Chapter 4—Results of Faith Applied to Hopeless Cases

One night I was in the Life Boat mission that we maintained on State street in Chicago. A man in the audience was so drunken that he kept on jumping up trying to say something, and this tended to break up the meeting. I took him by the arm and persuaded him to accompany me upstairs. I tried to impress upon him the importance of becoming delivered from the liquor habit. He said something about being a drunkard for forty years and that it was no use. I felt impressed that the Lord could do something for the poor fellow that I could not. In spite of his objection I succeeded in getting him down on his knees and I earnestly prayed the Lord to deliver this poor man, and told him he must pray. He said he couldn't, he didn't know how. I told him just to ask the Lord to deliver him from the liquor habit and finally he blurted out these very words:FF 41.1

“Lord, If you can do anything for a poor broken-down bum like me, I wish you would. Amen.”FF 42.1

That did not sound like a very remarkable prayer to me, but evidently God saw a bigger prayer in the poor man’s soul for he arose from his knees practically sober.FF 42.2

I took him down again to the mission meeting and intended to see him when it was over but he slipped out unobserved. Six weeks later he came back well dressed and clothed and in his right mind. He wanted to see “the doctor with whiskers,” but I was not there that night. When opportunity came to testify he rose and said that six weeks previous he had come into the mission a drunken outcast; his wife had left him in sheer despair, his employer had discharged him, his tools had been pawned for drink, but the doctor took him up stairs and got him down on his knees to pray and something happened to him: he went out of the mission with a new power in his life.FF 42.3

He hunted up his wife and told her that if she would come back and live with him he would give her no further trouble. He told his employer that if he would help him to get his tools he could keep sober now, and he said from that hour he had no appetite for whisky. In other words, he had gotten some pollen from another world and it had fertilized his soul. That represents what every man needs who is a victim of some enslaving habit. He does not need merely talk, he needs a new impulse, and that from a higher source.FF 42.4

*****

I knew Dick Lane who stole as early as he could remember. He stole from his mother on her deathbed, he stole while over in the State prison. He worked in the kitchen and a farmer came in to sell chickens to them. While he was selling the chickens, Dick Lane wiggled one out of sight and into the oven, and one of the prisoners who saw him do it told the Warden. The farmer insisted that he had brought in twelve chickens, yet there were only eleven to be paid for; but Dick Lane was sharp enough to know something was up and he slipped it out of the oven and into the ash pile and by the time the Warden got around, the chicken wasn't in the oven. Dick said, “You wouldn't think that of me, would you?” So the other prisoner got a reprimand for accusing him falsely.FF 43.1

Dick was lazy. He lay for fourteen days in a dark dungeon with only bread and water every day, and when he had eaten the bread, he would wet his fingers and feel around to see if he could find an extra crumb. But he did that rather than work in the stone quarry.FF 44.1

One night he went into a mission in Chicago and got something. After that he worked for a dollar a day cleaning windows in the Record-Herald building, and that is no snap. Dick Lane was usually on hand at the Life Boat mission and told his story to men who came in. Before his death he had risen until he was in charge of a department in the Record-Herald building.FF 44.2

Can the Lord save crooks? Certainly. Dick Lane said that plenty of times he wanted to be honest, but when he saw money, he couldn't help taking it. After his conversion he had the chance to steal unlimitedly but he didn't do it.FF 44.3

*****

One day in our Chicago medical missionary work a policeman brought to us a man who had been ten days in the gutter and was apparently at the point of death. However, physiological remedies and careful nursing soon wrought a marvelous transformation. I then learned from him that he had stood up in one of the Chicago missions again and again and asked for prayers, and yet had always gone back to drink. I assured him that God was not only willing but anxious to deliver him from his bondage; that he must be manufacturing the chains for his own slavery.FF 45.1

