Soul-surgery : some thoughts on incisive personal work

,1 ■■'■^§^m'-^''m^^

L»SURGERY

H. A. WALTER, M. A.

LIBRARY OF THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

PRINCETON. N. J.

PRESENTED BY

Mrs. Huston Dixon

BV 4487 .09 W35 1919

Walter, Howard Arnold,

1883-

1918.

Soul-surgery

JT

r-9>'<f^.^ tO-C-'T'grt «^i*^^^

Howard Arnold Walter, M. A.

SOUL-SURGERY

Some Thoughts on Incisive
Personal Work

/

BY

H. A. WALTER, M. A.

LITERARY SECRETARY. NATIONAL COUNCIL,

YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATIONS

OF INDIA AND CEYLON

ASSOCIATION PRESS

PUBLICATION DEPARTMENT OF THE NATIONAL

COUNCIL Y.M.C:A. OF INDIA AND CEYLON

5 RUSSELL STREET. CALCUTTA

19 19

RECORD PRESS

NEW BRITAIN^ CONN
1921

CONTENTS

Page
Meimories of Howard Arnold Walter 7

Foreword , 16

The Importance oe Personal Evangelism ... 19

Method of Personal Evangelism 36

1. Confidence 49

2. Confession 66

3. Conviction 97

4. Conversion 117

5. Conservation 131

PREFACE

This little book was published as a series of ar-
ticles in the Indian Witness with special reference to
the Evangelistic Campaign now going on in the Indian
Church. It met with such a wide appreciation that it
was decided to publish it in book form as soon as
possible, so that it might be permanently useful to all
Christians seeking to do a more intensive and fruitful
personal work. Just after receiving the manuscript
from Howard Walter we learnt the news that he had
been called away to the higher, nobler tasks of the
world beyond. We are very grateful to the Editor
of the Indian Witness for his kindness in permitting
the publication.

H. A. P.

/IDemories ot
IHowarD arnolC) Malter *

CHARGES D. THOMPSON.

"Where do you go with a face so bright?
/ seek the Bourne of the Fadeless Light.
And what if the end be death at last?
Not death, hut life, with the shadow past.
Who are you, Spirit, with heart so true?
/ was once your dream, and I might be — you."

I think I met Howard Walter for the first time at
the Northfield Student Conference in 1901, the sum-
mer before we entered college. We were in the same
eating-club part of our Freshman year. During the
first two years he roomed with Miner Rogers, who
was head of the Student Volunteer band and leader
of a mission study class which we both attended, and
who was afterward killed in the massacres at Adana,
Turkey, while trying to put out a fire on the roof of
the girls' school. In junior year we were messmates
the whole year, and members of an honour course
in composition, and 1 remember many a talk late into
the night, and exchanges of confidences. But it was

* Reprinted from the Indian Witness with the kind per-
mission of the Editor.

8 SOUL - SURGERY

not until senior year that I really came to know him.
We both roomed in Blair Hall, where I had to pass
his room going to and from classes. He had a lovely
single room, conveniently situated to watch the crowds
coming from the station, and there I learned from
his book-shelves that there were more famous poets
than I had ever heard of before. For some time a
group of intimate friends met for prayer every day
in his room. For several months that year he never
went to bed without having written a poem. He was
editor-in-chief of the Nassau Literary Magazine, one
of the editors of the Princeton Tiger, and winner
of the Baird Oratorical Contest, which was the
greatest literary honour in the college, and for which
only those who had stood highest in English through-
out their college courses could compete. I re-
member especially our canoe rides up the river and
through the swamps, and one long walk through a
rocky glen, when he told me that he had no less
than eight friends to whom he would not be
afraid to tell anything in his life, and I realized for
the first time something of his power for friendship.
Only that year, too, did I learn of the weakness of
his heart, which he never told to any but his best

so UL - SURGERY 9

friends, and of the courage which is shown in the Hnes
I have quoted above from his poem on "Optimism" —
a courage by which he faced death daily, and yet had
faith and strength to accomplish all that he did, know-
ing himself always near *'the Bourne of the Fadeless
Light."

At the Northfield Student Conference of 1905,
just after we graduated, and the last time we were
ever all together, there were seven of our class,
Princeton, 1905, who either planned to go or eventu-
ally did go to the foreign field as missionaries. One
is in the Princeton work in Peking, one went to
Turkey, and two to India, a fifth spent some time in
both India and South America, one was unable to go
because of ill health, and Norman Thomas, who became
a missionary to foreigners in America, and has been
the chairman of the committee on immigration of the
New York Federation of Churches. For many years
this group of men kept up a round-robin letter, and in
this letter Howard was the leading spirit. For years,
each day of the week was assigned for prayer for one
of the group, and I think none of us had any greater
time of inspiration than when these letters came
around.

lo SOUL - SURGURY

The first year out of college was spent at Hartford
Theological Seminary, and the next year he went to
Japan for a year to teach English in Waseda Universi-
ty, Tokio, under the auspices of the Y.M.C.A. It was
during this year in Japan that he wrote "My Creed,"
which is probably his best known poem. One day
a line or two occurred to him, on an inspiration from
his mother and he sat down and completed the whole
poem in some fifteen minutes. It has several times
been set to music specially composed for it, and has
appeared in several collections of hymns, and has been
used extensively on gift-cards, placards, and Christmas
cards. He Hved in the most intimate contact with
the Japanese students, going with them on one long
trip by sea to the outlying islands, and on many
tramps in the mountains. It was here that he formed
the basis of the personal work which was afterwards
one of the features of his work.

Returning to Hartford, he became a leader in all
the activities of the Theological Seminary, and on
graduating and being ordained, in 1909, he was at
once made assistant pastor of the Aslyum Hill Con-
gregational Church, which is the largest church in
Hartford. During his pastorate he married Miss

SOUL- SURGERY n

Marguerite Darlington, niece of Bishop Darlington.
His first daughter, Marion, was born in Hartford,
Ruth in India, and his son Henry during his furlough
in America. Three years later he was unanimously
asked to become the pastor of this large church, but
he decided to accept the offer of the Young Men's
Christian Association to become a special literary
secretary set apart for the study of Muhammadanism,
as Mr. Farquhar was already for Hinduism. In spite
of the knowledge of what it might involve, he fear-
lessly decided for India, and, in 1912, after beginning
the study of Arabic and Urdu in America, he came
out to take up the work to which his life was dedicated
from that time onward. A collection of nearly a
hundred of his poems was published, under the title
My Creed and Other Poems, the same year. He des-
cribes them truly as ''songs of faith and love and
friendship."

After spending the winter in the language school
at Lucknow, he was sent to Lahore, where he began
at once at first hand his studies into Muhammadan
life and customs. He was also given charge of the
Y.M.C.A. hostel for non-Christian students. Realiz-
ing that the problems of Indian students might be

12 SOUL - SURGBRY

different from those of American or Japanese students,
he set out characteristically to find out what was al-
ready known about personal work in India. He
addressed questionaires to a large number of personal
workers in India and compiled their answers in a
book which was published under the title "Handbook
of Work among Students Enquirers in India." He also
became secretary of the ''Missionaries to Muslims
League." On the steamer from Marseilles to Bombay,
and during the happy Christmas and New Year's days
spent in the Walters' home, the friendship of our col-
lege days was renewed and redoubled. Of the ways
in which he helped me personally to become a truer
and better man, I cannot speak here. Above all he
helped me to realize the indwelling presence of the
Spirit of Christ. The hours spent about his fireplace
were surely the happiest of those three years for me.

In 1916 he was to have gone to Egypt for two
years special study, had not the war prevented. In-
stead, he returned to America for a year, pursuing
further language studies and such researches concern-
ing Muhammadanism as were possible in America. He
attended a re-union of the class of 1905, at Princeton,
and a number of his old friends, who usually do not

SOUL - SURGERY 13

favour these functions, attended because they knew he
was to be there. He had been one of the leading
personal workers in the Eddy-Buchman Campaign in
Lahore, and while in America he frequently helped
Mr. Buchman in this work.

On his return to India in 1917, he spent three
months in China, doing personal work among the
students of China in company with Mr. Buchman.
A part of his last year in India was spent in Lucknow
collecting materials for two books, one on Muham-
madan sects, the other on Muhammadan mystics. The
last time I saw him was when he came to Allahabad
for a conference with Dr. Griswold and Mr. Farquhar,
and we both had the privilege of being guided about
the "Kumbh Mela" at Allahabad by Mr. Farquhar.
Although his work seemed barely begun, he had already
acquired a position of authority which, in his own
field, would soon have equalled that of his older co-
labourer in the field of Hinduism.

Every great change in his life he met in the spirit
of the lines of his ode "To Princeton— 1905" :

"Swift comes the sunrise of a larger day,

Whose tasks are near, are near;
Joined in the bonds of fellowship for aye,

Glad scorn we'll fling to fear."

14 SOU L - SURGERY

We may be sure he met the last great change in
the same spirit. He always looked forward to the
sunrise of that larger day and the greater, nobler tasks
which he believed awaited him in the joyous life of
that dawn.

I cannot close without repeating his creed — the
creed which all who knew him saw so bravely and so
wondrously lived out in all his ways.

BY HOWARD ARNOI^D WALTER.

'I would be true, for there are those who trust me
I would be pure, for there are those who care;

I would be strong, for there is much to suffer;
I would be brave, for there is much to dare;

I would be friend of all — the foe — the friendless ;

I would be giving and forget the gift ;
I would be humble, for I know my weakness ;

I would look up and laugh — and love — and lift."

FOREWORD

This pamphlet comprises a series of articles origin-
ally written for The Indian Witness, at the editor's
request. For much of the general background of
ideas I am indebteded to Professor Henry Wright, of
Yale Divinity School, and Mr. Frank N. D. Buchman,
of Hartford Theological Seminary, who acknowledge
their own vast debt to the pioneer in this field, Henry
Drummond. Those who are aware of the very wide
and rich experience of Dr. Wright and Mr. Buchman
as successful personal evangelists, are waiting with
eagerness for the volume on this theme upon which
they are collaborating. Pending its appearance, this
little study of certain phases of a subject on which,
despite its importance, there is so little recent liter-
ature, may prove helpful to some.

H. A. W.

I.

Zbc Umportance

of

Ipersonal BvangeUsm

XTbe Umportance ot
personal Branaelism

^■■rhe American philosopher-humorist, *'Mr. Dooley,"
LW once compared Christian science to the guinea-
pig which, he said, has not come from Guinea
and is not a pig. He failed to see where Christian
science is essentially either Christian or scientific.
Similarly what generally passes for "personal work"
is a double misnomer, in that it does not really take
account of the personal equation, and it is not work.
Along with Bible study and prayer we include personal
work as one of the three primary essentials of the
Christian life, but in our hearts do we not often re-
joice that those to whom we recommend these
practices do not know how shadowy and sporadic is
their presence in our own lives ?

Personal work! Bible study! The kind of
''work" in which we engage in connection with the
former phase of our activities would no more be
accepted as work in a twentieth century business office
than would the kind of "study" which we pursue
in relation to the Scriptures, be accepted as study in
any true school or college. Is personal work, then,

20 SOUL - SURGURY

not equal in importance to our regular activities, that
we judge it by lower standards, and slight it so con-
tinually ? Our chief witness both to the difficulty and
the rarity of this form of service shall be that one,
the influence of whose mind and spirit upon the
student world of his generation in Great Britain and
America was unrivalled. In his essay on ''Spiritual
Diagnosis," which marked the beginning of the mod-
ern movement of scientific personal evangelism, if
not of the psychology of religion as well, Henry
Drummond wrote in 1873 : "The true worker's world
is the unit. Recognise the personal glory and dignity
of the unit as an agent. Work with units, but, above
all, work at units. But the capacity of acting upon
individuals is now almost a lost art. It is hard to
learn again. We have spoilt ourselves by thinking
to draw thousands by public work — by what people
call 'pulpit eloquence', by platform speeches, and by
convocations and councils. Christian conferences, and
by books of many editions. We have been painting
Madonnas and Bcce Homos and choirs of angels, like
Raphael, and it is hard to condescend to the beggar
boy of Murillo. Yet we must begin again and begin
far down. Christianity began with one. We have

SOUL - SURGERY 21

forgotten the simple way of the founder of the great-
est influence the world has even seen — how He ran
away from cities, how He shirked mobs, how He
lagged behind the rest at Samaria to have a quiet
talk with one woman at a well, how He stole away
from crowds and entered into the house of one humble
Syro-Phoenician woman, 'and would have no man
know it'. In small groups of two's and three's, He
collected the early church around Him. One by one
the disciples were called — and there were only twelve
in all."*

Can we say that the situation throughout the
Christian Church in general has altered materially
since Drummond gave it as his deliberate judgment,
forty-five years ago, that the capacity of acting upon
individuals is now almost a lost art?

With regard to the importance of this form of
Christian service, which was the method followed
primarily by our Lord and the early Christian Church,
let us listen to the most authoritative voice in the
student world of the generation succeeding Drummond,
Dr. John R. Mott. In his most recent book. The

* Drummond : The New Evangelism and Other Essays,
p. 258. London.

22 SOUL - SURGBRY

Present World Situation, in the chapter entitled,
"Where to Lay the Chief Emphasis," Dr. Mott writes :
"Some missionary methods are more highly produc-
tive than others. These may be characterized as the
most vital processes, and in all cases where other
methods are employed, these vital processes should be
employed with them or related to them. The most
important and productive method of all is that of re-
lating men one by one through reasonable and vital
faith to Jesus Christ. By 'reasonable faith' is meant
a faith for which men can give reasons which will
stand. By 'vital faith' is meant a faith which actually
transforms life. This individual work for individuals
was the method most constantly employed by Christ
Himself, and has ever been given a large place in
the activities of the most helpful spiritual workers.
It is the crowning work, the most highly multiplying
work, the most enduring work. The most influential
converts in India were won by this personal siege
work. The largest and most satisfactory results in
conversions, both in colleges and hospitals, have come
from the use of the same method."*

♦' Mott : The Present World Situation, pp. 215-216. Student
Volunteer Movement, N. Y.

SOUL - SURGERY 23

The man who convinced Dr. Mott of the primary
importance of personal work was the late Henry Clay
Trumbull, whose classic volume, Individual Work
for Individuals, sums up the experience of forty years
of successful personal evangelism. t In that book,
after summarizing his varied activities as chaplain,
Sunday school missionary, editor and author, he gives
it as his deliberate judgment: ''Looking back on all
my work, in all these years, I can see more direct
results of good through my individual efforts with
individuals, than I can know of through all my spoken
words to thousands upon thousands of persons in
religious assemblies, or all my written words in the
pages of periodicals or of books. "J In another place
Dr. Trumbull quotes Dr. Nevius, a missionary leader
in China, indirectly, to this effect: ''He said he
wanted no great preachers in his field. That was not
the sort of missionaries who were needed in China.
If he could find a man who could talk familiarly,
face to face with another man wherever he met him,
he had missionary work for that kind of a man in
China."§

t Cf. Mott: Individual Work for Individuals (pamphlet),
p. 13 Association Press, New York.

$ Quoted in C. G. Trumbull: Taking Men Alive, p. 41.
Association Press, New York.

§ Ibid., p. 33.

24 SOUL - SURGERY

Why Dr. Nevius spoke so emphatically we begin
to realize when we survey the history of the modern
missionary advance of the church, and note how every
great forward movement has been due to an awaken-
ing in some quarter to the fundamental importance
of work with individuals.

It was my privilege to be travelling through Korea
in the later months of the great revival of 1906-1907,
a revival which in a sense is not yet ended, and I
remember how the Korean converts were constrained
to bear personal witness continually to what Christ
had done for them — were not, indeed, admitted to full
fellowship in the church until they had demonstrated
by actual souls they had won the genuineness of their
professions of faith. Such a witnessing church be-
comes of necessity a growing and a power-filled
church. Rev. H. A. Popley, who has been so inti-
mately concerned from the beginning in the great
evangelistic forward movement of the South India
United Church, initiated in 1915, testifies to the fact
that in all the preparation for, and progress of, that
truly remarkable and most heartening manifestation of
the power of God, working in co-operation with the
zeal of man, personal evangelism has held the central

SOUL - SURGERY 25

place. The same emphasis on personal work has char-
acterized the week of simultaneous evangelism, on the
part of the Presbyterian Church in India, in 1917 and
1918. We are beginning to realize how true were
Dr. Mott's words, written sixteen years ago: "If
the Christians of India would adopt this method, it
would be a comparatively easy task to preach the
unsearchable riches of Jesus Christ throughout the
entire country within a generation."* All this is
equally true of every successful evangelistic effort in
the West. Personal work was the cornerstone of the
mammoth Evangelistic campaign conducted by Rev.
William A. Sunday in New York City in 1917,
through which no less than 200,000 men and women
confessed to receiving a spiritual quickening in Christ
during the month that Dr. Sunday was preaching in
the tabernacle, and Mr. Frank Buchman was conduct-
ing personal workers' groups in all parts of the city.
Finally, to come down to the present moment, real
personal work is the keynote of the nation-wide move-
ment of intensive evangelism, which is in progress
in China, under the inspiring leadership of Messrs.
Eddy, Buchman and Day, together with many Chinese

* Mott : Individual Work for Individuals, p. 1.

