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Last week, for those of you who were here, how many were here for last week, by the way?

Oh, lots of returning people. I didn't scare you off yet, huh?

All right, that's good. That's good.

Last week we talked about a little bit about the history of Alcoholics Anonymous, how our fellowship came to be, how our book, more importantly, came to be, which we know from last week is the basic text of our society, and we're going to talk about that a little bit more this morning. If everybody can open to the title page, the table of contents of the book, that's

where we're going to start. And I just want to say a few words sort of recapping last week.

And a couple of things, I want to clear up a couple things I said last week. I screw one thing up

at least every week, okay? That's just the rule. We'll get it out of the way now. Okay?

Last week, we talked about some recovery rates that are found in the forward of the second edition of our book.

And somebody came up to me after the meeting and they said, gosh, boy, I'm really depressed.

Our recovery rate today isn't what it was in 1939.

And, boy, that's really depressing.

And I was in such a hurry because I knew we were running over.

I forgot to give you the hope.

See, typical alcoholic, I forget to give you the hope, right?

The hope is, okay, and this is the whole point of last week, was I still have access to a 75% or greater rate of recovery for myself and the people that I work with if I follow the precise directions that are outlined in the book Alcoholics Anonymous.

Does that make sense to everybody? That was the whole point of last week.

And my assertion last week was that the reason that they had a better rate of recovery than we do today, and there are many reasons.

I mean, AA is much bigger.

There's different people coming to AA now than there were then.

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