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.