I had won the fight
with myself, however, to the extent of getting the consent of my will to
pray and to trust, but I realized that the battle with myself was only
begun and I knew also that I had another fight ahead of me, or a series
of them, with the conditions that hemmed me in and seemed to make the
Christian life impracticable.
One of these adverse conditions was my relations with the men in my
boarding house. How could I go back and tell them that I had decided to
do the thing that I had ridiculed and scoffed at in their presence? Of
course this was pure cowardice; I was afraid of their ridicule. But the
break was made easier for me than I feared it would be. I found on
entering the smoking room of the boarding house, that "Uncle Dick Moss,"
a rank spiritualist, had the floor. He was on his high horse and was
charging up and down the room in the midst of a bitter and blatant
Ingersollian tirade against Christianity and the Bible. The crowd was
cheering him on. The day before, this probably would have amused me and
I might have followed him, supporting his arguments, or rather
assertions--there were no arguments.
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