John Wesley, Jr. Part 3

So, at the camp fires a man talked to the boys and a woman to the girls, not about the Inst.i.tute, but about life. These speakers knew the strange effect an Inst.i.tute 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. G.o.d'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 G.o.d. 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 b.u.mped 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 Inst.i.tute, 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 Inst.i.tute a.s.sumed a new and no less attractive aspect. Everybody was dressed for Sunday, as at home. Cla.s.ses 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute 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 Inst.i.tute bigger than this, a thousand miles off. And there's fifty-five or sixty Inst.i.tutes going on this year, besides the winter Inst.i.tutes, 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 wis.h.i.+ng 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 Inst.i.tute 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 G.o.d, 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 Inst.i.tute 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 a.s.sembly. And while the influence of it was still on them, J.W. saw Martin Luther Shenk, his cla.s.smate 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 Inst.i.tute," he began. "She has heard me talk since I found out a little about the Inst.i.tute, 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.

n.o.body 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 fas.h.i.+on, something of what J.W.'s little speech had suggested. Out of some four hundred Epworthians enrolled in the Inst.i.tute, 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 G.o.d.

The Inst.i.tute 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 pa.s.sengers for the fifty-odd miles between Inst.i.tute and home.

They sang, they cheered, they yelled the Inst.i.tute yells. They lived over the crowded days of the week that had so swiftly pa.s.sed. 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.