Archive image from page 468 of Discovery Discovery discovery0102londuoft Year: DISCOVERY 71 minutes while he went inside a church. M. Ratis- bonne entered the church himself to look at it while he was waiting. Suddenly he passed through an experience he was unable afterwards to describe, in which he saw a vision of the Virgin. His friend found him prostrate on the ground, weeping. He felt the most ardent joy in the bottom of his soul. He asked for a priest. He felt that a bandage had fallen from his eyes, and he had acquired a knowledge and a faith of the truth, of which he could give no ac
Archive image from page 468 of Discovery Discovery discovery0102londuoft Year: DISCOVERY 71 minutes while he went inside a church. M. Ratis- bonne entered the church himself to look at it while he was waiting. Suddenly he passed through an experience he was unable afterwards to describe, in which he saw a vision of the Virgin. His friend found him prostrate on the ground, weeping. He felt the most ardent joy in the bottom of his soul. He asked for a priest. He felt that a bandage had fallen from his eyes, and he had acquired a knowledge and a faith of the truth, of which he could give no account. This account shows the characteristic feature of suddenness which makes conversion such a striking mental event. Modern psychology explains such suddenness as due to the fact that the mental processes which resulted in the conversion were unconscious. We must suppose that, if we could have examined the unconscious mind of the convert before the event, we would have found that he had already begun to believe in Christianity, but that the change was repressed i)ecause of its conflict with the feelings and sym- pathies of his earlier life. The moment of the con- version was the moment when this repressed conviction became strong enough to overthrow the resistance to it, so that for the first time it became present to con- sciousness. Such unconscious processes, though they are banished from the conscious mind, can express themselves in dreams. The violently emotional dream which M. Ratisbonne had dreamed during the previous night shows that his unconscious mind was seriously occupied with the question of Christianity, although his conscious mind was not. His anti- pathy to priests may also be an indication of uncon- scious leanings towards Christianity. A violent and unreasonable prejudice against something is often a method by which the mind compensates for an imconscioui attraction towards it. It is typical of the results of conversion that M. Ratisbonne felt that he had
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