26 SOUL - SURGERY

Christian workers and missionaries. In connection
with this movement, Rev. George Davis, in charge of
the evangelistic work among the Methodists of Peking,
tells of how in one week over 8,000 people attended
a series of special meetings and 4,488 signed cards
saying that they wished to become Christians, of whom
2888 united with the Church on a single Sunday. He
adds that they were all won by personal work, in
which 400 Chinese were engaged. Mr. Robert R.
Gailey, one of the oldest Y.M.C.A. secretaries in
China, writes of Mr. Eddy's latest visit to China:
"This recent campaign has been different from others.
It was not a one-man campaign. It was not even a
one-team campaign. A hew spirit, a new idea, a new
inspiration has been sweeping over the whole of Asia
in the last few months. Mr. Eddy's campaign was
only a part of this movement. It can be characterized
more nearly by the phrase 'personal evangelism' than
any other, though of course no few words can ade-
quately express the depth of the full meaning of the
movement. The old-time hit-or-miss revival is gone.
Each meeting was 'covered'. Every non-Christian
who attended was personally invited by a Christian,
who accompanied him, sat with him and followed

SOUL - SURGERY 27

him up. Men were not swept off their feet by the sud-
den force of arguments or emotions. Each man had
been prepared for several months: otherwise he was
not eHgible to obtain a ticket. There was no mass
action; everything was sane, normal and on an indi-
vidual basis."

From this and other signs it is becoming evident
to many that the next great advance of the Christian
Church — already indeed under way — is to lie along the
line of world-wide lay mobilization for universal serv-
ice, in the sphere of personal evangelism, of all the
forces of the Christian Church, so that to the next gen-
eration, at least, Drummond's indictment may not
apply.

Some may feel that we are over-emphasizing the
importance of personal work in comparison with pray-
er and Bible study, but the experience of many will
bear out the statement that when one is actually en-
gaged in the work of winning souls, he is driven
continually to God in prayer and the study of His
revealed Word. On the other hand, one main reason
why there is such laxity in prayer and Bible study
among Christian people is, that those practices are
considered to be ends in themselves instead of pre-

28 SOUL - SURGERY

eminently the means of daily equipment and guidance
for effective personal evangelism.

With regard to the comparative importance of
personal and public evangelism, let us listen again to
Drummond, who has known few peers in either field,
"The past has indeed no masses. Men, not masses,
have done all that is great in history, in science, and
in religion. The New Testament itself is but a brief
biography ; and many pages of the Old are marked by
the lives of men. Yet it is just this truth which we
require to be taught again today, to be content with
aiming at units. Every atom in the universe can act
on every other atom, but only through the atom next
it. And if a man woiild act upon every other man,
he can do so best by acting, one at a time, upon those
beside him"."^' And Drummond lived what he preached.
His biographer, George Adam Smith, says that in this
paper on ''Spiritual Diagnosis," written at the age of
twenty-three on the eve of his participation in the
great Moody and Sankey Mission of 1874: "Drum-
mond enumerated the principles and laid down the
methods upon which, beginning from this very month
onwards, he conducted all his wonderful ministry to
* The New Evangelism, pp. 258-259.

SOUL - SURGERY 29

men."t Dr. Trumbull quotes America's most eloquent
preacher of civil war days, Henry Ward Beecher, as
saying in his hearing: *'The longer I live, the more
confidence I have in the sermons preached when one
man is the minister and one man is the congregation;
when there's no question who is meant when the
preacher says, ''Thou art the man. "J How many a
public evangelistic campaign, conducted by a dis-
tinguished speaker, has accomplished little because it
was not undergirded by a continuous campaign of per-
sonal evangelism in which large numbers of Christian
workers participated. In like manner very many iso-
lated evangelistic sermons and addresses fail of per-
manent results, because not driven home and riveted
in individual lives by carefully conducted personal in-
terviews. So much for the widespread neglect and
the fundamental importance of personal work.

We will not here canvass in detail the reasons
why this form of Christian service is so rare among
members of the Christian Church. Dr. Wright told
his personal workers' class in Yale University last year
that most men are not doing personal work because

t Smith : Life of Henry Drummond, p. 53. Hodder &
Stoughton, London.
% C. G. Trumbull : Taking Men Alive, p. 33.

30 SOUL ' SURGERY

of spiritual laziness, cowardice or impotence. They
do not wish to do it or they are afraid to do it, or they
are not able to do it, because sin of some kind has
paralyzed their energies. Ober and Mott, in their
pamphlet on Personal Work, first published in 1892,
four years after Mott graduated from Cornell Uni-
versity, gave the following hindrances to personal
work: Natural diffidence, self-conceit, love of ease,
consciousness of an inconsistent life, an inconsistent
life though unrecognized by the man himself, false
courtesy, lack of experience, ignorance of the Bible,
failure to recognize opportunities, Satan's active inter-
ference."''' This list probably includes the most
important hindrances, alt of which point back to the
lack of vital experience of the living Christ, out of
which must flow the zeal, courage, tact and consistent
Christian living which make personal work possible
and fruitful. The terms ''Christian" and "Personal
Worker" ought to be interchangeable. A professed
Christian who is not busy to some extent in the work
of witness-bearing to individuals, can be no true
follower of Christ, who declared "My Father worketh
even until now, and I work" (John 5:17), who bade

* C. K. Ober and J. R. Mott : Personal Works, How Organ-
ized and Accomplished, p. 32. Association Press, New York.

SOUL - SURGERY 31

us "Go and make disciples of all nations" (Matt.
28: 19, which includes the people who live closest
to us as well as those in distant lands. The one to
whom the Gospel is genuine ''good news" inevitably
passes it on to others, and it is through such personal
witnessing primarily that the Christian religion (and
for that matter the Buddhist and Muhammadan re-
ligions also) spreads abroad in the world. In this
paper we are assuming that the desire and the
courage and the capacity are present, at least poten-
tially, and that it is a question of right and wrong
methods of personal work — yes, let us dare to say,
of a scientific and an unscientific way of carrying on
this all-important work for the Master.

Church members are coming to realise the mean-
ing for them of Jesus' words: "The sons of this
world are for their own generation wiser than the sons
of light," (Luke 16: 8); and we are witnessing a
happy application of scientific efficiency — the shibbo-
leth of the modern business world — to methods of
Church management and missionary organization;
but as yet we have been lagging behind in making the
kindred idea of conservation an integral part of our
Christian programme. Amid all this war-time talk

32 SOUL - SURGERY

of the conservation of daylight, of shipping facihties,
of man-power for fighting purposes, etc., we of
Christ's army need to remember our great task of the
conservation of personality for the highest ends, as we
seek to prevent the fearful human wastage taking place
all about us through the ravages of sin. This task
is not just the comparatively simple one of passing on
a word of testimony that "J^^^s saves.'* We are the
human engineers by whom what is wrong with these
intricate spiritual machines around us should be cor-
rected. Viewed in this light we see at once how in-
evitably and necessarily personal — to a certain extent
"technical" — our work must be.

But perhaps even a more helpful figure is the one
which Jesus used when He said of Himself: "They
that are whole need not a physician, but they that are
sick" (Matt. 9: 12). He was speaking at the moment
to the Pharisees, whose coat of self-esteem was so
thick that they doubtless missed the sarcasm which
sought to tell them that they, most of all, needed
healing. But a physician is powerless to help a man
who, however ailing he may be, recognizes in himself
no defect, so that Jesus' work of healing — both spiri-
tual and physical — was chiefly confined to the class

SOUL - SURGBRY 33

that was recognized, by themselves and others, as
"sinners" — sin-sick. Jesus' language here is in line
with the whole thought of the Bible regarding sin
and salvation. The English words "heal," "whole"
and "holy" come from the same root, and in the
translations of the Hebrew and Greek originals they
are to some extent used interchangeably. Modern
psychology also has adapted this classification, as wit-
ness the titles of two of the chapters in William James'
The Varieties of Religious Experiences ;'^ "The Re-
ligion of Healthy-mindedness" and "The Sick Soul."

* William James* The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Longmans Green & Co., N. Y.

II.

flDetbob

ot

Iperaonal lEvanoelism

/iDetbob ot
personal Bvanaeltsm

^/f then we accept this definition of personal work
^ as the "Cure of Souls" (to quote the title of "Ian
Marclaren's" Yale Lectures on Preaching), we do
not need to argue for a scientific as against a haphazard
method of procedure. A prominent member of the
Chinese Church, after hearing Mr. Buchman lecture
on this subject, in 1917, said: "I know what you
mean, you don't believe in the chemist's shop method
of personal work." That analogy will describe much
that passes under the name of personal work, i.e.,
giving perfunctorily our spiritual specific, our cure-all,
to ailing souls around us, and perhaps wondering why
the Gospel does not prove more efficacious. The true
physician only after careful scientific diagnosis ad-
ministers a remedy, and then he follows the case
through with conscientious care. Have we (and I
mean now not simply clergymen, whose work is
preaching, but all of us whose work is winning men
and women to their highest selves in Christ) looked
at our business of curing souls in this conscientious

SOUL - SURGERY

37

way? I once heard Dean Jacobus, of Hartford Sem-
inary, in America, say that a man ought to prepare
as carefully for a vital interview with one man as for
a sermon to one hundred. In view of this the semi-
nary with which he is connected now has a ''spiritual
clinic," compulsory for all students, conducted by Dr.
John Douglas Adam, one of Scotland's many valued
gifts to the religious life of America, in which personal
evangelism is studied, as law is studied, by the case
method, instead of through vague generalization and
exhortations.

In the kindred sphere of philanthropy there is a
new technique which has transformed it into a science
through emphasizing this same individualized study,
as illustrated by a recent publication from the pen of
Mrs. Richmond, director of the organization depart-
ment of the Russell Sage Foundation. It, too, has
adopted the clinical method based on "social diagno-
sis," of which we read that "In social diagnosis there
is the attempt to arrive at as exact a definition as pos-
sible of the social situation and personality of a given
client."*

* Article in Current Literature for December, 1917, pp.
394, 395, based on Social Diagnosis, by Mary E. Richmond.
Russell Sage Foundation, New York.

38 SOUl - SURGERY

It was for the use of just this clinical principle in
individual work that Drummond pleaded in his essay
on "Spiritual Diagnosis," and it was this method that
he, himself, followed in all his unparalleled work for
individuals to the end of his life. In a letter to a
friend in 1882, he wrote: "I must say I believe in
personal dealing more and more every day, and in the
inadequacy of mere preaching. The inquiry room this
time, as before, brings its terrible revelation of the
vast multitude of un regenerate church members. I
have dealt with several men of position who knew the
letter of Scripture as they knew their own names, but
who had no more idea of Free Grace and a Personal
Christ than a Hottentot,"*

To further illustrate the use of this method of
approach, let us take an illustration from the field
most familiar to us in India ; in our missionary work
today there is a growing appreciation of the need of
studying scientifically the best way of reaching the
people of these other religions, in the light of their
pre-conceptions and past strivings and attainments
and failures in the realm of the religious life. The
detailed report of the Edinburgh Missionary Confer-

* Smith : Life of Drummond, pp. 145.

SOUL - SURGBRY 39

ence of 1910 showed the vast diversities in the mis-
sionaries' task, and the need of the most careful
preparation before the work is undertaken. Further
results of that epoch-making conference are appearing
in the careful findings of boards of missionary prepar-
ation in Great Britain and the United States, and in
the establishment, present or prospective, of schools
of missionary preparation, on both sides of the Atlan-
tic, which are setting their standards as high as the
professional schools in other departments of the
world's work. The "chemist shop" method is not
considered adequate to the missionary propaganda of
the twentieth century. Can we continue to use it in
our approach to the individual, where each case is so
different, so delicate, so difficult?

At this point we need to safeguard our use of the
word "method" in its application to personal evangel-
ism just because every case is different, has its
individual features, and must be dealt with by a
method of its own, a method which in each case will
emerge not so much out of the Christian worker's
past experience as out of his immediate communion
with Christ, the Master Physician, who alone fully
knows each individual human heart. Vitally important.

4d SOUL - SURGERY

then, for the spiritual physician is the develop-
ment of what the mystics of all religions know as
spiritual apprehension — the "wisdom that cometh
down from above" (James 3: 15). Drummond quotes
an old French sage (La Bruyere) as saying: "After
a spirit of discernment, the next rarest things in the
world are diamonds and pearls," and he also quotes
a certain principal of St. Andrew's University to this
effect: "There is a faculty of spiritual apprehension,
very different from the faculties which are trained
in schools and colleges, which must be educated and
fed not less but more carefully than our lower facul-
ties, else it will be starved and die."* This spiritual
apprehension is the sine qua non of an intimate
knowledge of the world and of human nature. I
once heard Dr. R. F. Horton, of London, speak on
the subject of prayer as a medium of understanding
the inner meaning of current events. If, as some one
has said, "History is His story," we can only rightly
understand history in the past or in the present as
we find our way, through spiritual apprehension, into
the mind of the Lord whose purposes are being worked
out in the afifairs of men. And, similarly, we cannot
* The New Bvangelism, p. 263.

SOUL-SURGERY 41

understand the people around us save as it becomes
possible for us to view them through the eyes of Jesus.
He was the Great Physician because He perfectly
"knew what was in man" (John 2: 25), and that
knowledge came primarily through His uninterrupted
communion with the Father. It is an indubitable fact
that the deeper and richer our prayer life becomes,
the less are we misled by appearances and professions,
and the clearer becomes our insight into the hidden
soul of the man before us. Moreover, this relation
of practiced prayer to personal work is more imme-
diately useful when we are laying spiritual siege to a
particular soul.

In the first place, through early morning prayer
our own spirits are brought into tune with the infinite,
and made spiritually sensitive and strong and resource-
ful, to meet all the unknown opportunities that await
us of influencing individual souls in whom we are
interested in the hours of the day to come. Our sense
of perspective is corrected afresh, so that we are likely
to view things in right proportions, looking at certain
seeming interruptions that may come as god-sent op-
portunities for service, and refusing to allow the most
important work of all to be crowded into a corner

42 SiOUl - SURGBRY

or out of the day altogether. We can all plead the
excuse of business, but many of the busiest men are
the greatest soul-winners; they have learned to "put
first things first" at all costs. We have time usually
to do the things we really wish to do. As a matter
of fact, if we refuse to let the early morning prayer be
crowded out of our lives, as it almost certainly will
be if we follow the line of least resistance, the very
discipline involved in our making time for that pristine
spiritual exercise is likely to have its influence in
leading us also to find time for the no less important
work of soul-winning, to which the prayer time is so
essential by way of preparation. Some years ago I
had a small part in a series of evangelistic meetings
in a large middle western university in the United
States. The chief burden of the meetings rested on
the shoulders of the general secretary of the University
Christian Association, a man of unusual spiritual
force. The days were so crowded with activity that
it seemed as though surely this was the time when the
early morning prayer might have been intermitted or
at least shortened. In conversation with the secre-
tary's wife, I discovered that instead of shortening his
period of prayer, he had lengthened it during that

SOUL - SURGERY 43

week to two full hours, rising, like his Master, "a
great while before day.'' I asked him later how he
could do it, and he replied that he was simply driven
to it by the burden he was carrying, the necessity of
being at his best intellectually for the perplexing prob-
lems to be solved, and at his best spiritually as he
came face to face and heart to heart with men all
through the day in individual interviews. Martin
Luther once said, that when any day promised to lay
upon him a special burden of work or responsibility,
he found it necessary to rise an hour earlier than usual
for prayer on that day. When we read in the lives
of great winners of men like John Wesley, Henry
Martyn, Hudson Taylor, Keith Falconer, Forbes
Robinson, William Booth and Philips Brooks, the
place given to believing, persistent, sacrificial prayer,
we cannot remain in doubt of the cause of our own
comparative lack of spiritual apprehension and power
in winning individuals to Christ.

