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John Wesley, Jr.

by Dan B. Brummitt · English · Gutenberg #10134 · 417,247 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: John Wesley, Jr.

Author: Dan B. Brummitt


        
Release date: November 1, 2003 [eBook #10134]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN WESLEY, JR. ***

JOHN WESLEY, JR.

The Story of an Experiment

BY

DAN B. BRUMMITT

1921

TO
THOMAS KANE, "LAYMAN,"
WHOSE LONG LIFE OF NOBLE SERVICE
IS BEARING FRUIT IN A NEW CHRISTIAN
CONSCIENCE TOWARDS THE SUPPORT OF
THE WORK OF CHRIST'S KINGDOM IN
ALL THE WORLD
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
EDUCATIONAL, MISSIONARY
AND BENEVOLENT
WORK OF THE CHURCH




CONTENTS

CHAPTER

THE GENESIS OF THE EXPERIMENT
I. AN INSTITUTE PANORAMA
II. JOHN WESLEY, JR.'S BRINGING UP
III. CAMPUS DAYS
IV. EXPLORING MAIN STREET
V. HERE THE ALIEN; THERE THE LITTLE BROWN CHURCH
VI. "IS HE NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER?"
VII. THE FIRST AMERICAN CIVILIZATION
VIII. CHRIST AND THE EAST
THIS EXPERIMENT TEACHETH--?



ILLUSTRATIONS


THE CARTWRIGHT INSTITUTE
THE WESLEY FOUNDATION SOCIAL CENTER
(This one is at Illinois University)
MAIN STREET
THE TENEMENTS OF MANY DELAFIELDS
ONE OF THE HIGH LIGHTS OF MAIN STREET
ONE OF THE CANNERY COLONY
THERE'S HOPE FOR THE NEGRO IN A SCHOOL LIKE THIS
THE MEXICAN'S HOME IN THE SOUTHWEST
THE MEXICAN'S CHURCH IN THE SOUTHWEST
DR. JOE CARBROOK DOES SUCH WORK AS THIS IN CHINA



THE GENESIS OF THE EXPERIMENT


After years of waiting for time and place and person,
the Rev. Walter Drury, an average Methodist
preacher, was ready to begin his Experiment.

The process of getting adjusted to its conditions was ended. He believed
that, if he had health and nothing happened to his mind, he might count
on at least eight years more at First Church, Delafield--a ten-year
pastorate is nothing wonderful in to-day's Methodism. The right preacher
makes his own time limit.

He would not think himself too good for Delafield, but neither did he
rate himself too low. He just felt that he was reasonably secure against
promotion, and that he need not be afraid of "demotion." There are such
men. They are a boon to bishops.

The unforeseen was to be reckoned with, of course, the possible
shattering of all his plans by some unimagined misfortune. But the man
who waits until he is secure against the unknown never discovers
anything, not even himself.

Walter Drury had at last found his man, or, rather, his boy, here in
Delafield. It was necessary to the Experiment that its subject should be
a decent young fellow, not particularly keen on formal religion, but
well set-up in body and mind; clean, straight, and able to use the
brains he had when need arose.

John Wesley, Jr., was such a boy.

Would the result be worth what he was putting into the venture? That
would depend on one's standards. The church doesn't doubt that the more
than twice ten years' experiment of Helms in the south end of Boston has
been worth the price. And Helms has for company a few pioneers in other
fields who will tell you they have drawn good pay, in the outcomes of
their patience.

Still, Walter Drury was a new sort of specialist. The thing he had in
mind to do had been almost tried a thousand times; a thousand times it
had been begun. But so far as he knew no one preacher had thought to
focus every possible influence on a single life through a full cycle of
change. He meant his work to be intensive: not in degree only, but in
duration.

At the end of ten years! If, then, he had not shown, in results beyond
question, the direction of the church's next great advance, at least he
would have had the measureless joy of the effort. No seeming failure
could rob him of his reward.

Now, do not image this preacher as a dreaming scattergood; he would do
as much as any man should, that is to say, his utmost, in his pulpit and
his parish. The Experiment should be no robbing of collective Peter to
pay individual Paul.

But every man has his avocation, his recreation, you know--golf, roses,
coins, first editions, travel. Walter Drury, being a confirmed bachelor,
missed both the joys and the demands of home life. No recluse, but,
rather, a companionable man, he cared little for what most people call
amusement, but he cared tremendously for the human scene in which he
lived and worked. He would be happy in the Experiment for its sheer
human fascinations. That it held a deeper interest, that if it succeeded
it would reveal an untapped reservoir of resources available for the
church and the kingdom of God, did but make him the more eager to be at
it in hard earnest.

The church to whose work he had joyfully given himself from his youth
had grown to be a mighty and a highly complex machine. Some thought it
was more machinery than life, more organization than organism. But
Walter Drury knew better. It _was_ a wonderful machine, wheels within
wheels, but there was within the wheels the living spirit of the
prophet's vision.

Partly because the church was so vast and its work of such infinite
variety, very few of its members knew what it did, or how, or why. It
was all over the land, and in the ends of the earth, for people joined
it; and they lived their lives in the cheerful and congenial circle of
its fellowship. But the planetary sweep of its program and its
enterprises was to most of them not even as a tale that is told. They
were content to be busy with their own affairs, and had small curiosity
to know what meanings and mysteries might be discovered out in places
they had never explored, even though just 'round the corner from the
week-by-week activities of the familiar home congregation.

Walter Drury, at the end of one reasonably successful pastorate, had
stood bewildered and baffled as he looked back over his five years of
effort against this persistent and amiable passivity. It was not a
deliberate sin, or he might have denounced it; nor a temporary numbness,
or he might have waited for it to disappear. All the more it dismayed
him.

At the beginning of his ministry he had set this goal before him, that
every soul under his care might see as he saw, and see with him more
clearly year by year, the church's great work; its true and total
business. He had not failed, as the Annual Conference reckons failure.
But he knew he had been less than successful. The people of his
successive appointments were receptive people as church folk go. Then
who was to blame, that sermons and books and Advocates and pictures and
high officials and frequent great assemblies, always accomplishing
something, always left behind them the untouched, unmoved majority of
the people called Methodists?

It was all this and more of the same sort, which at last took shape in
Drury's thought and fixed the manner and matter of the Experiment. This
boy he had found, with a name that might be either prophecy or mockery,
he would study like a book. He would brood over his life. Mind you, he
would take no advantage, use no influence unfairly. He would neither
dictate nor drive. He would not trespass even so far as to the outer
edges of the boy's free personality. For the most part he would stay in
the background. But he would watch the boy, as for lesser outcomes
Darwin watched the creatures of wood and field. Without revealing all
his purpose he would set before this boy good and evil; the lesser good
and the greater. He would use for high and holy ends the method which
the tempter never tires of using for confusion. He would show this boy
the kingdoms of the children of God, and the glories of them, and would
promise them to him, not for a moment's shame but for a life's devotion.

As to the particular form in which the result of the Experiment might
appear he cared little. He had a certain curiosity on the subject
naturally, but he knew well enough that the Experiment would be useless
if he laid interfering hands on its inner processes. That would be like
trimming a whitethorn tree in a formal garden, to make it resemble a
pyramid. He was not making a thorn pyramid in an Italian garden; he
wanted an oak, to grow by the common road of all men's life. And oaks
must grow oak-fashion, or not at all.

       *       *       *       *       *

Four years of the ten had passed. That part of the history of John
Wesley, Jr., which is told in the following pages, is the story of the
other six years.



CHAPTER I


AN INSTITUTE PANORAMA

"If anybody expects me to stay away from Institute this year, he has got
a surprise coming, that's all."

The meeting was just breaking up, after a speech whose closing words had
been a shade less tactful than the occasion called for. But the last two
sentences of that speech made all the difference in the world to John
Wesley, Jr.

The Epworth League of First Church, Delafield, was giving one of its
fairly frequent socials. The program had gone at top speed for more than
an hour. All that noise could do, re-enforced by that peculiar emanation
by youth termed "pep," had been drawn upon to glorify a certain
forthcoming event with whose name everybody seemed to be familiar, for
all called it simply "the Institute."

Pennants, posters, and photographs supplied a sort of pictorial noise,
the better to advertise this evidently remarkable event, which, one
might gather, was a yearly affair held during the summer vacation at the
seat of Cartwright College.

The yells and songs, the cheers and games and reminiscences, re-enforced
the noisy decorations. At the last, in one of those intense moments of
quiet which young people can produce as by magic, came a neat little
speech whose purpose was highly praiseworthy. But, to John Wesley, Jr.,
it ended on the wrong note. Another listener took mental exception to
it, though his anxiety proved to be groundless.

It was a recruiting speech, directed at anybody and everybody who had
not yet decided to attend the Institute.

The speaker was, if anything, a trifle more cautious than canny when he
came to his "in conclusion," and his zeal touched the words with
anti-climax.

"Of course," he said, "since ten, or at most twelve, is our quota, we
are not quite free to encourage the attendance of everybody,
particularly of our younger members. They have hardly reached the age
where the Institute could be a benefit to them, and their natural
inclination to make the week a period of good times and mere pleasure
would seriously interfere with the interests of others more mature and
serious minded."

Now, the pastor of the church, the Rev. Walter Drury, would have put
that differently, he said to himself. If it produced any bad effects it
would need to be corrected, certainly.

Just then, amid the inevitable applause, and the dismissal of the brief
formal assembly for the social half-hour, something snapped inside of
John Wesley, Jr., and it was the feeling of it which prompted him to
say, "If anybody expects me to stay away from Institute this year, he
has got a surprise coming, that's all."

You see, John Wesley, Jr., had just been graduated from high school,
and his family expected him to go to college in the fall, though he
faced that expectation without much enthusiasm. He felt his new freedom.
He addressed his rebellious remark to the League president, Marcia
Dayne, a sensible girl whom he had known as long as he had known anybody
in the church.

"Last year everybody said I was too young. They all talked the way he
did just now. But they can't say I am too young now," and with that easy
skill which is one of the secrets of youth, he managed to contemplate
himself, serenely conscious that he was personable and "right."

The girl turned to him with a gesture of surprise.

"But I thought your father had agreed to let you take that trip to
Chicago you have been saving up for. Will he let you go to the Institute
too?"

"Chicago can wait," said John Wesley, Jr., grandly. "Dad did say I could
go to Chicago to see my cousins, or I could go anywhere else that I
wanted. Well, I am going to the Institute. It's my money, and, besides,
I am tired of being told I am too young. A fellow's got to grow up some
time."

"That's all right," said Marcia, "but what's your special interest in
the Institute? Do you truly want to go? How do you know what an
Institute is like?"

Her voice carried further than Marcia thought, and a man who seemed a
little too mature to be one of the young people, turned toward her. He
was smiling, and any time these four years the town would have told you
there wasn't a friendlier smile inside the city limits. He was in
business dress, and suggested anything but the parson in his bearing,
but through and through he looked the good minister that he was.

Marcia moved toward him with an unspoken appeal. She wanted help. He was
waiting for that signal, for he depended a good deal on Marcia. And he
was still worried about that unlucky speech.

"Well, Marcia, are you telling J.W. what the Institute really is?" he
asked.

"No, Mr. Drury, I'm not. I'm too much surprised at finding that he's
about decided to go. You're just in time to tell him for me. I want him
to get it right, and straight."

"Well," the pastor responded, "I'm glad of that. If he's really going,
he'll find out that definitions are not descriptions. Now, our Saint
Sheridan used to say that an Institute was a combination of college,
circus, and camp meeting. I would venture a different putting of it. An
Institute is a bit of young democracy in action. Its people play
together, for play's sake and for finding their honest human level. They
study together, to become decently intelligent about some of the real
business of the kingdom of God, and how the church proposes to transact
that business. They wait for new vision together, the Institute being a
good time and a good place for seeing life clear and seeing it whole."

"Yes," said Marcia, "that's exactly it, only I never could have found
quite the right words. Do you think J.W. will find it too poky and
preachy?"

"Tell him to try it and see, as you did last year," said Pastor Drury.

"I'll risk that," said John Wesley, Jr., in his newly resolute mood.

He knew when to stop, this preacher. Particularly concerned as he was
about John Wesley, Jr., he saw that this was one of the many times when
that young man would need to work things out for himself. Marcia would
give what help might be called for at the moment. The boy was turning
toward the Institute; so far so good.

To-night was nearly four years from the beginning of his interest in
this young fellow with the Methodist name. He was a special friend of
the family, though no more so than of every family in the town which
gave him the slightest encouragement. To a degree which no one suspected
he shared this family's secret hopes for its son and heir; and he
cherished hopes which even the Farwells could not suspect. Unless he was
much mistaken he had found the subject for his Experiment.

That mention of the Farwells needs to be explained. Of course "John
Wesley, Jr.," was only part of the boy's name. In full he was John
Wesley Farwell, Jr., son of John Wesley Farwell, Sr., of the J.W.
Farwell Hardware Co. As a little fellow he had no chance to escape
"Junior," since he was named for his father. There were many Jacks and
Johns and Johnnies about. His mother, good Methodist that she was,
secretly enjoyed calling him "John Wesley, Jr.," and before long the
neighbors and the neighborhood children followed her example.

A little later he might have been teased out of it, but at the
impossible age when boys discover that queer names and red hair and
cross-eyes make convenient excuses for mutual torture, it happened that
he had attained to the leadership of his gang. For some reason he took
pride in his two Methodist names, and made short work of those who
ventured to take liberties with them. In all other respects he played
without reserve boyhood's immemorial game of give and take; but as to
his name or any part thereof he would tolerate no foolishness and no
back talk. When he reached the high school period, however, most of his
intimates rarely called him by his full name, having, like all high
school people, no time for long names, though possessed of infinite
leisure for long dreams. Straightway they shortened his name to "J.W.,"
which to this day is all that his friends find necessary.

Very well, then; this is J.W. at eighteen; a young fellow worth
knowing. Take a look at him; impulsive, generous, not what you would
call handsome, but possessed of a genial eye and a ready tongue, a
stubby nose and a few scattered freckles. A fair student, he is yet far
from bookishness, and he makes friends easily.

Of late he has been paying furtive but detailed attention to his hair
and his neckties and the hang of his clothes, though still in small
danger of being mistaken for a tailor's model.

With such a name you will understand that he's a Methodist by first
intention; born so. He is a pretty sturdy young Christian, showing it in
a boy's modest but direct fashion, which even his teammates of the
high-school football squad found it no trouble to tolerate, because they
knew him for a human, healthy boy, and not a morbid, self-inspecting
religious prig. Pastor Drury, you may be sure, had taken note of all
that, for he and J.W. had been fast friends since the day he had
received the boy into the church.

The morning after the Institute social J.W. announced at breakfast his
sudden change of plan.

"If you don't mind, Dad, I've about decided to go to the Institute
instead of Chicago. There is a bunch of us going, and Mr. Drury will be
there. Uncle Henry's folks might not want to be bothered with me now,
and anyway I don't know them very well. But I can go to the Institute
with the church crowd; and there will be tennis and swimming and plenty
of other fun besides the big program." Which was quite a speech for J.
W.

John Wesley, Sr., didn't know much about the Institute, but he had an
endless regard for his pastor, and the mother was characteristically
willing to postpone her boy's introduction to the unknown and, in her
thought, therefore, the menacing city.

So, after the brief but unhurried devotions at the breakfast table,
which had come to serve in place of the old-time family prayers,
parental approval was forthcoming. And thus it befell that J.W.
selected for himself a future whose every experience was to be affected
by so slight a matter as his impulsive choice of a week's holiday. That
choice expressed to him the new freedom of his years, for he had not
even been conscious of the quiet influence which had made it easier than
he knew to decide as he had done.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was a mixed and lively company that found itself crowded around the
registrar's table at the Institute one Monday evening in July, with J.
W. and his own particular chum, Martin Luther Shenk, better known as
"Marty," right in the middle of it.

J.W. wondered where so many Epworthians could have come from. Did they
really hanker after the Institute, or had they come for reasons as
trivial as his own? He put the question to Martin Luther Shenk.

"Marty, do you reckon these are all here for real Epworth League work,
or does the Institute want anybody and everybody?"

Marty had been scouting a little, and he answered: "No, to both
questions, I should say. Some have come just to be coming, and others
seem to be here for business. But I saw Joe Carbrook just now, and if he
is an Epworth Leaguer I am the Prince of Puget Sound. You know how he
stands at home. Wonder what he came for."

Just then Joe Carbrook himself came up. He was from Delafield too,
member of the same League chapter as the two chums, but he had rarely
condescended to league affairs. Having had two rather variegated years
at college, he felt he must show his sophistication by holding himself
above some of those simple old observances.

"S'pose you are here for solemn and serious work, you two," he remarked
mockingly, as he saw the boys. "I just met Marcia Dayne, and she told me
you were registering. Well, I'm here too--drove up in my car--but you
don't catch me tying myself down to all that study stuff. I'm looking
for fun, not work."

"Nothing new for you in that, Joe," said Marty. "But I should think you
might try the study stuff, if only for a change, after you have spent
good money on gas and tires. And you have to pay for your meals, you
know."

"Well, I studied hard enough last month in college cramming for the
final exams, so I could get within gunshot of enough sophomore credits,
and I'm through; with study for a while. If I find a few live ones in
this crowd, I guess we can enjoy ourselves without interfering with any
of you grinds, if you must study," and Joe Carbrook went off in search
of his live ones.

J.W. and Marty were in no hurry to register. The crowd milling around
in the office was interesting, and J.W. was still wondering how many of
them, himself included, would get enough Institute long before the week
was over. Besides, it was yet an hour before supper.

"Think of it, Marty. All these people come from Epworth Leagues just
like ours, from Springfield, and Wolf Prairie and Madison and all over
this part of the State. What for, I'd like to know? Will you look at
those pennants? Wish we had brought one or two of ours; we could add to
the display, anyway."

"I have two in my suitcase," said Marty. "We'll have them out this
evening at the introduction meeting. And maybe you'll find out 'what
for' by that time."

The introduction meeting in the chapel after supper was for the most
part informal. Yells and songs and the waving of pennants punctuated the
proceedings, as is quite the proper thing in an Epworth League
gathering. Some people, who see only what is on the surface, cannot
wholly understand the exuberance of an Epworth League crowd. But it has
roots in something very real.

The dean of the Institute managed, amid the roystering and the intervals
of attention, to set things up for the week. A few regulations would
need to be laid down; and these would be fixed, not by the faculty or by
the dean, but by the Student Council. Would each district group please
get together at once, and select some one to represent the group on this
council?

This request being obeyed amid considerable confusion, with Marcia Dayne
appointed from the Fort Adams District, and the council excused to draft
the basic laws for the week, the faculty was introduced, one by one.

Each teacher was given the opportunity to describe his or her course, so
that out of the eight or nine courses offered every delegate might
select two besides the two which were required of all students, and so
qualify for an Institute diploma.

J.W. found himself enjoying all this hugely. It appealed to his growing
sense of freedom from schoolboy restraint. If he did go to any of the
classes, it appeared that he could pick the ones he liked. Up to now he
had entertained no thought of any serious work, but the faculty talks
about these courses made him think there might be worse ways of spending
the week than qualifying for an Institute diploma. The whole thing
seemed to be so easy and so friendly. Of course he could see that the
study would not be much, even if he signed up for it, being just for a
week, but it might not be bad fun.

Morning Watch was an experience to J.W. He was surprised to find
himself staying awake in a before-breakfast religious meeting, and was
even more surprised to be enjoying it. Something about this big crowd of
young people stirred all his pulses, and the religion they heard about
and talked about seemed to J.W. something very real and desirable. He
thought of himself as a Christian, but he wondered if his Christian life
might not become more confident and productive. In this atmosphere one
almost felt that anything was possible.

Meal times turned out to be times of orderly disorder. J.W. and his
friends were at a table with other groups from the Fort Adams District,
and he quickly mastered the raucous roar which served the District for a
yell. Before the end of the second day his alert good nature made him
cheer leader, and thereafter he rarely had time to eat all that was set
before him, though possessed of a boy's healthy appetite. It was simply
that the other possibilities of the hour seemed more alluring than mere
food.

