He finally awakens to his true condition; and through the shame, the anguish, the degradation, and the want that comes upon him he longs for a return of the days when he was a free man.  But hope has almost gone from his life.  It would have been easier for him never to have begun, and easier for him to have stopped before he reached his present condition, but even in his present condition, be it the lowest and the most helpless and hopeless that can be imagined, he has the power to get out of it and be a free man once again.  Let us see.  The desire for drink comes upon him again.  If he entertain the thought, the desire, he is lost again.  His only hope, his only means of escape is this:  the moment, aye, the very instant the thought comes to him, if he will put it out of his mind he will thereby put out the little flame of the match.  If he entertain the thought the little flame will communicate itself until almost before he is aware of it a consuming fire is raging, and then effort is almost useless.  The thought must be banished from the mind the instant it enters; dalliance with it means failure and defeat, or a fight that will be indescribably fiercer than it would be if the thought is ejected at the beginning.

And here we must say a word regarding a certain great law that we may call the “law of indirectness.”  A thought can be put out of the mind easier and more successfully, not by dwelling upon it, not by attempting to put it out directly, but by throwing the mind on to some other object, by putting some other object of thought into the mind.  This may be, for example, the ideal of full and perfect self-mastery, or it may be something of a nature entirely distinct from the thought which presents itself, something to which the mind goes easily and naturally.  This will in time become the absorbing thought in the mind, and the danger is past.  This same course of action repeated, will gradually grow the power of putting more readily out of mind the thought of drink as it presents itself, and will gradually grow the power of putting into the mind those objects of thought one most desires.  The result will be that as time passes the thought of drink will present itself less and less, and when it does present itself it can be put out of the mind more easily each succeeding time, until the time comes when it can be put out without difficulty, and eventually the time will come when the thought will enter the mind no more at all.

Still another case.  You may be more or less of an irritable nature—­naturally, perhaps, provoked easily to anger.  Some one says something or does something that you dislike, and your first impulse is to show resentment and possibly to give way to anger.  In the degree that you allow this resentment to display itself, that you allow yourself to give way to anger, in that degree will it become easier to do the same thing when any cause, even a very slight cause, presents itself.  It will,