nd question after question
kept coming up, to all of which I said: 'Yes, Lord; yes, Lord!' until
this came: 'Why do you not accept it NOW?' and I said: 'I do,
Lord.'--I felt no particular joy, only a trust. Just then the meeting
closed, and, as I went out on the street, I met a gentleman smoking a
fine cigar, and a cloud of smoke came into my face, and I took a long,
deep breath of it, and praise the Lord, all my appetite for it was
gone. Then as I walked along the street, passing saloons where the
fumes of liquor came out, I found that all my taste and longing for
that accursed stuff was gone. Glory to God! ... [But] for ten or
eleven long years [after that] I was in the wilderness with its ups and
downs. My appetite for liquor never came back."

The classic case of Colonel Gardiner is that of a man cured of sexual
temptation in a single hour. To Mr. Spears the colonel said, "I was
effectually cured of all inclination to that sin I was so strongly
addicted to that I thought nothing but shooting me through the head
could have cured me of it; and all desire and inclination to it was
removed, as entirely as if I had been a sucking child; nor did the
temptation return to this day." Mr. Webster's words on the same
subject are these: "One thing I have heard the colonel frequently say,
that he was much addicted to impurity before his acquaintance with
religion; but that, so soon as he was enlightened from above, he felt
the power of the Holy Ghost changing his nature so wonderfully that his
sanctification in this respect seemed more remarkable than in any
other."[149]

[149] Doddridge's Life of Colonel James Gardiner, London Religious
Tract Society, pp. 23-32.

Such rapid abolition of ancient impulses and propensities reminds us so
strongly of what has been observed as the result of hypnotic suggestion
that it is difficult not to believe that subliminal influences play the
decisive part in these abrupt changes of heart, just as they do in
hypnotism.[150] Suggestive therapeutics abound in records of cure,
after a few sittings, of inveterate bad habits with which the patient,
left to ordinary moral and physical influences, had struggled in vain.
Both drunkenness and sexual vice have been cured in this way, action
through the subliminal seeming thus in many individuals to have the
prerogative of inducing relatively stable change. If the grace of God
miraculously operates, it probably operates through the sublim