“I am not pretending to say that I have worked harder, or practised more self-denial, or endured more hardships at any particular time of my life than have those around me; but I do want those who feel any interest in me to understand that faithfulness to God in the discharge of duty and the maintenance of a good conscience have cost me as severe a struggle as they can cost any Salvation Soldier in London, Berlin, Paris, New York, or Tokio to-day.

“One reason for the victory I daily gained from the moment of my conversion was, no doubt, my complete and immediate separation from the godless world.  I turned my back on it.  I gave it up, having made up my mind beforehand that if I did go in for God I would do so with all my might.  Rather than yearning for the world’s pleasures, books, gains, or recreations, I found my new nature leading me to come away from it all.  It had lost all charm for me.  What were all the novels, even those of Sir Walter Scott or Fenimore Cooper, compared with the story of my Saviour?  What were the choicest orators compared with Paul?  What was the hope of money-earning, even with all my desire to help my poor mother and sisters, in comparison with the imperishable wealth of ingathered souls?  I soon began to despise everything the world had to offer me.

“In those days I felt, as I believe many Converts do, that I could willingly and joyfully travel to the ends of the earth for Jesus Christ, and suffer anything imaginable to help the souls of other men.  Jesus Christ had baptised me, according to His eternal promise, with His Spirit and with Fire.

“Yet the surroundings of my early life were all in opposition to this whole-hearted devotion.  No one at first took me by the hand and urged me forward, or gave me any instruction or hint likely to help me in the difficulties I had at once to encounter in my consecration to this service.”

This clear experience and teaching of an absolutely new life, that “eternal life” which Jesus Christ promises to all His true followers, is indispensable to the right understanding of everything in connexion with the career we are recording.  Without such an experience nothing of what follows could have been possible.  With it the continual resistance to every contrary teaching and influence, and the strenuous struggle by all possible means to propagate it are inevitable.

One is amazed at this time of day, to find intelligent men writing as though there were some mysticism, or something quite beyond ordinary understanding, in this theory of conversion, or regeneration.