As a preacher he opened village schools, and taught the children their letters, his own boy among them.  Abraham learned quickly.  A place was found for him in a mission boarding school.  Thence he moved on and up to Lucknow Christian College.  It was this man who escorted J.W. through the great mills of which he was an executive.  He had a salary of two hundred dollars a month.  If his father had been an American village preacher at twelve hundred dollars a year, Abraham’s salary, relatively, would need to be twenty or thirty thousand dollars.

Abraham was the superintendent of a Sunday school in Cawnpore.  He was giving himself to all sorts of betterment work which would lessen the misery of the poor.  He had a seat in the city council.  A hostel for boys was one of his enterprises.  Here was a man doing his utmost to Christianize the industry in which thousands of his country men spent their lives; a second-generation Christian, and a man who must be reckoned with, no longer spurned and despised as a casteless nobody.

J.W. followed Abraham about the mills with growing admiration.  Inside the walls, light, orderly paths, flowers, cleanliness.  Outside the gate, to step across the road was to walk a thousand years into the past, among the smells and the ageless noises of the bazaar, with its chaffering and cheating, its primitive crudities, and its changeless wares.  Certainly, a Cawnpore mill is not the ideal industrial commonwealth, but without men like Abraham to alleviate its grimness the coming of larger opportunities through work like this might well lay a heavier burden on men’s lives than the primitive and costly toil which it has displaced.

There was just time for a visit to Lucknow, a city which to the British is the historic place of mutiny and siege; to American Methodists a place both of history and of present-day advance.  J.W. worshiped in the great Hindustani Methodist church, the busy home of many activities.  In the congregation were many students, girls from Isabella Thoburn College, and boys from Lucknow Christian College.  Lifelong Methodist as he was, J.W. quickly recognized, even amid these new surroundings, the familiar aspects of a Methodist church on its busy day.  The crowding congregations were enough to stir one’s blood.  A noble organ sounded out the call to worship and led the choir and people in the service of praise.  There was a Sunday school in full operation, and an Epworth League Chapter, completely organized and active.  His guide confided to J.W. that this church had yet another point of resemblance to the great churches at home; it was quite accustomed to sending a committee to Conference, to tell the bishop whom it wanted for preacher next year!

J.W. was not quite satisfied.  The days of his wanderings must soon be over, but before he left India he wanted to see the missionary in actual contact with the immemorial paganism of the villages, for he had discovered that the village is India.  How was the Christian message meeting all the dreary emptinesses and limitations of village life?