From the first day of the class work J.W. found himself keen for all
that was going on. There was variety enough so that he felt no
weariness, and the range of new interests opened up each day kept him at
constant and pleasurable attention. Without knowing just how, he was
catching the Institute spirit.

He walked away from the dining hall one noon with his pastor-friend, and
he talked. He had to talk to somebody, and Walter Drury contrived to
know of his need.

"Why, Mr. Drury," he said, eagerly, "I'm just finding out how little I
know about the church and real Christian work. I thought I was something
of an average Methodist boy, but if the people at home are no better
than I am, I can see how being a preacher to such a bunch is a man's
job."

"Correct, J.W." said the minister. "I find that out many a time, to my
humbling. But honestly, now, are you learning things you never knew
before?"

"Ye-es, I am," J.W. answered, "and then, again, I'm not. It seems to me
as if I had always known a lot of what we are getting in these classes,
though there is plenty of new stuff too. But until now I didn't get much
out of what I knew. I've always liked to hear you, but you're different.
As for most of the things I've heard, I just thought of it as religious
talk, church stuff, you know. It didn't seem to matter, but here it is
beginning to matter in all sorts of ways, and I can see that it matters
to me."

"How, for instance?"

Well, take the class in home missions; Americanization, they call it.
Maybe you noticed that the first thing the teacher did was to divide the
class right down the middle, and tell those on the left hand--yes, I'm
one of the goats--that for the rest of the week they were to consider
themselves aliens. The others were to play native-born Americans. And so
the study started, but believe me, we aliens have already begun to make
it interesting for those natives. Some of 'em want to come over on our
side already, but they can't. A few of us have found some immigration
dope in the college library, and it is pretty strong. We'll show up
those Pilgrim Fathers before the week is out. They think they have done
everything an alien could ask when they let him into the country, and
then they work him twelve hours a day, seven days a week, or else let
him hunt the country over for any sort of a job. They rob him by making
him pay higher prices than other people for all he has to buy. They
force him to live in places not fit for rats, and on top of everything
else they call him names, so that their kids stick up their noses at his
children in the school grounds. After all that they expect he'll become
a good citizen just by hearing 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at the movies
and watching the flag go by when there's a parade.

"Say, Mr. Drury, it makes me sick, and, if I feel that way just to be
pretending I'm a 'Wop' for a week, how do you suppose the real aliens
feel? Excuse me for talking like this, but honestly, something like that
is going on in all these classes; I wish we could take up such things in
the League at home." And he forced an embarrassed little laugh.

Pastor Drury laughed too, and said of course they could, as he linked
arms with J.W., and they passed on down the road. The preacher talked
but little, contriving merely to drop a question now and then; and J.W.
talked on, half-ashamed to be so "gabby," as he put it, and yet moved by
an impulse as pleasant as it was novel.

"And foreign missions, Mr. Drury. You won't be offended, I hope, but
somehow as far back as I can remember I have always connected foreign
missions with collections and 'Greenland's Icy Mountains' and little
naked Hottentots, and something--I don't know just what--about the River
Ganges. But here--why, that China class just makes me want to see China
for myself and find out how much of the advantages of American life over
Chinese has come on account of religion."

"Well, why not, J.W.? Maybe you will go to China some day, and have a
hand in it all," suggested the pastor, to try him out.

The boy shook his head.

"No, I don't think so. I am certainly getting a new line on foreign
missions, but I don't think there's missionary stuff in me. I'll have
to go at the proposition some other way."

Then Pastor Drury set him going on another subject.

"What do you think of the young folks who are here?" he asked.

"Well, at first I thought they were all away ahead of our bunch at home,
and some of them are; but you soon find out that the majority is pretty
much of the same sort as ours. I think I've spotted a few slackers, but
mighty few. Most of the crowd seems to be all right, and I've already
made some real friends. But do you know which one of them all is the
most interesting fellow I've met?"

The pastor thought he did, but he merely asked, "Who?"

"Why, that Greek boy, Phil Khamis. He is from Salonika, you know. He
knows the old country like a book, and he's going back some day, maybe
to be some kind of missionary to his people, in the very places where
the apostle Paul preached. Honest, I never knew until he told me that
his Salonika is the town of those Christians to whom Paul wrote two of
his letters; those to the Thessalonians--'Thessalonika,' you know. Well,
you ought to hear Phil talk. He came over here seven years ago, and
learned the English language from the preacher at Westvale."

"Yes, I have heard about him," said Mr. Drury. "They say he lived in the
parsonage and paid the preacher for his English lessons by giving him a
new understanding of the Greek New Testament. Not many of us have found
out yet how to get such pay for being decent to our friends from the
other side."

"Well, he is a thoroughbred, anyway; and do you notice how he is right
up in front when there is anything doing? The only way you can tell he
isn't American born is that he is so anxious to help out on all the
unpleasant work. When I look at Phil it makes me boil to think of
fellows like him being called 'Wop.'"

By this time the two had swung back into the campus, and J.W. found
himself drafted to hold down second base in the Faculty-Student ball
game. But that is a story for others to tell.

On the steps of the library Marcia Dayne and some other girls were
holding an informal reception. Joe Carbrook, with one or two of his
friends, was finding it agreeable to assume a superior air concerning
the Institute. The impression the boys gave was that their coming to the
Institute at all had been a great concession, but that they were under
no illusions about the place.

"All this is all right," Joe was saying, "for those who need it, but
what's the good of it all to us? For instance, what do you get out of
it, Marcia?"

"What do you think I want to get out of it? If you cared for the young
people's work at home, I should think you could see how 'all this,' as
you call it, would help you to do better work and more of it at
Delafield."

"As you ought to know pretty well, Marcia," Joe replied, "back home they
think I don't care much for the young people's work. It is a little too
prim and ready-to-wear for me, if you'll excuse me for saying so. No fun
in it at all, though I'll admit some of the classes here have more life
in them than I looked for."

One of the other girls, who knew him well enough to speak with large
frankness, came to the defense of them all, saying: "Well, Joe, I don't
see that you get very far with what you call fun. It's mostly at the
expense of other people, including your father, who pays the bills.
Besides, since you came home from college this spring, you seem to have
run out of nearly all the bright ideas you started with. I wonder if it
ever strikes you that being a sport, as you call it, is mostly being a
nuisance to everybody? Some of us long ago got over thinking you clever
and original. You must be getting over it yourself, by now, surely."

"Many thanks, dear lady, for them kind words," Joe responded, as he
bowed low in mock acknowledgment; "you make yourself quite plain, Miss
Alma Wetherell." He flung back the insult jauntily, as he and his
companions moved on, but at least one of the group suspected that the
words had struck home.

You who know the General Secretary could easily forgive J.W. his
delight in the class of which the program said the subject was
"Methods." This is the only hour in an Institute which the Epworth
League takes for its own work. Rightly enough, it is a crowded hour,
with the whole Institute present, and usually it is an hour of
unflagging interest.

J.W. and Marty were enjoying their first Institute too much to be late
at any classes. They were merely a little earlier at this class; to miss
any of it would be a distinct loss.

Now, what the General Secretary talked about was no more than the
everyday work of the League--how it meant the young people of the church
and their work for and with young people for the sake of the future. But
he had a way with him. He said the League was a great scheme of self,
with the "ish" left off. In the League one practiced self-help, and
enjoyed the twin luxuries of self-direction and self-expression, and
came sooner or later to that strange new knowledge which is
self-discovery. He explained how Epworthians as such could live on
twenty-four hours a day, the plan being an ingenious and yet simple
financial arrangement for keeping the League work moving, both where you
are and where you aren't, even around the world. He had innumerable
stories of the devotional meeting idea, the Win-My-Chum idea, the
stewardship idea, the Institute idea, the life service idea, the
recreation idea, the study-class idea, and every other League idea so
far invented.

But all this is merely a hint of what the General Secretary meant to the
Institute, and particularly to the delegates from Delafield. Even Joe
Carbrook had been impressed. He heard the General Secretary the morning
after that little exchange of compliments on the library steps, and for
an hour thereafter let himself enjoy the rare luxury of thinking. The
results were somewhat disconcerting.

"It's funny," said Marty, as the four of them, the other three being
Joe, Marcia, and J.W., sat under a tree in the afternoon, "but I believe
that man could make even trigonometry interesting. I thought I'd heard
all that could be said about the devotional meeting; but did you get
that scheme for leaders he sprung this morning? Watch me when we get
back home, that's all."

"You needn't suppose you are the only one who got it," said Marcia.
"Everybody was trying to watch the General Secretary and to take notes
at the same time, and I don't believe you are any quicker at that than
the rest of us. Of course all of us will use as many of his ideas as we
can remember, when we get home again."

Joe Carbrook, with a new seriousness which sat awkwardly on him,
confessed that he could not understand just what was happening. It was
evident that he was ill at ease; Marcia had noticed it every time she
had seen him since that encounter with Alma Wetherell.

"I guess you folks know I am not easily caught; but I'm ready to admit
that man has hold of something. Yes, and I'm half convinced that this
Institute has hold of something. I wish I knew what it is. If I could
really believe that all I hear and see at this place is part of being
young and part of being a Christian, I might be thinking before long
about getting into the game myself. The trouble is you three and the
other Leaguers I've watched at home are just you three and the others,
and that's all. I know, and you know, what you can do. You'll take all
these ideas of League work and use them, maybe; but what I can't see is
how you will pick up the Big Idea of this place and get back home
without losing it."

"We can't," said Marcia, "not without all sorts of help, visible and
invisible. You, for instance; if you would really get into the game, as
you say, nobody could guess how much it would mean to our League. And it
might mean more to you."

"Marcia's right about that," said J.W. "The Big Idea of this place, that
you speak of, is a lot too big for us to take home alone. Maybe you'll
think I'm preaching, but I don't care, if I say that for God to handle
alone, it is not big enough. He makes the stars, and gives us his Son,
without any help from us. Nobody else can do that. But he won't make our
League at home a success without us; and all of us together can't do it
without Him. I'm not saying I know how to do it, even then, but that's
the way it looks to me. Why, Joe," he said with sudden intensity as he
faced Joe Carbrook, "if you ever get hold of the Big Idea, and the Big
Idea gets hold of you, something is sure to happen, something bigger
than any of us can figure out now. I know you have it in you."

All four showed a surprised self-consciousness over J.W.'s unexpected
venture into these rather deeper conversational waters than usual, and
there was more surprise when Joe Carbrook began to talk about himself.

He laughed to hide a touch of embarrassment, but with little mirth; and
then he said, "Well, J.W., that's not all foolishness, though I don't
see why you should pick on me. Why not Marty? Of course, I came here for
fun, and I have had some, though not just the sort I expected. And I've
had several jolts too. I might as well admit that if I could just only
see how you hitch all of this League and church business to real life, I
would be for it with all I've got. The trouble is, while I've never been
especially proud of my own record, neither have I seen much excuse yet
for what you 'active members' have been busy with. I have been playing
my way, and you have been playing yours; but it all seems mostly play to
me. All the same, I guess I am getting tired of my kind." If Joe could
ever have spoken wistfully, you might have suspected him of it just
then.

Clearly, thought Marcia Dayne, in the silence that followed, something
big was already happening. But how to help it on she could not tell; so,
with a desperate effort to do the right thing, she contrived to turn the
subject It seemed to her it had become too difficult to go further just
now without peril to Joe's strange new interest, as well as to a very
new and tremulous little hope that had begun to sing in her own heart.

The shift of the talk was a true Institute change, and would have been
most disconcerting to anyone unfamiliar with the ways of young
Christians; but Marcia was sure that what had been said would not be
forgotten, and she knew there would be another time.

It was this that made her say, "I wish you boys would suggest what sort
of stunt our district should give on stunt night; you know the time is
getting short."

"That's a fact," exclaimed Marty, sitting up. "Stunt night is to-morrow,
and our delegation has to fix up the stunt for the Fort Adams District.
Let's get to work on something. We've been mooning long enough."

For though Marty never thought as quickly as Marcia, he too felt some
instinct of fear lest by an unfortunate word they should break the spell
of Joe Carbrook's interest in the "Big Idea," and promptly the four were
deep in a study of stunts.

To the uninitiated, stunt night at the Institute is without rime or
reason, but not to those in charge who are looking ahead to Sunday. They
know that the converging and cumulative psychic forces which the
Institute invariably produces must be tempered, along about midway of
the week, by some sharp contrast in the communal life. Otherwise, the
group, like over-trained athletes, will grow emotionally stale before
the week is done, and at the end of that is let-down and flatness. Hence
"stunt night."

In the early Institute years it was easy, as in some places it still is,
for stunt night to be no more than clowning, witless and cheap; but
there is a distinct tendency to exercise the imagination in producing
more self-respecting efforts.

Cartwright, happily, is one of the forward-looking Institutes, and stunt
night, crowded with most excellent fooling, produced two or three
creditable and thought-provoking performances. One of them deserves
remembering for its own sake. Besides, it is a part of this story.

The home missions class furnished the inspiration for it, and called it
"Scum o' the Earth," an impromptu immigration pageant. A boy who had
memorized Schauffler's poem stood off stage and recited it, while group
after group of "immigrants" in the motley of the steerage passed slowly
through the improvised Ellis Island sifting process. It was all
make-believe, of course, all but one tense moment. Then Phil Khamis
stepped on the platform, incarnating in his own proper person the poet's
apostrophised Greek boy:

"Stay, are we doing you wrong,
  Young fellow from Socrates' land?
You, like a Hermes so lissome and strong,
  Fresh from the master Praxiteles' hand?
So you're of Spartan birth?
  Descended, perhaps, from one of the band--
Deathless in story and song--
Who combed their long hair at Thermopylae's pass?
Ah, I forget the straits, alas!
  More tragic than theirs, more compassion-worth,
That have doomed you to march in our 'immigrant class'
 Where you're nothing but 'scum o' the earth!'"

The audience was caught unaware. It had been vastly interested in the
spectacle, as a spectacle, the more because the unusual Americanization
class which produced it had attracted general attention. But, Phil
Khamis, everybody's friend, standing there, an immigrant of the
immigrants, smiling his wistful friendly smile, was a picture as
dramatic as it was unexpected. First there were ejaculations of
astonishment and surprise. Then came the moment of understanding, and a
shining-eyed stillness fell on all. Then, what a shout! J.W. led off,
the unashamed tears falling from his brimming eyes.

On Saturday morning J.W. was sitting beside Phil Khamis at Morning
Watch. The leader had asked for answers to the question "Why did I come
to the Institute?" getting several responses of the conventional sort.
Suddenly Phil nudged J.W. and whispered, "Shall I tell why I came?" and
J.W. with the memory of stunt night's thrill not yet dulled, said
promptly, "Sure, go ahead."

When Phil got up an attentive silence fell upon them all. The Greek boy
had made many friends, as much by his engaging frankness and anxiety to
learn as by his perpetual eagerness to have a hand in every bit of hard
work that turned up. Since the stunt night incident he was everybody's
favorite.

"Friends," he said, in his rather careful, precise way, "I am here for a
different reason than any. When I was in America but a little time a
Methodist preacher made himself my friend. I could not speak English,
only a few words. He took me to his home. He taught me to talk the
American way. He find me other friends, though I could do nothing at all
for them to pay them back. Now I am Christian--real, not only baptized.
The young people of the church take me in to whatever they do. They
call me 'Phil' and never care that I am a foreigner, so when I heard
about this Institute I say to myself, 'It is something strange to me,
but I hear that many people like those in my church will be there.' I
cannot quite believe that, but it sounded good, and I wanted to come and
see. And now I know that many people are young people like those I first
knew. They treat me just the same. It makes me love America much more;
and if I could tell my people in the old country that all this good has
come to me from the church, they could not believe it. Still, it is
true. Everything I have to-day has come to me by goodness of Christian
people."

There were some half-embarrassed "Amens," and more than one hitherto
unsuspected cold required considerable attention. All the way to
breakfast Phil held embarrassed court, while his hand was shaken and his
shoulder was thumped and he was told, solo and chorus, by all who could
get near him, that "He's all right!"--"Who's all right?" "Phil Khamis!"

But J.W. was walking slowly toward the dining hall, alone. As he had
listened to Phil, at first he thought, "Good old scout, he's putting it
over," but by the time the Greek's simple words were ended, J.W. was
looking himself straight in the eye. "Young fellow," he was saying, "you
have come mighty near feeling glad that you have had so many more
advantages than this stranger, and yet can't you see that what he says
about himself is almost as true about you? All you have to-day--this
Institute, your religion, your church, your friends, the kind of a home
you have and are so proud of--everything has come to you by what Phil
calls the goodness of Christian people."

And then it was breakfast time, with an imperative call on J.W. from the
Fort Adams table for "that new yell we fixed up last night," and the
minutes in which he had talked with himself were for the time forgotten.
But the memory of them came back in the days after the Institute was
itself a memory.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Saturday night camp fire at this Institute, contrary to the usual
custom, was not co-ed. The boys went down to the lake shore and sat
around a big fire on the sand. The girls had their fire on the slope of
a hill at the other edge of the campus.

Nor does this Institute care for too much praise of itself. Its
traditional spirit is to work more for outcomes than for the devices
which produce complacency. It stages only a few opportunities of telling
"Why I like this Institute."

So, at the camp fires a man talked to the boys and a woman to the girls,
not about the Institute, but about life. These speakers knew the strange
effect an Institute week has on impressionable and romantic youth; they
knew that by this time scores of the students were either saying to
themselves, "I've got to do something big before this thing's over," or
were vainly trying to put the conviction away.

The woman who talked to the girls happened to be a preacher's wife.
This gave her a certain advantage when she told the listening girls that
the greatest of all occupations for them was not some special vocation,
but what Ida Tarbell has called "the business of being a woman." It was
good preparation for the next day's program, with its specific and
glamorous appeal, for it put first the great claim, so that special
vocations could be seen in clear air and could be fairly measured.

Pastor Drury, who talked to the boys, was talking to them all, as J.W.
very well knew, but every word seemed for him; as, indeed, it was, in a
sense that he did not suspect. He was not surprised that his pastor
should present the Christian life as effectively livable by bricklayers
and business men as surely as by missionaries. He had heard that before.
But to J.W. the old message had a new setting, a new force. And never
before had he been so ready to receive it.

The songs had sung themselves out, as the fire changed from roaring
flame and flying sparks to a great bed of living coals. From the world's
beginning a glowing hearth has been perfect focus for straight thought
and plain speech. The boys found it so this night.

The minister began so simply that it seemed almost as if his voice were
only the musings of many, just become audible. "I know," said he, "that
to-morrow some of you will find yourselves, and will eagerly offer your
lives for religious callings. We shall all be proud of you and glad to
see it. But most of you cannot do that. You are already sure that you
must be content to live 'ordinary Christian lives,' It is possible that
to-morrow you may feel a little out of the picture. And those who are
hearing a special call might regard you, quite unconsciously, of course,
as not exactly on their level."

"Now, suppose we get this thing straight to-night. There is no great nor
small, no high nor low, in real service. The differences are only in the
forms of work you do. The quality may be just as fine in one place as in
another. The boy who goes into the ministry, or who becomes a medical
missionary, will have peculiar chances for usefulness. So also will the
boy who goes into business or farming or teaching, or any other
so-called secular occupation. Just because he is not called to religious
work as a daily business he dare not think that he has no call. God's
calling is not for the few, but for the many. And just now the man who
puts his whole soul into being an out-and-out Christian in his daily
business and in his personal life as a responsible citizen must have the
genuine missionary spirit. He must live like a prophet, that is, a
messenger from God. He must know the Christian meaning of all that
happens in the world. And he must stand for the whole Christian program.
Otherwise, not all the ministers and missionaries in the world can save
our civilization. It is your chance of a great career. You who will make
up the rank and file of the Christian army in the next twenty-five
years--do you know what you are? _You are the hope of the world!"_

As the group broke up in the dim light of the dying embers, J.W.
stumbled into Joe Carbrook, and the two headed for the tents together.
They had been on a much more friendly footing since Thursday.

