In the course of fourteen days, I remember, the
word "salvation" did not pass his lips and I could have prayed as good
a prayer as he prayed any night as we knelt together. The time came,
indeed, when I seriously considered making him the object of special
prayer on the sly, only William was so really good I was ashamed to
show this lack of confidence in him to the Lord.

Meanwhile the Sabbath in June, when the protracted meeting usually
began, approached, and I knew if things did not change it would be a
flat failure. For William was in a blue funk spiritually.

"I cannot think what is the matter with me," he complained to me late
one afternoon as we sat on the parsonage steps waiting for the prayer
meeting bell to ring.

"You have backslid, William. That is what is the matter with you! You
listened to the voice of Horace Pendleton till you cannot hear the
voice of God. You no longer have the single eye. It has been bunged
up, put out!"

That was the first and last sermon I ever preached to William. It was
a short one, but it brought him forward for prayers, so to speak, and
for the next few days we had a terrible time at the parsonage. He was
an honest man, and he was not slow to recognize his condition once it
was pointed out to him.

It is not so bad to lose the "witness of the Spirit," because you can
still believe in God, and presently the witness is there again, but
when you begin to read books that curtail the divinity of Jesus Christ
and make your Heavenly Father just a natural force in the Universe,
when you bud and blossom into rationalism, there is a good deal of
mischief to pay. I do not say that Pendleton went this far, but the
books he read and loaned to William did, and they unconsciously had a
profounder effect upon William than they had on Pendleton, because
William really had a soul. (I am not saying Pendleton did not have,
you understand; I am an agnostic on that subject.) But to have a soul
and to be without an immediate Almighty is to experience a frightful
tragedy. If a man never recognizes this diviner part of himself, he
may live and die in the comfort or discomfort of any other mere
creature. But once you realize your own immortality (I make a
distinction here between the self-consciousness of immortality and the
loud preaching of it that a man may do just from biblical hearsay), you
are a lonesome waif in a bad storm. This was William's fix. He was
exposed, all at once, to