When all things became a matter of indifference to him, he loosened his grasp, and the evil instinct rose up within him as strong on the day he died as on the day he forced it down.
That is all a man can do, pray for strength to crush down the evil that is in him, and to keep it held down day after day.

I never hear washy talk about "changed characters" and "reformed natures" but I think of a sermon I once heard at a Wesleyan revivalist meeting in the Black Country.
"Ah! my friends, we've all of us got the devil inside us.

I've got him, you've got him," cried the preacher--he was an old man, with long white hair and beard, and wild, fighting eyes.

Most of the preachers who came "reviving," as it was called, through that district, had those eyes.

Some of them needed "reviving" themselves, in quite another sense, before they got clear out of it.