uld go into a chemist's shop or a bar
with money in his pocket without feeling the slightest desire to
indulge in such stimulants. He said that after his conversion, he had
a 'terrible fight' with his old habits, the physical results of their
discontinuance being most painful. Subsequently, however, and by
degrees, the craving left him entirely, I asked him to what he
attributed this extraordinary cure. He replied:--

'To the power of God. If I trusted in my own strength I should
certainly fail, but the power of God keeps me from being overcome.'

Now these are only two out of a number of cases that I have seen
myself, in which a similar explanation of his cure has been given to
me by the person cured, and I would like to ask the unprejudiced and
open-minded reader how he explains them. Personally I cannot explain
them except upon an hypothesis which, as a practical person, I confess
I hesitate to adopt. I mean that of a direct interposition from above,
or of the working of something so unrecognized or so undefined in the
nature of man (which it will be remembered the old Egyptians, a very
wise people, divided into many component parts, whereof we have now
lost count), that it may be designated an innate superior power or
principle, brought into action by faith or 'suggestion.'

That these people who have been the slaves of, or possessed by certain
gross and palpable vices, of which drink is only one, are truly and
totally changed, there can be no question. To that I am able to bear
witness. The demoniacs of New Testament history cannot have been more
transformed; and I know of no stranger experience than to listen to
such men, as I have times and again, speaking of their past selves as
entities cast off and gone, and of their present selves as new
creatures. It is, indeed, one that throws a fresh light upon certain
difficult passages in the Epistles of St. Paul, and even upon the
darker sayings of the Master of mankind Himself. They do, in truth,
seem to have been 'born again.' But this is a line of thought that I
will not attempt to follow; it lies outside my sphere and the scope of
these pages.

After the Officer who used to consume four bottles of whisky a day,
and is now in charge of the Salvation Army work in Greenock, had left
the room, I propounded these problems to Lieut.-Colonel Jolliffe and
the Brigadier, as I had done previously to Commissioner Sturgess. I
pointed out that religious conversion seemed to