Conversion

Conversion, a theological term applied to the conscious change of heart prompting the repentant sinner to a new life, which is part of the process of regeneration. Popularly the name means the sensible experience of this, and obviously there will be as much variety in its intensity and immediateness in individual cases as there was in their temperaments and antecedent spiritual conditions. The man who really knows something of the human heart will no more sneer at the grotesque expression of his experience from the lips of an awakened collier than he will smile at its intensity in the pages of a St Augustine or a Bunyan.—The word is applied also to a change of religion or of creed, as that of John Henry Newman from the Anglican to the Roman Catholic Church. By those who disapprove the change, such a conversion is called perversion.