Hadley BROKE His Promise and Suffered Severely
[ABOVE: Samule Hopkins Hadley, from John Wilbur Chapman's S. H. Hadley of Water Street. New York, Chicago, Toronto: Revell, 1906. Public domain.]
When he was eleven years old, Samuel Hopkins Hadley professed Christ. His mother made him promise never to take an alcoholic drink. He kept that promise until he was eighteen, when a neighbor taunted him, “If you don’t drink with me, I will think you feel yourself above me.” Years of hell followed in which he’d do anything for a drink—steal, lie, forge documents, sell his own clothes or his wife’s.
On this day, Tuesday 18 April 1882, he was sitting in a saloon in Harlem, hungry and sleepless, having raved with delirium tremens the previous four nights.
All of a sudden I seemed to feel some great and mighty presence....Never until my dying day will I forget the sight presented to my horrified gaze. My sins appeared to creep along the wall in letters of fire. I turned and looked in another direction and there I saw them again. I have always believed I got a view of eternity right there in that gin mill. I believe I saw what every poor lost sinner will see when he stands unrepentant and unforgiven at the bar of God. It filled me with unspeakable terror. . . . I got down from the whiskey barrel . . . and walked up to the bar and pounded with my fist until I made the glasses rattle. “Boys,” I said, “listen to me. I'm dying, but I will die on the street before I'll ever take another drink.”
To keep himself from breaking his resolution, he asked a police captain to lock him in a cell. “It seemed to me that all the demons that could find room came in that place with me that night. They were not all the company I had, either. No, praise the Lord! The dear Savior who came to me in the saloon was present and said, ‘Pray.’” Pray he did. The following Sunday he went to one of Jerry McAuley’s missions where he knelt and yielded to Christ.
Bartle Bull wrote,
The conversion of S. H. Hadley . . . challenges all philosophical theories that exclude the miraculous. It cannot be accounted for on any scientific or philosophic hypothesis, without the assistance of the supernatural. No operation of the mind or will, however powerful, can explain it.
Hadley himself asked,
How are you going to explain the physiological conditions of a man’s stomach and brain, when but a moment before he would almost commit murder for a glass of rum, and after the precious blood has touched his soul he abhors it? It is simply the Divine, miraculous power of Jesus casting out demons as He did when on earth.
J. Wilbur Chapman declared of Hadley’s conversion, “It is as truly a miracle as the turning of water into wine.”
When he rose from his knees transformed, Hadley wondered how he would stay saved. Christ seemed to speak to him. “My child, work for Me. There are thousands who would come to Me if they only knew Me. Go and tell them.” One whom he told was his older brother Henry. Henry was skeptical and watched to see if Hadley would come clean on some lies he had told. Hadley did, profoundly affecting Henry, who became a Christian himself and a prominent worker among alcoholics.
By then, still free from the alcoholism that had gripped him for twenty-two years, Hadley had become head of Water Street Mission, a refuge for alcoholics. After his death, hundreds of former derelicts testified publicly how Hadley’s love, preaching, and prayers had brought them to Christ. Chapman declared that Hadley was the most Christ-like man he had ever known.
Russ Taff: I Still Believe - This gripping documentary chronicles the multi- GRAMMY® and Dove Award-winning star’s musical journey and behind-the-scenes battle with alcoholism. It traces both Taff’s iconic career, and the childhood trauma he suffered at the hands of an alcoholic father and abusive mother. Watch at RedeemTV.
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