Conversion: A Radical Change

As the scientist goes on to remark: ‘A good deal of the important variation in both plants and animals is not the variation of a minute part or confined to one organ, but has really an inner physiological basis, and may be a variation of a whole organic system or of a whole tissue expressing itself at several points and in several shapes.’ Such is the variation known as conversion; not the refinement of a minute part of the personality, or of any one organ, but an ennoblement of the whole organic moral system.

Conversion and Reformation The psalmist’s prayer: ‘Wash me throughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin,’ is answered in the completed conversion of the penitent believer. In his deepest thought and purpose he awakes to the love of all righteousness, the hatred of whatever has the taint of sin. This is what Christian conversion means—that holiness becomes organic. Ray Lankester tells us that in the variation of plants and animals a variation in some related part of an organism may strike the eye of the onlooker as of the greatest consequence, when in fact the decisive change in the character of the organism is ‘an ob- scure change in an unseen group of cells,’ easily overlooked.

So an act of reform in a man’s life in some particular habit or direc- tion may be very prominent and excite special attention; but the real. thing, that of per- manent value, is the change that takes place in the hidden places of the heart, when, in the language of our Lord, a man is ‘born again.’