But he knew, and his head dropped upon his folded arms with a groan—he knew that none of these things would keep him from satisfying his desire; that they could give him no strength to resist.
They might indeed claim his attention for a little while, but surely, as those smiling friends predicted, he would drift back to the old temptation.
There were real tears of shame and mortification in his eyes, as he lifted them to the sky once more. Oh! if he could only begin again; if he had only been brought up as an abstainer, as children were brought up now-a-days; if he had only taken his stand that side, as a young man, like companions of his own youth had done; if only he had been born strong and not with this weakness.
But all such regrets were unavailing. He knelt there in the moonlight what he was, what he had been made, what he had made himself, and there was something in him that told him that to-night was a deciding point in his life.
And to drift needed no strength, no anything. Only just to get up from his knees and to go upstairs to bed, and to wake again to the old life in the morning.
But the very fact that he was kneeling came to his mind to remind him, and the quiet sky above him spoke to him of strength and peace, and suddenly he bowed his head upon the sill.
"Oh, God, what shall I do?" he moaned. And softly, a voice out of the past—his sweet old grandmother's voice—came to him with words he had never heard or heeded, since she taught them to him in his childhood.
"While we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly."
Without strength—the ungodly. That was himself, and for him Christ died!
The dawn was creeping up the eastern sky when John Gray softly closed the window and went upstairs, and there was the dawn of hope in his heart too, for in his life the Sun of Righteousness had risen with healing in His wings.