"Say, J.W.," said Joe, abruptly, "what's the matter with me? I came to
this place without knowing just why; thought I'd just have a good time,
I suppose; but here I am being bumped up against something new and big
every little while, until I wonder if it's the same world that I was
living in before I came. Do you suppose anybody else feels that way? Is
it the place? Or the people? Or what?"

"I don't just know," said J.W., trying to keep from showing his
surprise. "I feel a good deal that way myself. I think it's maybe that
this is the first time we've ever been forced to look squarely at some
of the things that seem so natural here. At home it's easy to dodge. You
know that, only you've dodged one way and I've done it another."

"But do you feel different, the way I do, J.W.? Do you feel like saying
to yourself: 'Looka here, Joe Carbrook, quit being a fool. See what you
could do if you settled down to getting ready for something real. Like
being a doctor, now.' Do _you_ feel that way? You don't know it, but
I've always thought I could be a doctor, if I could see anything in it.
And then the other side of me speaks up and says: 'Joe Carbrook, don't
kid yourself. You know you haven't got the nerve to try, even if you had
the grit to stick it through.' Is it that way with you, J.W.? You've
paid more attention to religion and all that than I ever did. And what
you said on Thursday about the 'Big Idea' has kept me guessing ever
since."

"No, Joe, my trouble's not like yours. I know I can't be a doctor, nor a
preacher, nor a missionary. I've got nothing of that in me. But what we
heard to-night at the camp fire came straight at me. As I tried to say
the other day, if you get the 'Big Idea' of the Institute, Christian
service looks like a great life. But me--I've no hope to be anything
particular; just one of the crowd. And I never quite saw until to-night
how that might be a great life too."

As they were parting, J.W. ventured a bold suggestion. "Say, Joe, if you
think you could be a doctor, _why not a missionary doctor?"_

Joe's answer was a swift turning on his heel, and he strode away with
never a word.

"Probably made him mad," thought J.W. "I wonder why I said it. Joe's the
last boy in the world to have any such notion. But--well, something's
already begun to happen to him, that's sure--and to me too."

On Sunday the little world of the Institute assumed a new and no less
attractive aspect. Everybody was dressed for Sunday, as at home. Classes
were over; and games also; the dining room became for the first time a
place of comparative quiet, with now and then the singing of a great old
hymn, just to voice the Institute consciousness.

The Morning Watch talk had been a little more direct, a little more
tense. And before the Bishop's sermon came the love feast. Now, the
Methodists of the older generation made much of their love feasts, but
in these days, except at the Annual Conference, an occasional Institute
is almost the only place where it flourishes with something of the
ancient fervor.

Many changes have come to Methodism since the great days of the love
feast; changes of custom and thought and speech. But your ardent young
Methodist of any period, Chaplain McCabe, Peter Cartwright, Jesse Lee,
Captain Webb, would have understood and gloried in this Institute love
feast. It spoke their speech.

Our group from Delafield will never forget it.

Nearly all of them spoke; Marcia Dayne first because she was usually
expected to lead in everything of the sort, then Marty, then J.W., and,
last of all and most astounding, Joe Carbrook.

Marty looked the soldier, and he put his confession into military terms.
He spoke about his Captain and waiting for orders, and a new
understanding of obedience.

Before J.W. got his chance to speak, the leader read a night letter from
an Institute far away, conveying the greetings of six hundred young
people to their fellow Epworthians.

J.W. could not bring himself to speak in terms of personal experience.
He was still under the spell of last night's camp fire, and his brief
encounter with Joe Carbrook, but without quite knowing what could
possibly come of all that. And the telegram gave him an excuse to speak
in another vein. You must remember that up to now he had been wholly
local in his League interests. He had gone to no conventions, he was not
a reader of _The Epworth Herald_, and to him the Central Office was as
though it had not been.

"I wonder if anybody else feels as I do," he said, "about this League of
ours? Until this last week I never thought much about it. But we've just
heard that telegram from an Institute bigger than this, a thousand miles
off. And there's fifty-five or sixty Institutes going on this year,
besides the winter Institutes, the conventions, and all the other
gatherings. We seem to belong to a movement that enrolls almost a
million young people, with all sorts of chances to learn how it can do
all sorts of Christian work by actually _doing_ it. This isn't the only
thing I've found out here, but it makes me want to see the whole League
become as good as it is big. I don't want to be dazzled by the size of
it, because I know how many other members are just as little use as I've
been. Only when I get home I hope I'm going to be a different sort of an
Epworthian, and I can't help wishing that we all felt that way about
being more good in the League. We can make it a hundred times more
useful to the church and to our Master."

Many others spoke like that, some of them because they could find
nothing more intimate to say, some here and there those who, like J.W.,
could not quite trust themselves yet to talk of their deeper personal
experiences.

And then Joe Carbrook arose. He spoke easily, as Joe always did, but it
was a new Joe Carbrook, and only the Delafield delegation understood how
amazing was the change.

"This Institute has made me all sorts of trouble," he said. "I had
nothing else to do, and without caring anything about it, except to get
some new fun out of it, I came along, intending to stir up some of you
if I could, and I knew I could. But I've seen what a fool I was. Every
day I've seen that a little more distinctly. And last night, just as I
was leaving one of the boys after the camp fire he said something about
what I might do with my life. I don't know how seriously he meant it.
Maybe he doesn't, either. I went off without answering him. There wasn't
any answer, except that I knew I wasn't fit even to think about it. And
then, thank God, I met a man who understood what was wrong with me. He's
our pastor. I haven't been anything but trouble to him at home, but that
made no difference to him. And he introduced me, down yonder by the
lake, to a Friend I had never known before, some one infinitely
understanding, infinitely forgiving. He showed me that before I could
find what I ought to be I'd have to come to terms with that Friend. And
I have. Whatever happens to me, whatever I may find to do, I want now
and here for the first time in my life to confess Jesus Christ as my
Saviour and Lord!"

The Bishop preached a great sermon, but it is doubtful whether the
Delafield delegation rightly appreciated it. They were too much
occupied with the incredible fact that Joe Carbrook had been converted,
and had openly confessed it.

More was to come. The afternoon meeting, long established in the
Institute world as the "Life Work Service," was in the hands of a few
leaders who knew both its power and peril. An invitation would be given
for all to declare their purpose who felt called to special Christian
work. The difficulty was to encourage the most timid of those who,
despite their timidity, felt sure of the inner voice, and yet prevent a
stampede among those who, without any depth of desire, were in love with
emotion, and would enjoy being conspicuous, if only for the brief moment
of the service.

For once a woman made the address--a wise woman, let it be said, who
made skillful and sure distinctions between the Christian life as a life
and the work of the Christian Church as one way of living that life.

It would have been a successful afternoon in any case, but three
incidents helped the speaker. When she asked those to declare themselves
who had decided for definite Christian work, young people in all parts
of the room arose, and one after another they spoke, for the most part
simply and modestly, of their hope and purpose. And Joe Carbrook was
among them!

He said very little, the nub of it being that he had always thought of
being a doctor, but not until a chance remark made by John Wesley, Jr.,
last night had the idea appeared to him important. Just to make one more
among the thousands of doctors in America was one thing, he said. It
was quite another to think of being the only physician among a great,
helpless population. But to be a missionary doctor a man had to be first
a missionary. And how could he be a missionary if he were not a
Christian? Well, as he had confessed at the love feast, that was settled
last night, and as soon as it had been attended to be knew there was
nothing else in the way. So he must work now toward being a medical
missionary.

Joe's declaration stirred the whole assembly. And while the influence of
it was still on them, J.W. saw Martin Luther Shenk, his classmate and
doubly his chum since a memorable day of the preceding October, get up
and quietly announce his purpose of becoming a minister. "And I hope,"
said Marty, "that I may find my lifework in some of the new home mission
fields we have been learning about this week."

At that point the leader felt more than a little anxious. These two
decisions, with all their restraint, had in them something infectious,
and she feared lest some young people, not holding themselves perfectly
in hand, might be moved to sentimental and unreflecting declaration.

If there had been any such danger, Marcia Dayne dispelled it. She was
all aglow with a new joy of her own, whose secret none knew but herself,
though one other had almost dared to hope he could guess.

"May I speak?" she asked. "I have no decision to make for myself. Last
year I took the 'Whatever, whenever, wherever' pledge, and I intend to
keep it, though I am not yet sure what it will mean. But I know a boy
here who will not talk unless somebody asks him, and there's a reason
why I think he should be asked. Please, mayn't we hear from John Wesley
Farwell, Jr., about _his_ kind of a call?"

J.W., taken unawares at the mention of his name, was still at a loss
when the leader seconded Marcia's invitation; and the knowledge that he
was expected to say something unusual did not make for self-control. But
he understood Marcia's purpose, and tried to pull himself together.

"Miss Dayne is president of our home Chapter, and she had a lot to do
with my coming to the Institute," he began. "She has heard me talk since
I found out a little about the Institute, and I told her this morning
something of what Joe Carbrook and I had discussed last night after the
camp fire."

Well, to get to the point, I think she wants me to say, and I'm saying
it to myself most of all, that for nearly all of us young people,
Christian lifework must mean making an honest living, doing all we can
to make our religion count at home, and then backing up with all we've
got, by prayer and money and brains, all these others like Joe Carbrook
and Marty Shenk, who are going into the hardest places to put up the
biggest fight that's in them. We've just got to do it, or be quitters.
As Phil Khamis said at Morning Watch yesterday, 'Everything we have has
come to us by the goodness of Christian people.' We aren't willing to be
the last links of that chain.

We don't want any special recognition, but I hope the Bishop and the
General Secretary and the Dean and all the rest of the League leaders
will know they can count on us just as we know they can count on these
friends of ours who have just become life service volunteers.

Nobody knows what might have happened if some one had not spoken like
that, but as the group of new volunteers stood about the platform at the
close of the meeting, the other young people, instead of wandering off
and feeling themselves of no significance, came crowding about them, to
say to them, boy-and-girl fashion, something of what J.W.'s little
speech had suggested. Out of some four hundred Epworthians enrolled in
the Institute, about forty had made definite decisions; but certainly
not less than two hundred more had also faced the future, and in some
sort had made a new contract with themselves and with God.

The Institute ended there, except for a simple vesper service after the
evening meal, and on Monday morning the whole company was homeward
bound.

The Delafield delegation had separated. The larger group went home by
train, but Joe Carbrook's insistence was not to be withstood, so J.W.
and Marty, Marcia Dayne and Pastor Drury were Joe's passengers for the
fifty-odd miles between Institute and home.

They sang, they cheered, they yelled the Institute yells. They lived
over the crowded days of the week that had so swiftly passed. But most
of all they deeply resolved that so far as they could help to do it
while they were at home the League Chapter of Delafield should be made
over into something of more use to the church to which it belonged.

It was Marty who put their purpose into the fewest words. "We, and the
others who have been to the Institute, don't think we know every little
League thing," said he, "and we don't think we are the whole League
either. But every time anybody in our Chapter starts anything good, he's
going to have more and better help than he ever had before."

Which thing came to pass, as may one day be recorded. The Rev. Walter
Drury kept his own counsel, but he knew that more had happened than the
putting of new life into the League. The Experiment had progressed
safely through some most difficult stages.



CHAPTER II


JOHN WESLEY, JR.'S BRINGING UP

Those words of Phil Khamis at Morning Watch kept popping into J.W.'s
head in the days following the Institute--"Everything I have to-day has
come to me by the goodness of Christian people."

"I know that must be true," he would say to himself, "but it's worth
tracing back."

The preacher was coming over to supper one night, as he loved to do; and
J.W. made up his mind to bring Phil's idea into the table talk. He was
on even better terms with the preacher than he used to be.

J.W.'s mother hadn't said much about the Institute, though she had
listened eagerly to all his talk of the crowded week, and she was
vaguely ill at ease. She had hoped for something, she did not know just
what, from the Institute, and she was not yet sure whether she ought to
feel disappointed.

But she provided a fine supper, to which the menfolk paid the most
practical and sincere of all compliments. And since nobody had anything
else on for the evening, there was plenty of time for talk.

The mother had a moment aside with the minister, and there was a touch
of anxiety in her question: "Do you think the Institute helped my boy?"

And the pastor had just time to whisper back, "It helped him much, but
he gave even more help than he got You have reason to be proud of him. I
am. He's growing."

It was not very definite, but it brought no small comfort to the
mother's heart.

"This Institute idea seems to be everywhere," said J.W., Sr., to the
pastor, "but how did it get started? I used to be in the Epworth League,
but we had nothing like it then."

"That's not so very much of a story," said the pastor. "We have the
Institute idea because we had to have it. And so the League gave it form
and substance."

"Well," J.W., Jr., chimed in, "I think it's about time more people knew
about it. I've wanted to ask you to explain it ever since we came back
from the Institute."

The pastor nodded. "I know; but remember even you were not really
interested until you had been at an Institute. Do you think our
Institute just happened, J.W.?"

"I know it didn't," J.W. replied. "Somebody did a lot of planning and
scheming."

"Yes," returned the pastor, "but did you notice that a large part of its
work touched subjects familiar to you, the local League activities, for
instance--the devotional meeting, and Mission Study, and stewardship,
and the scope of the business meeting which not so long ago elected you
to membership?"

"Yes, you're right, though I don't see anything remarkable in that. It
was a League Institute, wasn't it?"

"Certainly. But still, if there had not been any local Chapter, there
could have been no Institute, don't you see? What I mean is that the
Institute came because your Chapter needed it, and you needed it; not
because the Institute needed you. It's merely a matter of tracing
things back."

J.W., Jr., thought of Phil's words. "Sure enough," he responded,
"tracing things back makes a lot of difference. I've been going over
what Phil Khamis said at the Morning Watch--you remember? How everything
he has to-day has come to him by the goodness of Christian people. At
first I thought that was no more than a description of his particular
case, because I knew how true it was. But when you begin to trace things
back, as you say, what's true about Phil is true about all of
us--anyway, about me."

"How is that, son?" Mrs. Farwell asked gently.

"Well, I mean," J.W. smilingly answered her, though flushing a little
too, "the Institute, that seemed to me something new and different, is
really tied up to what you folks and the whole church have been doing
for me as far back as I can remember."

And so they talked, parents and pastor and J.W., quite naturally and
freely, of the long chain of interest which had linked his life to the
church's life, back through all the years to his babyhood.

J.W. had been in the League only a year or two, but it seemed to him
that he had been in the church always. And the memories of his boyhood
which had the church for center, were intimately interwoven with all his
other experiences.

As his father said, "I guess, pastor, if you tried to take out of J.W.'s
young life all that the church has meant to him, it would puzzle a
professor to explain whatever might be left."

J.W. had been born in the country, on a farm whose every tree and fence
corner he still loved. His first recollections of the church as part of
his life had to do with the Sunday morning drive to the little
meetinghouse, which stood where the road to town skirted a low hill. It
had horse-sheds on one side, stretching back to the rear of the church
lot, and some sizeable elms and maples were grouped about its front and
sides. It was a one-room structure, unless you counted the space
curtained off for the primary class, as J.W. always did. For back of
this curtain's protecting folds he had begun his career as a Sunday
school pupil and had made his first friends. At that time even district
school was yet a year ahead of him, with its wider democratic joys and
griefs, and its larger freedom from parental oversight.

When J.W. was six, going on seven, the family moved to Delafield,
though retaining ownership of the farm, and for years J.W. spent nearly
every Saturday on the old place, in free and blissful association with
the Shenk children, whose father was the tenant. It was here that he and
Martin Luther Shenk, already introduced as "Marty," being of the same
age, had sworn eternal friendship, a vow which as yet showed no sign
whatever of the ravages of time. There were three other children, Ben
and Alice and Jeannette. Now, Jeannette was only two years younger than
J.W. and Marty, but through most of the years when J.W. was going every
week to the farm, she was "only a girl," and far behind the two chums by
all the exacting standards which to boys are more than law. But there
came a time----

J.W., Sr., reveling in reminiscences before so patient a listener as the
preacher, though it was an old story, rehearsed how he had served for
years as superintendent of the country Sunday school, and how Mrs.
Farwell was teacher of the Girls' Bible Class. Their home had always
been Methodist headquarters, he said, as old-time Methodists usually
say, and with truth.

When they moved to town the change brought no loss of church interest;
the Farwells merely transferred it entire to Delafield First Church
("First" being more a title than a numeral, since there was no second).

But First Church had not a few progressive saints. They wanted the best
that could be had, so J.W., Sr., Sunday school enthusiast that he was,
found himself in a new place of opportunity. The Board of Sunday Schools
at Chicago had been asked to help Delafield get itself in line with the
best ideas and methods, and J.W., Sr., found the beginnings, at least,
of Sunday school science in active operation. At first, like a true
country man, he was a little inclined to counsels of caution, but in
his country Sunday school work he had acquired such strong opinions
about old fogies that he dreaded being thought one himself.

"And that's how it happened," he said with a laugh, "that I was soon
reckoned among the progressives. In that first year I helped 'em win
their fight for separate departments, and before long we had the makings
of a real graded Sunday school. Don't you remember, mother, how proud
you were when young J.W. there was graduated from the Primary into the
Junior Department?"

All this was before Pastor Drury's time, of course, but he had gone
through the same experiences in other pastorates, and needed not to have
anything explained.

"How long have we had a teacher-training class in our Sunday school?" he
asked.

That called out the story of the struggles to set up what many openly
called a useless and foolish enterprise. The Sunday school was
chronically short of teachers, and yet J.W., Sr., and the other
reformers insisted on taking out of the regular classes the best
teachers in the school, and a score of the most promising young people.
This group went off by itself into a remote part of the church. It
furnished no substitute teachers. It wasn't heard of at all. And loud
were the complaints about its crippling the school.

"But, pastor, you should have seen the difference when the first dozen
real teachers came out of that class; we were able to reorganize the
whole school. Our John Wesley got a teacher he'll never forget. And, of
course, we kept the training class going; it's never stopped since. The
Board of Sunday Schools has given us the courses and helped us keep the
class up to grade in its work, and you know what sort of teachers we
have now."

The pastor did, and was properly thankful. In some of his other
pastorates it had been otherwise, to his sorrow.

"Speaking of the Board of Sunday Schools," the elder Farwell resumed,
for this was a hobby he missed no chance to ride, "it made all the
difference with us in our work for a better Sunday school--gave us
expert backing, you know. And I notice by its latest annual report--yes,
I always get a copy, though J.W. thinks it dry reading--that it is
helping Sunday schools by the thousand, not in this country only, but
wherever in the world our church is at work. Of course you know how it
starts Sunday schools, and how often they grow into churches. Well, it
didn't quite do that here, but this church is a sight better and bigger
because we began to take the Board's advice when we did. It was a good
thing for our boy, and many another boy and girl, that the Board woke us
up."

"It hasn't all been easy work, though," the minister suggested. "I
remember that when I came I found there was a good deal of discontent
over the Graded Lessons."

"Sure there was," said J.W., Sr. "We had all been brought up on the
Uniform Lessons, and most of us thought they were just right. Besides,
we rather enjoyed thinking of ourselves as keeping step with the whole
Sunday school world--all over the wide earth everybody studying the same
scripture on the same Sunday. And that was a big idea to get into the
minds of Christians of every name everywhere."

"Yes, but, Dad," put in J.W., "what was the good of it if the lessons
didn't fit everybody? Did people think that the kids in the primary and
their mothers in ma's class ought to study the same lesson? or did they
think they could fit the same lesson to everybody by the different notes
they put into the Quarterlies?"

"Well, son," his father replied, "I reckon we thought both ways. And I'm
not so sure yet that it can't be done. But if one thing more than
another reconciled me to the Graded Lessons, it was that they made being
a Sunday school teacher a good deal bigger job than it had ever been. It
was harder work, because every lesson had to be studied by the teacher,
and in a different way from what was thought good enough in the old
days. And I'm for anything, Graded Lessons or whatever, that'll make
people take Sunday school teaching more seriously."

