there was which acted as powerfully to rob him--the soul-bewildering
difficulty of believing that the God of physical law can also be the God
of promise, that He that is within us and beneath us can also be above
us with power to lift us up.

Without a firm grip on this supernatural upholding power Toyner was a
man with a diseased craving for intoxicants. He fled from them as a man
flies from deadly infection; but with all the help that total abstinence
and the absence of temptation can give he failed in the battle. A few
weeks after he had returned to Fentown he was brought into his mother's
house one morning dead drunk. The mother, whose heart had revived within
her a little during the last year, now sank again into her previous
dejection. Her friends said to her that they had always known how it
would be in the case of so sudden a reformation. When Toyner woke up his
humiliation was terrible; he bore it as he had borne all the rest of his
pain and shame, silently enough. No one but Ann Markham even guessed the
agony that he endured, and she had not the chance to give a kindly
look, for at this time Toyner, unable to trust himself with himself, was
afraid to look upon Ann lest he should smirch her life.

Again Toyner set his feet sternly in the way of sobriety. Ah! how he
prayed, beseeching that God, who had revealed Himself to be greater and
nobler than had before been known, would not because of that show
Himself to be less powerful towards those that fear Him. It is the
prayer of faith, not the prayer of agonised entreaty, that takes hold of
strength. Toyner failed again and again. There was a vast difference now
between this and his former life of failure, for now he never despaired,
but took up the struggle each time just where he had laid it down, and
moreover the intervals of sobriety were long, and the fits of
drunkenness short and few; but there were not many besides Ann who