ggest fight that's in them. We've just got to do it, or be quitters.
As Phil Khamis said at Morning Watch yesterday, 'Everything we have has
come to us by the goodness of Christian people.' We aren't willing to be
the last links of that chain.
We don't want any special recognition, but I hope the Bishop and the
General Secretary and the Dean and all the rest of the League leaders
will know they can count on us just as we know they can count on these
friends of ours who have just become life service volunteers.
Nobody knows what might have happened if some one had not spoken like
that, but as the group of new volunteers stood about the platform at the
close of the meeting, the other young people, instead of wandering off
and feeling themselves of no significance, came crowding about them, to
say to them, boy-and-girl fashion, something of what J.W.'s little
speech had suggested. Out of some four hundred Epworthians enrolled in
the Institute, about forty had made definite decisions; but certainly
not less than two hundred more had also faced the future, and in some
sort had made a new contract with themselves and with God.
The Institute ended there, except for a simple vesper service after the
evening meal, and on Monday morning the whole company was homeward
bound.
The Delafield delegation had separated. The larger group went home by
train, but Joe Carbrook's insistence was not to be withstood, so J.W.
and Marty, Marcia Dayne and Pastor Drury were Joe's passengers for the
fifty-odd miles between Institute and home.
They sang, they cheered, they yelled the Institute yells. They lived
over the crowded days of the week that had so swiftly passed. But most
of all they deeply resolved that so far as they could help to do it
while they were at home the League Chapter of Delafield should be made
over into something of more use to the church to which it belonged.
It was Marty who put their purpose into the fewest words. "We, and the
others who have been to the Institute, don't think we know every little
League thing," said he, "and we don't think we are the whole League
either. But every time anybody in our Chapter starts anything good, he's
going to have more and better help than he ever had before."
Which thing came to pass, as may one day be recorded. The Rev. Walter
Drury kept his own counsel, but he knew that more had happened than the
putting of new life into the League. The Experiment had progressed
safely t
|