Part 71 (1/2)

EPILOGUE

A Year Later

”A broken and a contrite heart, O Lord, Thou wilt not despise.”

WHAT OCCURRED AT THE EDWARD HALL IN KINGSWAY

”Ah! happy they whose hearts can break And peace of pardon win!

How else may man make straight his plan And cleanse his soul from sin?

How else but through a broken heart May Lord Christ enter in?”

--_The Ballad of Reading Gaol._

A great deal of interest in high quarters, both in London and New York was being taken in the meeting of Leading Workers in the cause of Temperance that was to be held in Kingsway this afternoon.

The new Edward Hall, that severe building of white stone which was beginning to be the theatre of so many activities and which was so frequently quoted as a monument of good taste and inspiration on the part of Frank Flemming, the new architect, had been engaged for the occasion.

The meeting was to be at three.

It was unique in this way--The heads of every party were to be represented and were about to make common cause together. The scientific and the non-scientific workers for the suppression and cure of Inebriety had been coming very much together during the last years.

Never hostile to each other, they had suffered from a mutual lack of understanding in the past.

Now there was to be an _entente cordiale_ that promised great things.

One important fact had contributed to this _rapprochement_. The earnest Christian workers and ardent sociologists were now all coming to realise that Inebriety is a disease and not, specifically, a vice. The doctors had known this, had been preaching this for years. But the time had arrived when religious workers in the same cause were beginning to find that they could with safety join hands with those who (as they had come to see) _knew_ and could define the springs of action which made people intemperate.

The will of the intemperate individual was weakened by a _disease_. The doctors had shown and proved this beyond possibility of doubt.

It was a _disease_. Its various causes were discovered and put upon record. Its pathology was as clearly stated as a proposition in Euclid.

Its psychology was, at last, beginning to be understood.

And it was on the basis of psychology that the two parties were meeting.

Science could take a drunkard--though really only with the drunkard's personal connivance and earnest wish to reform--and in a surprisingly short time, varying with individual cases, restore him to the world sane, and in health.

But as far as individual cases went, science professed itself able to do little more than this. It could give a man back his health of mind and body, it could--thus--enable him to recall his soul from the red h.e.l.ls where it had strayed. But it could not enable the man to _retain_ the gifts.

Religion stepped in here. Christianity and those who professed it said that faith in Christ, and that only, could preserve the will; that, to put it shortly, a personal love of Jesus, a heart that opened itself to the mysterious operations of the Holy Spirit would be immune from the disease for ever more.

Christian workers proved their contention by statistics as clear and unmistakable as any other.

There was still one great question to be agreed upon. Religion and Science, working together, _could_, and _did_, cure the _individual_ drunkard. Sometimes Science had done this without the aid of Religion, more often Religion had done it without the aid of Science--that is to say that while Science had really been at work all the time Religion had not been aware of it and had not professedly called Science in to help.