As best may seem to Thee!”
Tears would course down my cheeks and my voice tremble with emotion. I never failed to remember that I had the greatest need of all for the rest for which I pleaded and which Jesus has promised to give “the oppressed and heavy laden.”
After service, all other youths escorted a girl home and lingered over the gate for blissful conversation. But I had the habit of making my solitary way to a desolate abandoned graveyard whose latest headstone was set up in the twenties of the nineteenth century.
Behold my Garden of Gethsemane, where not merely once, but once each week, I would throw myself on a grass-covered grave, writhe in an agony of moans, and even shriek. All my muscles seemed to be rigid, and my fists were clinched. I would dig my fingernails into my palms, and throw my arms about wildly.
“Change my nature, O God,” I would cry. “This very moment. By a miracle. Give me the mind and powers of a man.
My Temptations Hardly Equalled.
“Am I being ‘tried by fire’ as the Bible predicts for God’s children? Are others so tried by fire as I have been nearly all my life?”
[After half-a-century of rare opportunities to learn human nature, I have ascertained that I was tried worse than any one else I have heard of—that is, by torture of sexual desire that must not be gratified, and practically was not from seven to eighteen, inclusive. I was tried by fire a hundred times as hot as the average person ever knows. Probably so hot because of my intense fairie-ism from two to six. I believe I have, for years together, resisted lust many times as intense as the average person ever knows.]
My Garden of Gethsemane