ore eager to be at
it in hard earnest.

The church to whose work he had joyfully given himself from his youth
had grown to be a mighty and a highly complex machine. Some thought it
was more machinery than life, more organization than organism. But
Walter Drury knew better. It _was_ a wonderful machine, wheels within
wheels, but there was within the wheels the living spirit of the
prophet's vision.

Partly because the church was so vast and its work of such infinite
variety, very few of its members knew what it did, or how, or why. It
was all over the land, and in the ends of the earth, for people joined
it; and they lived their lives in the cheerful and congenial circle of
its fellowship. But the planetary sweep of its program and its
enterprises was to most of them not even as a tale that is told. They
were content to be busy with their own affairs, and had small curiosity
to know what meanings and mysteries might be discovered out in places
they had never explored, even though just 'round the corner from the
week-by-week activities of the familiar home congregation.

Walter Drury, at the end of one reasonably successful pastorate, had
stood bewildered and baffled as he looked back over his five years of
effort against this persistent and amiable passivity. It was not a
deliberate sin, or he might have denounced it; nor a temporary numbness,
or he might have waited for it to disappear. All the more it dismayed
him.

At the beginning of his ministry he had set this goal before him, that
every soul under his care might see as he saw, and see with him more
clearly year by year, the church's great work; its true and total
business. He had not failed, as the Annual Conference reckons failure.
But he knew he had been less than successful. The people of his
successive appointments were receptive people as church folk go. Then
who was to blame, that sermons and books and Advocates and pictures and
high officials and frequent great assemblies, always accomplishing
something, always left behind them the untouched, unmoved majority of
the people called Methodists?

It was all this and more of the same sort, which at last took shape in
Drury's thought and fixed the manner and matter of the Experiment. This
boy he had found, with a name that might be either prophecy or mockery,
he would study like a book. He would brood over his life. Mind you, he
would take no advantage, use no influence unfairly. He would neither
dictate n