was sung.  At its close, a man rose from his seat and entered his protest against the singing of that hymn any more.  It is not true, he said, that the man whom God has converted feels any proneness to wander.  He had had the grace of God in his soul for—­we don’t remember how many years—­and he could testify that the desire to wander from God’s commandments had been wholly removed.  He, therefore, repeated his protest against the use of a hymn containing a sentiment so dishonorable to a truly saved Christian.  As he sat down, a very young man arose and added the weight of his testimony to the assertion of his older Christian brother.  He also, in answer to prayer, as he confidently asserted, had attained unto that higher life which is not only free from sin, but from even the desire to wander from the ways of holiness.

As we looked into and read the faces of these two men, we sighed for what we saw therein, and pitied them for the peril in which they stood.  But our greater concern was for the poor, weak, almost helpless ones we saw around us, and for the effect of this delusive error which had been so needlessly thrown into their minds.  If any of them should rest in the belief that they, too, had, by the grace of God, been wholly set free from the bondage of sin; that the appetite for drink and the lust of all evil had been extinguished, and their proneness to wander from God taken away in simple answer to prayer, then would their danger, we felt, be so imminent as to leave but little room for hope of their standing in the new life.  A stumbling-block had been laid in their way over which they must almost surely fall.

We are writing for the help and safety of men for whom there is but little or no hope of rescue from the depths of evil and sensuality into which they have fallen, except in a truly religious life; not a life of mere faith, and sentiment and fancied holiness, but of earnest conflict and daily right living.  A life in which not only intemperance is to be shunned, as a sin against God, but every impure and evil desire of the heart, and every thought and purpose of wrong to the neighbor.  And, believing as we do, that God’s grace and power can only be given to those who will take it as active subjects—­not mere passive recipients—­and by using it as if it were their own, avail themselves of its purifying and regenerating influence, we can do no less than question and reject any doctrine that even seems to give a different impression, as delusive and exceedingly dangerous.

To make Gospel temperance the true power of God unto the salvation of intemperate men, we must have in it, and with it, the Gospel of conflict with evil, the Gospel of daily right living, the Gospel of love to the neighbor and the Gospel of common sense.  And these are coming more and more into the work, which is widening and increasing, and every year adding thousands upon thousands to the number of those who are saved from the curse of drink.