John Wesley, Jr. Part 24

"That must have been exciting," said Miss Morel. "I know I should enjoy such work. What did you find out, and what could you do about it?"

That was a question not to be glibly answered, J.W. knew. But he meant to be fair about it. "We found out plenty that surprised us; a great deal," he added, "that ought to be done, and much more that needed to be changed. We even went so far as to draw up a sort of civic creed, 'The Everyday Doctrines of Delafield,' The town paper printed it, and it was talked about for a while, but probably we were the people who got the most out of it; it showed us what we church members might mean to the town. And that was worth something."

Miss Morel was sure it was. But she came back to her first idea about the home churches. "Don't you think that much of the preaching, and all that, is pretty dull and tiresome? I came from a little country church, and it was so dreary."

J.W. thought of Deep Creek, and said, "I know what you mean; but even the country church is improving. I must tell you some time about Marty, my chum. He's a country preacher, helped in his training by the Rural Department of the Home Missions Board, and his people come in crowds to his preaching. Country churches are waking up, and the Board people at Philadelphia have had a lot to do with it."

"Well, I'm glad. But anyway, home missions is rather commonplace, haven't you noticed?" and Miss Morel looked almost as though she were asking a question of state.

"I can't say I've found it so," J.W. said, stoutly, "I was some time learning, but I ran into a lot of experiences before I left home. Take the work for colored people, for instance. I had to make a speech at a convention, and I found out that our church has a Board of Education for Negroes which is doing more than any other agency to train Negro preachers and teachers and home makers, and doctors and other leaders.

That's not so very commonplace, would you say so?"

"Well, no," the young lady admitted. "It is very important work, of course; and I'd dearly love to have a share in it. I am a great believer in the colored races, you know. But you are making me begin to think I am all wrong about the church at home. I don't mean to belittle it. Perhaps I appreciate it more than I realized. Anyway, tell me something else that you have found out."

"There isn't time," J.W. objected. "But if you won't think me a nuisance, maybe I can tell you part of it. For example, Sunday school.

Long ago I discovered that the whole church was providing for Sunday school progress through a Board of Sunday Schools, and there isn't a modern Sunday school idea anywhere that this Board doesn't put into its scheme of work. I was a very small part of it myself for a while, so I know."

"Yes, and even I know a little about the Sunday School Board," confessed Miss Morel. "It has helped us a lot in the Philippines. And so I must admit that the church does try to improve and extend Sunday school work.

What else?"

J.W. told about his experiences on the Mexican border, where home missions and foreign missions came together. Then, seeing that she was really listening, he told of his and Marty's college days, how Marty had borrowed money from the Board of Education, and how the same Board had a hand in the college evangelistic work. He told about the deaconesses who managed the hospital at Manchester, and the training school which Marcia Dayne Carbrook had attended when she was getting ready to go to China.

That school had sent out hundreds of deaconesses and other workers.

The thought of Marcia made him think of Joe, and he told what he knew of how the Wesley Foundation at the State University had helped Joe when he could easily have made shipwreck of his missionary purpose. Of course the story of his visit to the Carbrooks in China must also be told.

Miss Morel changed the subject again. "Tell me, Mr. Farwell," she asked, "were you in the Epworth League when you were at home?"

"I surely was," said J.W. "That was where I got my first start; at the Cartwright Inst.i.tute." And the story jumped back to those far-off days when he was just out of high school.

As he paused Miss Morel said, "I was an Epworthian, too, and in the young women's missionary societies. We had a combination society in our church, so I was a 'Queen Esther' and a 'Standard Bearer' as well. Those organizations did me a world of good. You know, when I think of it, the women's missionary societies have done a wonderful work in America and everywhere."

"I guess they have," said J.W. "I know my mother has always been a member of both, and she's always been the most intelligent and active missionary in the Farwell family."

The talk languished for a while, and then Miss Morel exclaimed, "I know why we've stopped talking; we're hungry. It is almost time for luncheon, and if you have an appet.i.te like mine, you're impatient for the call."

J.W. looked at his watch and saw that there was only ten minutes of the morning left. So they separated to get ready against the sounding of the dinner gong.

But J.W. was not hungry. He was struggling with an old thought that to him had all the tantalizing quality of novelty. The talk of the morning had become a sort of roll-call of church boards. How did it happen that the church was busy with this and that and the other work? Why a Board of Hospitals and Homes? Why a Deaconess Board, even though deaconess work happened to be merciful and gentle and Christlike? What was the church doing with a Book Concern? How came it that we had that board with the long name--Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals? He had traveled from Yokohama to Lucknow and back, and everywhere he had found this same church doing all sorts of work, with no slightest suspicion but that all of it was her proper business.

So picture after picture flickered before his mind's eye, as though his brain had built up a five-reel mental movie from all sorts of memory film; a hundred feet of this, two hundred of that, a thousand here, there just a flash. It had all one common mark; it was all "the church,"

but the hit-and-miss of it, its lightning change, bewildered him. The pictures leaped from Cartwright to Cawnpore, from the country church at Ellis to Joe Carbrook's hospital in China; from New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and Cincinnati and Washington to the ends of the country and the ends of the earth; and in and through it all, swift bits of unrelated yet vivid hints of _Advocates_ and _Heralds_, of prayer meetings and inst.i.tutes, of new churches and old colleges, of revivals and sewing societies, of League socials and Annual Conferences, of deaconesses visiting dreary homes, and soft-footed nurses going about in great hospitals; of beginners' departments and old people's homes; of kindergartens and clinics and preparatory cla.s.ses. There seemed no end to it all, every moment some new aspect of the church's activity showed itself and then was gone.

It was a most confused and confusing experience; and all through the rest of the day J.W. caught himself wondering again and again at the variety and complexity of the church's affairs.

