John Wesley, Jr. Part 4

It was Marty who put their purpose into the fewest words. "We, and the others who have been to the Inst.i.tute, 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 pa.s.s, 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 Inst.i.tute--"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 Inst.i.tute, 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 Inst.i.tute, 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 n.o.body 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute."

The pastor nodded. "I know; but remember even you were not really interested until you had been at an Inst.i.tute. Do you think our Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute, wasn't it?"

"Certainly. But still, if there had not been any local Chapter, there could have been no Inst.i.tute, don't you see? What I mean is that the Inst.i.tute came because your Chapter needed it, and you needed it; not because the Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute, 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 s.p.a.ce curtained off for the primary cla.s.s, 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 Sat.u.r.day on the old place, in free and blissful a.s.sociation 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, rehea.r.s.ed how he had served for years as superintendent of the country Sunday school, and how Mrs.

Farwell was teacher of the Girls' Bible Cla.s.s. 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 t.i.tle 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses 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 subst.i.tute 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 cla.s.s; 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 cla.s.s going; it's never stopped since. The Board of Sunday Schools has given us the courses and helped us keep the cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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' cla.s.s, 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 pa.s.s 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."