In the second place, through the early morning
time of prayer we learn each day's programme of
procedure, as God who, we must believe, never acts
or would have us act in a haphazard manner, transfers
to our minds such part of His perfect plan as we need

44 SOUI. - SURGE.RY

to know. From Him alone can we learn to whom
He would have us speak some timely word of a per-
sonal nature for which some soul is ready and which
can come effectively only from ourselves. At that
hour there come to us the mysterious "leadings" of
God's spirit which, when tested and proved and fol-
lowed, bring to pass moral miracles in individual lives.
Here is where so much of our personal work is lack-
ing: instead of having been "begun, continued and
ended" in God, initiated by His Spirit's dictation and
mirroring God's purpose throughout, it really begins
and ends with ourselves, both in impulse and plan.
Furthermore, if in the early morning our spirits are
attuned to the Divine Spirit, not only shall we receive
"leadings" at that time, but all through the day we
shall be sensitive to every summons to service. A
letter of Drummond's written on a summer holiday
tour in young manhood, chronicles the result of two
such leadings in a single day, and is worth quoting
as typical of what was with him almost a daily
occurrence : "I had some wonderful 'leading' on Satur-
day— all the more that it was unexpected. It would
take too long to tell, but I had two distinct and valua-
ble opportunities of talking personally and in detail

SOUL - SURGBRY 45

about the 'unsearchable riches.' The outline of the
first case is something like this : I started in the morn-
ing for UUswater, missed a seat on the two coaches,
walked half way, was picked up by a private party,
who offered me a seat beside the driver. At first he
was very quiet, and after some time I noticed tears
in his eyes. I found he had just buried his wife. He
was in very deep distress. He was a good respectable
man, a teetotaler, but plainly did not know the truth.
I did not tell him much then, but I got his address
and mean to write him to-night. I hope something
will come of it ; the poor fellow seemed very anxious.
Another of the cases was in coming down Helvellyn.
I went to UUswater, dined, and started for Helvellyn
alone about two. It was a lovely afternoon and the
view from the top was marvellous. In coming down
I met a young fellow who was in great anxiety about
a companion whom he had lost on the mountain. He
had searched everywhere, night was coming on, and
he feared his friend had been seized with a fit. He
didn't know what to do, but the question, 'What do
you think of praying?' led to a long and earnest talk.
He was a Swedenborgian, but had practically no re-
ligion I do not know that any positive good

46 SOUL - SURGERY

was done; I mean I saw no immediate effect; but we
talked the whole matter round very freely and plain-
ly. I am afraid these details will be uninteresting
on paper, and I will not trouble you with a third. For
my own part, I felt very grateful for them."*

In the third place, this time of prayer is necessary
not only to discipline and refine our spirits and to
enable us to receive our great unseen Captain's order
for the day: but, in addition, and most important of
all, we are there releasing spiritual forces of untold
potency which will be serving as allies in our spiritual
warfare. 'Trayer moves the Hand that moves the
world." The work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts
of men, the work which no human power can com-
pass, follows, we know, certain higher, mysterious
laws, in the working of which the prayer of faith is
somehow most effectually involved. This is the kind
of objective result of our praying to which St. James
referred when he wrote: "The heart- felt supplication
of a righteous man exerts a mighty influence" (James
5 : 16, Weymouth tr.). Someone has said, "The Holy
Spirit always works at both ends of the line," and
we may be sure that when we have entered into that
* Life of Drummond, pp. 118, 119.

SOUL, ' SURGBRY 47

supreme alliance, through prayer, the Spirit of God
will not only go with us but before us, preparing the
soil of the heart of our friend for the seed that we
are sent to sow. Thus did Philip the humble
evangelist, bidden to challenge the attention of the
mighty Ethiopian official, find that God's Spirit had
already prepared the way by prompting the eunuch
to read the very passage of Isaiahs prophesy most
closely related to the message which Philip was sent
to bring (Acts 8: 32, 33). So did Ananias, the ser-
vant of God in Damascus, following the summons of
God's Spirit to undertake the fearsome task of inter-
viewing the notorious enemy of the Christian Church,
Saul of Tarsus, find that the Spirit had already hum-
bled that proud heart, so that he was indeed "actually
praying" (Acts 9: 11, Weymouth tr.). So, on the
other hand, is very much of our attempted personal
work ineffectual, because we are working alone, un-
supported by this mighty ally on whom the early
church called so insistently and with such amazing
results.

Once we realize that the method comes from God,
and is applicable in detail to each individual case
confronting us, we can safely proceed to ask whether

48 SOUL - SURGERY

there is not a certain general line of approach in soul-
winning, whether there are not helpful sign-posts on
the way, from defeat to victory in Christ, along which
we would lead those who have gone astray. The sim-
plest rule I have heard consists in the three words:
Woo, Win, Warn. Perhaps we may better consider
what lies behind these three ideas by adopting the
fuller nomenclature suggested by Mr. Buchman as
indicating the normal procedure of the soul-physician :
Confidence, Confession, Conviction, Conversion, Con-
servation. Let us consider in turn these five succes-
sive stages, the boundaries of which often so merge
into each other as to be indistinguishable, although all
five are probably present in every successful instance
of soul-winning.

1.

Confibence

By this we mean coming so wholly into the con-
fidence of the one we seek to help along the avenue
of personal friendship that we know his verdict on his
own case, see him through his own eyes. The physi-
cian of souls must know his patients intimately, or he
cannot diagnose their troubles accurately. Some of
the material for his diagnosis, in addition to that
which arrives through the primary channel of spiritual
apprehension to which we have already alluded, will
arise out of a study of human nature as a whole. It
was his knowledge of the human heart that made
Henry Ward Beecher so irresistible a preacher, and
that gave him the content of the very suggestive
chapter on the ''Study of Human Nature" in his Yale
Lectures on Preaching. This is a study in which all
of us can engage, with the material lying about us
on every hand. If it is worth while for the salesman
of a business-house to study men in order that he may
know how best to win them to a desire to purchase
his wares, how much more important is that study for

50 SOUL - SURGERY

us who would win men to a new life of spiritual
health and victory in Christ. Says Drummond:
"Many men study men, but not to sympathise with
them: the lawyer for gain, the artist for fame, the
actor for applause, the novelist for profession. How
well up is the actor in plot and passion and intrigue!
How deftly can the novelist anatomise love and jeal-
ousy, vengeance and hate! And when there are men
found to study human nature for its own sake, for
filthy lucre's sake, shall there be none to do it for
man's sake — for God's sake?"* Further on he quotes
Oliver Wendell Holmes as saying somewhere that we
must try to be "a man that knows men in the street,
at their work, human nature in its shirt-sleeves — who
makes bargains with deacons instead of talking over
texts with them, and a man who has found out that
there are plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints
in the world."t

And just as the doctor needs to know the whole
subject of disease, so the soul-doctor must know sin
That does not mean experiential knowledge, in either
case, but the knowledge which comes through vital
healing contest with the real life-experiences of men.
* The New Evangelism, p. 284. t Ibid, p. 283.

SOUL - SURGERY 51

Books can help us here, but life will yield far more.
Mr. Buchman tells of how in his early preaching
days there was no conviction of sin in the audience,
no spiritual results, and he could not understand what
was the trouble until Rev. F. B. Meyer, of London,
when his advice was asked, replied: "Tell your peo-
ple on Sunday the things they are telling you during
the week." The trouble was that they were telling
him nothing. He was not in their confidence, and his
sermons, instead of being woven of the very stuff
of their lives — their temptations and doubts and prob-
lems and failures — were intellectual dissertations
which largely went over the heads of the people and,
even when they reached their understanding, did not
touch and move their hearts. No speaker to men in
the last half century better illustrates the positive side
of this truth than Drummond. Consider the following
paragraph, beginning an address on Temptation in his
memorable Edinburgh Lectures to Students: "Gentle-
men, I must ask the forbearance of the men here to-
night who are in intellectual difficulties if I speak to
the men who are in moral degradation. It has come
to my knowledge through the week, from a bundle of
letters from men now sitting in this room, that there

52 SOUL - SURGERY

are a large number with their backs to the wall.
They are dead beat, and I shall consider their cases
first."* After such an introduction could there be an
inattentative ear in the whole vast audience ? The min-
ister who knows men will win men, provided he has
evangelistic passion and constant touch with God's
spirit.

Paul can set us an example here. I have recently-
been re-studying his epistles to glean from them for
my own use what the great apostle knew of the
spiritual diseases of men — and the result is at once
suggestive and appalling. One who does not know
men to-day might say that if what Paul wrote — for
example in the first chapter of Romans — was true in
his day and world, it is not characteristic of the India
or Europe or America that we know today. But we
should ask the physician about disease, not the Chris-
tion scientist who denies its existence. We should
ask the true winner of souls about the sins that are
cutting the nerve of spiritual power in men and women
all around us. Yungtao, the great Chinese social re-
former who recently became a Christian, says that
China's three great sins are: concubinage, "squeze"
* Life of Drummond, p. 515.

SOUL - SURGERY 53

and gambling. And he further says that Christian mis-
sionaries so often fail, either through ignorance or
fear, in not speaking directly and courageously of
these deepest fundamental sins, and dealing incisively
and adequately with the sinner, instead of talking of
sin in abstract, theological language. What Yungtao
has the courage to say with regard to China, needs
to be said no less regarding Japan and India, Great
Britain and America. Indeed, Harold Begbie says it
in his own way, regarding Great Britain, in his Crisis
of Morals.

Not only must the soul physician know the soul,
in health and disease, the universal human heart,
which is found to be so surprisingly alike in all lands
when its passions and fears and aspirations are an-
alyzed; he must also know the particular individuals
to whom God's spirit has directed him to lay siege with
all the powers, seen and unseen, that he can muster to
his support. As a preliminary step in gaining his
confidence, let him study his patient's tastes in litera-
ture and drama, his likes and dislikes, his habits and
association. Horace Annesley Vachel, in a recent
novel (Between Two Worlds) tells of how a father's
unexpected discovery of the type of books his daughter

54 SOUL - SURGERY

was secretly reading broke through the crust of his
blind, worshipful belief in her innocence, and gave
him the knowledge that he needed to make him the
real help to his daughter that he ought always to have
been. How many parents fail tragically in helping
their children in the delicate and critical problems of
their sex life through ignorance compacted of unholy
reticence, blasphemous confidence and sheer coward-
ice. And the same would apply with no less force to
teacher and pupil, and pastor and parishioner, and to
most of us in our work of personal evangelism.

This background of knowledge of men and of sin,
coupled with a study of particular individuals, is indis-
pensable, but our diagnosis of any individual case can
never be complete until, to our general knowledge of
human nature and our specific knowledge, such as any
observant detective might acquire, of the man we seek
to win, there is added the knowledge that is locked
away from the detective which comes through the
lips of the patient himself.

In introducing the word "detective," let us pause
to observe with emphasis that the true soul-winner is
no spiritual detective, secretly spying on his friends
and neighbors, with a morbid taste for discovering

SOUL - SURGERY 55

the failings of men, and then following them with
spiritual nagging. We do not think of our family
physician as a detective ; far less can we thus think of
one whom God can use to help us spiritually, but
who can only help us adequately and permanently
when we are as frank with him as with the physician
who nurses our bodies back to health. We must re-
member, however, that the peril of our becoming the
mere detective is always present, and can only be
avoided as we realize what almost infinite respect and
love and faith, what constant consciousness of the
dignity and worth of an immortal human soul, must
be his who would serve as a medium to men of the
healing power of Christ. Above all, the physician
must keep human, sensitive, courteous, remembering
his own shortcomings and respecting another man's
reticences. Says Drummond: "Brusqueness and an
impolite familiarity may do very well when dealing
with his brains, but without tenderness and courtesy
you can only approach his heart to shock it. The
whole of etiquette is founded on respect; and by far
the highest and tenderest etiquette is the etiquette of
soul with soul."*

5)6 SOUL - SURGERY

Yet at the same time we must also remember the
great truth to which Drummond, out of his all but
matchless experience, gives the concluding emhpasis
in the article from which I have quoted so often : "Men
do not say much about these things, but the amount
of spiritual longing in the world at the present moment
is absolutely incredible. No one can even faintly
appreciate the intense spiritual unrest which seethes
everywhere around him; but one who has tried to
discern, who has begun by private experiment, by
looking into himself, by taking observations upon the
people near him and known to him, has witnessed a
spectacle sufficient to call for the loudest and most
emphatic action."* Every personal worker could mul-
tiply proofs of this fact, and of how his action on that
hypothesis brought further proofs of its truth. Says
W. D. Weatherford in his latest book, after speaking
of our natural reticence in the West, in speaking of
religious matters requiring a break in the barrier of
reserve that holds us apart and obviates the reciprocal
confidence on which all true helpfulness is based:
"The very fact that religion is so vital to persons
means that I must continue to share what I have found

* The New Evangelism, p, 280.

* The New Evangelism, pp. 2S3, 284.

SOUL - SURGBRY 57

so valuable to my own growth. My testimony need
not be prying or lacking in reverence, but it may be
intensely in earnest. If I have a real friend who has
meant much to me, I am eager to share that friend
with other friends and even good acquaintances. In
hke manner, if I know God and He means life to me,
I must of necessity desire to share this experience.
By some method or other I must break through all
reserve and share my treasure.^t In another place
he gives his experience: "Not only do men not re-
sent being approached, but I am sure that many of
them are wondering why we do not open the conver-
sation. I shall never forget an experience I had some
years ago at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. After
speaking one night, I came downstairs and was just
starting to leave the building. It was a rainy night;
and out on the porch, which was very dimly lighted
from within, there stood a young college man. I greet-
ed him as I walked out, and noticed that his greeting
was rather cordial. I then ventured the question as
to whether he had attended the meeting. His reply
was cordial again and in the affirmative. Made a
little more bold, I suggested that he was probably one

tW. D. Weatherford, Ph. 'D.,The Christian Life, a Nor-
mal Experience, p. 183. Association Press, New York.

58 SOUL - SURGERY

of the Christian workers. No, he was not even a
Christian! 1 asked him if he would mind going in
and talking it over. Imagine my amazement when
he replied: 'I have been standing here waiting for
you to come out, hoping you would ask me to do that.'
After half an hour he made a decision for the Chris-
tion life. Suppose I had missed that chance !"* And
then he gives this instance of failure to follow the inner
leading and break through the reserve that keeps us
silent: "Once at a Northfield Conference I knew a
young man from Yale, who said he had come down to
this conference with the delegation, thinking that
surely some man would, in that atmosphere, speak
to him about the Christian life. One of our inter-
national student secretaries of the Young Men's Chris-
tian Association told me that his room-mate in college,
a prominent athlete, had to make this secretary talk
to him about the religious life. What must people think
of the value we put upon our Christian experience when
we are so slow to share its blessings ?"t In an Ameri-
can university, after an outside evangelist (A. J.
Elliott) had won a student to Christ, when the college

*W. D. Weatherford, Ph. D., The Christian Life, a Nor-
mal Experience, pp. 192, 193. Association Press, New York,
t Ibid., p. 193.

SOUL ' SURGERY 59

pastor started to shake his hand by way of congratu-
lation the student refused to take it until he had told
this man, to whom was entrusted the religious life of
the students of the university, his honest opinion of
one who had been closelyassociated with him ever since
he entered college and yet who, as he expressed it,
"would have seen me go to hell without telling me per-
sonally about Jesus Christ." Milton's indictment still
holds true of too many ministers of our time: "The
hungry sheep look up and are not fed." But we can-
not apply it only to the clergy. All of us who pretend
to be Christian workers, followers of Christ, are sur-
rounded by hungry sheep who are dependent upon us,
whether or not they or we realize it, for finding the
way to the great spiritual Shepherd of men's souls.

Undoubtedly one reason why men do not confide
in us more, even when they are longing for help and
real friendship, is because of our own reserve which
holds them back. We must be as ready to give as
we are to receive, realizing the need of reciprocal con-
fidence. It is generally understood that if the preach-
er's message is to strike home to the hearts of his
hearers, it must proceed from his own heart. That
which comes from the heart reaches the heart, as

6o SOUl - SURGERY

the French proverb says. If preaching is "truth
through personahty," as Beecher defined it, it must
come charged with the authoritative power of per-
sonal experience. There must be an abandon of self-
giving. But what has not been as clearly seen is that
the personal evangelist, like the pulpit evangelist,
must also give himself, his treasured experiences of
the soul, with similar abandon, if he would woo the
confidence which must precede true friendship and
service. And who that has attempted both does not
know how much more difficult it is to achieve this
personal abandon in the private parlour where only
two are present, than in the pulpit where there is a
second barrier of unapproachableness, keeping the
audience at a distance even after the barrier of per-
sonal reserve has been thrown aside.

With most of us this abandon, this willingness to
be "a fool for Christ's sake," is probably lacking to
some extent, simply because we do not care enough.
Our "passion for souls" is theological and abstract,
rather than personal and concrete. Drummond's
biographer, who was his intimate friend, tells of how,
on his return to college, after the great mission of
1874 which made him famous at 23, his friends were

SOUL - SURGERY 61

"a little afraid of him and of his chances for tackling
us upon the religious Hfe." But he goes on, "We
felt that he was interested in us, and his interest being
without officiousness won our confidence and made us
frank with him. We could tell him, as we could not
tell others, the worst about ourselves — the worst, and,
just as easily also, the best — our ideals and ambitions,
of which men are often as ashamed to speak as they
are about their sins. To the latter he was never in-
dulgent, or aught but faithful with those who confessed
to him. But in every man he saw good, which the
man himself had either forgotten or was ignorant of."'*'

One of the chief secrets of the success of the Sal-
vation Army has been the element of deep personal
love involved. As the founder himself. General Booth,
has written: "The first vital step in saving outcasts
consists in making them feel that some decent human
being cares enough for them to take an interest in the
question whether they are to rise or sink."

It was because the pastor cared for individual men

and women, that under the ministry of the late Herbert

Roswell Bates, the Spring Street Presbyterian Church,

in the tenement house district of New York City, grew

"^ Life of Drummond, p. 115.

62 SOUL - SURGERY

rapidly from a dejected remnant of a congregation
into a powerful church of six hundred members. One
of his fellow-workers contributes this incident to the
biography of Bates, by S. Ralph Harlow : "One event,
which made a lasting impression upon me, 1 want to
share with you. It was during an illness when we lived
together in the Annex of the Neighbourhood House,
and 1 had been helping to care for him. One eve-
ning, as he lay on his bed, he asked me to bring him
his little book which contained the names of all the
members of his congregation. As he held it in his
hand, I sat by his side, and he told me of his love for
them all. He said: "I know what it means when
I read those words, 'He was a man of sorrows and
acquainted with griefs,' for I, too, have tried to carry
their sorrows and bear their burdens !" He told me
how he used to spend hours on his knees, praying
for each one by name, bringing to God their trials
and temptations. He said that at first they had been
like one great family, and then he broke down, for
he was very weak at the time, as he told how the
church had grown so large that he could no longer
bring to God each one by name, and know their bur-
dens, as he could before his work had grown to such

SOUL ' SURGERY 63

proportions. That little talk gave me an insight into
the heart of a man who was the kind of minister I
longed to become. ""^ To those who have attended
student conferences at Northfield in recent years, a
familiar figure at almost any hour of the day up to
midnight, or later, was "Herb" Bates, sitting under
a tree in some quiet spot in earnest conversation with
a single student about the deepest things of life.

