One day as he was in his seat in the lower house, in the midst of the business of the hour, there came to him a conviction that God—­the God in whom he did not believe, whose existence he could keenly disprove—­God was right there above his head thinking about him, and displeased at the way he was behaving towards Him.  And he said to himself:  “this is ridiculous, absurd.  I’ve been working too hard; confined too closely; my mind is getting morbid.  I’ll go out, and get some fresh air, and shake myself.”  And so he did.  But the conviction only deepened and intensified.  Day by day it grew.  And that went on for weeks, into the fourth month as I recall his words.  Then he planned to return home to attend to some business matters, and to attend to some preliminaries for securing the nomination for the governorship of his state.  And as I understand he was in a fair way to securing the nomination, so far as one can judge of such matters.  And his party is the dominant party in the state.  A nomination for governor by his party has usually been followed by election.

He reached his home and had hardly gotten there before he found that his wife and two others had entered into a holy compact of prayer for his conversion, and had been so praying for some months.  Instantly he thought of his peculiar unwelcome Washington experience, and became intensely interested.  But not wishing them to know of his interest, he asked carelessly when “this thing began.”  His wife told him the day.  He did some quick mental figuring, and he said to me, “I knew almost instantly that the day she named fitted into the calendar with the coming of that conviction or impression about God’s presence.”

He was greatly startled.  He wanted to be thoroughly honest in all his thinking.  And he said he knew that if a single fact of that sort could be established, of prayer producing such results, it carried the whole Christian scheme of belief with it.  And he did some stiff fighting within.  Had he been wrong all those years?  He sifted the matter back and forth as a lawyer would the evidence in any case.  And he said to me, “As an honest man I was compelled to admit the facts, and I believe I might have been led to Christ that very night.”

A few nights later he knelt at the altar in the Methodist meeting-house in his home town and surrendered his strong will to God.  Then the early conviction of his boyhood days came back.  He was to preach the gospel.  And like Saul of old, he utterly changed his life, and has been preaching the gospel with power ever since.

Then I was intensely fascinated in getting the other side, the praying-side of the story.  His wife had been a Christian for years, since before their marriage.  But in some meetings in the home church she was led into a new, a full surrender to Jesus Christ as Master, and had experienced a new consciousness of the Holy Spirit’s presence and power.  Almost at once came a new intense desire for her husband’s conversion.  The compact of three was agreed upon, of daily prayer for him until the change came.