"In the twinkling of an eye"

“IN THE TWINKLING OF AN EYE”
By Sydney Watson
Author of “The Mark of the Beast” “Life’s Lookout”, “Wops, the Waif”, Etc.
Copyright 1918
THE BIOLA BOOK ROOM BIBLE INSTITUTE OF LOS ANGELES 536-558 South Hope Street Los Angeles, Cal.


Some years ago, I received from an important Southern town, a letter from a Ladies’ Temperance Committee, to this effect:—“Sir, We, the undersigned, are a committee of Ladies, who, for many years, have purchased your “Stories for the People” in very large numbers, for free distribution and loan; always assuming that you were to be thoroughly relied upon as an upholder of strict Total-abstinence principles. But your latest story has sadly undeceived us, as regards your usefulness as a worker in the great cause we are pledged to uphold and further. On pp —— of your last story, you make your hero, returning from a day’s run with the hounds, come upon a woman lying in a lonely place, who has been injured in a trap accident. You say, speaking of your hero’s prompt help to the woman, that “taking his hunting flask from his pocket, he forced a few drops of the brandy between the woman’s lips, etc.” Now, sir, we contend that had you had the cause of Total-abstinence fully at heart, you would have made that huntsman’s flask to have contained water .”
So much for the letter. The moral of it lies on the surface. There are some persons who seem unable to see anything from the side of real, actual life—that Ladies’ committee could not—whose vision is narrowed down to the tiny slit of their own cramped, cabined life and thought, they have no true out look upon life, as a whole.
I preface this foreword with the above incident, because I am perfectly certain that the standpoint from which I have written this book will be utterly, absolutely misunderstood by many earnest, loving-hearted people, whose eyes, with my own, have caught the up ward gaze “from whence we look for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ.”