Then Mrs. Farwell ventured to take up the story. It was about that time,
in the very beginning of the Drury pastorate, that J.W. joined the
church on probation; much to her surprise and humbling.

"I hadn't even thought of it," she said, "though I should have been the
first one. He had been getting ready in the Junior League, as I very
well knew, but one day, as you may remember"--Brother Drury did, for
that day was the real beginning of this story--"you made an invitation
at the end of a real simple sermon, and if J.W., Jr., didn't get right
up from my side and walk straight to the front!"

After that there had been a probationers' class, with J.W. and perhaps
twenty others meeting the pastor every week for straight religious
teaching, so that at Easter, when they came up for membership, what with
their Sunday school and Junior League training, and what with the
pastor's more personal instruction, they were able to pass a pretty fair
examination on the great Christian truths, and on the general scheme of
the church's work.

"For a time mother was a trifle disappointed that J.W. hadn't waited for
the big revival we had the next year," said J.W., Sr., "but I think she
was glad afterward."

"Yes, I was," the mother said. "You see, I had been brought up to
believe in revivals, and I do yet, but we had no such chance to get the
right Christian start when we were little children, as J.W. has had, if
you'll let his mother say so, and that made a revival a good deal more
important to us when our church did get ready for one. But the other way
is all right too. I'm mother enough to be glad J.W. hasn't known some of
the experiences the boys of my time went through, and the girls as well.
He's no worse a Christian for having been right in the church ever since
I put him in short dresses, are you, son? And I will say that his father
was always with me in holding to the promises we made when he was
baptized. We've not done what we might, but we've never forgotten that
those promises were made to be kept."

J.W. felt none of his old shrinking from such talk, especially since the
Institute, and yet he had the healthy boy's reluctance to discuss
himself in company. But this was interesting him, outside himself.

He turned to the pastor. "That's what I meant when I told you what Phil
said. I'm all for the church, and church people and church ways; why
shouldn't I be? I've never known anything else. I remember well the one
thing I didn't like when it first came along; and that was the new sort
of Christmas celebration Dad and the others planned when I was ten or
eleven. You know what Christmas means to such kids, and I guess we were
all selfish together, because we didn't use our heads. Well, the Sunday
school proposed that instead of us all getting something we should all
give something. It looked pretty cheap to us little fellows at first,
and our teacher had all he could do to hold us in line. But let me tell
you, every boy was for it when the time came. We found that we could
have as much fun giving things away as we could grabbing things, and,
anyway, nobody really cared for those mosquito net stockings filled with
nuts and candy and one orange. It was only the idea of getting something
for nothing. That first 'giving Christmas,' I remember, our class
dressed up as delivery boys, and we came on the platform with enough
groceries for a small truck load, that we had bought with our own money.
The orphanage got 'em next day. And one class was dusty millers,
carrying sacks of flour, and another put on a stunt of searching for
Captain Kidd's treasure, and they found a keg of shining coins (new
pennies, they were)--more than a thousand of 'em. Everything went to the
orphanage, or the hospital; and then when the Board of Sunday Schools
began to get us interested in other Sunday schools and in missions--I
remember a scheme they call a 'Partnership Plan' that was great; I don't
know what happened to it--I got right into the game every time."

"How do you happen to know so much about the Board of Sunday Schools,
J.W.?" asked Mr. Drury.

"Oh, that's easy. You know how it is in our Sunday school: they don't
make one or two of us young fellows serve as librarians and secretaries
and such and miss all the class work: they have more help, and we all
get into class for the lesson. Well, two years ago Dad told me you had
nominated me for something at the annual Sunday school meeting. It was
only a sort of assistant secretary's job, but very soon I began to catch
on, and I've seen a lot of the letters and leaflets that come from the
Board in Chicago. Well, let me tell you that Board of Sunday Schools is
a whale of a machine. Why, it's the whole church at work to make better
Sunday schools, and more of 'em. They have Sunday school workers in all
sorts of wild places, and Sunday school missionaries in foreign lands.
Yes, and last year I happened to meet one of their secretaries, at your
house, you may remember. But you'd never think he was just a secretary,
he was so keen and wide awake. He knew the Boy Scouts from A to Z, and
that got me, 'cause I'm not so old that I've forgotten my scouting. And
he knew baseball, and boys' books, and all that. Don't you think,
Brother Drury, if more of the fellows knew what the real Sunday school
work is they would take to it like colts to a bran mash?"

"They couldn't help it," said the pastor. "And you may have noticed that
your father and the other people of our Sunday School Board are trying
to get them to find out some of the things you have found out. For
instance, you know what the two organized classes of high-school
freshmen are doing, and the other organized classes. Seems to me their
members are finding out that Sunday school is something big and fine."

"That they are," Mrs. Farwell agreed, "and you mustn't forget my
wonderful class of young married women, and the men's class of nearly a
hundred. I think our Sunday school has really begun to change the ideas
of a lot of people. Just think how little trouble we have now with what
Graded Lessons we have, and how happy all our teachers are because they
have the helps they need for just the sort of pupils that are in their
classes."

"That's so," said J.W., Sr. "I don't suppose even old Brother Barnacle,
'sot' as he is, would vote to go back to the times when the
superintendent reviewed the lesson the same way the teachers taught it,
from a printed list of questions. Seems as if I can hear Henry J. Locke
yet--his farm joins ours down by the creek--when he conducted the
reviewing at Deep Creek. He would hold his quarterly at arm's length to
favor his eyes, and then look up from it to the school and shoot the
question at everybody, 'And what did Peter do _then_, HEY?' He sure did
come out strong on Peter; but I'll say this for him, that he never
skipped a question from start to finish."

All three laughed a little over Henry J. Locke, and then the pastor said
he mustn't stay much longer. But he did want to back up J.W.'s belief
that what Phil Khamis had said was true of everybody--we are all
debtors.

"Look at this young J.W. here, will you," he said to the father and
mother, for once letting himself go, "with a name he's proud of, and a
home life that many a Fifth Avenue and Lake Shore Drive family would be
glad to pay a million for, if such goods were on sale in the stores. I'm
going to tell him something he already knows. Young man," and there was
a gleam in the pastor's eye that was not all to the credit of the work
he was praising, "you owe a big debt to the Sunday school. I'm not
jealous for the church, or for any other part of it, but by your own
admission the Sunday school has had a lot to do with your education.
Very well; remember it is a part of what Phil said, and what you are
because of the Sunday school you have become by the goodness of
Christian people. I don't think you'll forget it, seeing that you have
two of that sort of people in your own home all the time."

And then, with a fine naturalness the little group knelt by the chairs,
and two of the four, he who was pastor of the whole flock and he who
with simple dignity was priest in his own household, gave thanks to God
for the manifold goodness of Christian people, of which they were all
partakers every day.

As he went home, Walter Drury thought of the long days that stretched
out ahead before he could see the outcomes of the great Experiment, but
this night had seen a good night's work done in the laboratory, and he
was content.

One tale of the past had been much in J.W.'s thought that night, but
nothing on earth could have induced him to talk about it, especially
since the happenings at the Institute. Only one other person knew all of
its inwardness, though the preacher guessed most of the secret pretty
shrewdly, and everybody was familiar with its outcome.

It was the story of Marty Shenk's conversion.

These two had been David and Jonathan from their little boy days, no
less friends because they were so unlike; Marty, a quiet, brooding,
knowledge-hungry youngster, and J.W. matter-of-fact, taking things as
they came and asking few questions, but always the leader in games and
mischief; each the other's champion against all comers.

Marty's father, tenant-farmer on the Farwell farm, was steady enough and
dependable, but never one to get ahead much. Before the Farwells moved
to town he had rarely stayed on the same farm more than a year or two,
but, as he said, "J.W. Farwell was different, and anybody who wanted to
be decent could get along with him." So, for many Saturdays and
vacations of boyhood years J.W. and Marty had roamed the countryside,
and were letter-perfect in their boy-knowledge of the old farm.

Marty came in to high school from the farm, and often he stayed with
J.W. over the weekend. His school work was uneven--ahead in mathematics,
and the sciences, and something below the average in other studies.
That, however, has no place in this story.

Of course he and J.W. were thick as thieves. Except when class work made
temporary separations necessary, they lived the high-school life
together. That meant also, for these two, the social life of the church,
which occasionally paid special attention to the students.

So you might find them at Epworth League socials, Sunday school class
doings, in the Sunday school orchestra--violin and b-flat cornet
respectively--and, most significant of all in its effect on all the
later years, they went through Win-My-Chum week together. The hand of
the pastor was in that, too.

Marty was not a Christian. J.W. had been a church member for years, and
early in his course he had faced and accepted all that being a Christian
seemed to mean to a high-school boy.

There had been hard places to get over; some of the boys and girls were
merciless in their unconscious tests of his religion. Some were openly
scornful, and others sought by indirect and furtive means to break his
influence in the school. For he had no small gift of leadership, and he
cared a good deal that it should count for the decencies of high-school
life. By senior year the sort of trouble that a Christian boy encounters
in school was almost all ended, but it had been more through his dogged
resistance to opposition than because of any special zest in Christian
service.

And then came the announcement of Win-My-Chum week, with J.W.
confronted by two stubborn facts. He had only one real chum, and that
chum was not a Christian. Pastor Drury had let fall a remark, a month
before the Week, to the effect that any Christian who had a chum could
dodge Win-My-Chum week, but he couldn't dodge his chum. When the week
was past, the chum would still be on hand.

Think as he would, there was no honest way of escape from whatever those
facts might require of him, so J.W., long accustomed to go ahead and
take what came, had known himself bound by the obligations of this
matter also, days and days before the activities of Win-My-Chum week
began.

The two were out one Saturday on the north road. They had been up to the
woods on Barker's Hill for nuts, and with good success. The day was
warm, the way was long, and there was no hurry. When they came to the
roadside at the wood's edge they sat on a fallen tree and talked. At
least Marty did. For J.W. was not himself.

It was his chance, and he knew it. But a thousand impulses leaped to
life within him to make him put off what he knew he ought to say. The
fear of being misunderstood--even by Marty--the knowledge that Marty, in
the qualities by which boys judge and are judged, was quite as "good" as
himself; and, above all, his sense of total unfitness to be a pattern of
the Christian life to anybody, filled him with an uneasiness that
actually hurt.

And Marty soon discovered that something was amiss. Willing as he was to
do his full share of the talking, he became aware that except for
inarticulate commonplaces he was having to do it all.

"What's the matter with you all at once, J.W.?" he asked. "You're not
taken suddenly sick, are you? You were all right when we were among the
trees. _Are_ you sick?"

J.W. laughed shortly. "No, old man, I'm not sick. But I'm up against a
new game, for me, and I'm not in training."

"Sounds interesting," said Marty, "but sort of mysterious. Is it
anything I can do team-work on?"

"It surely is, but first I've got to say something, and I want you to
promise that you won't think I'm putting on, or butting in, because I'm
not; nothing like it. Will you?"

"Will I promise?" said Marty, much bewildered. "Course I'll promise not
to think anything about you that you don't want me to think, but I must
say I don't know within a thousand miles what you're driving at. Out
with it, and even if you're the train bandit who held up the Cannonball
or if you've plotted to kidnap the Board of Education, I'll never tell."

Marty's quizzical humor was not making J.W.'s enterprise any easier. He
had always supposed that what the leaflets called "personal evangelism"
had to be done in a spirit of solemnity. But how was he to acquire the
proper frame of mind? And certainly there was nothing solemn about Marty
just now. Yet the thing had gone too far; it was too late to retreat. He
tried to think how Mr. Drury would do it, but saw only that if it was
Mr. Dairy's business he would go straight to the center of it.
Desperately, therefore, he plunged in.

"Well, Marty," he said, speaking now with nervous haste, "what I'm up
against is this. What's the matter with your being a Christian?"

He will never forget the swift look of blank amazement that Marty turned
on him, nor the slow-mounting flush that followed the first astonished
start. For Marty did not answer, and turned his face away. J.W. was sure
that in his blundering bluntness he had offended and probably angered
his closest friend. The distress of that thought served at least to
drive away all the self-consciousness which thus far had plagued him.

"Say, Marty," he pleaded, putting his hand on the other's arm, "forget
it, if I've hurt your feelings. I know as well as you do that I'm not
fit to talk about such things to anybody, and, honest, I meant nothing
but to say what I knew I'd got to say."

Then Marty turned himself back slowly, and J.W. saw the troubled look
in his eyes. In a voice that trembled despite his proud effort at
control, he said, "Old man, you needn't apologize. You did surprise me,
I'll admit; I wasn't looking for anything like this. It's all right,
though, and I'm certainly not mad about it. But, say, J.W., let me put
something up to you. Why did you never think to ask me that question
before?"

"Why, it was this way," J.W. began, somewhat puzzled at the form of the
question, and still thinking he must set himself right with Marty. "You
know the Epworth League is planning for those special meetings
soon--'Win-My-Chum Week'--and I've been asked to lead one of the
meetings. But you can see that I wouldn't be ready to lead a meeting
like that unless I had put this thing of being a Christian up to you,
anyway. You're the only real chum I've got. Mr. Drury said something a
little while ago that made it mighty plain."

"Yes," said Marty, "I can see that. But why did you never say anything
to me about it when there wasn't any meeting coming? Haven't we always
shared everything else, since away back? This is the one subject that
you and I have kept away from in our talk of all we've ever thought
about, and I was wondering why."

"Well, I don't exactly know," J.W. replied. "It may have been that it
never seemed to be any of my business; that it was the preacher's
business, or the Sunday school teacher's, or somebody's. And you know
I've always been surer of what you really are than I have of myself. I
think I was always afraid you would either make fun of me or believe I
was letting on to be better than you were. But when the League got into
this Win-My-Chum plan, why, the name itself was an eye-opener. And I've
seen lately that a fellow's got to be a Christian, out and out, or his
religion is no good. And when I heard the preacher say, not long ago,
that a fellow might dodge Win-My-Chum week, but he couldn't forever
dodge his chum, I knew I had to speak to you. But you're sure you're not
offended?"

"Let me admit a thing to you, J.W. I've never said so before, but I've
been wanting somebody to ask me to be a Christian for a long time. I was
a coward about it, and wouldn't let on. I've been wanting to find out
what I've got to do, but I wouldn't ask. Do you think I _could_ be a
Christian?"

"I know you could be a long way better Christian than I am," J.W.
answered with unwonted feeling. "And if you did take Jesus Christ to be
your Master, it would be more than just your getting religion. You would
be the biggest kind of stand-by for me and for other people I know of.
It's the one thing you need to be a hundred per cent right. I'm a pretty
poor Christian, myself, Marty, partly because I don't know how to think
much about it, but you'd be dead in earnest to get all that there is in
the Christian life, and maybe I could follow along behind. You've always
helped every other way, and I've always wanted you to help me be a
genuine Christian."

Marty put his hand on J.W.'s shoulder and looked him straight in the
eye: "You've got me rated a lot too high," he said. "How can I help you?
But we two have been pretty good chums so far, haven't we? Well, there's
a lot to settle before I can be sure I'm a Christian, but it means
everything for you to think I can be of some use. And I promise you
this, J.W., I'll not let up until I am a Christian, and we'll stick
together all the more, when I am, us two. Is that ago?"

It was a go. J.W. was ready and far more than ready to call it a go. It
had been easier than he had expected, but then it had all been so
different from the vague and formal thing he had been afraid of. He
could hardly believe, but he had one request to make. "I know you'll
settle whatever has to be settled," he said, a bit unsteadily, "but when
it's all done, and you tell people about it, as I know you will, please,
Marty, don't bring me into it. Publicly, I mean. Let's just have this
understanding between ourselves. I can lead my meeting now, but there's
no need to say anything about me. Besides, I made a mess of it."

"It may be the best mess anybody ever stirred up for me, J.W., but I
won't say anything to worry you, if the time comes for me to say
anything at all. And I believe it will."

It did. Marty and the pastor had two or three long interviews. From the
last of them the boy came away with a new light on his face and a new
spring in his step. Evidently whatever needed to be settled, had been
settled.

He kept his promise to his chum, but that did not prevent him from
choosing the night when J.W. led the meeting to stand up at the first
opportunity and make his straightforward confession of love and loyalty,
since God had made him a sharer in the life that is in Christ. Then for
a moment J.W. feared Marty might forget their agreement, but Marty said
simply, "And part of the joy that is in my heart to-night is because
there is a new tie, the only other one we needed, between myself and my
old-time chum, the leader of this meeting."

In the back of the room Walter Drury, quietly looking on, sent up a
silent thanksgiving. The great Experiment was going well.



CHAPTER III


CAMPUS DAYS

So it was that J.W. and Marty had come into the inner places of each
other's lives. Of all the developments of Institute week, naturally the
one which filled J.W.'s thoughts with a sort of awed gladness was
Marty's decision to offer himself for the ministry. Joe Carbrook's
right-about-face was much more dramatic, for J.W. saw, when the decision
was made, that Marty could not have been meant for anything but a
preacher. It was as fit as you please. As to Joe, previous opinion had
been pretty equally divided; one side leaning to the idea that he might
make a lawyer, and the other predicting that he was more likely to be a
perpetual and profitable client for some other lawyer.

In the light of the Institute happenings, it was to be expected that the
question of college would promptly become a practical matter to four
Delafield people. Marty was greatly troubled, for he knew if he was to
be a preacher, he must go to college, and he couldn't see how. J.W. felt
no great urge, though it had always been understood that he would go.
Marcia Dayne had one year of normal school to her credit, and would take
another next year, perhaps; but this year she must teach.

Joe Carbrook spent little time in debate with himself; he let everybody
know that he was going to be a missionary doctor, and that he would go
to the State University for the rest of his college course.

"But what about the religious influence of the University?" Marcia Dayne
had ventured to ask him one evening as they walked slowly under the elms
of Monroe Avenue.

"I don't know about that," Joe answered, "and maybe I'm making a
mistake. But I don't think so. To begin with, there isn't any question
about equipment at the State University. They have everything any church
school has, and probably more than most church schools, for what I want.
And they work in close relationship to the medical school. That's one
thing. The big reason, though--I wonder if you'll understand it?"

"I believe I could understand anything you might be thinking about--now,
Joe." And Marcia's voice had in it a note which stirred that usually
self-possessed young man out of all his easy composure.

"I'll remember that, Marcia," he said in the thrill of a swift elation.
"I'll remember that, because I think you do--understand, and some day
I--but I've got at least five years of plugging ahead of me, and----"

"You were going to tell me about your big reason for going to the State
University," Marcia broke in, though she wondered afterward if her
instinct had not played her false.

"Yes," Joe said, with a little effort. "Well, this is it. You know I
didn't make much of a hit at college; I pulled through sophomore year,
but that's about all, and I doubt if the faculty will pass resolutions
of regret when I don't show up there in the fall. The religious
influences of a church school didn't prevent me from being a good deal
of a heathen, though I will say that was no fault of the school. Maybe I
ought to go back and face the music. It wouldn't be so bad, I guess. But
I feel more like making a clean, new start, in a new place. The State
University wouldn't be any worse for me than I should be for it, if
nothing had happened to change my point of view. So, that isn't the
issue. But if the State University life is able to beat me before I get
to sawing bones at all, I'd make a pretty missionary doctor if I ever
landed in foreign parts, wouldn't I?"

Marcia could find nothing to say; perhaps because her thoughts were busy
with other and more personal aspects of Joe's plans for the future.

And as Joe's people were completely oblivious to everything except the
startling change that had come over him, and were abundantly able to
send him to three universities at once if necessary, Joe Carbrook was as
good as enrolled.

Marty and J.W. did not find the future opening up before them so easily.
Marty, for all he could not imagine the way opening before such as
himself, was all eagerness about the nearest Methodist school, which
happened to be the one where the Institute had been held, Cartwright
College. It was named, as may be supposed, in honor of Peter Cartwright,
that pioneer Methodist preacher who became famous on the same sort of
schooling which sufficed for Abraham Lincoln, and once ran against
Lincoln himself for Congress. J.W. was not specially eager to look for a
college education anywhere. Why should he be, since he was expecting to
go into business?