Let me give a single example of the same drawing
power of painstaking love in India. Professor J. B.
Raju, of Madras Christian College, has said that his
first vital interest in Christianity dates from the morn-
ing when he learned that Sherwood Eddy had been
sitting up all the preceding night for the purpose of
making a prayer and Bible study calendar for him.

Often the knowledge that we have been praying
for a friend conies to him, at the right moment, with
arresting power. The very surprise of learning that
another cares so much gives him pause, and may lead
him to pray for himself with real earnestness. There
came to me last year, on unimpeachable authority, a
recent incident in the life of a distinguished British

* S. Ralph Harlow : Life of H. Roswell Bates, pp. 54, 55.
Fleming H. Revell Co.

64 SOUL ' SURGBRY

journalist, the change in whose later writing reveals
a transformation in his inner life. A friend of his,
generally known as a society woman but actually a
woman of prayer and an earnest if unconventional
Christian worker, sent word to this man, asking him
to come to her home on a matter of importance.
When he arrived, she asked him to wait in the draw-
ingroom while she went to an upper room to pray for
him. Left alone, he later told a friend that he turned
over the pages of the books and magazines on the
table with increasing disquiet, until at the end of a
half hour he began himself to pray. When his friend
returned, they had prayer together, at the close of
which he assured her that a mysterious change had
take place in his heart, a change to which his life
has since given witness. Only the courage and love
born in prayer could lead one to venture for Christ as
this woman did, to meet with such success as probably
no other method could have achieved. Often the un-
conventional way, introducing an element of surprise
as well as a revelation of love, may take another
unaware, and cause him to look at religious matters
from a new angle.

SOUL - SURGERY 65

From all these illustrations, it is evident that true
"lovers of their fellow-men" do not possess an
abstract ''love of the crowd" but a warm, sympathetic,
enduring interest in individuals around them, which
expresses itself in varied forms. And to such men and
women the confidence of others naturally comes.

2.

Confession

This is only the last word of confidence, denoting
that the personal worker has won through to the
innermost recess of his friend's life, has been privi-
leged to see into the darkened chamber whose door is
usually closed and barred, so that he knows his man —
way back into the motives and desires that are the roots
of all his actions. Through the avenue of confidence
we win a man's friendship. Through confession we
may win his soul — for Christ. Even where there is
abundance of natural confidence, our work may be a
comparative failure, because we have stopped short
of the ultimate confession that is needed in order to
complete penitence and victory. If, as Drummond
says, the furniture of a man's inner life can be totally
changed in an hour, it is necessary that light should
be let into all of the rooms of his soul. The house
must be refurnished throughout. Here our analogy
of the physician of men's bodies will help us again,
though it is only partial since it stops short of the
moral issue. The physician's diagnosis cannot be

SOUL - SURGERY 67

complete until the patient has given him his entire
confidence, which may involve certain revelations of
his past history or present habits which he naturally
shrinks from disclosing. Until the physician is sure
that he has all the data, he must continue a verbal
probing which may be fully as important as any
probing that may later need to be done with instru-
ments. However reluctant a man may be at this point,
he is seldom resentful, for he realises how much may
be staked upon his making a clean breast. A doctor
in China told us that often when he is practically
certain that the patient has been indulging in some
secret vice, he has found that the simplest, surest mode
of procedure is to ask quickly and naturally, naming
the suspected practice, "When did you do that last?"
The sick man, taken ofif his guard, instantly tells the
truth.

Every physician knows the importance of probing
to the root of the trouble, to avoid the danger of false
diagnosis and superficial or harmful treatment, which
might even result fatally. Is it any less important for
the soul-surgeon with a life-destiny at stake to make
certain that he has reached the ultimate seat of the
trouble before he seeks to administer the cure? It is

68 SOUL - SURGBRY

well for him to remember that men are living their
lives on four levels — spiritual, intellectual, social and
physical — and that the diseased spot, the centre of
infection that is spreading in all directions, may be in
any of the four. It may be that either pride, dis-
honesty, selfishness or impurity corresponding roughly
to the four levels enumerated, is slowly poisoning the
entire personality. The trouble with so much of our
evangelism, public and personal, is that we are not
actually reaching men at the real seat of trouble and
temptation. John Krishnaswamy, in his little pamph-
let on personal work, uses a telling illustration from
Hindu mythology : "In the Ramayana we read how,
again and again, Ravana's heads, though momentarily
cut off by the arrow of Rama, began to grow one by
one in their proper places. Rama was told that Ravana
could be killed only if the arrow hit him at the life-
centre, and -the giant was killed as soon as the arrow
hit the life-spot. In exactly the same way misdirected
spiritual effort will be fruitless or worse, for, by aim-
ing at random, we not only do not gain the individual
but spoil the chances of his being gained afterwards."*
It is with a view to finding this life-spot that we are

* Krishnaswamy's Personal Work, p. 9. Association Press,

Calcutta.

SOUL - SURGERY 69

bidden by Sherwood Eddy to "make the moral test"
as the third step in soul-winning.t Those who best
know the facts declare that ninety per cent of the
ultimate sin around us is on the lowest physical level,
to which we penetrate most rarely and with the great-
est mal-adaptation in our personal work.

Here, in India, it is our ever-present temptation
to seek to argue a man into the Kingdom by dissipat-
ing his intellectual doubts, real or fancied, when the
seat of the trouble is impurity, which has so coated
with filth the window of his spiritual faculty that it is
simply impossible for him to see God. While writing
this page, a friend who has had unusual success in
Christian work among Indian Muslim boys, was tell-
ing me how from one after another he has been
receiving confessions of scarcely believable moral
dereliction at an early age, which had convinced him

t Mr. Eddy's and Mr. Buchman's helpful "Ten Suggestions
for Personal work," viewed from a physician's standpoint,
are as follows : — "1. Get a point of contact. 2. Diagnose the
person's real difficulty. 3. Make the moral test. 4. Avoid argu-
ment. 5. Aim to conduct the interview yourself. 6. Adapt the
truth to the hearer's need. 7. Bring the person face to face
with Christ. 8. Show the way out of the special difficulty.

9. Bring the person finally to the point of decision and action.

10. Start the person on the new life with simple, concrete and
definite suggestions regarding daily Bible study, prayer, over-
coming temptation and service for others."

70 SOUL - SURGBRY

of the need in his work of always making the moral
test. Unfortunately, it is too often true of our Chris-
tian students as well, that there is immorality in their
lives of which their teachers are altogether ignorant.
Undoubtedly, one cause of the failure of many con-
verts to justify previous expectations, and one reason
for the frequent lapses into a former faith, is the fact
that an operation has never been performed on the
diseased member, through the healing power of Christ
being brought to bear right at the center of infection.
A man can have no saving sense of the power of the
living Christ, if that power has not saved him from the
sin that, in his heart of hearts, he knows lives on, and
that is festering and poisoning his spiritual life. It is
the easiest way to argue- with a man about his doubts,
of which he may be half-proud ; it is the most difficult
thing to evoke a confession of the sin of which he is
altogether ashamed. Sherwood Eddy told some of us
in Lahore, in December, 1915, about a man who came
to him at Yale University during a series of special
meetings, asking for help in resolving his doubt of the
existence of God. Mr. Eddy gave him all the proofs
he could think of and the man went away unconvinced.
Later, Mr. Eddy said, Mr. Buchman, who had charge

SOUL - SURGBRY 71

of the interview end of the meetings, came in touch
with the same man, found that he was Hving in gross
sin, and was able to bring about his genuine conver-
sion. Recently in an Indian city I met a young man
who, I was told, had been six times a Christian, and as
many times had reverted to the Arya Samaj, of which
he was originally a member. He was full of doubts,
which neither the Samaj nor the missionaries could
dissipate. A Christian physician to whom he was sent
for treatment discovered quite naturally that his
trouble was fundamentally not intellectual but moral.
Evil habits had undermined his power of volition, so
that he was really unable to "make up" what mind
he possessed. He had never found Christ on that
plane, and was not likely to do so unless the Christian
worker with whom he was dealing diagnosed his
trouble and prescribed the right treatment.

But there is another side to this subject. Not only
is this entire self-disclosure needed in order that the
spiritual surgeon may possess all the data for an
accurate diagnosis. It is required by an imperious
inner law, that will not leave to the sinner a vestige
of the old prideful pose behind which he had shielded
iniquity. The secret thing must be exposed before

72 SOUL - SURGERY

it can be dealt with effectually, permitting the
repentant sinner to go forward on a new basis of
utter honesty, looking the whole world in the face.
The clinic of the soul surgeon is, therefore, a very
different thing from the confessional of the Roman
Catholic priest. Misunderstanding of this fundamen-
tal difference brought much sincere criticism upon the
head of the American clergyman. Dr. Chas. H. Sheldon
(author of the book. What Would Jesus Do?), when
he was widely quoted as declaring that every Christian
Church should have its confessional, that every clergy-
man should know how to act as confessor to the
sinning soul. If he had used the word "clinic," which
is the physician's confessional, he would probably have
avoided the criticism. The Roman Catholic confes-
sional is a mechanical device, serving as a means by
which the priest can become cognizant of the sins of
professing Christians and prescribe the appropriate
penance, without knowing the identity of the con-
fessing party. The Protestant confessional is the
innermost shrine of Christian friendship, whose essence
and glory lies in self-revelation. Nevertheless the
Roman Catholic priest, whose experimental knowledge

SOUl - SURGERY 73

of men often puts to shame the Protestant clergyman,
truly understands the value and need of the confession
of sin.

One of the finest passages in Principal Smith's
biography of Drummond is the following, in the
introductory chapter, entitled: "As We Knew Him":
**As we shall see, soon after he had read to his
fellow-students his paper on 'Spiritual Diagnosis,' in
which he blamed the lack of personal dealing as the
great fault of the organised religion of his time, he
was drawn to work in the inquiry rooms of the revival
of 1873-75. And in these he dealt, face to face, with
hundreds of men and women at the crisis of their
lives. When that work was over, his experience, his
fidelity and his sympathy continued to be about him,
as it were the walls of a quiet and healing confessional,
into which wounded men and women crept from the
world, dared 'To unlock the heart and let it speak' —
dared to tell the worst about themselves. It is safe to
say that no man in our generation can have heard
confession more constantly than Drummond did.
And this responsibility, about which he was ever as
silent as about his own inner struggles, was a heavy
burden and a sore grief to him. If some of the letters

74 SOUL - SU RGBRY

he received be specimens of the confidence poured into
his ears, we can understand him saying, as he did to
one friend: ''Such tales of woe I've heard in Moody's
inquiry room that I have felt I must go and change
my very clothes after the contact"; or to another,
when he had come from talking privately with some
students : *'0, I am sick with the sins of these men !
How can God bear it !" And yet it is surely proof of
the purity of the man and of the power of the Gospel
he believed in that, thus knowing the human heart,
and bearing the full burden of men's sins, he should
nevertheless have believed (to use his own words) *in
the recoverableness of a man at his worst,' and have
carried with him wherever he went the air of health
and of victory."*

It is encouraging to note how the need for such
confessional-clinics as we have been advocating is be-
ing realized increasingly in the church in the West.
The church news page of a denominational paper
told recently of the ministry, just terminated, of a
leading Canadian pastor, who had established an office
in the premises of his church in Toronto, where he
kept daily office hours from nine until four. He
received a continual stream of callers, including many
* Smith: Life of Drummond, pp. 10, 11.

SOUL - SURGERY 75

young men and women from the British Isles, to
whom he gave counsel and help. This he called his
"Moral Clinic." No doubt there was a more intimate
connection than many would realise between the clinic
and the fact stated in another paragraph, that this
pastor had "a Sunday evening audience of 1,500." He
was telling his people on Sunday the cure for what
had been coming to him all the week, of temptation
and sin and sorrow, from burdened, yearning hearts.

A more pretentious effort in this direction which
emphasises the close connection between physical and
spiritual clinical work, has been the original experi-
ment in Emmanuel Church, Boston, which has now
passed the experimental stage and proved its prag-
matic right to permanency. More than ten years ago
the pastors of this church, Drs. Worcester and
McComb, determined to appropriate some of the
power of Christian science, without its bad philosophy
and theology, by bringing into the foreground the fig-
ure of the Healing Christ — healer of the sick bodies
and minds and souls of men. With surprising rapid-
ity the prayer meeting grew from a few score to many
hundreds. Great audiences soon filled the church on
Sundays. The establishment of a week-day clinic was

76 SOUL - SURGERY

found to be necessary, in which a well-known physi-
cian was associated with the two clergymen, who
themselves took special training in the treatment of
nervous disorders. I visited this famous clinic in
1908. All about the premises of the church (proper
arrangement not having then been made) were ailing
people, who had come from all parts of the eastern
states. I remember talking with one elderly woman,
who had been sent from Philadelphia by the famous
nerve specialist and novelist, Dr. S. Wier Mitchell.
Each patient was directed first to the medical mem-
ber of the trio for a thorough physical examination.
Later he was accorded a searching interview with Dr.
Worcester or Dr. McComb, who had already seen the
physical diagnosis and could then prescribe treatment
based on all the facts revealed. This experiment was
watched with great interest by both clergymen and
physicians, and has certainly pointed the way to a far
closer co-operation between doctors of the body and
of the soul in years to come.

Up to this point we have been thinking of the con-
fession that is made to a single friendly ear. We
must now consider the question of the public confes-
sion, which is sometimes as necessary as the other.

SOUL - SURGERY 77

Every genuine revival furnishes fresh evidence of the
value of this factor in religious experience, and it fre-
quently illustrates also the concomitant danger tha^
the tendency to confession may run to unwholesome
lengths. The value of this element, when carefully
safeguarded, was repeatedly shown in the early stages
of the present widespread movement of personal
evangelism in China. I was myself a witness of most
of the instances of confession given in the following
quotation from an article written by Pastor Chang
Cheng Yi, secretary of the China Continuation Com-
mittee, one of the most attractive and powerful
Christian leaders I have met in China or elsewhere:
"At one of Mr. Buchman's meetings a pastor was led
by the Spirit of God to make public confession of his
failure as a minister of the Gospel. There and then
he walked across the meeting hall toward one of the
elders of his church with whom he had not been on
good terms for the long period of seven years, and
publicly asked him for forgiveness. He declared that
while there was wrong on both sides, his was the
greater. A church quarrel existed for some years
between the pastors of a certain mission. Disagree-
ment in opinion regarding certain things was the

78 SOUl - SURGBRY

beginning of the trouble. Ill feeling, however, grew
from bad to worse, and there existed unfriendliness
and even hatred. But the warmth of God's love can
melt the coldness of men's hearts. After publicly con-
fessing their sins, they shook each other's hands, as
a token of restored friendship. A lady missionary
with intense earnestness requested her fellow-workers
to pray with her for those members of her family who
were not yet won for Christ. Her intense passion for
souls moved the hearts of all who were present at that
hillside gathering. She is a great power, and through
her many have been, and are being, blessed. One other
young missionary, when inspired by God's Spirit, bold-
ly confessed the failures in his work for Christ. He
said that there was no power in his work, and, to
use Mr. Buchman's word, no miracles. Why? Be-
cause egotism, unkindliness, and other things had
come between himself and God. Now he is a keen
soul-winner, and is never so happy as when he is
speaking to some one about his need of Christ. He
is in real earnest, and means business. The Spirit of
God was certainly working in the hearts of the semi-
nary students when they stood up and confessed their
sins before the whole school. One of the students

SOUL, - SURGURY 79

had been the preacher in a large church in the south
for eight years before he joined the college. He care-
fully prepared a long letter which he intends to send
to his former congregation confessing the failure of
his ministry. Among other things he frankly tells
them that during all those eight years he could not
name one single person that was won for Christ
through him, and he further declared that he was so
deeply interested in institutional and other kinds of
work that the spiritual welfare of his congregation
was not properly cared for. He, therefore, asked their
forgiveness. For a young man to say these things
before the whole school and church certainly required
an unusual amount of courage."*

The above-mentioned occurrences took place in
widely scattered cities of China, in small, quiet gath-
erings where there was no unnatural excitement —
only the manifest working of the Spirit of God. I
should like to give one further example of the potential
importance of public confession, within the range of
my own observation, which made a lifelong impression
upon me. In one of the large eastern universities of

" "Miracles," by C. Y. Cheng, in The Chinese Recorder
December, 1917.

80 SOUL - SURGURY

the United States, one of the most active Christian
students, a Bible class teacher and a Student Volun-
teer, had been struggling vainly for three years to
break the bonds of a certain secret sin that held him
in a vice-like grip. Several friends, to whom he final-
ly revealed his trouble, joined with him in prayer,
daily for a long period, and still he could not gain a
complete victory, and the long, losing struggle was
having its effect in departments of his life. At his
last student summer conference, following graduation,
after a trenchant address on sin by Dr. John R. Mott,
this man, with many others, determined to claim the
power of Christ, once for all, "to break the power of
cancelled sin, and set the prisoner free." Then God's
Spirit showed him what he must do. At the final
delegation meeting of his university, as each man
around the large circle rose and told what the confer-
ence had meant to him, this man rose, in his turn,
and, before the room full of his fellow students,
confessed his sin and asked for their prayers that he
might be saved and kept from ever again succumbing
to its power. It was one of the most morally courage-
ous acts I ever witnessed and can hardly have been
forgotten by any man there, and it proved to be the

SOUL - SURGERY 8i

begininng of a life of real victory and power for this
man, who is today a very successful missionary in a
foreign land.

Only God can show a man when and where he must
confess; and only He can show the personal worker
when he ought to press for a confession. When he is
certain that the need for confession exists, the soul
surgeon must be lovingly relentless in insisting that
the confession be made, when and where it is needed.
It is often the kind of drastic, spiritual operation
which alone can prevent a superficial repentance and
unreal conversion. In New York City, last winter,
a university student leader came to talk with Mr.
Buchman about entering the Christian ministry. He
had just been attending a conference on the ministry,
at which the brilliant addresses had interested but had
not convinced him. He was full of questions and of
longing for the personal interview for w^hich, as so
often, the conference committee had made no adequate
provision. Mr. Buchman answered his questions on
the ministry to the best of his ability, but still the man
seemed unsatisfied. They had finished dinner with
little accomplished, and Mr. Buchman then invited
him to his room for further conversation. In time the

82 SOUL - SURGERY

student opened up a little more, and said: "I'll tell
you why I couldn't enter the ministry. I want my own
way too much." ''Isn't there anything else?" Mr.
Buchman asked, and the student said ''No." Then
Mr. Buchman was "told what he should speak," as
suspicion became conviction ; and leaning forward he

said earnestly to the man : "Isn't your trouble "

The barrier of pride crumbled away, the man burst
into tears, and a new beginning was made of a sure
foundation, which transformed the young man into a
genuine personal worker and decided finally his
problems concerning the ministry. As they were walk-
ing together to the underground railway, after their
talk was finished, the student said (and it is worth
remembering) : "Buchman, Fd have cursed you to-
night if you hadn't got at my real need."

In concluding this subject, it might be well to
mention several admonitions which we need to bear
in mind.

Take nothing for granted. A man may be presi-
dent of a Christian Endeavour society, superintendent
of a Sunday school, an elder or vestryman in a
church — yes, the secretary of a Young Men"s Christian
Association, a clergyman or a missionary — and still

SOUL - SURGERY 83

stand in need of moral surgery. One great lack in
what I formerly understood as personal work was, that
it dealt only or chiefly with the class theologically
known as "the lost," considered in need of salvation.
One thought of the world as divided into two classes —
the saved and the unsaved — with the boundaries of
the first class for the most part coterminous with those
of the visible church. One was expected to ''do
personal work" of a vague, dreary sort with the latter
class, who seemed somehow hopelessly inaccessable,
That was essentially the accepted division in Jesus'
day — the professionally religious people, the Scribes
and Pharisees, in one class or caste, and the "Pub-
licans and sinners" in the other. The Pharisee
thanked God that he was not like "this Publican,"
whose prayer was : ''God be merciful to me, a sinner."
Jesus had in mind this classification when He said to
the Pharisees, with scathing irony : 'T came not to
call the righteous but sinners to repentance." There-
upon He showed clearly which of the two classes He
considered to be in direct need of spiritual surgery,
when He so excoriated the self -righteousness of the
Pharisees that the name "Pharisee" has taken its
place in our language as synonymous with a canting

84 SOUL - SURGERY

hypocrite. Certainly the parable of the Pharisee and
the Publican is full of arresting significance for those
of us today who belong to the professionally religious
class, the members of Christ's Church on earth.

There is one infallible test by which we must be
judged, and it is indicated by two verses of Scripture:
"If any man hath not the Spirit of Christ he is none
of His," and "By their fruits ye shall know them."
We are told what the fruits of the Spirit are in Gala-
tians 5 : 22, 23 : "But the fruit of the Spirit is love,
joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithful-
ness, meekness, self-control; against such there is no
law." The Spirit of Jesus Christ, we know, was one
of redemptive, holy love, expressed in the continuous
faithful effort to bring men, one by one, into vital
relation with the living God. If we are not true sharers
in His purpose and programme today, can we claim to
possess His Spirit and to be worthy of bearing His
name? Is it not, then, a fair corollary to the above
that if a man's life is not bringing forth fruit some-
where, according to his opportunity, in intensive,
evangelistic effort, there is somthing wrong with his
spiritual life, judged by the lofty standards of Jesus?
Would we not, therefore, be wise to discard for prac-

SOUL - SURGERY 85

tical purposes, the old classification of ''the saved,"
and ''the unsaved," and divide men rather into the
two classes, suggested by the Master, of the morally
whole and the morally sick — those that are and those
that are not living a normal, glowing, contagious, re-
ligious life, owned and inspired by the spirit and
passion of Christ? While no one of us dare attempt
to judge his brothers, the very emphasis on that truth
will bring its own conviction to souls that are not in
a condition of radiant health. This, surely, is one of
the lessons of the parable of the Last Judgment. The
separation of the sheep and the goats is according to
a principle that takes account not of the profession but
of the practice of Jesus' religion of loving, fruitful
service. Our first business at this point is to discover
through the lips of the patient whether there is a sin
hitherto unconfessed and unforgiven, by which the
soul has been insulated from contact with the life-
giving power of Christ. Our second task may be to
assist in the removal of such a hindrance, however
costly and difficult the process shall prove to be.

Never betray an appearance of shocked surprise.
Such an attitude will assuredly dry up confidence at
the roots, and militate against any continuance of

86 SOUL - SURGERY

friendly service on our part. It usually results from

inexperience on the personal worker's side, for the

wider his knowledge of the real world of men and

events the less is he likely openly to stand aghast

(however deeply pained in spirit) at any of the

revelations that may be necessary to lay bare before

him the inner life of his patient. Of all men who

know sin vicariously and redemptively, the Roman

Catholic priest, as a rule, knows it best because the

confessional has bared it to him in its widest range

and grimmest realism. In Chesterton's detective

story, The Blue Cross, the desperate criminal,

Flambeau, marvels at the knowledge of the criminal

world possessed by Father Brown. The priest asks

him : "Has it never strtrck you that a man who does

next to nothing but hear men's real sins is not likely

to be wholly unaware of human evil?"* What about

our Protestant confessional of redemptive friendship?

Have we felt for ourselves Drummond's experience,

quoted above, of wishing to wash our hands and change

our clothes, at times, to rid ourselves of the clinging

influence of the sickening revelations that have poured

into our ears ?

* Chesterton: The Innocence of Father Brown, p. 19.
Cassell & Co., London.

SOUL - SURGERY 87

We are charged to be ''in the world, but not of
it." The trouble with too many of us Christians is
that we are neither in nor of the world, but are living
an in-growing, religious life in a spiritual hot-house
of our own creation, apart from and largely ignorant
of the sinning world that Jesus came to save, and
sent His followers to leaven. We are too much like
the person referred to in the illustration used in India
by Professor George Hare Leonard, in 1915-16, in the
course of his lectures on Social Service. This individ-
ual, on hearing a child crying piteously in the cold,
stormy street outside, rose and closed the window —
to shut out the sound. Since the suffering of others is
troublesome to us, and their sins are revolting, the
way of self-indulgence is to shut them away from
our ken as far as that is possible. How different was
the example of Jesus, who perfectly fulfilled th^ ideal
of the suffering servant of Jehovah, forseeri by
Isaiah — the ideal which every Christian must seek
to make his own: "Surely He hath borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows; yet we did esteem Him
stricken, smitten of God and afflicted. But He was
wounded for our transgressions. He was bruised for
our iniquities; the chastisement of our peace was

88 SOUL - SURGBRY

upon Him, and with His stripes we are healed"
(Isaiah 53: 4, 5). The only certain way really to
come to know the human life that is surging around
us, in all its aspects of light and shade, so as to be
lifted above the possibility of betraying disastrous
surprise, is through intensive personal work. The
confessions we thus receive will give us cross sections
of typical lives wherein are involved and exposed
whole areas of the life around about us, in which sin
and suffering and sorrow are rife.

Be ready to confess your own shortcomings
honestly and humbly. Nothing will more surely
obviate an appearance of self-righteousness in the
spiritual physician than his own confession of where
he too fell before the onslaughts of temptation, and
found in the power and presence of Christ salva-
tion and security. And often nothing else will break
through the barrier of pride behind which the patient
is shielding his sin. An illustration of this comes
to my mind, which occurred at a conference in China
in the summer of 1917. There was present a certain
student in a mission college for whom a number of us
were specially praying, because of his influence on the
other students and because we had reason to believe

SOUL - SURGERY 89

that he was guilty of dishonesty in his college work
and needed to confess and make a new start. Yet the
confession would not come. Finally it came, and
with it penitence and the desire for a new heart,
when one of his future professors, just arrived in
China, a recent graduate of Yale University, told the
student how he had himself once yielded to the tempta-
tion of cheating in examinations, and how he had been
brought to see the way in which that dishonesty was
undermining his moral integrity. It was necessary
that the pride of the professor as well as that of the
student should entirely melt away. In this way God
often uses our temptations, and perhaps our early
failures and our ultimate victories, to make and keep
us human in these delicate spiritual operations that
need to be performed. After a personal work group
in a China hill station, one missionary told me how for
years he had been hounded and hindered by the
memory of dishonesty in his university examinations,
a sin which had never been confessed. He had not
realized that once he made things right by proper
confession and any possible restitution, the very fact
of his early weakness could be over-ruled for good by
the Divine Hand, in the course of his work among
students in China where, as everywhere else, that sin

90 SOUL - SURGERY

is so common. Men so easily over-exaggerate their
sins by dwelling on them, until they morbidly imagine
that they are peculiar and unique in the nature and
extent of their sins. We do not need to make light
of sin in order to show the patient that his case is not
unique and therefore hopeless. The student in New
York whose fruitful interview with Mr. Buchman
was mentioned above, when he had broken down and
confessed, sobbed: ''You'll never like me again,"
and he was immeasurably helped at once by being
told how many other cases of secret sin exactly like his
Mr. Buchman had dealt with that very week. I
remember in my own case the feeling almost of
elation, after deep depression, that came to me as a
student when I sought help from a Christian worker
whom 1 vastly admired, and learned from him that he
had fought through my very fight. It spurred me on
toward victory as nothing else could have done.

Regarding the use which God can make of our
consciousness and confession of our own failures, we
have the testimony of Rev. Howard Agnew Johnson,
whose Studies for Personal Workers have helped
thousands in many lands: "In the Christian the
consciousness of limitations will ever tend to prevent
boastfulness. The one fact which helps most here is

SOUL - SURGERY 91

that God expects every man to reveal Christ. By so

much as I ask myself how far I am revealing Christ, I

am emptied of self-exaltation by the consciousness of

a pitiful failure."* "Any intimation of a feeling

of superiority on the part of a Christian is fatal to his

influence with one who is not, especially in view of

the fact that any such spirit is always unjustifiable.

To go with a confession of unworthiness is not only

consistent, but it tends to disarm criticism ....

Hence, when approaching him, it is always safest

and generally helpful to begin by confessing one's

own sense of unworthiness, and then add a confession

of faith and hope in Christ as one who is most precious

and helpful to you, and, therefore, to all who will

accept Him."t

We shall not go far wrong if our attitude toward

the man we wish to help is that recommended in

Frederick Lawrence Knowle's poem, "The Discipline

of Failure" :

"Thus believing, I have come to love you.
All who climb with me from self to freedom.
Let me kiss thy lips. O fallen brother!
Let my arms enfold thee, fallen sister!
Let me trust and love you back to honour,
Let me draw you to the Great Forgiveness,

^ * Johnson : Studies for Personal Workers, p. 37. Associa-
tion Press, New York.
t Ibid., p. 79.

92 SOUL - SURGERY

Not as one above who stoops to save you,
Not as one who stands aside with counsel,
Nay, as he who says, I, too, was poisoned
With the flowers that sting, but now, arisen
I am struggling up the path beside you ;
Rise ! and let us face these heights together."*

We need likewise to remember that the value of
public (as well as private) confession of sin, when it
is in response to the proved leading of God's Spirit,
does not only arise from the effect upon the one who
thus confesses. There is also to be considered the
effect upon those who hear. Many changed lives in
China this past year have resulted from the confession
by Mr. Buchman, to small groups, of how for a whole
year, he did not win one soul to Christ because he was
harbouring a feeling of resentment toward a group
of men, who, he knew, had wronged him. Finally, a
sermon that he heard at Keswick, England, moved
him to write six letters to the men who had wronged
him, asking their forgiveness of his uncharitable atti-
tude toward them. At the top of each letter he wrote
the verse:

"When I survey the wondrous Cross,
On which the Prince of Glory died.
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.**

* Knowles : Love Triumphant, pp. 92, 93. Dana, Estes & Co.,
Boston.

SOUL - SURGERY 93

We may be sure, then, that if we are honest and
humble and truthful, God will keep us human and
sympathetic, and may be able to use our very weak-
nesses and temptations, over-ruled by His grace, to
His everlasting honour and glory.

Finally, keep every confidence absolutely sacred.
This counsel may seem superfluous because the need
of observing it is so obvious and yet we often do not
realise how easily we may let slip a remark about
some person into whose confidence we have come,
which may reveal to another more than we think.
The professional honour of the physician is of the
utmost importance here, as every Roman Catholic
priest is compelled to learn. Unless people come to
feel an entire reliance on our discretionary silence
they assuredly will not trust us. Many a potential
personal worker is severely handicapped because he
(or she) has never acquired this great and costly gift
of silence. They may need to pray not now for a
new heart, but for a new tongue. Weymouth trans-
lates a phrase in the seventh verse of the thirteenth
chapter of First Corinthians, referring to true love:
"She knows how to he silent" It is a noble and
rare achievement. The moral surgeon must be one

94 SOUL - SURGBRY

who is the complete master of his tongue, a man of
studied silences and large reserves of knowledge.
True personal workers must have overcome the insidi-
ous temptation to criticism among Christians to which,
when they yield, they inevitably wall themselevs away
from those whom they ought to serve. Our business
is not to circulat e the salacious bit of scandal we
happen to have heard, but to destroy it by tracing
out and cleaning up the source. Our business is not
the common, destructive one of pointing out to the
world in general the weaknesses in our fellow-men,
but it is the constructive task of the human engineer —
to strengthen and correct, and hence conserve. If
men have found that we are accustomed to speak
carelessly and ungenerously of others they will not
seek us out when in need of confidential help. Truly,
as St. James wrote : "The tongue can no man tame ;
it is a restless evil, it is full of deadly poison"
(Jas 3:7). Weymouth renders "a restless evil" more
vividly, "an ever-busy mischief." More specific is the
author of the proverb: "A worthless man deviseth
mischief; and in his lips there is a scorching fire."
"A perverse man scattereth abroad strife; and a
whisperer separateth chief friends." (Prov. 16: 27,

SOUL-SURGERY 95

28). The "whisperer" will not receive men's confi-
dence because they know he cannot keep it. He can
only become certain of keeping it, and hence deserve
to receive it, when he has appropriated the power of
Christ to master and guide the truant tongue that no
one of himself can tame.

When we pause to criticise our own confidence-
destroying criticism of others we usually discover that
it is, at least presumptively, not altogether true or
just. I often find it helpful to call to mind a little
verse, learned long ago, of which 1 never knew the
author :

"Could we but draw back the curtains that surround each

other's lives,
See the naked heart and spirit, know what spur the action

gives —
Often we should find it better, purer, than we think we

should :
We should love each other better if we only understood."

When those closed curtains are drawn aside for

us by a hand from within, and we are permitted to

enter the innermost chamber of another life, we are

sure to find many surprises, and to be rebuked for our

former shallow and biased judgments. From that

time forth must our lips be sealed by love, and our

hearts be bound over to prayer and faith and redemp-

96 SOUL - SURGERY

tive friendship. I will close this section with another
quotation, of unknown derivation, which I may not
give quite correctly. It prescribes the safest attitude
for us to assume habitually toward those of our
neighbors, past the curtains of whose lives we have
not seen: "No one may look across where another
soul moves on a quick, straight path and say the way
is easier for the other. No one can see if the rocks are
cutting his friend's feet. No one can know what
burning lands he has crossed to follow, to be so close
to his Angel, his Messenger. Believe always that
every other life has been tempted, more tried than
your own. Believe that the lives higher and better
than yours are so, not through more ease but more
effort. Believe that the lives lower than yours are so
through more temptation, more trial. Believe that
your friend with peace in his heart has won it, not
happened on it, that he has fought your very fight."

3.

Conviction

This stage is as closely related to Confession as
Confession is to Confidence. It may come simultan-
eously with, or it may precede confession, but that con-
fession of sin is not conviction of sin any one who has
worked among Indian students can testify. Some
measure of a sense of sin is almost universal. Says K.
J. Saunders : "We cannot see life steadily without be-
ing oppressed with the awfulness of the burden of sin
— our own and that of the world. | We cannot think
of human nature without being staggered by the
terrible contradictions it contains; capable of soar-
ing to God-like acts and emotions, man is capable
no less of devilish lust and cruelty: and no one who
knows himself dare tell all he knows."* To the
Christian, conviction of sin means more than this: it
means a vision of the hideousness of his own personal
guilt in the light of the revelation of God's holy love
in Christ. It is the point where a man cries out to

* Saunders : Adventures of the Christian Soul, p. 98. Cam-
bridge University Press.

9S SOUL - SURGERY

God with the Psalmist, "Against Thee, Thee only,
have I sinned and done that which is evil in Thy
sight." It speaks in the penitent voice of the Prodi-
gal, ''Father, I have sinned against heaven and in
thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy
son." It is the recognition that sin — in the graphic,
personal terms Dr. Joseph Parker used to employ — is
striking God in the face. As Dr. Glover brings out
in the chapter, 'Jesus' Teaching upon Sin," in his
Jesus of History,^ John the Baptist thought of sin
in relation to the law of God ; Jesus, in relation to the
love of God — a far different thing. This work of
bringing conviction of sin to a human heart no man
can accomplish. It is the work of the Spirit of God,
of whom Jesus prophesized: "When He is come He
will convict the world of sin, and of righteousness and
of judgment" (John 16: 8). Is our part, then, to
be that of mere passive waiting, when we arrive at the
baffling point where there is confession of sin with no
deep sense of conviction, leading to a new birth? By
no means, there is much that we can do.

In the first place, we can try to help the man to
see himself as God sees him, to view his own life, as
t Glover : The Jesus of History, p. 57.

SOUL - SURGERY 99

we would have him view sin, sub specie aeternitatis,
from the standpoint of eternity, as the old divines
uesd to put it. Here Drummond's masterly analysis
will help us again. "A well-known American essay-
ist and poet has told us that the difficulty of analysing
our neighbour's character arises from the fact that
every man is in reality a threefold man. When two
persons are in conversation, there are really six per-
sons in conversation. Thus, to put the paradox into
the shape of an example, suppose that John and Tom
are in conversation, there are three Johns and three
Toms, who are accounted for in this way.

Three Johns —

1 . The real John ; known only to his Maker.

2. John's ideal John : John, i.e., as he thinks him-
self ; never the real John, and often very unlike him.

3. Tom's ideal John; i.e., John as Tom thinks
him : never the real John : nor John's John, but often
very unlike either.

Three Toms —

1. The real Tom.

2. Tom's ideal Tom.

3. John's ideal Tom.

loo SOUL - SURGERY

In this way when I talk to another it is not I whom
he hears talking, but his ideal of me : nor do I talk to
him as he defines himself, but to my ideal of him.
Now that ideal will, without almost inconceivable
care and penetration on my part, be quite different also
from his real self as God only knows him, so that in-
stead of speaking to his real soul, I may possibly be
speaking to his ideal of his own soul, or, more likely,
to my ideal of it.

"From this it will be seen at a glance that the
power of soul analysis is a hard thing to possess one-
self of. It requires intense discrimination and knowl-
edge of human nature — much and deep study of
human life and character. The man with whom you
speak being made up of two ideals — his own and yours,
and one real — God's, it is one of the hardest possible
tasks to abandon your ideal of him and get to know
the real — God's. Then, having known it so far as
possible to man, there remains the greatest difficulty
of all — to introduce him to himself. You have created
a new man for him, and he will not recognise him at
first. He can see no resemblance to his ideal self ; the
new creature is not such a lovely picture as he would
like to own : the lines are harshly drawn, and there is

SOUL ' SURGBRY loi

little grace and no poetry in it. But he must be told
that none of us are what we seem; and if he would
deal faithfully with himself, he must try to see him-
self differently from what he seems. Then he must be
led with much delicacy to make a little introspection
of himself ; and with the mirror lifted to his own soul
you read off together some of the indications which
are defining themselves vaguely upon its surface.
Even in social and domestic circles the difficulty of
performing this apparently simple operation upon
human nature is so keenly felt that scarce one friend
will be found with a friendship true enough to perform
it to another. And in religious matters it will be at
once conceded that the complexity of the difficulties
increases the problem a hundredfold."'^

A second service we may render at this stage is to
help a man not only to see himself as God sees him,
but also to understand, if he is young and inexperi-
enced, the terrible consequences of the sin that is not
checked, perhaps through the medium of a painful
surgical operation. It was one who knew sin in its
farthest reaches who used the uncompromising
language of Matthew 5 :28, and the verses following :
* Drummond : The New Evangelism, pp. 270-273.

I02 SOUL - SURGERY

"And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and

cast it from thee : for it is profitable for thee that one

of thy members should perish than that thy whole body

should be cast into hell," Try to make the sinner

realise.

1. Sin's Binding Power. The normal man, at

one time or another, feels constrained to cry out with

the Apostle Paul, "I am unspiritual, the slave bought

and sold, of sin" (Romans 7: 14, Weymouth trt.) ;

or, with the Psalmist, ''My sins are mightier than I"

(Psalm 65: 3). Not only of deceit, but of every

other sin are the poet's words true :

"Oh what a tangled web we weave
When we first practice to deceive."

Some one has graphically stated in the following
familiar sentence the sequence which is psychologi-
cally and Scripturally accurate, "Sow a thought,
reap an act; sow an act, reap a habit; sow a habit,
reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny."
Often if a man can be led to see the chain he is forg-
ing, link by link, in the habits he is forming, he may
be arrested temporarily and may then be permanently
helped. Says Fosdick, in The Meaning of Faith:
*'At the beginning sin always comes disguised as

SOUL - SURGBRY 103

liberty. Its lure is the seductive freedom which it
promises from the trammels of conscience and the
authority of law. But every man who ever yet accept-
ed sin's offer of a free, unfettered hfe, discovered the
cheat. Free to do the evil thing, to indulge the baser
moods — so men begin, but they end not free to stop,
bound as slaves to the thing that they were free to do.
They have been at liberty to play with a cuttle-fish,
and now that the first long arm with its suckers grasps
them, and the second arm is waving near, they are
not at liberty to get away."*

2. Sin's blinding power. The last phrase of
moral turpitude, the sin against the Holy Ghost, is
present to some extent in those who, consciously or un-
consciously say, "Evil, be thou my good," who, behold-
ing Satan masquerading as an angel of light, follow
after him and reflect that unholy light in their lives. All
sin, we must point out, is a step toward moral myopia.
It was this confusion of standards in the Pharisees
that laid them open to the stinging rebukes of Jesus.
Dr. Glover has described their condition in language
that is worth quoting at length, for its apt character-
ization of a condition that is all about us:

* Fosdick : The Meaning of Faith, p. 253.

I04 SOUl - SURGERY

"Jesus said that the Pharisee was never quite sure
whether the creature he was looking at was a camel or
a mosquito — he got them mixed (Matt. 23: 24).
Once we realise what this tremendous irony means,
we are better able to grasp his thought. The Phari-
see was living in a world that was not the real one — it
was a highly artificial one, picturesque and charming
no doubt, but dangerous. For, after all, we do live
in the real world — there is only one world, however
many we may invent: and to live in any other is
danger. Blindness, that is partial and uneven, lands
a man in peril whenever he tries to come downstairs
or to cross the streets — he steps on the doorstep that is
not there and misses the real one. He is involved in
false appearances at every turn. And so it is in the
moral world — there is one real, however many unreals
there are, and to trust to the unreal is to come to grief
on the real. *The beginning of a man's doom,'
wrote Carlyle, *is that vision be withdrawn from
him.' 'Thou blind Pharisee !' (Matt. 23: 26). The
cup is clean enough without; it is septic and poison-
ous within, and from which side of it do you drink,
outside or inside? (Matt. 23: 25). As we study
the teaching of Jesus here, we see anew the profundity

SOUL • SURGBRY 105

of the saying attributed to Him in the Fourth Gospel,
'The truth shall make you free' (John 8: 32). The
man with astigmatism, or myopia, or whatever else it
is, must get the glasses that wall show him the real
world, and he is safe, and free to go and come as
he pleases. See the real in the moral sphere, and the
first great peril is gone."'^

This gradual, tragic perversion of the moral
vision, accompanied by a steady lowering of the stand-
ards of right and wrong, has never been more
trenchantly depicted than in Pope's lines:

"Vice is a monster of such frightful mien
That to be hated needs but to be seen :
But, seen too often, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace."

3. Sin's Deadening Power. Not only does sin
bring confusion to a man's standards of right and
wrong, but it brings callousness of heart in the pres-
ence of the sin and suffering of others. A good
touchstone of a man's integrity of character is his
capacity for true moral indignation (which is rather
the suffering of disapproving love than the anger of
offended virtue) in the presence of the sin and wrong
round about him. Can he say with St. Paul, '"'Who
* Glover : The Jesus of History, p. 163.

io6 SOUL ' SURGERY

is led astray into sin and I am not aflame with indigna-
tion?" (2 Cor. 11:29, Weymouth tr.). Or, does he
now easily permit in his own life practices which
once grieved his spirit when he witnessed them in
others? If the latter is the case he must come to see
that he needs, though for deeper reasons, the surgical
operation to which Stevenson alludes :

"If I have faltered more or less
In my great task of cheerfulness,
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not, if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain,
Knock on my sullen heart in vain:
Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take,
And stab my spirit broad awake."

4. Sin's Propagating Power. Perhaps the most
terrible consequence of sin is its deadly power of pass-
ing on its taint to others in the family, the community,
and even in the next generation. Because of my sin
others must suffer and others will be led to sin. In
the case of sexual immorality these social consequences
of sin are most conspicuous, and here such a little
book as the one, entitled Life's Clinic,'^ in which the
suffering of the innocent is portrayed with ghastly

* E. H, Hooker : Life's Clinic. Association Press, Calcutta,
1918.

SOUL - SURGERY 107

fidelity to the hideous truth, may be used of God in
bringing about real conviction of sin. Here it is quite
evident that not only do we reap what we sow, but
others must reap the sorrowful harvest of our *'wild
oats." But this holds true not only in those sins we
are accustomed to call the grosser sins, but in such no
less deadly and deadening society sins as unkind criti-
cism, uncontrolled temper and untruthful language.

Moreover, it may well be that the sin for which
others than ourselves must suffer is neither of the
gutter nor of the drawing-room, but of the business
office, the bank, the factory. It seems as though such
a book as Prof. E. A. Ross' Sins of Society must
bring conviction of sin to many a smug elder in the
Church who has made a fortune at the expense of the
suffering and privation of others. Prof. Walter
Rauschenbusch considers this type of "social sin" to
be "the climax of sin," the heart of man's rebellion
against God. In his most recent book, he writes :

''Sin is essentially selfishness. That definition is
more in harmony with the social gospel than with any
individualistic type of religion. The sinful mind,
then, is the un-social and anti-social mind. To find
the climax of sin we must not linger over a man who

io8 SOUL - SURGBRY io8

swears, or sneers at religion, or denies the mystery of
the Trinity, but put our hands on social groups who
have turned the patrimony of a nation into the private
property of a small class, or have left the peasant
labourers cowed, degraded, demoralized, and without
rights in the land. When we find such in history, or
in present-day life, we shall know we have struck real
rebellion against God on the higher levels of sin."*

In the next place, besides trying to help a man to
see himself and his sins as they are, rather than
through such deceptive "white logic" as Jack London
writes of in John Barleycorn, we shall be able to help
him toward a decision by the contagious power of our
own example. Indeed, this should be our first con-
tribution. "Character is caught not taught," as Pres.
King, of Oberlin, so often says. Dr. Henry Sloane
Coffin puts it more incisively: "Before you can get
religion into anyone else you must have a contagious
case of it yourself." Health is contagious as well as
disease. In our presence this sin-haunted soul should
feel the spell of a radiant, victorious life, the very life
of Christ.

*' Quotation from Rauschenbusch : "A Theology for the
Social Gospel" (Macmillan, in Current Opinion, March, 1918,
p. 199).

SOUL - SURGERY 109

Men become conscious of the blackness of sin
when there is present the contrast of the white hoHness
of the character of Christ and His redemptive love.
Our lives, as well as our lips, must show forth this
spirit. Otherwise as Emerson would say, our lives
will speak so loud (in denial) that men will not hear
what we say (in affirmation) of the principles of
Christ. Lady Stanley has presented to the Missionary
Education Movement in New York a letter written by
the late Sir Henry M. Stanley, in which the great ex-
plorer tells how the beginning of his real Christian
experience dated from his brief meeting with Living-
stone in the heart of Africa. No man, he said, could
be the same after a few days passed in the company
of such a character.

Of how many of us is it true that the resolving
of doubt and conviction of sin and a new challenge to
higher living came through a Christ-filled personality
whose contagion we could not resist. Tennyson said
that we are a part of all that we have met, and Drum-
mond used to say that he became a part of every man
he met, and every man he met became a part of him.
The worth of what we give depends upon what we are.
The greatness of our gifts to others is in proportion to

no SOUl - SURGERy

the fulness of our appropriation of the unsearchable
riches of Christ. How great was Drummond's gift to
every man he met. He himself said: "What the
cause of Christ needs is not so much more of us as a
better brand of us."* The message of the Lambeth
Conference of 1908 contained these words: "The
power to witness for Christ depends on being like
Him. Men will always learn of Christ from those
whom they see living with Christlike simplicity for
their sake."t

It is worth remembering that it is through the
contagious interest of some one else that we enter into
most of the rewarding experiences of life. I may
meet a man whose major enthusiasm is astronomy, and
soon 1 am looking thfugh his telescope with such
interest in the stars as I have never conceived before.
I may hear a lecture on geology, and I look with new
eyes upon the curious rock formations near my home,
which before had seemed commonplace and unworthy
of special notice. Or I may hear an address by a
missionary recently returned from Japan, and some-
thing of the speaker's love for that marvellous race and

* Quoted in H. A. Johnson's Studies for Personal Workers,
p. 20.

t Quoted in E. S. Wood's Modern Discipleship, p. 117.
Association Press, New York.

SOUL - SURGHRY m

his enthusiastic desire that the West shall give to them
also its best — the religion of Jesus — enters into my
own breast. Interest stimulates interest. Enthusiasm
awakens enthusiasm. So it is that a man who has had
a genuine experience of the power of Christ to save
and keep from sin, to comfort in affliction, to arouse
and equip for unselfish service, is certain to quicken
in others, wherever he goes, an interest in things
religious and a desire to possess the same power and
enthusiasm.

A striking illustration of this truth is given in the
autobiographical pamphlet, The Life that Wins, by
Chas. Gallaudet Trumbull, obtainable from the Sun-
day School Times Company, Philadelphia. In it
the son of Dr. H. C. Trumbull tells of how the ex-
perience of a new life of real victory over sin came
to him only after years of unsatisfied search, which
covered the period of his earlier editorship of the ►S'. S.
Times, of his writing a book on Personal Work, and
engaging in various other Christian enterprises. In
the presence of certain people he felt that they pos-
sessed something that he lacked, and somehow his
testimony did not carry conviction or bring results.
After the change came, partly through a visit to

112 SOUL - SURGERY

Keswick, England, he tells how one after another of
his old friends were won to Christ, how everywhere he
went the victory that he had found in his own life
proved to be a contagious, compelling influence in the
lives of others.

Finally, our main reliance at this point must be
prayer and a judicious use of the Christian Scriptures.
We must not only pray for a man, but we must be able
naturally and persuasively to pray with our man and
to get him to pray for himself. It is usually in prayer
that the great illumination comes by which a man
begins to feel both his own incompleteness and God's
greatness, flowing around his incompleteness, round
his restlessness, the divine rest.

Let us heed the advice of Forbes-Robinson in
Letters to His Friends.

"Just try to pray for some one person committed
to your charge— say for half an hour or an hour — and
you will begin really to love him .... It is quite
worth your while to take practically a day off some-
times and force yourself to pray. It will be the best
day's work you have ever done in your life."

With regard to the Scriptures, the records of the
various Bible societies and missionary organizations

SOUL - SURGBRY 113

teem with instances of conviction of sin brought about
by reading the Bible, without any human agency or
interpreter. Christ Himself is the great Convictor of
sin, and His own words, as given in the New Testa-
ment, are the most powerful weapons in the world
to pierce the armour of self-righteousness and self-
satisfaction. Two quotations, from The Vital Forces
of Christianity and Islam/^ illustrate the application
of this truth to the Muhammadan world, and it is no
less true of sinful humanity everywhere.

Dr. W. A. Shedd, of Urumia, Persia, writes : "So
also anything that will lead Moslems to read the
Scriptures is of great value. They, at least, will have
many misconceptions corrected and may be led to
deeper inquiry. The greatest attractive force is Christ
Himself. No Moslem can speak of Him with any-
thing but reverence, and we can let Him speak in His
words in the Gospels. The most uncompromising
claims of Christianity are in those words. Just so far
as we can base His claims on His own words, we
make them strong. We must present Him, as He
offered Himself, as the Light and Truth of the world
and as the Saviour and King of men."

* Oxford University Press, 1915, pp. 67, 235.

