Despite a medical professor’s prediction that Milans would “die a drunkard,” Jesus Christ stepped in, saved him, transformed him, and used him beyond everyone’s expectation.

“The story starts long ago when Milans had a wife, children and friends. In his youth, Milans was a newspaper editor, good enough to fill the chair of Horace Greely of the New York Herald Tribune.

But Milans started drifting down Whiskey Lane. He lost his job, his home, his children, and his friends took to the other side of the street when Milans came their way.

Liquor became the answer for all his woes as well as a toast for all his joys, the result was the same, and in short he was more often drunk than sober. Left alone, he turned to the Bowery, and drank everything he could obtain.

One day after a long drinking bout, he fell to the street, unable to navigate any further under his own power. From here he was taken to Bellevue Hospital. After a few days in the hospital, he was placed on display as a laboratory exhibit.

One morning there came into his ward, a noted professor of medicine from Cornell University, trailed by a number of medical students. They encircled Milans’s cot and the professor began to lecture on the effects of alcohol on the human system. During the course of it, he said, “Look at this man, we have discovered in him all the marked indications of an incurable inebriate. Note the dancing eyes, a sure sign of approaching insanity, brought on by the habit. Note the trembling of his hands and the members of his body; alcohol has eaten into his nerve center. Note that he cannot control himself physically, to say nothing of mentally and morally.” The professor continues, “This man can never be cured, and you are looking at an example of alcoholism at its worst, he must die a drunkard, nothing can save him, you are looking gentlemen, at a hopeless incurable.”

Milans was invited to attend The Salvation Army by a young Salvation Army lassie. He attended and enjoyed the service, the comfort and the warmth, and the stirring personal testimonies of reclaimed drunkards.

After attending the meetings for a week, one night he answered the plea and accepted the Lord. He surrendered, and poured out his soul to God asking for strength, not just to carry on, but for deliverance from the desire and want of alcohol. That night the miracle was performed, it was simple but it was permanent. In time his wife returned to him, and for 20 years he was manager of a large New York printing firm. Right up to the moment of his death he had complete victory over alcohol, so much so, that he often testified, “If I were again to become a drunkard, I should have to acquire anew the appetite for liquor.”

Henry F. Milans’s faith was soundly fundamental, his outlook broad, his passion wide, his spirit immeasurably vital and buoyant. He made thousands of friends during the last 36 years of his life. A great number of them through correspondence, the opportunities of which ministry, he embraced shortly after his conversion.

Milans was the alcoholic’s friend. He worked with the men at the bottom of the social scrap-heap. Many of them are rehabilitated and pretty well up in the world now. But They Knew Milans Once.

What God was able to do for Henry F. Milans, He can do for any individual who has an alcoholic problem.”

Source: The biography of Henry F. Milans | Photos via The Salvation Army National Archives

This article was originally published in the January 2016 issue of YS.