For three hours he sat there drinking steadily, with his watch before
him. At half-past ten he rang the bell, paid his bill, came home, and
cut his throat.
For a quarter of a century people had been calling that man a "reformed
character." His character had not reformed one jot. The craving for
drink had never died. For twenty-six years he had, being a great man,
held it gripped by the throat. When all things became a matter of
indifference to him, he loosened his grasp, and the evil instinct rose up
within him as strong on the day he died as on the day he forced it down.
That is all a man can do, pray for strength to crush down the evil that
is in him, and to keep it held down day after day. I never hear washy
talk about "changed characters" and "reformed natures" but I think of a
sermon I once heard at a Wesleyan revivalist meeting in the Black
Country.
"Ah! my friends, we've all of us got the devil inside us. I've got him,
you've got him," cried the preacher--he was an old man, with long white
hair and beard, and wild, fighting eyes. Most of the preachers who came
"reviving," as it was called, through that district, had those eyes. Some
of them needed "reviving" themselves, in quite another sense, before they
got clear out of it. I am speaking now of more than thirty years ago.
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