step and to pray for faith, hoping that in the process I should find a
Christian experience. And so I answered, "Yes, I'll do it."

My friend prayed with me and then I prayed, but all that I could say was
"Lord, show me the way." I was not conscious of any special interest, I
had simply willed to pray and wanted to believe. 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.

But during the twelve hours that had just passed I had been facing
realities and Uncle Dick's exhibition disgusted me. So when he had
quieted down, I decided that it was time for me to run up my colors. If
the break had to come, it had better come then. "Uncle Dick," I said,
"you have been talking about something that you don't know anything