I soon discovered that he had an abnormal appetite for mustard, pepper, fiery spices, condiments, juicy beefsteaks, and tea and coffee, all of which produce a thirst that water cannot satisfy, and really were constantly arousing the awful craving for liquor which was sweeping him from his feet in spite of the prayers of the mission workers, just as certainly as a hot stove would produce blisters on the one who would persist in laying his hands on it.FF 45.2

I advised him to go to our Workingmen’s Home and eat rice, well cooked grains, juicy fruits, refreshing vegetables and nourishing dairy products, and abandon those artificial, thirst-producing foods. He did not seem to appreciate the importance of my advice, but promised, nevertheless, to carry out my suggestions.FF 45.3

For a few days everything went well. He had absolutely no desire for liquor. Then he visited friends on the North side who invited him to dine with them. The meal consisted of pork chops and all those other wretched things that are really the devil’s toboggan slide to the saloon door for all those who have inherited the liquor appetite. He told me afterward that before he had finished the meal the craving for liquor so overpowered him that he would if necessary have walked into the mouth of hell for it to quench his thirst.FF 46.1

He went to the nearest saloon. Then he was ten days in the gutter. The officers of the law again brought him to us. He was so dropsical that his skin had burst in several places, and the fluid was oozing out. To all appearances, he had only a few hours to live; but God, in answer to our prayers, blessed the simple remedies we administered, and in a short time he was practically restored.FF 46.2

Then he told me he had discovered the difference between eating for strength and eating for drunkenness ( Ecclesiastes 10:17), and henceforth would carry out my dietetic advice to the letter.FF 47.1

*****

One of our workers was visiting in one of the toughest places in Chicago. It was in a back alley where a family was living which had five or six children. The father was sick, I presume with tuberculosis, and the frail mother tried to support the family by taking in washings. The worker volunteered to take home with her for a few days the oldest girl, a child of seven or eight years, so as to lighten the burden to that extent. The little girl loved her new friend devotedly; and soon the worker discovered to her amazement that her own hair had become infected with vermin. That worker did not say, “Oh, well, I am cleanly, and of good habits and have a good reputation, what difference does it make if I do harbor a few lice in my hair?” No, indeed! She went after those invaders in dead earnest, and did not rest until she knew that her head was delivered from the last one of them.FF 47.2

You say she showed good sense. Certainly; but I want to remind you that a few sins inside the head are a thousand times worse than a few loathsome bugs on the outside. God will not transplant sin into the next world any more than a sensible housekeeper would want to buy second hand furniture and put in into her own house if she knew it was infected with bedbugs. Sin is a horrible, loathsome thing. It cost the death of God’s own Son to furnish the antitoxin necessary to destroy it. God will never take you or me into heaven unless we give Him a chance to save us from known sin down here. Ask God to make you hate sin as much as you hate bedbugs and other vermin; then He will have a chance to help you get rid of it.FF 48.1

As a physician, I desire to see people delivered from headache, intercostal neuralgia, gastric ulcers, neuritis, rheumatism, and all those other physical torments. But I ten times more desire to see them cured of their sins. If I did not, I might better be a horse doctor; for when we reach the end of the journey we shall realize that to be saved from sin is the most important experience that could possibly come to us in this life.FF 48.2

But sin is a comfortable thing to have. If you talk to a gambler and a poor outcast girl they will say, “I am all right, look out for yourself.” The person isn't sensitive. The man who isn't soaked with sin is sensitive to the progress of it.FF 49.1

Possibly there are some sins that you have been clinging to all this while, that over and over again God has put his finger on, saying, “My child, let Me help you get saved from them;” and perhaps you have said, “Oh, nearly everybody does those things! I prefer to compromise with them and put them under tribute.” Then remember that they will become a snare to you. There is no more sense in your clinging to pet sins because other people do, than there would be in your keeping bedbugs in your bedroom because you knew some of your neighbors who had them.FF 49.2

