and exclaimed that I would not
leave that place if all the men on earth and all the devils in hell
surrounded me. 'What!' I said, 'such a degraded sinner as I am, on my
knees confessing my sins to the great and holy God; and ashamed to have
any human being, and a sinner like myself, find me on my knees
endeavoring to make my peace with my offended God!' The sin appeared
awful, infinite. It broke me down before the Lord." Memoirs, pp.
14-16, abridged.

"I had said I would not give up; but when my will was broken, it was
all over," writes one of Starbuck's correspondents.-- Another says: "I
simply said: 'Lord, I have done all I can; I leave the whole matter
with Thee,' and immediately there came to me a great peace."--Another:
"All at once it occurred to me that I might be saved, too, if I would
stop trying to do it all myself, and follow Jesus: somehow I lost my
load."--Another: "I finally ceased to resist, and gave myself up,
though it was a hard struggle. Gradually the feeling came over me that
I had done my part, and God was willing to do his."[111]--"Lord Thy
will be done; damn or save!" cries John Nelson,[112] exhausted with the
anxious struggle to escape damnation; and at that moment his soul was
filled with peace.

[111] Starbuck: Op. cit., pp. 91, 114.

[112] Extracts from the Journal of Mr. John Nelson, London, no date, p.
24.

Dr. Starbuck gives an interesting, and it seems to me a true,
account--so far as conceptions so schematic can claim truth at all--of
the reasons why self-surrender at the last moment should be so
indispensable. To begin with, there are two things in the mind of the
candidate for conversion: first, the present incompleteness or
wrongness, the "sin" which he is eager to escape from; and, second, the
positive ideal which he longs to compass. Now with most of us the
sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our
consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal we can aim
at. In a majority of cases, indeed, the "sin" almost exclusively
engrosses the attention, so that conversion is "a process of struggling
away from sin rather than of striving towards righteousness."[113] A
man's conscious wit and will, so far as they strain towards the ideal,
are aiming at something only dimly and inaccurately imagined. Yet all
the while the forces of mere organic ripening within him are going on
towards their own prefigured result, and his conscious s