The Temple, the collection of George Herbert's poetry published shortly after his death in 1633, offers a literary depiction of the lived experience of an individual's relationship with God through life's vicissitudes. Readers of The Temple find in it not the orderly exhortations of praise from a decided convert, but rather, verses that dramatise the fraught and unresolved processes of conversion.1 Herbert himself described The Temple in a letter written to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, as ‘a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master’. Later in this same letter, Herbert advises Ferrar to publish his manuscript only if ‘it may turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul’. If not, Herbert writes, ‘let him burn it’. Thus, Herbert hoped that his artful depiction of an individual's spiritual conflict and struggle with conversion might enable positive spiritual transformation in his readers. Indeed, Herbert's verse was intended to have use, purpose, and power. Without a conversional effect, this poetry, in Herbert's estimation, was worthy only to be kindling for the fire.

According to Herbert, the process of spiritual conversion, of turning the soul towards God, is a long, arduous, and imperfect one. Although Herbert does use the term ‘conversion’ in the Pauline sense of a singular moment of spiritual clarity, an epiphany of sorts when an individual recognises a true and better way and turns towards it, there is in Herbert's poems always the possibility of falling away from such an assured spiritual state of grace. Even when Herbert offers moments of sublime conversion in The Temple, such conversions are never final or absolute. As Helen Wilcox notes in her commentary on ‘The Glance’, ‘the convert's “sweet originall joy”, as Herbert calls it (1. 18), is hardly ever permanently or consistently felt … . [Instead,] the soul suffers “many a bitter storm” even after the first delightful contact with God’. Thus, Herbert's paraphrase of Psalm 23 describes the continual interventions by God, the good shepherd, to turn and return his sheep to the flock: