,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. 
 
nceton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 01058 2486 
 
 
 Date Due 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 #v 1 *^ '4^ 
 
 
 
 
 jjj*«¥9rn 
 
 r 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 MWT^^ 
 
 «- 
 
 
 
 
 .... ; 
 
 
 
 JUB 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 i 
 
 
 
■ ■ 7:.,!.vj':it'r:i;ir