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.
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