114 SOUL ' SURGBRY

We may well conclude this section with a quota-
tion from the letter of a missionary in China for whom
many of these truths regarding personal work have re-
cently begun to live in his life and work. It is one of
a number that are quoted in Bulletin No. 11, on
Personal Evangelism, of the China Continuation Com-
mittee's Special Committee on a Forward Evangelistic
Movement :

*'As to individual work, I realise how far I have
travelled in personal dealing, especially with erring
Christians, when I recall how amazed I was that Mr.
Buchman could induce men to tell him their secret
sins. My experiences of this sort had been very much
the reverse of confession. Indignant denial was
usually followed by a demand to know the culprit
who had accused them. Also I had not been able to
get alongside of men, and share with them my spirit-
ual experiences, in order to enter the deeper places of
their soul, and help where help was needed.

"It has been my privilege and joy recently, in life
after life, to break through to the bedrock facts of the
heart and life. This ability has not come easily, but
such progress as I have made has come from the exer-
cise of the Christian virtues of courage and love.

SOUL - SURGERY 115

Here is a man who has fallen. His life is empty of
Christ, and he has a resentment against the Church
for looking askance at him. In approaching him I
must believe that God can speak quite distinctly to
him, and that he will realise that he is dealing with
God; also that God's most direct way of speaking to
a man is through another man. I am eager to be
that man. I go to that man, convinced that God is
going to speak to him through me. I even dare to
say, "God wishes to say this to you through me."
In many cases I have the absolute confidence that the
man will be won, and he usually is.

"To get his confidence, I have been taught that
the only way is to take my place as a fellow sinner.
He has to realise that I am seeking his truest well-
being, and will not be satisfied till I get to the facts.
The interview, of course, must be private, and often
the wrestle comes after we get down on our knees
together. I have done what I have never done in my
life before, and what is foreign to my instincts — put
my arm around a man's shoulder as we prayed together
on our knees, until the guilt was confessed and the
burden lifted. The actual touch sometimes makes all
the difiierence.

ii6 SOUL - SURGURY

"The reward has been a response in real affection
from these men, and the joy of seeing the welcome
break on the prodigal's face. One feels that one is
having a great time of it. It also multiplies one's
usefulness more quickly than any other way."

I

* Conversion

We need not linger long over this crucial step,
because it is a transaction that takes place altogether
between the soul and God, usually following con-
viction of sin and a new sense of the need of a Saviour,
when Christ's salvation is recognised and appropriated.
Here we can do little except help to centre on Christ
and His redeeming love and power, the attention
which has been directed toward the sinful self and its
needs. If the patient stopped at the last stage he
would be like a sick man who mourned the magnitude
(real or fancied) of his disease, but saw no hope of
healing. He would become a morbid religious hypo-
chondriac. The burden of his sin must fall from
his shoulders, as did that of Pilgrim, and he must
come to know not only the poignant sorrow for his
sin, experienced on Calvary, but also the triumphant
joy of the Resurrection morning. The Christian
worker here needs, as Drummond assures us, thor-
oughly to understand the rationale of conversion.

* For the best treatment of this subject, viewed in the light
both of psychology and Christian experience, see Chapters
IV, V and VI of K. J. Saunders' Adventures of the Christimi
Soul,

ii8 SOUL - SURGERY

Viewed from man's side, it is an act of faith in which
the sinner deHberately and finally turns from all
known sin and identifies himself with Christ, for the
future, in a saving, victorious moral unity and fellow-
ship. Viewed from God's side, it is an act of God's
free grace by which He is able, through bearing hu-
man sin — in suffering redemptive love — to forgive the
sinner and so to effect in Christ a reconciliation, a new
relationship, in which the barrier of sin no longer re-
mains. The result of this two-fold act is a fundamen-
tal change, so important that Jesus called it a new
birth of the spirit. The modern religious psychologist
uses strikingly similar language, calling the change
that occurs at conversion "the formation of a new ego."
Writes Starbuck: **It seems that the heightened
worth of self and the altruistic impulses in conversion
are closely bound up together, and the differences be-
tween them lie simply in the different content of con-
sciousness, determined by the direction in which it is
turned. The central fact underlying both is the for-
mation of a new ego, a fresh point of reference for
mental states."*

In different terms, but with a no less clear recog-

* Starbuck's Psychology of Religion, p. 129.

t James : Varieties of Religious Hxperience, p. 189.

SOUL. - SURGERY 119

nition of the profound significance of this crisis and
transformation, WilHam Jarnes begins his chapter on
"Conversion," in the book to which we have already
alluded. "To be converted, to be regenerated, to
receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assur-
ance, are so many phrases which denote the process,
gradual or sudden, by which a self, hitherto, divided,
and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, be-
comes unified a nd consciously right, superior and
happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon re-
ligious realities. "t Later on he writes concerning the
new centring of a man's life interests after conver-
sion. "It makes a great difference to a man, whether
one set of his ideas, or another, be the centre of
his energy; and it makes a great difference, as re-
gards any set of ideas which he may possess, whether
they become central or remain peripheral in him. To
say that a man is 'converted' means, in these terms,
that religious ideas, previously peripheral in his con-
sciousness, now take a central place, and that religious
aims form the habitual centre of his energy. "J

Professor James' colleague at Harvard, the late
Professor Royce, referred to this new focal point of a

* Royce : The Philosophy of Loyalty, p. 46.
t Ibid., p. 196.

I20 SOUL - SURGBRY

man's interests and activities as a new centre of loyal-
ty to a great cause around which all his energies
thenceforth revolve, and which calls forth his highest
powers. He writes: **If you want to find a way of
living which surmounts doubt and centralizes your
powers, it must be some such way as all the loyal in
conversion have trodden since first loyalty was known
among men."*

What the new loyalty to Christ meant in the life
of St. Paul, a great expulsive power that purged his
soul of all the old pride and fanaticism and discontent,
we read in his Epistle to the Phillipians: "Yet all
that was gain to me — for Christ's sake I have reckoned
it loss. Nay, I even reckon all things as pure loss
because of the priceless privilege of knowing Christ
Jesus my Lord. And for His sake I have suffered
the loss of everything, and reckon it all as mere refuse,
in order that I may win Christ and be found in union
with Him, not having a righteousness of my own,
derived from the law, but that which arises from
faith in Christ — the righteousness which comes from
God through faith. I long to know Christ and the
power which is in His resurrection, and to share in
* Saunders : Adventures of the Christian Soul, pp. 67, 68.

SOUL - SURGERY 121

His sufferings and die even as He died; in the hope
that I may attain to the resurrection from among the
dead/'t

But the question which these psychologists seem
unable to answer satisfactorily, namely, what motive
is adequate to explain the phenomena which they have
so painstakingly investigated, bringing to pass this
unification of the divided self, this supreme loyalty, is
answered by Kenneth Saunders, who has added to
a thorough training in psychology a wide experience
in dealing with individual souls, illumined by true
devotion to Christ. Conversion, in his eyes, is a ''fall-
ing in love." He writes : "The basis of conversion
is the awakening of a new self, and the vital element
in this new birth is the dawning of a new affection
which henceforth dominates the heart. Conversion
is, in fact, as we have said, a 'falling in love,' a say-
ing 'Yes' to the 'Divine Lover.' "* And again he
writes: "It is this passion for the Unseen and the
Eternal which above all else can change the heart,
and strengthen the will, and illuminate the mind.
Conversion is the birth of Love."t

t Ibid., p. 88.

t Phillipians 3:7-11, Weymouth tr.

122 SOUL - SURGBRY

With the birth of this new affection religion has
parted company with philosophy, as Fosdick makes
clear in his Meaning of Faith: ''Religion begins
when the God outwardly argued is inwardly experi-
enced. Religion begins when we cease using the
tricky and unstable aeroplane of speculation to seek
Him among the clouds, and retreat into the fertile
places of our own spirits, where the living water rises,
as Jesus said. God outside of us is a theory; God
inside of us becomes a fact. God outside of us is in
hypothesis; God inside of us is an experience. God
the Father is the possibility of salvation; God the
Spirit is actuality of life, joy, peace, and saving
power. God the transcendent may do for philosophy,
but he is not enough for religion. "i

Similarly, Professor Coe, of Union Seminary,
writes of the new sense of reality effected by conver-
sion, in the most recent contribution to the subject of
the psychology of religion.

''Granted that his training has prepared him for

the crisis, and that conversion puts him under the

control of existing social standards and ideas of God,

the fact remains that conversion makes these things

t Fosdick : Meaning of Faith, p. 283.

SOUL - SURGERY 123

real to the convert. Heretofore he has 'knowledge
about' them; now he has 'acquaintance with' them.
The world or God has meaning for him, and makes
response now. He is no mere repetition of the past,
for the individual is a new and unique one, and this
experience as his is as fresh as the creation morn
itself."*

All these facts relating to the rationale of conver-
sion it is well for the personal worker to know, but all
that the sinner needs is to know how hateful is his sin
in the eyes of his Heavenly Father, and that if he turns
his face resolutely toward God in Christ, He is able
to cleanse him from sin and to empower him for a
new life of righteousness and victory. Books of re-
ligious psychology, like those above referred to, and
books narrating cases of actual transformations, like
C. G. Finney's Memoirs and S. H. Hadley's Down
in Water Street, in the United States, and the writ-
ings of Harold Begbie and General Booth in England,
abound in illustrations of conversions where there was
little or nothing of the theological belief, but only a
loathing of sin, the confession of utter helplessness
unless through the aid of some higher Helper, then

*'G. A. Coe, The Psychology of Religion, p. 315. Quoted
in The Biblical Review, New York, April, 1918, pp. 214, 215.

124 SOUL - SURGERY

2l hand stretched upward and the consciousness that
Another had grasped the hand, and that thereafter
freedom, and strength and peace had come. The last
phase of Hadley's conversion, as abridged from his
own account by James, may be quoted as typical :

''1 listened to the testimony of twenty-five or
thirty persons, everyone of whom had been saved
from ruin, and I made up my mind that I would be
saved or die right there. When the invitation was
given, I knelt down with a crowd of drunkards.
Jerry made the first prayer. Then Mrs. McAuley
prayed fervently for us. Oh, what a conflict was
going on for my poor soul ! A blessed whisper said,
"Come," the devil said, "Be careful." I halted but
a moment, and then, with a breaking heart, I said,
"Dear Jesus, can you help me?" Never with mortal
tongue can I describe that moment. Although up to
that my soul had been filled with indescribable gloom,
I felt the glorious brightness of the noonday sun shine
into my heart. I felt I was a free man. Oh, the
precious feehng of safety, of freedom, of resting on
Jesus ! I felt that Christ with all His brightness and
power had come into my life; that indeed, old things
had passed away and all things had become new.

SOUL - SURGERY 125

''From that moment till now I have never wanted
a drink of whiskey, and 1 have never seen money
enough to make me take one. I promised God that
night that if He would take away the appetite for
strong drink, I would work for Him all my life. He
has done His part, and I have been trying to do
mine.'"*"

To show how similar is the experience of conver-
sion at opposite ends of the world and in utterly
different types of character, in the American drunk-
ard and in the greatest scholar that Indian woman-
hood has produced, let me give a few quotations from
the autobiography of Pandita Ramabai. After telling
how, largely through reading the Bible, she was
drawn to the religion of Jesus, was baptised, and ex-
perienced comparative happiness for a number of
years, becoming, however, increasingly dissatisfied as
she realised that she had the religion of Jesus but
not Christ Himself, she goes on —

"I was desperate, I realised that I was not pre-
pared to meet God, that sin had dominion over me, and
I was not altogether led by the Spirit of God, and
had no witness of the Spirit that I was a child of God.

* Varieties of Religious Experiences, pp. 202, 203.

126 S,OUL - SU RGBRY

"What was to be done? My thoughts could not,
and did not, help me. I had at last come to an end of
myself, and unconditionally surrendered myself to the
Saviour ; and asked Him to be merciful to me, and to
become my Righteousness and Redemption, and to
take away all my sin.

"Only those who have been convicted of sin and
have seen themselves as God sees them, under similar
circumstances, can understand what one feels, when a
great and unbearable burden is rolled away from
one's heart. I shall not attempt to describe how and
what 1 felt, at the time when I made an unconditional
surrender, and knew I was accepted to be a branch of
the True Vine, a child of God by adoption in Christ
Jesus my Saviour. Although it is impossible for me
to tell all that God has done for me, I must yet
praise Him and thank Him for His loving kindness
to me, the greatest of sinners. The Lord, first of all,
showed me the sinfulness of sin, and the awful danger
I was in of everlasting hell-fire; and the great love
of God with which He so loved the world that He
gave His only begotten Son.

'*I do not know if any one of my readers has ever
had the experience of being shut up in a room, where

SOUL - SURGERY 127

there was nothing but thick darkness, and then grop-
ing in it to find something of which he or she was in
dire need. I can think of no one but the Wind man,
whose story is given in St. John 9. He was born
bHnd and remained so for forty years of his Hfe ; and
then suddenly he found the Mighty One, who could
give him eyesight. Who could have described his
joy at seeing the daylight, when there had not been
a particle of hope of his ever seeing it? Even the
inspired evangelist has not attempted to do it. I can
give only a faint idea of what I felt, when my mental
eyes were opened, and when I, who was 'sitting in
darkness saw Great Light,' and when I felt sure that
to me, who but a few moments ago *sat in the region
and shadow of death, light had sprung up.' I was
very like the man who was told, 'In the name of Jesus
Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk.' 'And he, leap-
ing up, stood, and walked, and entered with them into
the temple, walking and leaping, and praising God."*
From such illustrations as this we see that, as Mr.
Buchman puts the matter in the simplest terms, only

* Pandita Ramabai : A Testimony, pp. 18, 19. Mutki Mis-
sion Press, Kedgaon, 1917.

ia8 SOUL - SURGERY

three essential factors are involved in conversion — Sin,
Jesus Christ, and (the result) a Miracle. Conviction
of sin is a matter of the sinner's heart. Conversion is
a matter both of the heart and the will, and if there is
anything we can do to assist him to make the great
venture of faith, once he has realised his sins at the
foot of the Cross and expressed the desire to be
cleansed, it is, first of all, to give him autobiographical
writings like those of St. Augustine, Brother Lawrence
and iolstoy, and illustrations of others who have so
ventured with momentous results; and, secondly, to
help him toward greater decision of character through
the reading of such pamphlets as Foster's Decision of
Character; King's Fight for Character; Mott and
Eddy's Constructive Suggestions for Character Build-
ing and the chapter on "Decision" in Speer's Things
That Make a Man.*'

Here, too, of course, as at every other point, we
must remember that our greatest service will be ren-
dered through the medium of intercessory prayer. A
personal experience of Rev. William Jessup, of Syria,
told by Dr. Howard Agnew Johnson, will illustrate

* All these pamphlets can be secured from the Association
Press, Calcutta.

SOUL - SURGBRY 129

the importance of recognizing that the work is God's
and that our first duty is to co-operate in prayer.

"Just ten years ago I was in Syria, and one day
visited the home of WiUiam Jessup, that splendid
missionary of the Cross, a son of Henry Jessup, who
had been there for fifty years. We were speaking of
these things, and he told us this —

" 'Some months ago I was very much depressed
and discouraged. There were a number of men around
here that I had not been able to win for Jesus Christ,
and I wondered why. I knew the difficulty must be
in me, that it was not in God. So I decided finally
that I would take a week and let God teach me the
thing that I needed to know. On Monday morning
I took my Bible and began to turn it over to see what
God would say.' He had not gone far, he said, be-
fore something dawned on him that he had never
realized before — that he had not given God His place
in his thought of the work to be done in winning
these people to Christ. He thought of the account
of the fall of Jericho before the children of Israel.
God brought that about in a way that no one should
be able to think that it was a man's work so that these
Gentiles should realize that the God of this peculiar

I30 SOUL - SURGERY

people is a mighty God, and would like to have Him
for their God. God wanted to have Israel a channel
through which He could give His love and His salva-
tion to everyone else.

''Mr. Jessup said, as this fact dawned on him that
morning he closed his Bible and took a sheet of paper,
and wrote the names of the men in that locality whom
he had been trying to win to Jesus Christ. And he
lifted them up to God, and asked God to do His work
in those lives, to use him as He wished, but to enable
him to realize that his was the smaller part in that
great task. And as he continued through the Book,
the thought grew upon him that he had not realized
before that God, and not he, William Jessup, was the
one who was to do that work.

''On Friday of that week a young man, whose
name was on that list, came to him burdened about his
soul, and about his father, whose name was also on
the list. The missionary realized that God was work-
ing.

" 'Even yet,' he said, 'I am shamed to say I did
not fully believe that God was going to do all. On
Monday morning of the following week I started out,

SOUL ' SURGERY 131

and in three weeks God gave every one of those eleven
men whose names were on that Hst to Jesus Christ.' "

'' '1 will be a different sort of a missionary,' he con-
tinued, 'for the rest of my life. I have a new vision
of what it is to have a God who can and who will

* From an address by Dr. Johnson, quoted in Victory in
Christ, A Report of the Princeton Conference of 1916, p. 194
* Advetitures of the Christian Soul, p. 95.

5.

