied exhortation of the revivalists.  Associated with him in the ministry and leading the meetings was another of the Sabbatarian pastors, Elder Estee, a grave and earnest man like my uncle, who inspired me with great confidence.

As I look back from the standpoint of one who reposes in the evolutionary philosophy, in which the accidental and ecstatic disappear, upon this phase of psychology, in which hysteria becomes an element of moral reform, it seems to me worth while to record the experience of one subjected to the forces which were counted as such powerful aids to the spread of Christianity,—­of one either under the influences of the pomp of ceremony, the stimulus of music, the purely sensuous stimulants to devotion,—­or in the crude form of that ecstatic exaltation in which the individual is carried into a supersensuous state, in which perception, reason, and even responsibility to a great extent are, if not suspended, so far made abnormal that analysis becomes impossible.  The term for this latter condition amongst revivalists was “the power,” and it was distinctly a phenomenon sought for as the evidence of divine grace.  The uncle of whom I have spoken had once during his prior religious experience felt the “power,” and described it as an emotion which for the time lifted him above the consideration of his surroundings, and left him subsequently indifferent to that very curious shame which generally accompanies the early yielding to the revivalist urgency of acknowledging the necessity of change of heart,—­a sense of having made one’s self ridiculous, which was, in my own and many other cases in my knowledge, a powerful influence adverse to the “going forward” at the meetings, or being understood to be “religious,”