I went to Boston to speak in Moody and Sankey’s meeting.  I never once hoped by so doing to be the means of others’ salvation; my sole thought was self and selfish ambition.  Instead of talking at the Moody meeting, I took a drink of liquor, soon got drunk, and so remained for days.  When I came out of the oblivion of that debauch, the agony experienced was terrible.  All the shames, all the burning regrets, all the stinging compunctions of conscience I had known on coming out of such debauches before my conversion were almost as joy compared with the misery which preyed upon my heart then.  I can not describe the hopeless feeling of remorse which came over me.  I lived and moved in a night of misery and no star was in its sky.  In the course of a few days I recovered physically so far as to be able to lecture.  I prayed in secret, long and often, for a return of that peace which comes from God alone, but in vain.  I was justly self-punished.  At the end of four or five weeks I fell again, and this time my degradation was deeper than before.  I would at times console myself with the thought that my suffering had reached the limit of endurance, and at such times new and still keener agonies would rise in my heart, like harpies, to tear me to atoms.

It was at this time that I was committed to the Hospital for the Insane at Indianapolis.  The reader is aware of what took place on my arrival at Indianapolis, after leaving the hospital.  I felt somehow that it was my last spree.  I kept it up until nature could endure no more.  I felt that my stomach was burned up, and that my brain was scalded.  I was crucified from my head to the soles of my feet.  I began to feel sure that this time I would die, and, when dead, go to the hell which seemed to be open to receive me.  July twenty-first I left Indianapolis, and went to Fowler, Indiana, at which place, for five days and nights, I suffered every mental and physical pang that can afflict mortal man.  Day and night I prayed God to be merciful, but no relief came.  The dark hopelessness in which I lay I can not describe.  I felt that I was undeserving of God’s pardon or mercy.  I had wronged myself, and my friends more than myself; I had trampled upon the love of Christ; I had loved myself amiss and lost myself.  The Christian people of Fowler prayed for me; they called a prayer-meeting especially for me, to ask God to have mercy on and save me.  On Wednesday night I went to the regular prayer-meeting, and, with a breaking heart, begged, on bended knee, that God would take compassion on me.  The next day, July twenty-sixth, was the most wretched day I ever passed on earth.  It seemed that whichsoever way I turned, hell’s fiercest fires lapped up around my feet.  There seemed no escape for me.  Like that scorpion girt with flames, flee in any direction I would, I found the misery and suffering increasing.  I resolved to commit suicide, but when just in the act of taking my life the Spirit of God restrained me.