judgment a chance to act; I had taken advice from experience; I had
prayed; I had turned my face toward the Christian life; I had cut loose
from conditions unfriendly to Christian experience, and I was trying to
be a Christian. But I was still in the fog.

For the next three days I worked very hard trying to be a Christian. I
attended a meeting each night, rose for prayer, prayed, did everything I
was told to do, and as much more as I could think of. The burden of my
prayer and of my requests for prayer was that I might have faith. I
wanted to get something that I thought every Christian had, or must have
in order to be a Christian, and so far as I knew, I was willing to pay
the price. But nothing resulted, except the natural weariness from my
own exertions. I was still in the fog.

The fifth day was "Fast Day," a good old New England institution, with a
prayer meeting in the morning, which I attended and at which I rose for
prayer. In the afternoon was a union service, with a civic or
semi-religious topic, but I attended it, as I did not want anything to
get by me that might contribute to the solution of my problem. There was
scarcely anything about the service that was calculated to make a
spiritual impression. The address was poor, as also was the music. I
tried to follow the argument, but finally gave it up and began to think
about that which had been uppermost in my mind for the five days past.
The thing baffled me; the object of my quest had eluded my every effort
to grasp it. The experience of the five days was new, but it contained
nothing but that which could be accounted for by purely natural causes.
I reviewed the whole period to see if I had left out any essential part
of the formula. Was it possible that my skepticism had been well
founded, that there was nothing in the so-called "Christian experience"
after all? It was about four o'clock in the afternoon of the fifth day