When William came on the circuit where he lived he was a sad, middle-aged man who spent much of his spare time looking for God and praying for the witness of His Spirit. His was the most tragic figure I ever saw in the house of God. He was a large, dark man with a blasted look on his somber face. For years it was said that he was the first to accept the invitation to sinners to the altar for prayers and the last to leave it, always with that lost look--never blessed, never forgiven. William stood before him powerless. He could cast no light in that darkness; it was literally the outer darkness where light cannot be created. Toward the end of a revival, during which he had wandered back and forth from the altar night after night like a dazed sleepwalker, he went out and shot himself. The fate of this man was one of the tragedies in William's life. He must have had much the same feeling toward him that a surgeon feels toward a patient who dies on the operating table. If he had survived he would have lived. I never heard him preach after that about the "dead line" in the spiritual life. One thing impressed me even more than it did William: he never was able to reach the chief sinners in his congregation. Some of them sat in such high places in the church--perhaps behind him in the pulpit. Compared with these the reprobates on the back benches were easily stirred and awakened to a sense of their lost condition. Sometimes one of these members would confess to feeling "cold" spiritually, but I do not now recall a single one who really confessed his sins or renounced them. Suppose a steward owns a big flour mill and can afford to pay the preacher liberally, bear more than his share of the "assessments," and own an automobile besides, because he cheats every customer out of a few ounces of real flour by substituting "fancy flour." What shall he do--sacrifice the auto and the church "causes"? He never does, because at bottom he has a sneaking conviction that the auto in particular is worth more than his kind of a soul, and he is shockingly correct in his estimate of values. If there really are any apostates in this world they belong to this spiritually-refrigerated class to be found in every religious denomination. But if he did not close in often with the chief sinners, William occasionally came upon a rare saint. I mean "rare" in the scientific, spiritual sense--that is, different, moving in time, but not of it--the unconscious prophet of a new order in the souls of mankind. And it was a grand sight to see him measure the sword of his spirit with one of these.