e him to
"possess the iniquities of his youth." After some weeks he was better,
and once more his conduct took on the semblance of improvement.

The true mainspring of all well-regulated lives was still lacking, and
sin soon broke out in unholy indulgence. George Muller was an adept at
the ingenuity of vice. What he had left he pawned to get money, and with
Beta and two others went on a four days' pleasure-drive, and then
planned a longer tour in the Alps. Barriers were in the way, for both
money and passports were lacking; but fertility of invention swept all
such barriers away. Forged letters, purporting to be from their parents,
brought passports for the party, and books, put in pawn, secured money.
Forty-three days were spent in travel, mostly afoot; and during this
tour George Muller, holding, like Judas, the common purse, proved, like
him, a thief, for he managed to make his companions pay one third of his
own expenses.

The party were back in Halle before the end of September, and George
Muller went home to spend the rest of his vacation. To account plausibly
to his father for the use of his allowance a new chain of lies was
readily devised. So soon and so sadly were all his good resolves again
broken.

When once more in Halle, he little knew that the time had come when he
was to become a new man in Christ Jesus. He was to find God, and that
discovery was to turn into a new channel the whole current of his life.
The sin and misery of these twenty years would not have been reluctantly
chronicled but to make the more clear that his conversion was a
supernatural work, inexplicable without God. There was certainly nothing
in himself to 'evolve' such a result, nor was there anything in his
'environment.' In that university town there were no natural forces that
could bring about a revolution in character and conduct such as he
experienced. Twelve hundred and sixty students were there gathered, and
nine hundred of them were divinity students, yet even of the latter
number, though all were permitted to preach, not one hundredth part, he
says, actually "feared the Lord." Formalism displaced pure and undefiled
religion, and with many of them immorality and infidelity were cloaked
behind a profession of piety. Surely such a man, with such surroundings,
could undergo no radical change of character and life without the
intervention of some mighty power from without and from above! What this
force was, and how it wrought u