As he sat down, a very young man arose and added the weight of his testimony to the assertion of his older Christian brother.

He also, in answer to prayer, as he confidently asserted, had attained unto that higher life which is not only free from sin, but from even the desire to wander from the ways of holiness.
As we looked into and read the faces of these two men, we sighed for what we saw therein, and pitied them for the peril in which they stood.
But our greater concern was for the poor, weak, almost helpless ones we saw around us, and for the effect of this delusive error which had been so needlessly thrown into their minds.

If any of them should rest in the belief that they, too, had, by the grace of God, been wholly set free from the bondage of sin; that the appetite for drink and the lust of all evil had been extinguished, and their proneness to wander from God taken away in simple answer to prayer, then would their danger, we felt, be so imminent as to leave but little room for hope of their standing in the new life.

A stumbling-block had been laid in their way over which they must almost surely fall.
We are writing for the help and safety of men for whom there is but little or no hope of rescue from the depths of evil and sensuality into which they have fallen, except in a truly religious life; not a life of mere faith, and sentiment and fancied holiness, but of earnest conflict and daily right living.

A life in which not only intemperance is to be shunned, as a sin against God, but every impure and evil desire of the heart, and every thought and purpose of wrong to the neighbor.