"Whatever is not of faith is sin"; but while an old and a new faith are warring in a man's soul the definition fails: many a righteous act is born of doubt, not faith.

This was one reason why Toyner no longer possessed all-conquering strength.

Another reason there was which acted as powerfully to rob him--the soul-bewildering difficulty of believing that the God of physical law can also be the God of promise, that He that is within us and beneath us can also be above us with power to lift us up.
Without a firm grip on this supernatural upholding power Toyner was a man with a diseased craving for intoxicants.

He fled from them as a man flies from deadly infection; but with all the help that total abstinence and the absence of temptation can give he failed in the battle.

A few weeks after he had returned to Fentown he was brought into his mother's house one morning dead drunk.