The two had many a discussion, Marty arguing in favor of college for
everybody, and J.W. admitting that for preachers and teachers and
lawyers and doctors it was necessary, but what use could it be in
business?

"But say, J.W., you're not going to be one of these 'born a man, died a
grocer' sort of business men," urged Marty. "Broad-minded--that's your
future, with a knowledge of more than markets. And look at the personal
side of college life. Haven't you heard Mr. Drury say that if he hadn't
anything else to show for his four years at college than the lifelong
friendships he made there it would have been worth all it cost? And you
have reason to know he doesn't forget the studies."

"That's all right, Marty," J.W. rejoined. "I don't need much convincing
on that score. I can see the good times too; you know I'd try for all
the athletics I could get into, and I guess I could keep my end up
socially. But is all that worth my time for the next four years,
studying subjects that would be no earthly good to me in business, in
making a living, I mean? The other boys in hardware stores would have
four years the start of me."

"But don't you remember, J.W., what our commencement speaker said on
that very point? He told us we had to be men and women first, no matter
what occupations we got into. And he bore down hard on how it was a good
deal bigger business to make a life than to make a living. In these days
the most dangerous people, to themselves and to all of us, are the
uneducated people."

"Yes, I remember," J.W. admitted. "'Cultural and social values of
education,' he called that, didn't he? And that's what I'm not sure of.
It seems pretty foggy to me. But, old man, you're going, that's settled,
and maybe I'll just let dad send me to keep you company, if I can't find
any better reason."

"That's all very well for you to say, J.W.," Marty retorted, with the
least little touch of resentment in his tone. "You'll _let_ your dad
send you. My dad can't send me, though he'll do all he's able to do, and
how I can earn enough, to get through is more than I can see from here."

But J.W. asserted, confidently: "There's a way, just the same, and I
think I know how to find out about it. I haven't been a second assistant
deputy secretary in the Sunday school for nothing. You reminded me of
the commencement address; I'll ask you if you remember Children's Day?
It came the very next Sunday."

"Yes, I remember it; but what of it?"

"Well, my boy, we took up a collection for you!"

"We did? Not much we did, and anyway, do you think I'd accept that sort
of help? I'm not looking for charity, yet," and Marty showed the hurt he
felt.

"Steady, Martin Luther! I wouldn't want you to get that collection
anyway; it wasn't near big enough. But don't you know that every
Children's Day collection in the whole church goes to the Board of
Education, and that it has become a big fund, never to be given away but
always to be loaned to students getting ready to be preachers and such?
It's no charity; it's the same broad-minded business you want me to go
to college for. I can see that much without getting any nearer to
college than the Delafield First Church Sunday School. You borrow the
money, just as if you stepped up to a bank window, and you agree to pay
it back as soon as you can after you graduate. Then it goes into the
Fund again, and some other boy or girl borrows it, and so on. More than
twenty-five thousand students have borrowed from this fund. About
fifteen hundred of 'em got loans last year. Ask the preacher if I'm not
giving you this straight."

Marty had no immediate way of testing this unusual wealth of
information, so he said, "Well, maybe there's something in it. I'll talk
to Brother Drury about it, anyway."

That observing man was quite willing to be talked to. When Marty
presented himself at the study a few days later he found the pastor as
well prepared as if he had been expecting some such interview, as,
indeed, he had.

He told Marty the story of the Student Loan Fund--how it originated in
the celebration of the Centenary of American Methodism, in 1866, and how
it had been growing all through the years, both by the annual Children's
Day offering and by the increasing return of loans from former students.

Then he explained that this Fund, and many other educational affairs,
were in the hands of the Church's Board of Education. This Board, Marty
heard, is a sort of educational clearing house for the whole church, and
especially for Methodist schools of higher learning. It helps young
people to go to college, and it helps the colleges to take care of the
young people when they go, of course always using money which has come
from the churches. It has charge of a group of special schools in the
South, and it sets the scholastic standards to which all the church's
schools and colleges must conform. Besides looking out for these
interests it helps the school to provide courses in the Bible and
Christian principles, and it furnishes workers to serve the colleges in
caring for the religious life of the students.

Marty listened carefully, and with no lack of interest, but when the
minister paused the boy's mind sprang back to his own particular
concern.

"But, Mr. Drury, can any student borrow money from that fund?"

"Well, no," said the preacher, "not every student. Only those who are
preparing for the ministry or for other careers of special service. They
have to show that the loan will help them in preparing to be of some
definite Christian value when they graduate. That won't affect you; you
can borrow, not all you could use, perhaps, but enough to be a big help.
How much do you expect to need?"

"Why," answered Marty, "I hardly know. I hadn't really thought it
possible I could go. But dad says he'll let me have all he can, and they
tell me a fellow can get work to do if he's not particular about easy
jobs. I'm pretty sure I could manage, except for tuition and books,
but----"

"Then you may as well consider it settled," said the pastor, "Cartwright
College will welcome you on those terms, or I'll know the reason why.
And I think you can count on J.W. going with you."

J.W. was not hard to convince. His parents were all for it. The pastor
had no intention of overdoing his own part in the affair, and contented
himself with a suggestion that disposed of J.W.'s main objection.

J.W. had been saying to him one day, "I know I should have a good time
at college, but I should be four years later getting into business than
the other boys."

"That depends on what 'later' means," replied Mr. Drury. "You would not
need four years to catch up, if college does for you what I think it
will. Besides, you're intending to be a Christian citizen, I take it,
and that will be even more of a job than to be a successful hardware
man. Colleges have been operating these many years, to give young people
the best possible preparations for a whole life. Remember what John
Milton said: I care not how late I come, so I come fit.' You want to
come to your work as fit as they make 'em, don't you?"

And J.W. owned up that he did. "I don't mean to be a dub in business,
and I've no right to be a dub anywhere. Me for Cartwright, Brother
Drury!"

Another day's work in the laboratory. Walter Drury knew how to be
patient, yet every experience like this was a tonic to his soul. And now
he must be content for a time to let others carry the work through its
next stages, though he would hold himself ready for any unexpected
development that might arise.

So it befell that J.W. and Marty started to Cartwright, and a week later
Joe Carbrook went off to the State University.

The day after they had matriculated, J.W. and Marty were putting their
room to rights--oh, yes, they thought it would be well to share the same
room--and as they puttered about they reviewed the happenings of the
first day. They had made a preliminary exploration of the grounds and
buildings, revisiting the places which had become familiar during
Institute week, and living over that crowded and epochal time.

Marty, scouting around for something to do, had discovered that he could
get work, such as it was, for ten hours a week, anyway, and maybe more,
at thirty to fifty cents an hour. He had a little money left after
paying his tuition, and the college registrar assured him that the loan
from the Board of Education would be forthcoming. Therefore the talk
turned on money.

"That tuition bill sure reduced the swelling in my pocketbook, Marty,"
remarked J.W., as he examined his visible resources.

"What do you think it did to mine?" Marty observed quietly. "I'm still
giddy from being relieved of so much money in one operation. And yet I
can't see how they get along. Look at the big faculty they have, and all
these buildings to keep up and keep going. When I think of how big a
dollar seems to me, the tuition looks like the national debt of Mexico;
but when I try to figure out how much it costs the college per student,
I feel as though I were paying lunch-counter prices for a dining-car
dinner. How _do_ they do it, J.W.?"

"Who told you I was to be looked on in the light of a World Almanac, my
son? I could give you the answer to that question without getting out of
my chair, but for one small difficulty--I just don't know. Tell you
what--it's a good question--let's look in the catalogue. I'd like to
find information in that volume about something besides the four
centuries of study that loom before my freshman eyes."

So they looked in the catalogue and discovered that Cartwright College
had an endowment of $1,750,000, producing an income of about $80,000 a
year, and that the churches of its territory gave about $25,000 more.
They learned also that most of the buildings had been provided by
friends of the college, with the Carnegie Library mainly the gift of the
millionaire ironmaster. They learned also that about $500,000 of the
endowment had been raised in the last two years, under the promise of
the General Education Board, which is a Rockefeller creation, to provide
the last $125,000. The college property was valued at about half a
million dollars.

"And there you are, Martin Luther, my bold reformer," said J.W.,
cheerfully. "The people who put up the money have invested about two and
a half millions on you and me, and the other five hundred students, say
about $250 a year per student. And we pay the rest of what it costs to
give us a college career, $125 to $175 a year, depending on our taste in
courses. I remember I felt as if the John Wesley Farwell family had
almost gone broke when dad signed up for $1,000 on that last endowment
campaign. I thought the money gone forever, but I see now he merely
invested it. I've come to Cartwright to spend the income of it, and a
little more. Five or six people have given a thousand dollars apiece to
make a college course possible for each of us. There's some reason in
college endowments, after all."

And Marty said, "One good I can see in this particular endowment is that
anybody but a selfish idiot would be glad to match four years of his
life against all the money and work that Christian people have put into
Cartwright College."

"I hope you don't mean anything personal by that remark," J.W. said,
with mock solemnity, "because I'm inclined to believe you're more than
half right. It reminds me again of what Phil Khamis said. I'm beginning
to think I'll never have a chance to forget that Greek's Christian
remark about Christians."

By being off at school together J.W. and Marty gave each other
unconfessed but very real moral support in those first days when a lone
freshman would have known he was homesick.

But another antidote, both pleasant and potent, was supplied by the
Epworth League of First Church. It had allied itself with the college
Y.M.C.A.--and for the women students, with the Y.W.C.A.--in various
ways, but particularly it purposed to see that the first few Sundays
were safely tided over.

So the two chums found themselves in one of the two highly attractive
study courses which had been put on in partnership with the Sunday
school. It was in the early afternoon of one of the early Sundays that
J.W. called Marty's attention to a still more alluring opportunity.

"Looky here, Marty, it's raining, I know, but I've a feeling that you'd
better not write that letter home until a little further on in the day.
What's to stop us from taking a look at this League fellowship hour
we're invited to, and getting a light lunch? We don't need to stay to
the League meeting unless we choose, though we're members, you know."

Marty picked up the card of invitation which J.W. had flipped across the
table to him, and read it.

"Well," he commented, "it reads all right. Let's try it."

Out into the rain they went and put in two highly cheerful hours,
including one in the devotional meeting, so that when Marty at last sat
down to write home, he produced, without quite knowing how, a letter
that was vastly more heartening when it reached the farm than it would
have been if he had written it before dark.

Joe Carbrook set out for the State University in what was for him a
fashion quite subdued. Before his experience at the Institute he would
have gone, if at all, in his own car, and his arrival would have been
notice to "the sporty crowd" that another candidate for initiation into
that select circle had arrived.

But Joe was enjoying the novelty of thinking a little before he acted.
Though he would always be of the irrepressible sort, he was not the same
Joe. He had laid out a program which surprised himself somewhat, and
astonished most of the people who knew him.

He knew now that he would become, if he could, a doctor; a missionary
doctor. No other career entered his mind. He would finish his college
work at the State University, and then go to medical school. He would
devote himself without ceasing to all the studies he would need. Not for
him any social life, any relaxation of purpose. Grimly he told himself
that his play days were over. They had been lively while they lasted;
but they were done.

Of course that was foolish. If he had persisted in any such scholastic
regimen, the effort would have lasted a few days, or possibly weeks; and
then in a reaction of disgust he might easily have come to despair of
the whole project.

Fortunately for Joe and for a good many other people, his purpose of
digging into his books and laboratory work and doggedly avoiding any
other interest was tempered by the happenings of the first week.
Doubtless he would have made a desperate struggle, but it would have
been useless. Not even conversion can make new habits overnight, and in
his first two years at college Joe had been known to teachers and
students alike as distinctly a sketchy student, wholly inexpert at
concentrated effort.

And so, instead of becoming first a grind and then a discouraged rebel
against it all, he had the immense good fortune to be captured by an
observant Junior whom he had met while they were both registering for
Chemistry III.

"You're new here," said the Junior, Heatherby by name, "and I've had two
years of it. Maybe you'll let me show you the place. I'm the proud
half-owner of a decidedly second-hand 'Hooting Nanny,' you know, and I
rather like bumping people around town in it."

That was the beginning of many things. Joe liked it that Heatherby made
no apologies for his car, and before long he discovered that the other
half-owner, Barnard, was equally unaffected and friendly. It was
something of a surprise, though, to learn that Barnard was not a
student, but the youthful-looking pastor of the University Methodist
Church, of late known as the Wesley Foundation.

"I'm not up on Methodism as I should be," said Joe to Barnard, a day or
two later, "and I may as well admit that I never heard before of this
Wesley Foundation of yours. Is it a church affair?"

"Well, rather," Barnard answered. "It is just exactly that. You know, or
could have guessed, that a good many of the students here are from
Methodist homes--about a fourth of the whole student body, as it
happens. And our church has been coming to see, perhaps a bit slowly,
that although the State could not provide any religious influences, and
could certainly do nothing for denominational interests, there was all
the more reason for the church to do it. That's the idea under the
Foundation, so to speak, and the work is now established in nine of the
great State Universities."

"Yes, I see," Joe mused, "but just what is the Foundation's duty, and
how do you do it?"

Barnard laughed as he said, "We do pretty near everything, in this
University. We have a regular Methodist church, with a membership made
up almost entirely of faculty and students. The town people have their
own First Church, over on the West Side. Our church has its Sunday
school, its Epworth League Chapter, and other activities. We try to come
out strong on the social side, and in a little while, when our Social
Center building is up--we're after the money for it now--we can do a
good deal more. There is plenty of demand for it."

"That's all church work, of course. I suppose you have no relation to
the University, though," Joe asked, "studies and all that?"

"Yes, indeed, and we're coming to more of it, but gradually. We are
already offering courses in religious subjects, with teachers recognized
by the University, and credit given. It's all very new yet, you know,
but we're hoping and going ahead."

"I should think so," said Joe with emphasis. "But where does the money
come from for all this? It must be Methodist money, of course; who puts
it up?"

"Oh, the usual people," said Barnard. "A few well-to-do Methodists have
provided some of it, but the really big money has to come from the
churches--collections and subscriptions and all that. This sort of work
is being done in forty-odd other schools, where the Wesley Foundation is
not organized. The money comes officially through two of the benevolent
boards."

"Yes?" queried Joe. "I've often heard of 'the benevolences,' but I never
thought of them as meaning anything to me. How do they hook up to a
proposition like that?"

"Well," said Barnard, "the Board of Education, naturally, is interested
because of the Methodist students who are here. And the Board of Home
Missions and Church Extension is interested because at bottom this is
the realest sort of home mission and church extension work."

"Do these boards supply all the money you need?" was Joe's next
question.

"No, not all at once, anyway," Barnard answered. "We're needing a good
deal more before this thing really gets on its feet; and when our people
know what work can be done in State schools, and what a glorious chance
we have, I think they'll see that the money is provided. The students
are there, half a hundred thousand of them, and the church must be there
too."

"Well," Joe said, "I admire the faith of you. And I want to join. You
know, although I'm a mighty green hand at religious work, I've got to go
at it hard. There's a reason. So please count me in on everything where
I'm likely to fit at all. I didn't tell you, did I, that I'm headed for
medicine?--going to be a missionary doctor, if they'll take me when I'm
ready. Maybe your Foundation can do something with me."

Barnard thought it could, and the next two years justified his
confidence. Joe Carbrook, as downright in his new purpose as he had been
in his old scornful refusal to look at life seriously, quickly found a
place for himself in the church and the other activities of the
Foundation. It saved him from his first heedless resolution to study an
impossible number of hours a day, and from the certain crash which would
have followed. It gave him not a few friends, and he was soon deep in
the affairs of the League and the church. Besides, it made possible some
special friendships among the faculty, which were to be of immense value
in later days.

While Joe Carbrook was fitting himself into the life of the University
and the Wesley Foundation, the chums at Cartwright were quite as busy
making themselves a part of their new world. As always, they made a
good team, so much so that people began to think of them not as
individuals, but as necessarily related, like a pair of shoes, or collar
and tie, or pork and beans. And, though the old differences of
temperament and interest had not lessened, the two had reached a fine
contentment over each other's purposes. J.W. was happy in Marty's
preacher-plans, and Marty believed implicitly in the wisdom of J.W.'s
understood purpose to be a forthright Christian layman.

But it was not all plain sailing for J.W. Nobody bothered Marty; he was
going into the ministry, and that settled that. Among the students who
went in for religious work were several who could not quite share
Marty's complacence over J.W.'s program. They thought it strange that so
active a Christian, with the right stuff in him, as everybody
recognized, should not declare himself for some religious vocation.

And from time to time men came to college--bishops, secretaries,
specialists--to talk to the students about this very thing. There was a
student volunteer band, in which were enrolled all the students looking
to foreign mission work. The prospective preachers had a club of their
own, and there was even a little organized group of boys and girls who
thought seriously of social service in some form or another as a career.

Now, J.W., before the end of sophomore year, had come to know all, or
nearly all, of these young enthusiasts. Some of them developed into
staunch and satisfying friends. If he had run with the sport crowd,
which was always looking for recruits, or if he had been merely a hard
student, working for Phi Beta Kappa, he might have been let alone. But,
without being able to wear an identifying label, he yet belonged with
those who had come to college with a definite life purpose.

Just because nobody seemed to realize that being a Christian in business
could be as distinct a vocation as any, J.W. was at times vaguely
troubled, in spite of his confident stand at the Institute. He wondered
a little at what he had almost come to feel was his callousness. Not
that he was uninterested; for Marty he had vast unspoken ambitions which
would have stunned that unsuspecting youth if they had ever become
vocal; and he never tired of the prospects which opened up before his
other friends. He kept up an intermittent correspondence with Joe
Carbrook, and found himself thinking much about the strange chain of
circumstances which promised to make a medical missionary out of Joe. He
more than suspected that Joe and Marcia Dayne were vastly interested in
each other's future, and he got a lot of satisfaction out of that. They
would have a great missionary career.

No; he was not unfeeling about all these high purposes of the boys and
girls he knew; and if he could just get a final answer to the one
question that was bothering him, his college life would need nothing to
make it wholly satisfying. He had early forgotten all his old reluctance
to put college before business.

Marty knew something of what was passing in J.W.'s mind, and it
troubled him a little. He thought of tackling J.W. himself, and by this
time there was nothing under the sun they could not discuss with each
other freely. But he did not quite trust himself.

At last he made up his mind to write to their pastor at home. He knew
that for some reason Mr. Drury had a peculiar interest in J.W. and was
sure he could count on it now.

"I know J.W.'s bothered," he wrote, "but he doesn't talk about it. I
think he has been disturbed by hearing so much about special calls to
special work. We've had several lifework meetings lately, and the needs
of the world have been pretty strongly stated. But the stand he took at
the Institute is just as right for him as mine is for me. Can't you
write to him, or something?"

Walter Drury could do better than write. He turned up at Cartwright that
same week.

It happened that three or four prospective preachers and Christian
workers had been in their room that afternoon, and J.W. was trying to
think the thing through once more. He recalled what his pastor had said
at the camp fire, and his own testimony on Institute Sunday in the
life-service meeting, after Marcia Dayne had put it up to him. But he
was making heavy weather of it. And just then came the pastor's knock at
the door.

There was a boisterous welcome from them both, with something like
relief in J.W.'s heart, that he would not, could not speak. But he could
get help now. For the sake of saying something he asked the usual
question. "What in the world brings you to Cartwright?"

"Oh," said Pastor Drury, "I like to come to Cartwright. Your President's
an old friend. Besides, why shouldn't I come to see you two, if I wish?
You are still part of my flock, you know."

So they talked of anything and everything. By and by Marty said he must
go over to the library, and pretty soon J.W. was telling his friend the
pastor all that had been disturbing him.

"It all began in the summer before I came to college, at the Institute
here, you know, when you spoke at the camp fire on Saturday night."

