The third day being Sunday, J.W. listened to an American missionary in the morning, who spoke boldly of the prime need for a college like this if the youth of China were to be trained for the highest service to their country.  At night he sat through nearly three hours of the most amazing testimony meeting he had ever seen.  It was led by a Chinese who had been graduated from the college thirty years before.  The eagerness, almost impatience, to confess what Jesus Christ and Christian education had meant to these Chinese leaders—­for it was evident they were leaders—­was a thing to stir the most sluggish Christian pulse.  J.W.’s mind took him back to a memorable love feast at Cartwright Institute, when Joe Carbrook had made his first confession of and surrender to Jesus Christ, and it seemed to him that the likeness between these two so different gatherings was far more real than all their contrasts.

On Monday the anniversary banquet brought the American consul, a representative of the provincial governor, and many other dignitaries.  And on Tuesday the students put on a pageant which illustrated in gorgeousness of color and costume and accessories the history of the college.  Besides all this pomp and circumstance there was a wonderful industrial exhibit.  The president of China sent a scroll, as did also the prime minister.  Former students in the cities of China, from Peking to Amoy, sent subscriptions amounting to twenty-five thousand dollars for new buildings, and other old students in the Philippines sent a second twenty-five thousand dollars.

All of which stirred J.W. to the very soul.  Here was a Christian college older than many in America.  Its results could not be measured by any visible standards, yet he had seen graduates of the school and students who did not stay long enough to graduate, men of light and leading, men of wealth and station, officials, men in whom the spirit of the new China burned, Christian workers; and all these bore convincing testimony that this college had been the one great mastering influence of their lives.  A Christian college—­in China!

J.W. thought of it all and said to himself:  “I wonder if I am the same individual as he who not so many months ago was talking about the good sense of letting China wait indefinitely for Christ?  Anyhow, somebody has had better sense than that every day of the last forty years!”

The “tour of the tools” was teaching J.W. more than he could teach the merchants of Asia.  And yet he was doing no little missionary work, as evidenced both in his own reports to Peter McDougall, and still more in the reports which went to that observant gentleman after J.W. had moved on from any given place.  The Cummings Hardware Corporation may be without a soul, as corporations are known to be, but it has many eyes.

These eyes followed J.W.’s progress from Shanghai to Foochow, to Hong Kong, to Manila.  They observed how he studied artisans and their ways with tools, and the ways of builders with house fittings, and the various devices with which in field and garden the toilers set themselves to their endless labor.  As the eyes of the Cummings organization saw these things, the word went back across the water to Saint Louis, and Peter McDougall took credit to himself for a commendable shrewdness.