September 29

September 29 – AM          Page 9, Bill’s Story, Chapter 1

The door opened and he stood there, fresh-skinned and glowing.  There was something about his eyes.  He was inexplicably different.  What had happened?
I pushed a drink across the table.  He refused it.  Disappointed but curious, I wondered what had got into the fellow.  He wasn’t himself.
“Come, what’s all this about?”  I queried.
He looked straight at me.  Simply, but smilingly, he said, “I’ve got religion.”
I was aghast.  So that was it—last summer an alcoholic crackpot; now, I suspected, a little cracked about religion.  He had that starry-eyed look.  Yes, the old boy was on fire all right.  But bless his heart, let him rant!  Besides, my gin would last longer than his preaching.

September 29 – PM          Page 44-45, We Agnostics, Chapter 4

If a mere code of morals or a better philosophy of life were sufficient to overcome alcoholism, many of us would have recovered long ago.  But we found that such codes and philosophies did not save us, no matter how much we tried.  We could wish to be moral, we could wish to be philosophically comforted, in fact, we could will these things with all our might, but the needed power wasn’t there.  Our human resources, as marshalled by the will, were not sufficient; they failed utterly.