So they talked of anything and everything.  By and by Marty said he must go over to the library, and pretty soon J.W. was telling his friend the pastor all that had been disturbing him.

“It all began in the summer before I came to college, at the Institute here, you know, when you spoke at the camp fire on Saturday night.”

“I remember,” the pastor replied.  “You hadn’t taken much interest in your future work before that?”

“No real interest, I guess,” J.W. admitted.  “I’d always taken things as they came, and didn’t go looking for what I couldn’t see.  I was enjoying every day’s living, and didn’t care deeply about anything else.  Why, though I’ve been a Methodist all my life, you remember how I knew nothing at all about the Methodist Church outside of Delafield, except what little I picked up about its Sunday schools by serving as an assistant to our Sunday school secretary.  And when I began to hear, at the Institute, about home missions and foreign missions, about Negro education and other business that the church was doing, I saw right off that it was up to us young people to supply the new workers that were always needed.  But, even so, only those who had a real fitness for it ought to offer themselves, and I thought too that something else would be needed.  I wasn’t any duller than lots of other church members—­even the older ones didn’t seem to know much more about the church outside than I did.  You would take up collections for the benevolences, but if you told us what they meant, we didn’t pay enough attention to get the idea clearly, so as to have any real understanding.  I suppose the women’s societies had more.  I know my mother talks about Industrial Homes in the South, and schools in India—­she’s in both the societies, you know—­but that is about all.”

“And it seemed when I began to find out about things, Mr. Drury, that if our whole church needed workers for all these places, it needed just as much to have in the local churches men and women who would know about the work in a big way, and who would care in a big way, to back up the whole work as it should be backed up.  So, when you spoke at the camp fire it was just what I wanted to hear, and when I was called on, I made that sort of a declaration the next day at the life decision services.”

“Yes I remember that too,” said Mr. Drury, “and I remember telling Joe Carbrook that you had undertaken as big a career as any of them.”

“That’s what I kind of thought too,” said J.W., simply, “but rooming with Marty Shenk—­he’s going to make a great preacher too—­keeps me thinking, and I know about all the students who are getting ready for special work, and lately I’ve been wondering——­”

“About some special sort of work you’d like to do?” Mr. Drury prompted.

“No; not that at all.  I’m just as sure as ever I’m not that sort.  If only I can make good in business, there’s where I belong.  But can a fellow make good just as a Christian in the same way I expect Marty Shenk to make good as a Christian preacher?”