In the dark corners of our large cities we see the natural results of selling ourselves for naught. Our cities are a perfect cesspool. They are the place into which everything drains. I was never before so much impressed with the absolute necessity of the gospel to break the bondage of sin as when seeking the lost jewels amid all the moral rubbish found in Chicago in those early days, and on the other hand I learned as never before and saw it illustrated by many shining examples that whomsoever the Son sets free is free indeed.FF 49.3

I remember an Irishman who was converted at the Life Boat mission. He prayed and struggled to be delivered from booze, but said his civilization broke down whenever he passed a saloon. He was finally delivered from the appetite and the Lord set him free.FF 50.1

When we see a man who was a terror to his family, with a spirit in him that no prison discipline has been able to subdue, change about and become a meek and peaceful follower of the lowly Nazarene; his children, who before were whipped if they did not steal just so much each day, now clothed and fed; the wife, who before sat in indescribable want and misery, now happy and well,—then we feel assured that some one has been “lifted from the miry clay” and has been set free by the Son of God. To reach these classes, one must go where they are and work for them whole-heartedly.FF 50.2

Once a man had fallen through the ice, and some people were trying to help him out by thrusting a plank at him. It soon became icy so that each time he tried to take hold of it his hand slipped off. Finally he gasped, “For God’s sake give me the warm end of the plank!” And when they thrust him the other end of the plank his hands clung to it and his life was saved. Perhaps you and I are constantly holding out to people the frozen end of the plank. If so, may God help us to reach them the warm end.FF 51.1

I would rather the Master would come and find me hunting for pearls in the moral swamps of our large cities than to find me indifferent to their dangerous condition. I remember several years ago there was a woman drowning in Lake Michigan while two hundred men and boys stood on the wharf any one of whom could have rescued her. One stole her pocketbook and all were criticising the life savers who were trying to reach the spot, but not one of those two hundred attempted to pull her out of the water. I don't wish to be lined up with that crowd in the Judgment.FF 51.2

*****

At our training school on Wabash Avenue I remember an interesting case of a dressmaker who needed rescuing. As she was returning to her home one evening she was suddenly captured by three men, forcibly dragged into a saloon and compelled to swallow some whisky. They did not, however, have opportunity to carry out their evil designs for she succeeded in tearing herself away from them and reaching our training school building, where she fell exhausted on the steps. She was taken into the ward and kept there until her friends could be notified of her whereabouts. The next day she went home, finished some work she had on hand and came back and pled with the matron of the ward to be allowed to remain there for a time. She said, “I have been so impressed with what I have seen here that it seems if I am turned out I shall be eternally lost.” She remained a week and was converted. She had been raised in a Christian family, but felt that she had never experienced a sound conversion until she came here.FF 52.1

There was one little boy in Chicago who did not know who his parents were. That boy was sleeping on the sidewalk and was so dirty you could not tell what he looked like. He and a little girl had been following a woman who seemed to have charge of them. One of our patients ran across him and got the child and brought him home. Some one said, “Oh, that is one of Hulda’s kids.” Hulda was the degenerate woman who was dragging them down to ruin. The boy was placed in a good home and now he is a bright, beautiful young man.FF 53.1

*****

On hearing the singing in the mission one night, a man and woman turned aside. They were going to a cheap theatre, but she heard them singing of Jesus and she said, “I am going in.” The man said, “You are a fool. That is a mission.”FF 53.2

“It doesn't make any difference, I am going in. You can come along if you like.”FF 53.3

So they came in. By and by when the call came to come up front, she said, “I am going forward.” He said, “You have gone stark crazy.”FF 54.1

They were both crooks, but she was converted to Christ that night. She came and saw me from time to time. She said, “I will never give up praying for my husband.” And one night about six years afterward he came in and gave his heart to God. To-day that woman is an earnest missionary. She has brought I suppose at least five hundred people to Christ.FF 54.2

At the World’s Fair in St. Louis, I stepped into a mission where a man was talking to the people and telling how he had been beaten on the head with a brick in Chicago and he had later rented a room of this same woman. She had rooms to rent and always asked the Lord to send people she could help. So she prayed for this roomer and he was converted and became a splendid mission worker and ran a mission on the North side in Chicago.FF 54.3

