John Wesley, Jr. | Page 2

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 God, 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 passivity. 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 assemblies, 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 trespass 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 God, 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
trimming 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 passed. 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 INSTITUTE PANORAMA
"If anybody expects me to stay away from Institute 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