Conservation

Here is where, perhaps the greatest service can
and should be done by the personal worker, and where
he most frequently and lamentably falls down. Mr.
Saunders brings out the fact that the tendency in some
circles to belittle the work of the "revivalist," because
he "appeals to the emotions," shows a lack of knowl-
edge of all that is involved in conversion. He writes :
"The emotions to which the revivalist appeals are the
core of the religious nature of man, and in many of
his audience, in whom the will is warped and the in-
tellect stunted, to what shall he appeal except the emo-
tions?" But he then goes on to point out that the
trouble with the revival is that it too often stops at this
stage. "Sterile emotions are not religion, and sup-
pressed emotion, which is given no opportunity of
expressing itself, too often forms a complex which will
later express itself in undesirable ways."* Every
psychologist understands the danger of an emotional
arousal which finds no expression in practical activity.
This holds as true of any sermon or religious confer-
ence, in which an emotional appeal is made, as of
an evangelistic address when conversion is the object.
The new convert should receive the most sedulous at-

SOUL - SURGERY 133

tendon in the days following his conversion, if he
is not to prove one more of the sad examples of back-
sliders (far less numerous than many believe and
usually the result of superficial evangelism or imper-
fect conservation) who are pointed out in deprecation
of evangelistic efforts. It is the testimony of many
that just after we have taken some forward step, in-
volving the attempt to live our lives thenceforth on a
higher moral level, the Tempter is most powerful and
insidious in his efforts to drag us down.

To quote Mr. Saunders again: "The convert
knows, perhaps, deeper and more intense joy than the
man who has always been religious, but he knows
also more profound grief, and a spiritual 'dryness'
which is the peculiar trial of those who have come
through great religious experiences. God seems for
a time to withdraw His Presence. And there are very
often desperate struggles in store for the convert;
'those haunting reminiscences of a polluted heart —
those frailties, those inconsistencies, to which the
habits of the past have made him liable.' "* Dr.
Fosdick, in his study of "Faith and Moods," in The
Meaning of Faith, makes the point that the accep-
* Adventures of the Christian Soul, pp. 93, 94.

134 SOUL - SURGERY

tance of the Christian faith means the determination
to beHeve the testimony, and Hve in the spirit of our
best hours, instead of allowing lower and weaker
moods to dominate our spirits. It is for us to help
the new convert to see how he can keep habitually in
the higher altitudes of faith, resisting the tendency to
give way to unworthy moods, — and how, when dark
times of trouble descend upon him, it is true that

"The task in hours of insight willed
Must be through hours of gloom fulfilled."

This will only be possible as he learns the need,
for his spiritual as well as for his physical sustenance
and development, of receiving continuously air, food
and exercise to quote Sherwood Eddy's suggestive
parallel.

We shall keep at our best, as President King, of
Oberlin, says, only as we persistently "stay in the
presence of the best" — that is, supremely, of Christ.
Hence the importance of prayer as a daily exercise
and a life-long study. In prayer we breathe the tonic
air of faith that defies every temptation to doubt and
fear. In prayer our souls become assured that while
zve may fail God, He never fails us, that though we
may at times feel no solacing sense of His nearness,

SOUL • SURGBRY 135

it does not indicate that He has drawn away from us,
but rather, perhaps, that we have begun to Hve by
feehng rather than by faith. Drummond, in one of
his addresses to students, is reported to have said :

"1 cannot guarantee that the stars will shine
brighter when you leave this hall tonight, or that
when you wake tomorrow a new world will open
before you. But I do guarantee that Christ will
keep that tvhich you have committed to Him. He
will keep His promise, and you will find something
real and dependable to rely on and to lead you away
from documental evidence to Him who speaks to you
in your hearts at this moment.

"Gentlemen, He will be your leader. He will be
your guide, He will be your highest ideal. He has
asked you for your life, and He will make you just as
you are at this moment His — entirely His."*

First of all, then, we must guide the convert into
a real and continuous and developing prayer life.

In the second place, the new convert must learn

to feed his soul, day by day, on God's living Word

revealed in the Scriptures ; and here, too, he cannot be

left to himself, but needs and will usually welcome

* Life of Drummond, p. 522.

136 SOUL - SURGERY

friendly guidance. Recently one of the most successful
and ardent personal workers I know, among women,
was telling me of her brother's experience. He was
converted in a series of revival meetings during the
period of adolescence, when conversion is most natural
and hopeful. He was instructed that he must read
his Bible daily, and was then left to shift for himself.
Boy-like, he began with the first chapter of Genesis,
intending to read the entire Bible through in daily
portions. He read faithfully for a number of weeks,
and then one day tossed the Bible across the room
with the remark that he did not believe a single word
of it. This was many years ago, he is now a middle-
aged man with a family, but from that hour to the
present moment his life has proclaimed his later belief
that the Bible is a myth, that there is no God, and that
the wisest man is he who extracts the largest amount
of worldly pleasure from each passing day. He has
been impervious to every attempt of Christian rela-
tions and friends to move him once more in the direc-
tion of religious faith. His sister is certain that, had
he been wisely guided in his first Bible study, his in-
fant faith would have grown normally into maturity,
instead of very speedily starving to death through lack
of the right spiritual sustenance. We must be ready

SOUL ' SURGERY 137

with practical suggestions for progressive Bible study,
adapted to the mind and temper of the one for whose
building up in the faith we are responsible in God's
eyes.

In the third place — and here most of all we are
prone to fail in this work of individual conservation —
following conversion the new convert must be set to
Vv^ork to win others. This will be both the test of the
reality of his new experience and one of the surest
safeguards against its soon becoming unreal. He
should understand from the first that his prayer and
Bible study will ultimately become burdensome, if
not actually distasteful, if he regards them only as
a means to his own spiritual development, and not
also as fundamentally and inevitably the means to his
successfully serving and winning others. The central
pivot around which his life revolves must now be not
self but others, not serving his own interests or de-
velopment but serving and winning others, so that the
major emphasis should be placed on the third require-
ment, exercise, thought of, however, not as "setting
up exercises" but as "wearing out shoe-leather" in the
interests of God's Kingdom. Let the new convert un-
derstand at the outset, what many of us have had to
learn after many years, at painful cost, that the only

138 SOUl - SURGERY

way to live a normal, buoyant developing Christian
life is to be constantly a missionary of Christ to others.
Says Drummond's biographer of his meetings for
students: "One of the finest features of the move-
ment, however, was the large number of the men
affected by it who set themselves, often at great sacri-
fice, to win their fellow-students for Christ."*

This brings us face to face with the fact that if we
would teach persistance to the convert, we must our-
selves have learned its value and attained to its prac-
tice. It is one of the first principles of personal
evangelism, not only in the period of conservation but
at every other stage of our work. Have we the un-
discourageable persistence of love that, like Francis
Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," pursues the object
of its affection "down the arches of the years," until
at last, in the poem, man yields to the Divine Lover,
to be told :

How little worthy of any love thou art!
Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee,

Save Me, save only Me?
All which I took from thee I did but take.

Not for thy harms.
But just that thou might seek it in My arms.

All which thy child's mistake
Fancied as lost, I have stored for thee at Home :

Rise, clasp My hand, and come !
* Smith : Life of Drummond, p. 364.

SOUL - SURGERY 139

So George Matheson's familiar hymn begins, "Oh
love that will not let me go." Has our love for those
we have been led to seek to woo and win been a reflec-
tion of the divine love in its ardent relentlessness — if
need be through many years and coimtless disappoint-
ments ?

A story told by Drummond in a public address in
America is worth giving in full, to illustrate this point
of pertinacity in personal work.

"One night I got a letter from one of the students
of the University of Edinburgh, page after page of
agnosticism and atheism. I went over to see him,
and spent a whole afternoon with him, and did not
make the slightest impression. At Edinburgh Uni-
versity we have a Students' Evangelistic Meeting on
Sunday nights, at which there are eight hundred or
one thousand men present. A few nights after this
I saw that man in the meeting, and next to him sat
another man whom 1 had seen occasionally at the
meetings. I did not know his name, but I wanted to
find out more about my sceptic, so when the meeting
was over, I went up to him and said, 'Do you happen

to know T 'Yes,' he replied, 'it is he that has

brought me to Edinbugh. Are you an old friend?'

I40 SOUL - SURGBRY

I asked. 'I am an American, a graduate of an Ameri-
can university,' he said. 'After I had finished there I
wanted to take a post-graduate course, and finally
decided to come to Edinburgh. In the dissecting-
room I happened to be placed next to , and 1

took a singular liking for him. I found out that he
was a man of very remarkable ability, though not a
religious man, and 1 thought I might be able to do
something for him. A year passed, and he was just
where I found him.' He certainly was blind enough, be-
cause it was only two or three weeks before that that
he wrote me that letter. 'I think you said,' I resumed,
*that you only came here to take a year of the post-
graduate course ?' 'Well,' he said, 'I packed my trunks
to go home, and I thought of this friend, and I won-
dered whether a year of my life would be better spent
to go and start in my profession in America, or to stay
in Edinburgh and try to win that one man for Christ,
and I stayed.' Well,' I said, *my dear fellow, it will
pay you ; you will get that man.' Two or three months
passed, and it came to the last night of our meetings.
We have men in Edinburgh from every part of the
world. Every year five or six hundred of them go
out never to meet again, and in our religious work we

SOUL - SURGURY 141

get very close to one another, and on the last night
of the year we sit down together in our common hall
to the Lord's Supper. This is entirely a students'
meeting. On that night we get in the members of the
Theological Faculty, so that things may be done de-
cently and in order. Hundreds of men are there, the
cream of the youth of the world, sitting down at the
Lord's table. Many of them are not members of the
Church, but are ther« for the first time pledging
themselves to become members of the Kingdom of
God. I saw sitting down and handing the com-
munion cup to his American friend. He had got his
man. A week after he was back in his own country.
I do not know his name ; he made no impression in
our country, nobody knew him. He was a subject of
Christ's Kingdom, doing his work in silence and in

humility. A few weeks passed and came to

see me. I said, 'What do you come here for?' He
said, *I want to tell you I am going to be a medical
missionary.' It was worth a year, was it not?"*
Drummond himself would often make the journey
from Edinburgh to Glasgow just to talk with one man
who needed his help.

* Smith : Life of Drummond, pp. 364, 366.

142 SOUL -SURGERY

One of the romances of recent evangelism in the
United States has been the story of how Professor
Henry Wright, with the assistance of young men from
Yale University who have summered with him, has
changed the entire character of the New England town
where most of his summers have been spent, winning,
one by one, after ceaseless prayer and varied ap-
proaches, the most hostile and godless among the in-
habitants. In the spring of 1917, to illustrate this
very subject of persistence in personal work, I heard
Dr. Wright read extracts from a letter received the
preceding week from the man, in the village above
referred to, who from the beginning had been most
bitter and uncharitable in his opposition to every move-
ment toward better things. Dr. Wright and others
had for years been praying for him constantly, and
in this letter he expressed his entire surrender to God
and dedication of his life to furthering the programme
of His Kingdom.

One excuse we often make for failing to follow
people up, either before or after conversion, is the
fact that we have been separated from them so that
we naturally cease further to work for them. The
proverb holds true for us, *'Out of sight, out of minds."

SOUL-SURGERY 143

But here enter the possibilities of the great ministry
of correspondence, where very often as much can be
accompHshed as in personal conversation if the writ-
ing and sending of the letters is born and followed
up in prayer. May I give here a personal experience
in my undergraduate days : I was once writing letters
in the correspondence room of the Hotel Northfield,
during one of the summer conferences, when a man
whom I did not know came in, seated himself at the
table, drew some writing paper toward him, and then
for some minutes remained with his hand over his
eyes, obviously engaged in prayer before beginning
to write. At that time I do not suppose I had ever
in my life prayed about a letter I had written, and
that simple act, so natural and unconscious, affected
me more, and has been remembered longer, than any
of the conference addresses I listened to. Afterward
I came to know that the man who had so unconsciously
helped me was the late John Forman, of Mainpuri,
whose Christ-filled life has been an inspiration to so
many thousands. It was a letter written by a friend
in response to the impulse of the Spirit that brought
conviction of sin to Dr. Henry Clay Trumbull. Let
me give one other personal experience, relating to

144 SOUL - SURGERY

another preacher of the Gospel who happily is still
with us: Eleven years ago I crossed the Atlantic
Ocean on the same boat with the distinguished
Chicago preacher, Dr. F. W. Gunsaulus. When liv-
ing in Chicago as a youth I had often heard him
preach, and had come to know him slightly. Now,
with characteristic friendliness and interest in the
individuals around him, he made the six days' journey
memorable for me through many conversations, in
which he gave lavishly of his rich store of experiences
in the realms of friendship, art, poetry and religion,
as though he were addressing an audience instead
of a single insignificant student in theology. The
preceding two Sundays, in London, I had heard him
preach three tremendous sermons in the City Temple ;
and in our conversations he referred, in some con-
nection, to the vast pile of letters which the sermons
had brought to his desk. I ventured to suggest that
since it was his vacation he could not, of course, think
of answering those letters personally. He looked at
me a moment, then exclaimed: 'What are we here
for?' and turned and walked away up the deck.
Later he told me that he had answered or would
answer every one. I remembered then how a letter I

SOUL ' SURGERY i4S

had written him, after a sermon in the Auditorium in
Chicago seven years before, brought an immediate
and most helpful response.

A certain religious journal once inaugurated
among its readers a 'Xeague of the Golden Pen,"
whose members agreed to consecrate their pens to
Christ's service, in innumerable ways that thought
and prayer might suggest. We cannot read the pub-
lished correspondence of men like Drummond and
Forbes Robinson and Thring of Uppingham without
asking ourselves whether we have made the largest
possible use of this self-multiplying agency in our
work for individuals?

We must close, where we began, with reiterating
the statement that the ultimate measure of our suc-
cessful service in spreading the Evangel can only be
the measure of our full appropriation of the Truth
as it is in Jesus. As the author of Bcce Homo
brought out so clearly, half a century ago, the coming
of Christ into the world gave birth among men to a
new "enthusiasm for humanity," a new and passionate
love for individuals, irrespective of race or creed or
social station, a new brotherhood of men who looked
upon all other men as their brothers for whom, as for

146 SOUL - SURGERY

themselves, Christ died. They realised that the debt
they owed to Christ could be discharged only as they
passed on to others the same privileges of freedom
and friendship and hope that had come to them
through Christ's life and death and resurrection. St.
Paul is the great exemplar for all time and for all
men of this new passion and its inevitable effect, still-
ing the old restlessness of the soul that is without
a sense of God's loving companionship, only to awaken
a new divine restlessness that would share with all the
world its glorious experience of God's love. All this,
Myers has caught for us in the stirring lines of St.
Paul:

"Oft when the word is on me to deliver,

Lifts the illusion and the truth lies bare;
Desert or throng, the city or the river,
Melts in a lucid paradise of air, —

Only like souls I see the folk thereunder,

Bound who should conquer, slaves who should be kings
Hearing their one hope with an empty wonder,

Sadly contented in a show of things, —

Then with a rush the intolerable craving

Shivers throughout me like a trumpet call,
O to save these ! to perish for their saving,

Die for their life, be offered for them all !

SOUL - SURGERY 147

Therefore, O Lord, I will not fail nor falter;

Nay, but I ask it, nay, but I desire;
Lay on my lips Thine embers of the altar,

Seal with the sting, and furnish with the fire ;

Quick, in a moment, infinite forever.

Send an arousal better than I pray;
Give me a grace upon the faint endeavor,

Souls for my hire and Pentecost today.'

XLl)C Oreat Ipbi^stclan

At even, ere the sun was set,
The sick, O Lord, around Thee lay;

Oh, in what divers pains they met!
O, with what joy they went away!

Once more 'tis eventide, and we,
Oppressed with various ills, draw near ;

What if Thy form we cannot see?
We know and feel that Thou are here.

O Saviour Christ, our woes dispel.
For some are sick, and some are sad.

And some have never loved Thee well,
And some have lost the love they had.

And some have found the world is vain,
Yet from the world they break not free,

And some have friends who give them pain,
Yet have not sought a friend in Thee.

And none, O Lord, have perfect rest,
For none are wholly free from sin;

And they who fain would serve the best
Are conscious most of wrong within.

O Saviour Christ, Thou too art Man;

Thou hast been troubled, tempted, tried ;
Thy kind but searching glance can scan

The very wounds that shame would hide.

Thy touch has still its ancient power;

No word from Thee can fruitless fall;
Hear, in this solemn evening hour,

And in Thy mercy heal us all.

—H. Twells

TLhc Secon& TToucb

Mark 8 : 25

(To F. N. D. B.)

The blind man, sunk in sordid helplessness,

A sound of footsteps caught.
"The Healer comes," they cried, and through the press

The hapless wretch they brought.
With wild hope, born of uttermost distress,

The healing touch he sought.
A hand reached forth in potent tenderness —

The miracle was wrought.

Strangely he stares. "What dost thou see?" they cry

"I see men walk as trees."
Again the cool hand strokes each aching eye;

The last dim shadow flees ;
Not moving shapes but live men drawing nigh,

Now glad and clear he sees,
And tells to each how God's own Son came by

And healed his dire disease.

Dungeoned by self, we too besought His hand,

Our shuttered eyes to free.
His touch bestowed, vast, stricken crowds we scanned,

And guessed their misery.
Lord Christ, Thy second touch our hearts demand,

Each separate soul to see,
His wounds to salve, his wants to understand,

And lead him home to Thee. H. A. W.

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