Part 1 (1/2)
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 fellows.h.i.+p. 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 accomplis.h.i.+ng 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-fas.h.i.+on, 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.”