I could talk to you by the hour of the people helped by this woman; and it all started when she turned aside to hear the song in the mission. It doesn't pay to rush ahead so fast. God had a message for her in the burning bush.FF 54.4

*****

I remember a young man who had been with Lord Wolseley in his famous military expedition into Egypt. Afterwards he became so cursed by the drink evil that when he finally dropped into our Life Boat mission in Chicago he had been drinking steadily for eight days. During that time he had not had his clothes off nor had he sat down to eat a meal.FF 55.1

The strains of the sweet gospel music were wafted into the street through the open door and reached his benumbed brain. Someone invited him in. He thought it would be a chance to at least sit down in a chair and rest.FF 55.2

He accepted the invitation to give his heart to God. The Spirit of God impressed him that he must also give up tobacco, to which he was as much a slave as to liquor. This poor degraded wanderer said, “Yes, Lord, if you will help me I will give it up.” Then he began to pray and a new peace and assurance came into his life.FF 55.3

As he walked out of the mission he threw his pipe and tobacco into the gutter, saying, “That is where you belong.”FF 56.1

He later became a faithful missionary nurse, led many other men to the foot of the Cross, and to-day is a conscientious Christian man, loved and respected by all who know him.FF 56.2

*****

It means something to be a soul-winner. It takes courage to straighten up your own life so the Lord can answer your prayers for others.FF 56.3

When I was converted I had to get something fixed up with an old lady who lived next to us. We had some words and as she was a woman of action as well as words she jabbed a pitchfork into my ankle, and then I said some more things; and it left a bad spirit. When I was converted I had to fix things up with her. I couldn't seek the Lord when I knew I had had a row with the Irish woman. I had a lot of other things to do; I had to see a boy whose eyes I had blackened in school.FF 56.4

These things have to be done before the Lord can answer our prayers and I hope the Lord will save me from ever taking any position that shall result in leading a human soul away from God.FF 56.5

The question is whether there is such a thing as answer to prayer. You know we are living in a very skeptical age, in a very material age. Men are willing to believe in a wireless telegraphy that they can neither see nor hear, they are perfectly willing to believe in the X-ray that can look into their bones and tell that story but are not as ready to believe that God can answer prayer, which is just as real.FF 57.1

I heard Detective Burns tell his wonderful story of finding crooks and he gave as the secret of his success that God was on his side instead of on the side of the crook. In every case sooner or later God compelled the crook to advertise the fact that he was a crook and helped him to catch him. I have thought about that a great deal and believe he had gotten hold of something I sometimes fear some preachers have not grasped any too well.FF 57.2

We had a preacher out here at our sanitarium a while ago whom I asked how he happened to come out here. He said, “Well, my work is so wearing, and particularly praying the pastoral prayer is what broke me up.” I could not quite sympathize with the good brother. The trouble with him was that his pastoral prayer had become formal, and I should think that would become a wearisome thing.FF 57.3

I early had an introduction to this question of prayer. When I was a boy eight years old I lost my jackknife, which was a more serious matter for me than it would have been to lose an automobile now, even if I had one. I asked the Lord to help me find my jackknife and He did and so I got a start as a mere youngster in reference to prayer. In Nebraska in a campmeeting, they asked me to talk to the children and I asked how many of them prayed. Nearly all held up their hands. Then I asked how many expected to get answers to their prayers and then only about half as many held up their hands. That set me to thinking a great deal. Isn't that the way with most grown-up people who profess to be Christians?FF 58.1

I have traveled far and near, have mingled in a confidential way with thousands of people, and I believe there are very few people who have at all gotten out of prayer what they might. They say prayers to God but they don't pray to God. He seems too far off. Those of you who have just stood on the outer edge of that thing I want you to know there is something more for you.FF 58.2