when I asked permission of my father to accept the offer of an ex-dancing-master for whom I had been able to do some work in the workshop, to give me preparatory lessons so that I might appear less clumsy on entering the class, I was sternly brought to a sense of the enormity of the matter by my father’s replying, “William!  I would rather see you in your grave than in a dancing-school.”  I could only understand that I had not been lifted by the divine grace from the condition of total depravity in which I had been born, and I knew that the preternatural indication of my redemption, which would be recognized in the descent of the spirit in the form of the revival frenzy, was wanting.  I longed for it, prayed for it, and considered myself forsaken of God because it would not come, but come it never did, and it seemed to me that I was attempting to deceive both my mother and the church when I finally yielded to the current which carried along my young friends, and took the grace for granted, since, as I thought, having asked the special prayers of the elders, men of God, and powerful in influence with Him, I had a right to assume the desired descent of the redeeming light on me, though I had never had 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 sense—­a being snatched away from the body and made to see and feel things not describable in terms of ordinary experience, but in my religious evolution it had no place, then or since.