Now comes the point of the story.  At Hadleigh he ‘got converted,’ and from that hour has never touched either drink or drugs.  Moreover, he assured me solemnly that he could 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 me to be a spiritual process, whereas the craving for drink or any other carnal satisfaction was, or appeared to be, a physical weakness of the body.  Therefore, I did not understand how the spiritual conversion could suddenly and permanently affect or remove the physical desire, unless it were by the action of the phenomenon called miracle, which mankind admits doubtfully to have been possible in the dim period of the birth of a religion, but for the most part denies to be possible in these latter days.