But J.W. was not hungry.  He was struggling with an old thought that to him had all the tantalizing quality of novelty.  The talk of the morning had become a sort of roll-call of church boards.  How did it happen that the church was busy with this and that and the other work?  Why a Board of Hospitals and Homes?  Why a Deaconess Board, even though deaconess work happened to be merciful and gentle and Christlike?  What was the church doing with a Book Concern?  How came it that we had that board with the long name—­Temperance, Prohibition, and Public Morals?  He had traveled from Yokohama to Lucknow and back, and everywhere he had found this same church doing all sorts of work, with no slightest suspicion but that all of it was her proper business.

So picture after picture flickered before his mind’s eye, as though his brain had built up a five-reel mental movie from all sorts of memory film; a hundred feet of this, two hundred of that, a thousand here, there just a flash.  It had all one common mark; it was all “the church,” but the hit-and-miss of it, its lightning change, bewildered him.  The pictures leaped from Cartwright to Cawnpore, from the country church at Ellis to Joe Carbrook’s hospital in China; from New York and Philadelphia and Chicago and Cincinnati and Washington to the ends of the country and the ends of the earth; and in and through it all, swift bits of unrelated yet vivid hints of Advocates and Heralds, of prayer meetings and institutes, of new churches and old colleges, of revivals and sewing societies, of League socials and Annual Conferences, of deaconesses visiting dreary homes, and soft-footed nurses going about in great hospitals; of beginners’ departments and old people’s homes; of kindergartens and clinics and preparatory classes.  There seemed no end to it all, every moment some new aspect of the church’s activity showed itself and then was gone.

It was a most confused and confusing experience; and all through the rest of the day J.W. caught himself wondering again and again at the variety and complexity of the church’s affairs.

Why should a church be occupied with all this medley?  Why should it be so distracted from its main purpose, to be a Jack of all trades?  Why should it open its doors and train its workers and spend its money in persistent response to every imaginable human appeal?

Perhaps that might be it; “human.”  Once a philosopher had said, “I am a man, and therefore nothing human is foreign to me.”  What if the church by its very nature must be like that? what if this really were its main purpose—­all these varied and sometimes almost conflicting activities no more than its effort to obey the central law of its life?