d been taught to despise alcohol as a
beverage and to respect all kinds of womanhood. For three years I
played regularly for Richmond--the best of the London clubs at the
time--and subsequently for Oxford, being put on the team the only term
I was in residence. I also threw the hammer for the hospital in the
united hospitals' sports, winning second place for two years. Indeed,
athletics in some form occupied every moment of my spare time.

It was in my second year, 1885, that returning from an out-patient
case one night, I turned into a large tent erected in a purlieu of
Shadwell, the district to which I happened to have been called. It
proved to be an evangelistic meeting of the then famous Moody and
Sankey. It was so new to me that when a tedious prayer-bore began with
a long oration, I started to leave. Suddenly the leader, whom I
learned afterwards was D.L. Moody, called out to the audience, "Let us
sing a hymn while our brother finishes his prayer." His practicality
interested me, and I stayed the service out. When eventually I left,
it was with a determination either to make religion a real effort to
do as I thought Christ would do in my place as a doctor, or frankly
abandon it. That could only have one issue while I still lived with a
mother like mine. For she had always been my ideal of unselfish love.
So I decided to make the attempt, and later went down to hear the
brothers J.E. and C.T. Studd speak at some subsidiary meeting of the
Moody campaign. They were natural athletes, and I felt that I could
listen to them. I could not have listened to a sensuous-looking man, a
man who was not a master of his own body, any more than I could to a
precentor, who coming to sing the prayers at college chapel
dedication, I saw get drunk on sherry which he abstracted from the
banquet table just before the service. Never shall I forget, at the
meeting of the Studd brothers, the audience being asked to stand up if
they intended to try and follow Christ. It appeared a very sensible
question to me, but I was amazed how hard I found it to stand up. At
last one boy, out of a hundred or more in sailor rig, from an
industrial or reformatory ship on the Thames, suddenly rose. It seemed
to me such a wonderfully courageous act--for I knew perfectly what it
would mean to him--that I immediately found myself on my feet, and
went out feeling that I had crossed the Rubicon, and must do something
to prove it.

[Illustration: OXFORD UNI