246 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
but at the organization of emotional dispositions around cer tain ideas, the development and strengthening of common ideals and sentiments, the secondary stage of fusion is desirable. Suppose, for instance, that the preacher desires to teach his congregation, to enlarge and improve their con ception of God. This can not be done by developing a tide of emotion which puts limitations upon the actions of the individual intellects and leads to the uncritical acceptance of the ideas he imparts. The method should be an appeal to their individual rational powers with the aim of produc ing conviction. On the other hand, suppose it is his desire to cultivate the sentiment of loyalty to Christ; then he should strive to develop in connection with their inellectual conception of Christ the appropriate feeling of devotion to him to organize in the minds of his auditors a fixed cor relation of certain emotions with their idea of his character; and this involves, of course, strong and repeated stimulation of the affective side of their natures. But if the emotional tide runs so high as to submerge the intellectual life and drown all definite ideas in its flood, the second purpose as well as the first is wholly defeated. No sentiment is then developed, no ideal is established, but only a thirst is created for wild and senseless emotional intoxication which is dis organizing and debilitating in its effects upon personality. The third stage of psychic fusion should, therefore, always be avoided.
But our division of the process of fusion into three stages is a logical one and does not correspond to the reality, except in a general way. As a matter of fact, while these three stages are in a general way distinguishable, the assembly does not pass as a whole from one into the other. There are in it persons of various degrees of suggestibility. Those of the greatest suggestibility are the first to suffer the arrest of the intellectual processes and lose their individuality, while those who are least suggestible maintain their mental autonomy until the extreme limit of emotional excitement is reached. Children, women (as a rule), persons of limited
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