ing that the consciousness of moral conflict seems to me only a rare and occasional ingredient in religion, and that these emotional experiences generally follow the religious attitude rather than help to engender it. In the religious life at least the emotions do not seem to any great extent to be influenced by the subconscious. They are provoked and sustained by definite conceptions of gods and goddesses, definite beliefs about life and the future, or by the images, ritual, music, hymns, etc., used in the cult. There is nothing specific in the emotions. They are the ordinary human emotions of joy, sorrow, hope, fear, reverence, love, etc., and, in proportion to the intensity or vividness with which the believer realizes or visualizes his beliefs, they arise as spontaneously as do the emotions of a young mother in regard to her first child.
Hence, although there is a very common practice of regarding this emotional life of the believer as his "religious life" in a special sense, you have only to consider it to see that it contains nothing specifically religious except the ideas or objects to which the emotions refer. It is only in the exceptional cases, which I study in the next chapter, that psychological analysis may discover points of special interest. A nun's love of Jesus, for instance, or a young monk's love of Mary may very well have a strong subconscious sexual coloring. In the overwhelming majority of believers the emotions are normal and have no specific religious or sexual meaning. What requires explanation, in other words, is the belief. Given the belief,
