What is the second birth?

G. Stanley Hall, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

G. Stanley Hall answers

All are born twice — once as individuals and once as representatives of the species.¹ That first birth gives us our animal nature, our private hungers and fears and the long recapitulated heritage of the race compressed into a single body; the second birth is the great reversal, the passage in which the self ceases to be the center of its own universe and the race, the divine, the larger human community, rises to supremacy in its place.

The second birth is not a sudden rupture but the culmination of the whole adolescent decade, the slowest and most comprehensive of growths.¹ Physiology describes it as adolescence; theology names its spiritual potency regeneration and conversion; but these are two aspects of one law, the law that necessitates a change of dynasty and of constitution in the city of Man-soul.²

Every mythology, every initiation rite, every hymn and ceremony of every faith has groped toward this same event — the spring resurrection, dawn vanquishing night, the bursting forth of fountains in the desert, emergence from the womb into a larger and more independent life, rescue from shipwreck, finding a haven in storm.² The very abundance of these figures witnesses to the manifold significance of the change, though each figure is inadequate, often pathetically so, to grasp its full range.³

What makes it a birth rather than merely a development is the pivotal character of the transition: a discernible point where the ego yields to the alter, where self-love merges in resignation and renunciation into love of man.¹ Before it, the individual is the measure; after it, the race is supreme. Henceforth service and self-sacrifice, which seemed at first contradictory of all that had preceded, begin to loom as the ulterior law of life.⁴

Christianity marks the same pivotal point in ethnic adolescence that the individual crisis marks in personal life — where the self-centered soul opens outward into love of God and love of man, which are one and inseparable.¹ Yet consciousness is a very poor witness to what takes place in the abysses of soul-life during this passage.³ The individual feels it as ferment, as tension, as dreams and automatisms and invasions from below the threshold of ordinary awareness; he cannot explain what is working in him, though the curtain sometimes seems to rift or lift a little.

This is why remembered religious experiences are so pitifully fragmentary and often so mistaken as to cause, process, and object — why trivial incidents loom enormous in the mist, and grow in the telling as the years go by.³ The mass collection and tabulation of individual narrations, the method of genetic psychology, is precisely what allows us to order these fragments and read in them the law they imperfectly express.³

The second birth is, in the end, the supreme instance of what the genetic method finds everywhere in the developing soul: that the higher stage does not simply add to what preceded it but reorganizes the whole, subordinating the lower to a new and larger center. The biologic changes of adolescence in the individual have their macrocosmic analogue in the great eras when whole peoples pass through the same reorganization — the dawning of Christianity itself being the ethnic adolescence of the Western world, the racial second birth.²

Sources

1. All are thus born twice, once as individuals and once as representatives of the species... True religion is normally the slowest because the most comprehensive kind of growth, and the entire ephebic decade is not too long and is well spent if altruism or love of all that is divine and human comes to assured supremacy over self before it is ended.

   Adolescence Vol 2

2. all these, every one and countless more, are only efforts which abound in the hymns, theologies, and ceremonies of all faiths to describe some aspect of the law that necessitates this change of dynasty and of constitution in the city of 'Man-soul.'

   Adolescence Vol 2

3. Here, perhaps more than anywhere else, consciousness is a very poor witness to what takes place in the abysses of soul-life. It struggles to reflect, describe, realize what is going on below its threshold and beyond its ken... This is one reason why the remembered religious experiences of individuals are so pitifully fragmentary and puerile, and often so absurdly mistaken as to cause, process, issue, and object.

   Adolescence Vol 2

4. The ulterior law of service and self-sacrifice, which seems at first to be contradictory of all that has preceded, begins to loom up, and the prolonged period of readjustments and subordinations begins. Henceforth the race, not the self, must become supreme.

   Adolescence Vol 2