"I remember," the pastor replied. "You hadn't taken much interest in
your future work before that?"

"No real interest, I guess," J.W. admitted. "I'd always taken things as
they came, and didn't go looking for what I couldn't see. I was enjoying
every day's living, and didn't care deeply about anything else. Why,
though I've been a Methodist all my life, you remember how I knew
nothing at all about the Methodist Church outside of Delafield, except
what little I picked up about its Sunday schools by serving as an
assistant to our Sunday school secretary. And when I began to hear, at
the Institute, about home missions and foreign missions, about Negro
education and other business that the church was doing, I saw right off
that it was up to us young people to supply the new workers that were
always needed. But, even so, only those who had a real fitness for it
ought to offer themselves, and I thought too that something else would
be needed. I wasn't any duller than lots of other church members--even
the older ones didn't seem to know much more about the church outside
than I did. You would take up collections for the benevolences, but if
you told us what they meant, we didn't pay enough attention to get the
idea clearly, so as to have any real understanding. I suppose the
women's societies had more. I know my mother talks about Industrial
Homes in the South, and schools in India--she's in both the societies,
you know--but that is about all."

"And it seemed when I began to find out about things, Mr. Drury, that if
our whole church needed workers for all these places, it needed just as
much to have in the local churches men and women who would know about
the work in a big way, and who would care in a big way, to back up the
whole work as it should be backed up. So, when you spoke at the camp
fire it was just what I wanted to hear, and when I was called on, I made
that sort of a declaration the next day at the life decision services."

"Yes I remember that too," said Mr. Drury, "and I remember telling Joe
Carbrook that you had undertaken as big a career as any of them."

"That's what I kind of thought too," said J.W., simply, "but rooming
with Marty Shenk--he's going to make a great preacher too--keeps me
thinking, and I know about all the students who are getting ready for
special work, and lately I've been wondering----"

"About some special sort of work you'd like to do?" Mr. Drury prompted.

"No; not that at all. I'm just as sure as ever I'm not that sort. If
only I can make good in business, there's where I belong. But can a
fellow make good just as a Christian in the same way I expect Marty
Shenk to make good as a Christian preacher?"

The pastor stood up and came over to J.W.'s chair. "My boy, I know just
what you are facing. It is a pretty old struggle, and there's only one
way out of it. God hasn't any first place and second place for the
people that let him guide them. A man may refuse his call, either to go
or to stay, and then no matter what he does it will be a second best.
But you--wait for your call. For my part, I think probably you've got
it, and it's to a very real life. If you and those like you should fail,
we should soon have no more missionaries. And if the missionaries should
fail, we should soon have no more church. God has little patience with a
church that always stays at home, and I doubt if he has more for a
church that doesn't stand by the men and women it has sent to the
outposts. It is all one job."

There was much more of the same sort, and when J.W. walked with his
pastor to the train the next morning, the only doubt that had ever
really disturbed him in college was quieted for good.

Walter Drury went back to Delafield and his work, surer now than ever
that the Experiment was going forward. He knew, certainly, that all this
was only the getting ready; that the real tests would come later But he
was well content.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was early football season of the junior year. The State University
took on Cartwright College for the first Saturday's game, everybody well
knowing that it was only a practice romp for the University. Always a
big time for Cartwright, this year it was a day for remembering. Joe
Carbrook, who had been graduated from the University in June, and was
now a medical student in the city, drove down to see the game. For
loyalty's sake he joined the little bunch of University rooters on the
east stand. Otherwise it was Cartwright's crowd, as well as Cartwright's
day.

To the surprise of everybody, neither side scored until the last
quarter, and then both sides made a touchdown, Cartwright first! A high
tricky wind spoiled both attempts to kick goal, and time was called with
a score at 6-6. Cartwright had held State to a tie, for the first time
in history!

Joe came from the game with the chums and took supper with them. The
whole town was ablaze with excitement over its team's great showing
against the State, and the talk at table was all of the way Cartwright's
eleven could now go romping down the schedule and take every other
college into camp, including, of course, Barton Poly, their dearest foe.

The boys were happy to have Joe with them, he looked so big and fine,
and had the same easy, breezy bearing as of old. Nor had he lost any of
that frank attitude toward his own career which never failed to
interest everybody he met. After supper they had an hour together in the
room.

"Those boys in the medical school surely do amuse me," he laughed. "When
I tell 'em I'm to be a missionary doctor, which I do first thing to give
'em sort of a shock they don't often get, they stand off and say, 'What,
you!' as if I had told 'em I was to be a traffic cop, or a trapeze
artist in the circus. Some of 'em seem to think I'm queer in the head,
but, boys, they are the ones with rooms to let. When the others talk
about hanging out a shingle in Chicago or Saint Louis or Cleveland or
some other over-doctored place, I tell 'em to watch me, when I'm the
only doctor between Siam and sunrise! Won't I be somebody? With my own
hospital--made out o' mud, I know--and a dispensary and a few native
helpers who don't know what I'm going to do next, and all the sick
people coming from ten days' journey away to the foreign doctor!" And
then his mood changed. "That's what'll get me, though; all those
helpless, ignorant humans who don't even know what I can do for their
bodies, let alone having any suspicion of what Somebody Else can do for
their souls! But it will be wonderful; next thing to being with him in
Galilee!"

There was a pause, each boy filling it with thoughts he would not speak.

"Where do you expect to find that work, Joe?" J.W. asked him.

The answer was quick and straight: "Wherever I'm sent, J.W., boy," he
said. "Only I've told the candidate secretary what I want. I met him
last summer in Chicago, and there's nothing like getting in your bid
early. He's agreed to recommend me, when I'm ready, for the hardest,
neediest, most neglected place that's open. If I'm going into this
missionary doctor business, I want a chance to prove Christianity where
they won't be able to say that Christianity couldn't have done it alone.
It _can_!"

Then, with one of those quick turns which were Joe Carbrook's devices
for concealing his feelings, he said, "And how's everything going at
this Methodist college of yours? Your boys put up a beautiful game
to-day, and they ought to have won. How's the rest of the school?"

Both the boys assured him everything was going in a properly
satisfactory fashion, but Marty had caught one word that he wanted Joe
to enlarge upon.

"Why do you say 'Methodist college'? It is a Methodist college; but is
there anything the matter with that?"

Joe rose to the mild challenge. "Don't think I mean to be nasty," he
said, "but I can't help comparing this place with the State University,
and I wonder if there's any big reason for such colleges as this. You
know they all have a hard time, and the State spends dollars to the
church's dimes."

"Yes, we know that, don't we, J.W.?" and Marty appealed to his chum,
remembering the frequent and half-curious talks they had on that very
contrast.

J.W. said "Sure," but plainly meant to leave the defense of the
Christian college to Marty, who, to tell the truth, was quite willing.

"There's room for both, and need for both," said that earnest young man.
"Each has its work to do--the State University will probably help in
attracting most of those who want special technical equipment, and the
church colleges will keep on serving those who want an education for its
own sake, whatever special line they may take up afterward: though each
will say it welcomes both sorts of students."

This suited Joe; he intended Marty to keep it up a while. So he said,
"But why is a church college, anyway?" And he got his answer, for Marty
too was eager for the fray.

"The church college," he retorted with the merest hint of asperity, "is
at the bottom of all that people call higher education. The church was
founding colleges and supporting them before the State thought even of
primary schools. Look at Oxford and Cambridge--church colleges. Look at
Harvard and Yale and Princeton and the smaller New England
colleges--church colleges. Look at Syracuse and Wesleyan and
Northwestern and Chicago. Look at Vanderbilt, and most of the other
great schools of the South. They are church colleges, founded, most of
them, before the first State University, and many before there was any
public high school. The church college showed the way. If it had never
done anything else, it has some rights as the pioneer of higher
learning."

J.W. had been getting more interested. He had never heard Marty in
quite this strain, and he was proud of him.

"That's a pretty good answer he's given you, Joe," he said with a
chuckle. "Now, isn't it?"

"It is," admitted Joe. "I reckon I knew most of what you say, Marty, but
I hadn't thought of it that way before. Now I want to ask another
question, only don't think I'm doing it for meanness; I've got a reason.
And my question is this: granting all that the church schools have done,
is it worth all they cost to keep them up now; in our time, I mean?"

"I think it is," Marty answered, quieter now. "They do provide a
different sort of educational opportunity, as I said. Then, they are
producing most of the recruits that the churches need for their work.
Since the churches began to care for their members in the State
Universities, a rather larger number of candidates for Christian service
are coming out of the universities, but until the last year or two
nearly all came, and the very large majority still comes, and probably
for years will come, from the church colleges. And there's another
reason that you State advocates ought to remember. Our Methodist
colleges in this country have about fifty thousand students. If these
colleges were to be put out of business, ten of the very greatest State
Universities would have to be duplicated, dollar for dollar, at public
expense, to take care of the Methodist students alone. When you think of
all the other denominations, you would need to duplicate all the State
Universities now in existence if you purposed to do the work the church
colleges are now doing. And if you couldn't get the money, or if the
students didn't take to the change, the country would be short just that
many thousand college-trained men and women. The whole Methodist Church,
with the other churches, is doing a piece of unselfish national service
that costs up into the hundreds of millions, and where's any other big
money that's better spent?"

When Marty stopped he looked up into Joe's good-natured face, and
blushed, with an embarrassed self-consciousness. "You think you've been
stringing me, don't you?"

"Now, Marty," Joe spoke genially, "don't you misunderstand. I said I had
a reason. I have. My folks have some money they want to put into a safe
place. And they like Cartwright. I do too, but--you know how it is. I
want to be sure. Anyhow I'm glad I asked these questions. You've given
me some highly important information; and, honestly, I'm grateful. You
surely don't think I'm small enough to be making fun of you, or of
Cartwright. If I seemed to be, I apologize on the spot. Believe me?" and
there was no mistaking his genuine earnestness.

"Of course I believe you, old man," Marty rejoined, just a wee bit
ashamed. "Forgive me too, but I've been reading up on that college thing
lately, and it's a little different from what most people think. So you
got me going."

"I'm glad he did," said J.W. "It makes me prouder than ever of
Cartwright College." And, as he got up he said, as though still at the
game, "The 'locomotive' now!" and gave Cartwright's favorite yell as a
solo, while Marty and Joe grinned approval and some students passing in
the street answered it with the "skyrocket."

       *       *       *       *       *

There is material for a book, all mixt of interest varying from very
light comedy to unplumbed gloom, in the life of two boys at college--any
two; and some day the chronicles of the Delafield Duo may be written;
but not now.

Senior year, with its bright glory and its seriously borne
responsibilities. It found Marty a trifle less shy and reticent than
when he came to Cartwright, and J.W., Jr., a shade more studious. Marty
would miss Phi Beta Kappa, but only by the merest fraction; J.W. would
rank about number twenty-seven in a graduating class of forty-five.
Marty had successfully represented his college twice in debate, and J.W.
had played second on the nine and end in the eleven, doing each job
better than well, but rarely drawing the spotlight his way.

Curiously enough, you had but to talk to Marty, and you would learn that
J.W., Jr., was the finest athlete and the most popular student in
school. Conversely, J.W., Jr., was prepared to set Cartwright's debating
record, as incarnated in Marty, against that of any other college in the
State. What was more, he cherished an unshakable confidence that the
"Rev. Martin Luther Shenk" would be one of the leading ministers of his
Conference within five years.

And so they came to commencement, with the Shenk and the Farwell
families, Pastor Drury, and Marcia Dayne in the throng of visitors. Mr.
Drury rarely missed commencements at Cartwright, and naturally he could
not stay away this year. The Farwells thought Marcia might like to see
her old schoolmates graduate, and the boys had written her that they
wanted somebody they could trot around during commencement week who
might be trusted to join in the "I knew him when" chorus without being
tempted to introduce devastating reminiscences. And Marcia, being in
love with life and youth, had been delighted to accept the combined
invitation. She was not at all in love with either of the boys, nor they
with her. They thought they knew where her heart had been given, and
they counted Joe Carbrook a lucky man.

"Tell us, Marcia," said J.W., Jr., one afternoon, as the three of them
were down by the lake, "how it happens you went to the training school
instead of the normal school last year."

"That's just like a man," said Marcia. "Here am I, your awed and
admiring slave, brought on to adorn the crowning event of your
scholastic career, and you don't even remember that I finished the
normal school course in three years, and graduated a year ago!"

Marty rolled over on the sand in wordless glee.

"Aw, now, Marcia, why----" J.W., Jr., boggled, fairly caught, but soon
recovering himself. "You must have been ashamed of it, then. I do
remember something about your getting through, now you mention the fact,
but why didn't I receive an invitation? Answer me that, young lady!"

"Oh, we educators don't think commencement amounts to so much as all
that. With us, you know, life is real, life is earnest, and so forth.
But I'll tell you the truth, J.W. I knew you couldn't come, either of
you, and I was saving up a little on commencement expenses; so I left
you--and a good many others--off the list. I needed the money, that's
the simple fact; And the reason you didn't see me at home last summer
was because I was busy spending the money I had saved on your
invitations and other expensive things."

Marty usually waited for J.W., but the idea which now occurred to him
demanded utterance. "Say, Marcia, I think it's fine of you to be
studying dispensary work and first aid."

"How did you know?" Marcia demanded.

"Never mind; I saw Joe Carbrook in Chicago when we went through on our
way to the Buckland-Cartwright debate, and I guessed a good deal more
than he told me, which wasn't much."

"Marty," said Marcia, her face aglow and her brave eyes looking into
his, "there's nothing secret about it. When Joe gets through medical
school we shall go out together to whatever field they choose for him.
The least I can do is to get ready to help."

"Is that why you've been going to training school?" asked J.W. They had
so long been used to such complete frankness with each other that the
question was "taken as meant."

"Yes, J.W., it is," said Marcia. "Joe has been doing perfectly splendid
work in his medical course, and they say he will probably turn out to be
a wonderful all-round doctor--everybody is surprised at his
thoroughness, except me. I know what he means by it. But, of course, he
has little time for training in other sorts of religious work, and so,
ever since last June, I've been dividing my time between a settlement
dispensary and the training school. Why shouldn't I be as keen on my
preparation as he is on his, when we're going out to the same work?"

"You should, Marcia--you should," J.W. agreed, vigorously, "and we're
proud of you; aren't we, Marty? I remember thinking two years ago what
fine missionary pioneers you two would make. Only trouble is, we'll
never know anything about it, after we've once seen your pictures in
_The Epworth Herald_ among the recruits of the year. If you were only
going where a feller could hope to visit you once every two years or
so!"

Marcia looked out across the lake, but she wasn't seeing the white sails
that glided along above the rippling blue of its waters. In a moment she
pulled herself together, and observed that there had been enough talk
about a mere visitor. "What of you two, now that your student
occupation's gone?"

"Tell her about yourself, Marty," said J.W. "She knows what I'm going to
do." And for the moment it seemed to him a very drab and unromantic
prospect, in spite of his agreement with Mr. Drury that all service
ranks alike with God.

Marty was always slow to talk of himself. "It isn't much," he said. "The
district superintendent is asking me to fill out the year on the Ellis
and Valencia Circuit--the present pastor is going to Colorado for his
health. So I'm to be the young circuit-rider," and he smiled a wry
little smile. He had no conceit of himself to make the appointment seem
poor; rather he wondered how any circuit would consent to put up with a
boy's crude preaching and awkward pastoral effort.

But J.W., Jr., was otherwise minded. A country circuit for Marty did not
accord with his views at all. Marty was too good for a country church,
he argued, mainly from his memories of the bare little one-room
meetinghouse of his early childhood. In his periodical trips to the farm
he had seen the old church grow older and more forlorn, as one family
after another moved away, and the multiplying cars brought the town and
its allurements almost to the front gate of every farm.

So J.W. had tried to say "No," for Marty, who would not say it for
himself. It was one of the rare times when they did not see eye to eye.
But it made no difference in their sturdy affection; nothing ever could.
And Marty would take the appointment.

Commencement over, for the first time in many years the chums went their
separate ways, Marty to his circuit, and J.W. home to Delafield. Then
for a little while each had frequent dark-blue days, without quite
realizing what made his world so flavorless. But that passed, and the
young preacher settled down to his preaching, and the young merchant to
his merchandising; and soon all things seemed as if they had been just
so through the years.

To J.W. came just one indication of the change that college had made.
Pastor Drury, though he found it wise to do much of his important work
in secret, thought to make use of the college-consciousness which most
towns possess in June, and which is felt especially, though not
confessed, by the college colony. The year's diplomas are still very new
in June. So a college night was announced for the social rooms, with a
college sermon to follow on the next Sunday night. The League and the
Senior Sunday School Department united to send a personal invitation to
every college graduate in town, and to every student home for the
vacation. They responded, four score of them, to the college-night call.

As J.W. moved about and greeted people he had known for years he began
to realize that college has its own freemasonry. These other graduates
were from all sorts of schools; two had been to Harvard, and one to
Princeton; several were State University alumni. Cartwright was
represented by nine, six of them undergraduates, and the others
confessed themselves as being from Chicago, Syracuse, De Pauw, three or
four sorts of "Wesleyan," Northwestern, Knox, Wabash, Western Reserve,
and many more.

Not even all Methodist, by any means, J.W. perceived; and yet the
fellowship among these strangers was very real. They spoke each other's
tongue; they had common interests and common experiences. He told
himself that here was a suggestion as to the new friends he might make
in Delafield, without forgetting the old ones. And the prospect of life
in Delafield began to take on new values.

On the next Sunday night not so many college people were out to hear Mr.
Drury's straight-thinking and plain-spoken sermon on "What our town asks
of its college-trained youth"; and a few of those who came were inclined
to resent what they called a lecture on manners and duty.

But to J.W. the sermon was precisely the challenge to service he had
been looking for. It made up for his feeling at commencement that he was
"out of it." It completed all which Mr. Drury had suggested at the
Institute camp fire four years ago, all that he himself had tried to say
at the decision service on the day after the camp fire; all that the
pastor had urged two years ago when J.W., Jr., confessed to him his new
hesitations and uneasiness.

The pastor had not preached any great thing. He had simply told the
college folk in his audience that no matter where they had gone to
school, many people had invested much in them, and that the investment
was one which in its very nature could not be realized on by the
original investors. The only possible beneficiaries were either the
successive college generations or the communities in which they found
their place. If they chose to take as personal and unconditional all the
benefits of their education, none could forbid them that anti-social
choice; but if they accepted education as a trust, a stewardship,
something to be used for the common good, they would be worth more to
Delafield than all the new factories the Chamber of Commerce could coax
to the town.

And to those who might be interested in this view of education, Pastor
Drury said: "Young people of the colleges, you have been trained to some
forms of laboratory work, in chemistry, in biology, in geology--yes,
even in English. I invite you to think of your own town of Delafield as
your living laboratory, in which you will be at once experimenters and
part of the experiment stuff. Look at this town with all its good and
evil, its dying powers and its new forces, its dullnesses and its
enthusiasms, its folly and wisdom, its old ways and its new people, its
wealth and want. Do you think it is already becoming a bit of the
kingdom of God? Or, if you conclude that it seems to be going in ways
that lead very far from the Kingdom, do you think it might possess any
Kingdom possibilities? If you do, no matter what your occupation in
Delafield, Delafield itself may be your true vocation, your call from
God!"

For John Wesley Farwell, Jr., it was to become all of that.



CHAPTER IV


EXPLORING MAIN STREET

J.W., Jr., found small opportunity to make himself obnoxious by becoming
a civic missionary before the time. He was busy enough with his
adjustment to the business life of "Delafield and Madison county," this
being the declared commercial sphere of the John W. Farwell Hardware
Company. J.W. always had known hardware, but hitherto in a purely
amateur and detached fashion. Now he lived with it, from tacks to
tractors, ten or twelve hours a day. He found that being the son of his
father gained him no safe conduct through the shop or with the
customers. He had a lot to learn, even if he was John Wesley Farwell,
Jr. That he was the heir apparent to all this array of cast iron and
wrought and galvanized, of tin and wire and steel and aluminum and
nickel, did not save him from aching back and skinned knuckles, nor from
the various initiations staged by the three or four other employees.

