ght, but I came home
and began washing my windows. That's all.

J.W. said "Huh!" and that stood for understanding, and approval, and
confidence.

As to Marty's preaching, it was a boy's preaching, naturally, but it was
preaching. And the people came for it; J.W., remarked to himself the
contrast between the close-parked cars around Ellis church and the
forlornly vacant horse-sheds he had seen at Deep Creek the Sunday
before.

The hearty singing of people glad to be singing together, the contagious
interest of a well-filled house, and the simple directness of the
preacher were all of a piece. Here was no effort to ape the forms of a
cathedral, but neither was there any careless, cheap slovenliness. And
assuredly there were no religious "stunts."

Marty preached the Christian evangel, not moralized agriculture. He made
the gospel invitation a social appeal, without blinking its primary
message to the individual to place himself under the authority of
Christ's self-forgetting love. He put first things in front--"Him that
cometh unto me," and then with simple illustrations and words as simple
he showed that they who had accepted Christ's lordship were honor bound
to live together under a new sort of law from that of the restless,
pushing, self-centered world: "It shall not be so among you." Besides,
he told them they could not separate service from profit. They knew, for
instance, that their farm values were a third higher because of the
presence of the church and its work, but they would find that the profit
motive was not big enough to keep the church going. They had to love the
work, and do it for love of it.

That afternoon the friends drove over to Valencia, where at night Marty
would preach again this his one sermon of the week; and J.W. left him
there, turning his car homeward for the fifty-two miles to Delafield.

As they parted, J.W. gripped Marty's hand and said: "Old man, I own up.
I thought you ought not to bury yourself in the country, but I had no
need to worry. I know preachers who are buried in town all right; you
have a bigger field and a livelier one than they will ever find. And
I'll never say another word about your two-weeks' school. If the Home
Missions Board had nothing else to do, such work as it showed you how to
do would be worth all the Board costs. I'm going to make trouble for Mr.
Drury and the district superintendent and the bishop and the Board and
anybody else I can get hold of, until