Why should a church be occupied with all this medley? Why should it be so distracted from its main purpose, to be a Jack of all trades? Why should it open its doors and train its workers and spend its money in persistent response to every imaginable human appeal?

Perhaps that might be it; "_human_." Once a philosopher had said, "I am a man, and therefore nothing human is foreign to me." What if the church by its very nature must be like that? what if this really were its main purpose--all these varied and sometimes almost conflicting activities no more than its effort to obey the central law of its life?

J.W. was in his stateroom; he paced the narrow aisle between the berths--three steps forward, three steps back, like a caged wild thing.

Something was coming to new reality in his soul; he was scarce conscious of the walls that shut him in. Once he stopped by the open port. He looked out at the tumbling rollers of the wide Pacific. And as he looked he thought of the vastness of this sea, how its waters washed the icy sh.o.r.es of Alaska and the palm-fronded atolls of the Marquesas; how they carried on their bosom the mult.i.tudinous commerce of a hundred peoples; how from Santiago to Shanghai and from the Yukon to New Zealand it was one ocean, serving all lands, and taking toll of all.

In spite of all the complexities and diversities of the lands about this ocean, they had one possession which all might claim, as it claimed them--the sea. It gave them neighbors and trade, climate and their daily bread. In the sociology and geography and economics of the Orient this Pacific Ocean was the great common denominator. _And in the geography and economics and sociology of the kingdom of G.o.d? Might it not be--must it not be, the church_!

Not only the Pacific basin, but the round world was like that, every part of it dependent on all the rest, and growing every day more and more conscious of all the rest. Railways helped this process, and so did steamships and air routes and telegraph and wireless. More than that, all the world was becoming increasingly related to the life of every part. With raw material produced in Brazil to make tires for the limousines of Fifth Avenue and the Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive, what of the new kinship between the producers in Brazil and the users in the States? All good was coming to be the good of all the earth; and all evil was able to affect the lives of unsuspecting folk half the earth's circ.u.mference away.

In such a time, what an insistent call for the program and power of the Christian faith! And the call could be answered. J.W. had seen the church applying the program as well in a Chinese city and in an Indian village as in his home town and on the Mexican border. He was sure that the power that was in the Christian message could heal all the hurts of the world, and bring all peoples into "a world-commonwealth of good will."

This was what Jesus meant to do; not just to save here and there a little group for heaven out of the general hopelessness, but to save and make whole the heart of mankind. The church was not, first of all, seeking its own enlargement, but extending the reach of its Founder's purpose. It did all its many-sided work for a far greater reason than any increase in its own numbers and importance; in a word, for the Christianizing of life, Sunday and every day, in Delafield as well as in the forests of the Amazon and the huddled cities of China.

J.W. sat on the edge of his berth. In the first glow of this new understanding his nerves had steadied to a serenity that was akin to awe. Yet he knew he had made no great discovery. The thing he saw had been there all the time.

Then his mind set to work again on that motley procession of pictures which he had likened to a patchwork film. Was it as disjointed as it seemed? Could it not be so put together as to make a true continuity, consistent and complete?

Why not? In the events of his own life, strangely enough, he had the clue to its right arrangement. By what seemed to be accidental or incidental opportunity it had been his singular fortune to come in contact with some aspect or another of all the work his church was doing. And every element of it, from the beginners' cla.s.s at Delafield to the language school at Nanking, from the college social in First Church to the celebration at Foochow--it was all New Testament work. Its center was always Jesus Christ's teaching or example, or appeal. There was in its complexity a vast simplicity; each was a part of all, and all was in each.

"John Wesley Farwell, Jr.," said that young man to himself, "this thing is not your discovery--but how does that bit of Keats' go?"

'Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific--and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise-- Silent, upon a peak in Darien,'

There you have it! But I might have known. Cortez, if it _was_ Cortez, could not have guessed the Pacific. He had nothing to suggest it. But I might have guessed the singleness of the church's work. What is my name for, unless I can appreciate the man who said 'The world is my parish,'

and who would do anything--sell books, keep a savings bank, open a dispensary--for the sake of saving souls? That's the single idea, the simple idea. It makes all these queer activities part of one great activity; and rests them all on one under-girding truth--'The Church's one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord.'

But the wonderful thing to me is that, after all this time, I should suddenly have found this out for myself!

"What a story to take home to Delafield! Pastor Drury is going to have the surprise of his life!"

Three people met J.W. as his train pulled in to the station at Delafield. The other two were his father and mother.

After the first tearfully happy greetings, J.W. looked around the platform. "I rather thought Brother Drury might have come too," he said.

The others exchanged meaning glances, and his father asked, "Then you didn't get my second letter at San Francisco?"

"No," said J.W., in vague alarm, "only the one. What's wrong? Is Mr.

Drury--"

"He's at home now, son," said the elder Farwell, gravely. "He came home from our Conference hospital at Hillcrest two weeks ago. We hope he's going to gain considerable strength, but he's had some sort of a stroke, we don't rightly know what, and he's pretty hard hit. He's better than he was last week, but he can't leave his room; sits in his easy chair and doesn't say much."

J.W.'s heart ached. Without always realizing it, he had been counting on long talks with the pastor; there was so much to tell him. And especially so since that wonderful day out in the middle of the Pacific, when he had seen what he even dared to call his 'vision' of the church.

So he said, "You and mother drive on home; I'll walk up with Jeannette."

For lovers who had just met after a year's separation these two were strangely subdued. They had everything to say to each other, but this sudden falling of the shadow of suffering on their meeting checked the words on their lips.

"Will he get better?" J.W. asked Jeannette.

"They fear not," she answered. "The doctors say he may live for several years, but he will never preach again. He just sits there; he's been so anxious to see you. You must go to-day."