But he was getting his bearings, and not from the store and the
warehouse only. A good hardware store in a country town is a center of
democracy for town and country alike. In what other place do farmers and
artisans, country women and city women meet on so nearly equal terms?
Not in the postoffice, nor in the bank; and certainly not in the
department store. But the hardware store's customers, men and women all,
are masters of the tools they work with; and whoso loves the tools of
his craft is brother to every other craftsman.

It was in the store, therefore, that J.W. began to absorb some of the
knowledge and acquire some of the experiences that were to make his work
something to his town.

For one thing, he got a new view of local geography, in terms of tools.
All the farmers from the bottoms of Mill Creek called for pretty much
the same implements; the upland farms had different needs. The farmers'
wives who lived along the route of the creamery wagon had one sort of
troubles with tinware; the women of the fruit farms another. J.W. knew
this by the exchange of experiences he listened to while he sold milk
strainers and canning outfits. He found out that the people on the edge
of town who "made garden" were particular about certain tools and
equipment which the wheat farmer would not even look at.

And the townpeople he learned to classify in the same way. He was soon
on good terms with those store clerks who were handy men about the
house, with women who did all their own work, with blacksmiths and
carpenters, with unskilled laborers and garage mechanics. In time he
could almost tell where a man lived and what he did for a living, just
by the hardware he bought and the questions he asked about it.
Heretofore J.W. had thought he knew most of the people in Delafield.
But the first weeks in the store showed him that he knew only a few. Up
to this time "most of the people in Delafield" had meant, practically,
his school friends, the clerks and salespeople in certain stores--and
the members of the First Methodist Church.

That is to say, in the main, to him Delafield had been the church, and
the church had been Delafield. But now he realized that his church was
only a small part of Delafield. The town had other churches. It had
lodges. When the store outfitted Odd Fellows' Hall with new window
shades he learned that the Odd Fellows shared the place with strong
lodges of the Maccabees and Modern Woodmen. And there were other halls.
J.W. Farwell, Sr., was a Mason, but these other lodges seemed to have as
many members as the Masons, and one or the other of them was always
getting ready for a big public display.

The same condition was true of the country people. He began to hear
about the Farm Federation, and the Grange, and the Farmers' Elevator,
and the cooperative creamery, for members of all of these groups passed
in and out of the store.

One day J.W. remarked to the pastor who had dropped into the store: "Mr.
Drury, I never noticed before how this place is alive with societies and
clubs and lodges and things. Everybody seems to belong to three or four
organizations. And they talk about 'em! But I don't hear much about our
church, and nothing at all about the old church out at Deep Creek. Yet
I used to think that the church was the whole thing!"

The older man nodded. "It's true, J.W.," he said, "all the churches
together are only a small part of the community. They are the best, and
usually the best-organized forces we have, I'm sure of that; but the
church and the town have to reckon with these others."

"What good are they all? They must cost a pile of money. What for?"

"That's what you might call a whale of a question, J.W." John W.
Farwell, Senior, who had been standing by, listening, essayed to answer.
"And you haven't heard yet of all the organizations. Look at me, for
example. I belong to the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotary Club. I'm on
the Executive Committee of the Madison County Horticultural Society, and
I've just retired from the Board of Directors of the Civic League. Then
you must think of the political parties, and the County Sunday School
Association, and the annual Chautauqua, and I don't know what all."

"Yes, and I notice, dad, that a good many of these," said J.W., Jr.,
"are just for the men. The women must have nearly as many. Why,
Delafield ought to be a model town, and the country 'round here ought to
be a regular paradise, with all these helpers and uplifters on the job.
But it isn't. Maybe they're not all on the job."

"That's about it, my boy," his father agreed "I sometimes think we need
just one more organization--a society that would never meet, but between
the meetings of all the other societies would actually get done the
things they talk about and pass resolutions about and then go off and
forget until the next meeting."

"Well, dad, what I want to find out," J.W. said, as he started off with
Mr. Drury to the post office, "is where the church heads in. Mr. Drury
is sure it has a big responsibility, and maybe it has. But what is it
willing to do and able to do, and what will the town let it do? It seems
to me that is the question."

J.W. heard his father's voice echoing after him up the street, "Sure,
that is the question," and Mr. Drury added, "Three questions in one."

J.W. found himself taking notice in a way he had not done before through
all his years in Delafield. As might be expected, he had come home from
college with new ideas and new standards. The town looked rather more
sordid and commonplace than was his boy's remembrance of it. Of late it
had taken to growing, and a large part of its development had come
during his college years. So he must needs learn his own town all over
again.

Cherishing his young college graduate's vague new enthusiasm for a
better world, he had little sympathy with much that Delafield opinion
acclaimed as progress.

The Delafield Daily Dispatch carried at its masthead every afternoon one
or more of such slogans as these: "Be a Delafield Booster," "Boost for
more Industries," "Put Delafield on the Map," "Double Delafield in Half
a Decade," "Delafield, the Darling of Destiny," "Watch Delafield Grow,
but Don't Stop Boosting to Rubber."

These were taken by many citizens as a sort of business gospel; any
"theorist" who ventured to question the wisdom of bringing more people
to town, whether the town's business could give them all a decent living
or not, was told to sell his hammer and buy a horn. J.W. said nothing;
he was too young and too recent a comer into the town's business life.
But he could not work up any zeal for this form of town "loyalty."

A big cannery had been built down near the river, where truck gardens
flourished, and there was a new furniture factory at the edge of the
freight yards. Hereabouts a lot of supremely ugly flats had gone up, two
families to each floor and three stories high; and in J.W.'s eyes the
rubbish and disorder and generally slattern appearance of the region was
no great addition to Delafield's attractions.

Still more did the tumbledown shacks in the neighborhood of the cannery
offend the eyes and, to be frank, the ears and nose as well. It was a
forlorn-looking lot of hovels, occupied by listless, frowsy adults and
noisy children. Here existence seemed to be a grim caricature of life;
the children, the only symbol of abundance to be seen, continued to be
grotesque in their very dirt. What clothes they had were second or
third-hand garments too large for them, which they seemed to be
perpetually in danger of losing altogether.

To J.W., Delafield had always been a town of homes; but in these dismal
quarters there was little to answer to the home idea. They were merely
places where people contrived to camp for a time, longer or shorter;
none but a Gradgrind could call them homes.

One of the factory foremen was a great admirer of Mr. Drury, who
introduced him to J.W. one day when the foreman had come to the store
for some tools. He had talked with J.W., and in time a rather casual
friendliness developed between them. It was this same Foreman Angus
MacPherson, a Scot with a name for shrewdness, who gave the boy his
first glimpse of what the factory and the cannery meant to
Delafield--especially the factory.

J.W. was down at the factory to see about some new band-saws that had
been installed; and, his errand finished, he stopped for a chat with
Angus.

"This factory wasn't here when I went off to college," he said. "What
ever brought it to Delafield?"

At that MacPherson was off to a perfect start.

"Ye see, my boy," he began, "Delafield is so central it is a good town
for a good-working plant; freights on lumber and finished stuff are not
so high as in some places. And then there's labor. Lots of husky fellows
around here want better than farm wages, and they want a chance at town
life as well. Men from the big cities, with families, hope to find a
quieter, cheaper place to live. So we've had no trouble getting help.
Skill isn't essential for most of the work. It's not much of a trick
nowadays to get by in most factories--the machines do most of the
thinking for you, and that's good in some ways. Only the men that 'tend
the machines can't work up much pride in the output. Things go well
enough when business is good. But when the factory begins to run short
time, and lay men off, like it did last winter, there's trouble."

J.W. wanted to know what sort of trouble.

"Oh, well," said MacPherson, "strikes hurt worst at the time, but
strikes are just like boils, a sign of something wrong inside. And
short-time and lay-offs--well, ye can't expect the factory to go on
making golden oak rockers just to store in the sheds. Somebody has to
buy 'em. But the boys ain't happy over four-day weeks, let alone no jobs
at all."

His sociology professor at Cartwright, J.W. recalled, had talked a good
deal about the labor question, but maybe this foreman knew something
about it too. So J.W. put it up to him: "What is at the bottom of it
all, MacPherson? What makes the thing the papers call 'labor unrest'?"

MacPherson hesitated a moment. Then he settled himself more comfortably
on a pile of boards and proceeded to deliver his soul, or part of it.

"I can tell you; but there's them that would ship me out of town if I
talked too much, so I'll have to be careful. John Wesley, you've got a
grand name, and the church John Wesley started has a good name, though
it's not my church. I'm a Scot, you know. But I know your preacher, and
he and I are of the same mind about this, I know. Well, then, if your
Methodist Church could find a method with labor, it would get hold of
the same sort of common people as the ones who heard Jesus gladly. These
working-men are not in the way of being saints, ye ken, but they think
that somewhere there is a rotten spot in the world of factories and
shops and mills. They think they learn from experience, who by the way,
is the dominie of a high-priced school, that they get most of the losses
and few of the profits of industry. They get a living wage when times
are good. When times are bad they lose the one thing they've got to
sell, and that's their day's work; when a loafing day is gone there's
nothing to show for it, and no way to make it up. Maybe that's as it
should be, but the worker can't see it, especially if the boss can still
buy gasoline and tires when the plant is idle. Oh, yes, laddie, I know
the working man is headstrong. I'll tell you privately, I think he's a
fool, because so often he gets into a blind rage and wants to smash the
very tools that earn his bite and sup. He may have reason to hate some
employer, but why hate the job? It's a good job, if he makes good
chairs. He goes on strike, many's the time, without caring that it hurts
him and his worse than it hurts the boss. And often the boss thinks he
wants nothing bigger than a few more things. Maybe he _is_ wild for a
phonograph and a Ford and golden oak rockers of his own in the parlor,
and photographs enlarged in crayon hanging on the walls--and a steady
job. But, listen to me, John Wesley, Jr., and you'll be a credit to your
namesake: these wild, unreasonable workers, with all their foolishness
and sometimes wickedness, are whiles dreaming of a different world, a
better world for everybody. 'Twould be no harm if some bosses dreamed
more about that too, me boy. Your preacher--he's a fine man too, is Mr.
Drury--he understands that, and he wants to use it for something to
build on. That's why I tell folks he's a Methodist preacher with a real
method in his ministry. Now I'll quit me fashin' and get back to the
job. I doubt you'll be busy yourself this afternoon."

He gripped J.W.'s hand, so that the knuckles were unable to forget him
all day, but what he had said gripped harder than his handshake. If the
furniture factory was a mixed blessing, what of the cannery?

Somewhat to his own surprise, J.W. was getting interested in his town,
but if at first he was inclined to wonder how he happened to develop all
this new concern, he soon ceased to think of it. So slight a matter
could not stay in the front of his thinking when he really began to know
something of the Delafield to which he had never paid much attention.

It was through Joe Carbrook that he got his next jolt. Joe, now spending
his vacations in ways that amazed people who had memories of his wild
younger manner, was in and out of the Farwell store a good deal. Also he
spent considerable time with Pastor Drury, though there is no record of
what they talked about.

"J.W., old boy," Joe asked one day, coming away from the pastor's
study, "have you ever by any chance observed Main Street?"

"Why, yes," J.W. answered, "seeing that two or three or four times a day
I walk six blocks of it back and forth to this store door, I suppose I
have."

"Oh, yes, that way," Joe came back at him, "and you've seen me, a
thousand times. But did you ever observe me? My ears, for instance," and
he put his hands over them. "Which one is the larger?"

Without in the least understanding what his friend was driving at, and
stupidly wondering if he ever had noticed any difference in Joe's ears,
J.W. stared with inane bewilderment. "Is one really larger than the
other?" he asked, helplessly.

Joe took his hands down, and laughed. "I knew it," he said. "You've
never observed my ears, and yet you think you have observed Main Street.
As it happens, each of my ears takes the same-sized ear-muff. But you
didn't know it. Well, never mind ears; I'm thinking about Main Street.
What do you know of Main Street?"

J.W. thought he could make up for the ear question. So he said, boldly,
"Joe Carbrook, I can name every place from here to the livery barn
north, and from here to the bridge south, on both sides of the street.
Want me to prove it?"

"No, J.W., I don't. I reckon you can. But I believe you're still as
blind as I've been about Main Street, just the same. I know Chicago
pretty well and I doubt if there's as big a percentage of graft and
littleness and dollar-pinching and going to the devil generally on
State Street or Wabash Avenue as there is an Main Street, Delafield."

"You're not trying to say that our business men are crooks, are you,
Joe?" J.W. asked, with a touch of resentment. "You know I happen to be
connected with a business house on Main Street myself."

"Sure, I know it, and there's Marshall Field's on State Street, and Lyon
& Healy's on Wabash Avenue, and Hart, Schaffner & Marx over by the
Chicago River; just the same as here. But I--well, of course, there's a
story back of it all. Mother heard a couple of weeks ago that one of our
old Epworth League girls was having a hard time of it--she's working at
the Racket store, helping to support her folks. They've had sickness,
and the girl doesn't get big wages. So mother asked me to look her up.
Mother can't get about very easily, you know, and since I'm studying
medicine she seems to think I'm the original Mr. Fix-It. I made a few
discreet inquiries, discreet, that is, for me, and can you guess who
that girl is? You can't, I know. Well, she's Alma Wetherell, and that's
the identical girl who gave me such a dressing down one day at the
Cartwright Institute four years ago. Remember? Say, J.W., that day she
told me so much of the deadly truth about myself that I hated her even
more for knowing what to say than I did for saying it. But she had a big
lot to do with waking me up, and I owe her something."

J.W. had not remembered the Institute incident. But he recalled that
Alma was at Cartwright that summer, and he had seen her at church
occasionally since he came home from college. She was living in town and
working in some store or other he knew, but that was all.

"What did you find out?" he asked Joe.

"I found out enough so that Alma has a better job, and things are going
easier at home. But that was just a starter. My brave John Wesley, do
you remember your college sociology and economics and civics and all the
rest? Never mind confessing; you don't; I didn't either. But I began to
review 'em in actual business practice. First I told the right merchant
what sort of a bookkeeper I had found slaving away for ten dollars a
week on the dark, smelly balcony of the Racket--and he's given Alma a
job at twenty in a sun-lighted office. Then I told Mr. Peters of the
Racket what I had done, and why. He didn't like it, but it will do him
good. That made me feel able to settle anything, and I'm looking around
for my next joy as journeyman rescuer and expert business adjuster.
Honest, J.W., I've not seen near all there is to see, but I'm swamped
already. You've got to come along, you and some others, and see for
yourself what's the matter with Main Street."

Not all at once, but before very long, J.W. shared Joe's aroused
interest. Pastor Drury was with them, of course; and the three called
into consultation a few other capable and trustworthy men and women.
Marcia Dayne had come home for a few weeks' holiday, and at once
enlisted. Alma Wetherell was able to give some highly significant
suggestions.

There was no noise of trumpets, and no publicity of any sort. Mr. Drury
insisted that what they needed first and most was not newspaper
attention, and not even organization, but exact information. So for many
days a group of puzzled and increasingly astonished people set about the
study of their own town's principal street, as though they had never
seen it before. And, in truth, they never had.

It was no different from all other small town business districts. The
Gem Theater vied with the Star and the Orpheum in lavish display of
gaudy posters advertising pictures that were "coming to-morrow," and in
two weeks of observation the investigators learned what sort of moving
pictures Delafield demanded, or, at least what sort it got. They took
note of the Amethyst Coterie's Saturday night dances--"Wardrobe, 50
cents, Ladies Free"--and of the boys and girls who patronized the place.
The various cigar and pocket-billiards combinations were quietly
observed, some of the observers learning for the first time that young
men are so determined to get together that they are not to be deterred
by dirt or bad air or foul and brainless talk.

The candy stores with soda fountains and some of the drug stores which
served refreshments took on a new importance. Instead of being no more
than handy purveyors of sweets, of soft drinks and household remedies,
they were seen to be also social centers, places for "dates" and
telephone flirtations and dalliance. Much of their doings was the merest
silly time-killing, but generally the youthful patrons welcomed all this
because it was a change from the empty dullness of homes that had missed
the home secret, and from the still duller and wasting monotony of
uninteresting toil.

It was Pastor Drury who suggested the explanation for all these forms of
profitless and often dangerous amusement. He was chatting with the whole
group one night, and merely happened to address himself first to J.W.,
Jr.

Your great namesake, J.W., was so much a part of his day that he
believed with most other great religious thinkers of his time that play
was a device of the devil. His belief belonged to eighteenth-century
theology and psychology. But even more it grew out of the vicious
diversions of the rich and the brutalizing amusements of the poor. Both
were bad, and there was not much middle ground. But here on Main Street
we see people, most of them young, who feel, without always
understanding why, that they simply must be amused. They feel it so
strongly that they will pay any price for it if circumstances won't let
them get it any other way. And Main Street is ready to oblige them.
There could be no amusement business if people were not clamoring to be
amused. And we know now why we have no right to say that all this clamor
is the devil's prompting. Isn't it queer that the church is only now
beginning to believe in the genuineness and wholesomeness of the play
instinct, though it is a proper and natural human hunger? Literally
everybody wants to play.

"People pay more for the gratification of this hunger than they do for
bread or shoes or education or religion. They take greater moral risks
for it than they do for money. We have seen people who undoubtedly are
going to the devil by the amusement route, unless something is done to
stop them. They go wrong quicker and oftener in their play than in their
work. Are we going to be content with denouncing the dance hall and the
poolroom and the vile pictures and the loose conduct of the soft-drink
places and Electric Park? Haven't we some sort of duty to see that every
young person in Delafield has a chance at first-hand, enjoyable, and
decent play?"

All agreed that the pastor was right, though they were not so clear
about what could be done.

But commercialized amusement was not all they found in their quiet
voyages of discovery up and down Main Street.

The chain stores had come to Delafield--not the "5 and 10" only, but
stores which specialized in groceries, tobacco, shoes, dry goods, drugs,
and other commodities. Alongside of them were the locally owned stores.
Altogether, Main Street had far too many stores to afford good service
or reasonable prices. With all this duplication on the one hand, and
absentee-control on the other, Main Street was a street of
underlings--clerks and salespeople and delivery men. That condition
produced low wages and inefficient methods, many of the workers being
too young to be out of school and too dense to show any intelligence
about the work they were supposed to do. Cheap help was costly, and the
efficient help was scarcely to be found at any price.

The investigators were frankly dismayed at the extent and complexity of
the situation. They had thought to find occasional cases calling for
adjustment, or even for the law. But instead they had found a whole
fabric of interwoven questions--amusements, wages, competition,
cooperation, ignorance, vulgarity, vice, cheapness, trickery, "business
is business." True, they had found more honest businesses than shady
ones, more faithful clerks than shirkers, more decent people in the
pleasure resorts than doubtful people. But the total of folly and evil
was very great; could the church do anything to decrease it?

And that question led the little company of inquisitive Christians into
yet wider reaches of inquiry. J.W. and Joe and Marcia at Mr. Drury's
suggestion agreed to be a sort of unofficial committee to find out about
the churches of Delafield. He told them that this was first of all a
work for laymen. The preachers might come in later.

Joe invited the others to the new Carbrook home on the Heights into
which his people had lately moved. The Heights was a new thing to
J.W.--a rather exclusive residential quarter which had been laid out
park-wise in the last four or five years; with houses in the midst of
wide lawns, a Heights club house and tennis courts and an exquisite
little Gothic church.

"When our folks first talked about moving out here I thought it was all
right; and I do yet, in some ways," explained Joe. "But the Heights is
getting a little too good for me; I'm not as keen about being exclusive
as I used to be. I've thought lately that exclusiveness may be just as
bad for people inside the gates, as for the people outside. But here we
are, as the Atlantic City whale said when the ebb tide stranded it in
front of the Board Walk. What are we up to, us three?"

"We're up to finding out about the town churches," said J.W. "Maybe they
can help the town more than they do, but we don't know how, and so far
we haven't found anybody else who knows how."

