This stimulus and this education, in normal cases, are given by tradition; that is to say, by religious belief and practice.

Or they may come from the countless minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes to us, and which few of us have the subtlety to analyze.

If these suggestions of tradition or environment are met by resistance, either of the moral or intellectual order, whilst yet the deep instinct for full life remains unsatisfied, the result is an inner conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule, this is only resolved and harmony achieved through the crisis of conversion, breaking down resistances, liberating emotion and reconciling inner craving with outer stimulus.

There is, however, nothing spiritual in the conversion process itself.

It has its parallel in other drastic readjustments to other levels of life; and is merely a method by which selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve the union of feeling, thought, and will necessary to stability.
Now we have behind us and within us all humanity's funded instinct for the Divine, all the racial habits and traditions of response to the Divine.