John Wesley, Jr. Part 1

John Wesley, Jr.

by Dan B. Brummitt.

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 amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sivity. 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 a.s.semblies, 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 trespa.s.s 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 G.o.d, 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g 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 pa.s.sed. 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 INSt.i.tUTE PANORAMA

"If anybody expects me to stay away from Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute."

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 Inst.i.tute.

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 Inst.i.tute 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 a.s.sembly 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute. 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 Inst.i.tute? Do you truly want to go? How do you know what an Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute was a combination of college, circus, and camp meeting. I would venture a different putting of it. An Inst.i.tute 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 G.o.d, and how the church proposes to transact that business. They wait for new vision together, the Inst.i.tute 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.