And Marcia said: "At least we know some things. We have the figures.
About one Delafield citizen in seven goes to church or Sunday school on
Sunday. Church membership is one in ten. And as many people go to the
movies and the Columbia vaudeville and the dance halls and poolrooms on
Saturday as go to church on Sunday, to say nothing of the crowds that go
on the other five days."

Joe Carbrook whistled. "That's a tough nut to crack, gentle people," he
said, "because you've simply got to think of those other five days. The
chances are that four times as many people in Delafield go to other
public places as go to church and Sunday school."

"What can the churches do?" asked J.W. "You can't make people go to
church."

"No," assented Marcia, "and if you could, it would be foolish. We want
to make people like the churches, not hate them. One thing I believe our
churches can do is to put their public services more into methods and
forms that don't have to be taken for granted or just mentally dodged.
Half the time people don't know what a religious service really stands
for."

"Meaning by that----?" Joe queried, as much to hear Marcia talk as for
the sake of what she might say.

"Well, they have seen and heard it since they were children. When they
were little they didn't understand it, and now it is so familiar that
they forget they don't understand it," Marcia responded, not wholly
oblivious of Joe's strategy, but too much in earnest to care. "I've
heard of a successful preacher in the East who seems to be making them
understand. He says he tries to put into each service four
things--light, music, motion; that is, change--and a touch of the
dramatic. Why not? I think it could be done without destroying the
solemnity of the worship. They did it in the Temple at Jerusalem, and
they do it in Saint Peter's at Rome and in Westminster Abbey and Saint
John's Cathedral in New York. Why shouldn't we do it here in our little
churches?"

"Make a note of it, J.W.," ordered Joe. "It's worth suggesting to some
of the preachers."

J.W. made his note, rather absently, and offered a conclusion of his
own:

"The church must take note of the town's sore spots too. I've found out
that crowding people in tenements and shacks means disease and
immorality. Isn't that the church's affair? Angus MacPherson has taught
me that when the jobs are gone little crimes come, followed by bigger
ones; and sickness comes too, with the death rate going up. Babies are
born to unmarried mothers, and babies, with names or without, die off a
lot faster in the river shacks and the east side tenements than they do
up this way. Maybe the church couldn't help all this even if it knew;
but I'm for asking it to know."

"I'll vote for that," Joe asserted, "if you'll vote for my proposition,
which is this: our churches must quit trying just to be prosperous; they
must quit competing for business like rival barkers at a street fair;
they must begin to find out that their only reason for existence is the
service they can give to those who need it most; they've got to believe
in each other and work with each other and with all the other town
forces that are trying to make a better Delafield."

"That's right," said J.W. "I was talking to Mr. Drury this morning, and
I asked him what he would think of our starting a suggestion list. He
said it ought to be a fine thing. But he wants us to do it all
ourselves. Just the same, we can take our suggestions to him, and then,
if he believes in them, he can talk to the other preachers about them,
and, of course, about any ideas of his own. Because you know, I'm pretty
sure he has been thinking about all this a good deal longer than we
have."

It was agreed that the list should be started. Marcia was not willing
to keep it to themselves; she wanted to have it talked about in League
and Sunday school and prayer meeting, and then, when everybody had been
given the chance to add to it, and to improve on it--but not to weaken
it--that it be put out for general discussion among all the churches.

"And then," said Joe Carbrook, "we might call it 'The Everyday Doctrines
of Delafield,' If we stick to the things every citizen will admit he
ought to believe and do, the churches will still have all the chance
they have now to preach those things which must be left to the
individual conscience."

That was the beginning of a document with which Delafield was to become
very familiar in the months which followed; never before had the town
been so generally interested in one set of ideas, and to this day you
can always start a conversation there by mentioning the "Everyday
Doctrines of Delafield," The Methodist preacher gave them their final
form, but he took no credit for the substance of them, though, secretly,
he was vastly proud that the young people, and especially J.W., should
have so thoroughly followed up his first suggestion of a civic creed.

THE EVERYDAY DOCTRINES OF DELAFIELD

1. Every part of Delafield is as much Delafield as any other
part We are citizens of a commonwealth, and Delafield should
be in fact as well as name a democratic community.

2. Whenever two Delafield citizens can better do something
for the town than one could do it, they should get together.
And the same holds good for twenty citizens, or a hundred, or
a thousand. One of the town's mottoes should be, "Delafield
Is Not Divided."

3. Everything will help Delafield if it means better people,
in better homes, with better chances at giving their children the
right bringing-up, but anything which merely means more people,
or more money, or more business is likely to cost more than it
comes to. We will boost for Delafield therefore, but we will
first be careful.

4. Every part of Delafield is entitled to clean streets and plenty
of air, water, and sunlight. It is perhaps possible to be a Christian
amid ugliness and filth, but it is not easy, and it is not
necessary.

5. Every family in Delafield has the right to a place that can
be made into a home, at a cost that will permit of family self-respect,
proper privacy, and the ordinary decencies of civilized living.
Every case of poverty in Delafield should be considered as
a reflection on the town, as being preventable and curable by
remedies which any town that is careful of its good name
can apply.

6. Delafield believes that beauty pays better than ugliness.
Therefore she is for trees and flowers, green lawns, and clean
streets, paint where it properly belongs, and everybody setting
a good example by caring for his own premises and so inciting
his neighbor to outdo him.

7. The only industries Delafield needs are those which can
provide for their operation without forcing workers to be idle
so much of the time as to reduce apparent income, and so to
cause poverty, sickness, and temptation to wrongdoing. The
standard of income ought to be for the year, and not by the
day; in the interest of homes rather than in the interest of lodging
houses and lunch rooms.

8. Delafield can support, or should find ways to support, the
workers needed in her stores, shops, and factories, at fair pay,
without making use of children, who should continue in school,
and without reckoning on the desperation of those made poor
by their dependence on a job.

9. Amusements in Delafield can be and ought to be clean,
self-respecting, and available for everybody. This calls for playgrounds
and weekday playtime, as well as plenty of recreational
opportunities provided by the churches, without money-making
features.

10. The forms of amusement provided for pay can be and
should be influenced by public opinion, positively expressed,
rather than by public indifference. Any picture house would
rather be praised for bringing a good picture to town than condemned
for showing a bad one. Picture people enjoy praise as much as preachers
do.

11. Delafield's many organizations should tell the whole town
what they are trying to do, so that unnecessary duplication of
plan and purpose may first be discovered and then done away with.

12. Whenever a Delafield church, or club, or society, proposes
to engage in a work that is to benefit the town, the plan ought
to be made known, and in due time the results should be published
as widely as was the plan. This will help us to learn by
our Delafield failures as well as by our Delafield successes.

13. The churches of Delafield are Delafield property, as the
schools are, though paid for in a different way. Neither schools
nor churches exist for their own sakes, but for Delafield, and
then some.

14. Every church in Delafield should have a definite parish,
and every well-defined section or group should have a church.
The churched should lead in providing for the unchurched, and
the overchurched might spare out of their abundance of workers
and equipment some of the resources that are needed.

15. The first concern of all the churches should be to reach
the unchurched and to make church friends of the church-haters.
This goes for all the churches; it is more important to get the
sense of God and principles of Jesus into the thought of the
whole town than to set Protestant and Roman Catholic in mutually
suspicious and hateful opposition; devout Jew and sincere
Christian must realize that righteousness in Delafield cannot be
attended to by either without the other.

16. The churches of Delafield believe that all matters of social
concern--work, wages, housing, health, amusement, and morals--are
part of every church's business. Therefore they will not
cease to urge their members always to deal with these matters as
Christian citizens, not merely as Christians.

17. Every child and young person in Delafield ought to be in
the day school on weekdays, and in Sunday school on Sunday.
Delafield discourages needless absence from one as much as
from the other.

18. Delafield wants the best possible teachers teaching in all
her schools. She insists on trained teachers on week days, and
needs them on Sundays. Therefore she believes that teacher-training
is part of every church's duty to Delafield.

"There's one thing about all this that bothers me," said J.W. when they
had finished the final draft of the Every Day Doctrines, "not that it's
the only one; but some of these Doctrines stand small chance of being
put into practice until the church people are willing to spend more
money on such work. It can't be done on the present income of the
churches, or by the usual money-raising methods."

"That's a fact," Joe Carbrook agreed. "I'd already made up my mind that
the Carbrooks would have to dig a little deeper, and so must everybody
else who cares."

"Yes, but how to get everybody else to care; that's the trouble," J.W.
persisted. "Dad's one of the stewards, you know, and they find it no
easy job to collect even what the church needs now. They have a deficit
to worry with every year, almost."

Marcia Dayne was the only other member of the "Let's Know Delafield"
group who happened to be present at this last meeting. She had been
waiting for a chance to speak. "I'm surprised at you two," she said.
"Don't you know the only really workable financial way out?"

"Well, not exactly," J.W. admitted. "I suppose if we could only get
people to care more, they would give more. It's a matter of letting them
know the need and all that, I guess. For instance--"

Marcia was not ready for his "for instances." "John Wesley, Jr.," she
interrupted with mock severity, "as a thinker you have shone at times
with a good deal more brilliance than that. If you had said it just the
other way 'round you would have been nearer right. People _will_ give if
they care, of course, but it is even more certain that they will care if
they give. The thing we need is to show them how to give."

Joe Carbrook broke into an incredulous laugh. "In other words, my fair
Marcia, you want Christians to give before they care what it is they are
giving to, or even know about it. Don't you think our church will be a
long time financing the Every Day Doctrines on that system?"

Joe and Marcia never hesitated to take opposite sides in a discussion,
and always with good-humored frankness. So Marcia came back promptly: "I
know you think it unreasonable," she said, "but there's a condition you
overlook. We became Christians long before any of us thought about
studying Delafield's needs. And if we and all the rest of the Christians
of the town had accepted our financial relation to the Kingdom and had
acted on it from the start, there would always be money enough and to
spare."

"Oh, yes," Joe said understandingly, "I see now. You mean the tithe."

Marcia knew, no matter how, that Joe had begun to think about tithing,
and this seemed the opportune time to stress it a little more. It could
help the Every Day Doctrines, and both Joe and J.W. were keen for that.

So Marcia admitted that she did mean the tithe. "I don't pretend to know
how it began, any more than I know how real homes were established after
the Fall, or how keeping Sunday began; I do know these began long before
there was any fourth or fifth commandment, or any Children of Israel.
And I've gone over all the whole subject with Mr. Drury--he has a lot of
practical pamphlets on the tithe. I believe that it is the easiest,
surest, fairest and cheerfulest way of doing two Christian things at
once--acknowledging God's ownership of all we have, and going into
partnership with God in his work for the world, what the books sometimes
call Christian Stewardship."

"I'd like to see those pamphlets," said J.W.

"It's queer you haven't seen them before this," said Marcia. "Mr. Drury
has distributed hundreds of them. But maybe that was when you were away
at Cartwright. Anyway, I'll get some for you."

Joe was holding his thought to the main matter. "Marcia," said he, "if
you can make good on what you said just now, pamphlets or no pamphlets,
I'll agree to become a tither. First, to start where you did, how is
tithing easier than giving whenever you feel like giving?"

Now, though Marcia expected no such challenge, she was game. "I'm not
the one to prove all that, but I believe what I said, and I'll try to
make good, as you put it. But please don't say 'give' when you talk
about tithing, or even about any sort of financial plan for Christians.
The first word is 'pay,' Giving comes afterward. Well, then; tithing is
the easiest way, because when you are a tither you always have tithing
money. You begin by setting the tenth apart for these uses, and it is no
more hardship to pay it out than to pay out any other money that you
have been given with instructions for its use."

"Not bad, at all," said Joe. "Now tell us why it is the surest way of
using a Christian's money."

By this time Marcia was beginning to enjoy herself. "It is the surest
because it almost collects itself. No begging; no schemes. You have
tithing money on hand--and you have, almost always--therefore you don't
need to be coaxed into thinking you can spare it. If the cause is a real
claim, that's all you need to find out. And when you begin to put money
into any cause you're going to get interested in that cause. Besides,
when all Christians tithe there will be more than enough money for every
good work."

J.W. had not thought much of the tithe except as being one of those
religious fads, and he knew that every church had a few religious
faddists. But he had long cherished a vast respect for Marcia's good
sense, and what she was saying seemed reasonable enough. He wondered if
it could be backed up by evidence.

Joe smilingly took up the next excellence of the tithe which Marcia had
named. "Let me see; did you say that the tithe is the fairest of all
Christian financial schemes?"

"Not that, exactly," Marcia corrected. "I said it was the fairest way of
acknowledging God's ownership and of working with him in partnership.
And it is. It puts definiteness in the place of whim. It is proportional
to our circumstances. It is not difficult. Mr. Drury says that forty
years' search has failed to find a tither who has suffered hardship
because of paying the tithe."

"Well, Joe," J.W. put in, "if Marcia can produce the evidence on these
three points, you may as well take the fourth for granted. If tithing is
the easiest, surest and fairest plan of Christian Stewardship, seems to
me it's just got to be cheerful. I'm going to look into it, and if she's
right, as I shouldn't wonder, it's up to you and me to get our finances
onto the ten per cent basis."

Joe was never a reluctant convert to anything. When he saw the new way,
his instinct was for immediate action. "Let's go over to Mr. Drury's,"
he proposed, "and see if we can't settle this thing to-day. I hope
Marcia's right," and he looked into her eyes with a glance of something
more than friendly, "and if she is I'm ready to begin tithing to-day."

Pastor Drury, always a busy man, reckoned interviews like this as urgent
business always. Not once nor twice, but many times in the course of a
year, his quiet, indirect work resulted in similar expeditions to his
study, and as a rule he knew about when to expect them. He produced the
pamphlets, added a few suggestions of his own, and let the three young
people do most of the talking. They stayed a long time, no one caring
about that.

As they were thanking the pastor, before leaving, Joe said with his
usual directness, "Marcia _was_ right, and here's where I begin to be a
systematic Christian as far as my dealings with money are concerned."

J.W., not in the least ashamed to follow Joe's lead, said, "Same here.
Wish I'd known it sooner. Now we've got to preach it."

And Joe said to Mr. Drury, in the last moment at the door, "Mr. Drury,
if we could all get a conscience about the tithe, and pay attention to
that conscience, half the Everyday Doctrines would not even need to be
stated. They would be self-evident. And the other half could be put into
practice with a bang!"

The Delafield _Dispatch_ got hold of a copy of the "Everyday Doctrines"
and printed the whole of it with a not unfavorable editorial comment,
under the caption "When Will All This Come True?"

But Walter Drury, when he saw it, said to himself, "It has already come
true in a very real sense, for John Wesley, Jr., and these others
believe in it." And he knew it marked one more stage of the Experiment,
so that he could thank God and take courage.



CHAPTER V


HERE THE ALIEN; THERE THE LITTLE BROWN CHURCH

It was all very well to work out the "Everyday Doctrines of Delafield."
To secure their adoption and application by all the churches of
Delafield was another matter. The unofficial committee scattered, for
one thing. Joe Carbrook went back to medical school, and Marcia to the
settlement and the training school. Marty was traveling his circuit. J.
W. and the pastor and a few others continued their studies of the town.
Nobody had yet ventured to talk about experts, but it began to be
evident that the situation would soon require thoroughgoing and skilled
assistance. Otherwise, all that had been learned would surely be lost.

One day in the late fall a stranger dropped in at the Farwell Hardware
Store and asked for Mr. J.W. Farwell, Jr. He had called first on Pastor
Drury, who was expecting him; and that diplomat had said to him, "Go see
J.W. I think he'll help you to get something started."

J.W., with two of the other clerks, was unloading a shipment of
stovepipes. The marks of his task were conspicuous all over him, and he
scarcely looked the part of the public-spirited young Methodist. But
the visitor was accustomed to know men when he saw them, under all
sorts of disguises.

J.W., called to the front of the store, met the visitor with a
good-natured questioning gaze.

"Mr. Farwell, I am Manford Conover, of Philadelphia. Back there we have
heard something of the 'Everyday Doctrines of Delafield,' and I've been
sent to find out about them--and their authors."

"Sent?" J.W. repeated. "Why should anybody send you all the way from
Philadelphia to Delafield just for that?" He could not know how much
pastoral and even episcopal planning was back of that afternoon call.

"Don't think that we reckon it to be unimportant, Mr. Farwell," said Mr.
Conover, pleasantly. "You see I'm from a Methodist society with a long
name and a business as big as its name--the Board of Home Missions and
Church Extension. The thing some of you are starting here in Delafield
is our sort of thing. It may supply our Board with new business in its
line, and what we can do for you may make your local work productive of
lasting results, in other places as well as here."

J.W. did not quite understand, but he was willing to be instructed, for
he had found out that the effort to promote the "Everyday Doctrines" was
forever developing new possibilities and at the same time revealing new
expanses of Delafield ignorance and need. Anybody who appeared to have
intelligence and interest was the more welcome.

They talked a while, and then, "I'll tell you what," proposed J.W.
"How long do you expect to be in town?" Mr. Conover replied that as yet
he had made no arrangement for leaving.

"Then let's get together a few people to-night after prayer meeting. Our
pastor, of course, and the editor of the _Dispatch_--he's the right
sort, if he does boost 'boosting' a good deal; and Miss Leigh, of the
High School--she's all right every way; and Mrs. Whitehill, the
president of the Woman's Association of our church--that's the women's
missionary societies and the Ladies' Aid merged into one--she's a
regular progressive; and Harry Field, who's just getting hold of his job
in the League; and the Sunday school superintendent. That's dad, you
know; he's had the job for a couple of years now, and he's as keen about
it as Harry is over the League."

They got together, and out of that first simple discussion came all
sorts of new difficulties for Delafield Methodism to face and master.

       *       *       *       *       *

Manford Conover was a preacher with a business man's training and
viewpoint. He may have mentioned his official title, when he first
appeared, but nobody remembered it. When people couldn't think of his
name he was "the man from the Board," which was all the same to him.

After that first night's meeting Conover gave several days to walks
about Delafield. J.W. had found the shacks and the tenements, and Joe
Carbrook had introduced J.W. to Main Street, but it was left to
Conover to show him Europe and Africa in Delafield.

There's a certain town in a Middle Western State, far better known than
Delafield, rich, intelligent, highly self-content. Its churches and
schools and clubs are matters for complacent satisfaction. And you would
be safe in saying that not one in five of its well-to-do people know
that the town has a Negro quarter, an Italian section, a Bohemian
settlement, a Scandinavian community, a good-sized Greek colony, and
some other centers of cultures and customs alien to what they assume is
the town's distinctive character.

They know, of course, that such people live in the town--couldn't help
knowing it. Their maids are Scandinavian or Negro. They buy vegetables
and candy from the Greeks. They hear of bootlegging and blind tigers
among certain foreign groups. The rough work of the town is done by men
who speak little or no English. But all this makes small impression. It
is a commonplace of American town life. And scarcely ever does it
present itself as something to be looked into, or needing to be
understood.

So Conover found it to be with Delafield. The "Everyday Doctrines" were
well enough, but he knew a good deal of spade work must be done before
they could take root and grow. He fronted a condition which has its
counterpart in most American towns, each of which is two towns, one
being certain well-defined and delimited areas where languages and
Braces live amid conditions far removed from the American notion of
what is endurable, and the other the "better part of town," sometimes
smugly called "the residence section," where white Americans have homes.

Conover and Pastor Drury compared notes. They were of one mind as to the
conditions which Conover had found, conditions not surprising to the
minister, who knew more about Delafield than any of his own people
suspected.

One afternoon they met J.W. on the street, and he led them into a candy
store for hot chocolate.

As they sipped the chocolate they talked; J.W., as usual, saying
whatever he happened to think of.

"Say, Mr. Conover," he remarked, "I notice in all your talk about the
foreigner in America you haven't once referred to the idea of the
melting pot. Don't you think that's just what America is? All these
people coming here and getting Americanized and assimilated and all
that?"

"I'd think Americ

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