Railways helped this process, and so did
steamships and air routes and telegraph and wireless. More than that,
all the world was becoming increasingly related to the life of every
part. With raw material produced in Brazil to make tires for the
limousines of Fifth Avenue and the Lake Shore Drive, what of the new
kinship between the producers in Brazil and the users in the States? All
good was coming to be the good of all the earth; and all evil was able
to affect the lives of unsuspecting folk half the earth's circumference
away.

In such a time, what an insistent call for the program and power of the
Christian faith! And the call could be answered. J.W. had seen the
church applying the program as well in a Chinese city and in an Indian
village as in his home town and on the Mexican border. He was sure that
the power that was in the Christian message could heal all the hurts of
the world, and bring all peoples into "a world-commonwealth of good
will."

This was what Jesus meant to do; not just to save here and there a
little group for heaven out of the general hopelessness, but to save and
make whole the heart of mankind. The church was not, first of all,
seeking its own enlargement, but extending the reach of its Founder's
purpose. It did all its many-sided work for a far greater reason than
any increase in its own numbers and importance; in a word, for the
Christianizing of life, Sunday and every day, in Delafield as well as in
the forests of the Amazon and the huddled cities of China.

J.W. sat on the edge of his berth. In the first glow of this new
understanding his nerves had steadied to a serenity that was akin to
awe. Yet he knew he had made no great discovery. The thing he saw had
been there all the time.

Then his mind set to work again on that motley procession of pictures
which he had likened to a patchwork film. Was it as disjointed as it
seemed? Could it not be so put together as to make a true continuity,
consistent and complete?

Why not? In the events of his own life, strangely enough, he had the
clue to its right arrangement. By what seemed to be accidental or
incidental opportunity it had been his singular fortune to come in
contact with some aspect or another of all the work his church was
doing. And every element of it, from the beginners' class at Delafield
to the language school at Nanking, from the college social in First
Church to the celebration at Foochow--it was all New Testament work.