Dan B. Brummitt

“ Miss Morel, being a teacher going home after three years of steady, close work in a Manila high school, was ready to talk of anything but school work. She found herself immensely interested in J.W.'s experiences. He had told her of the double life, so to say, which he had led; preaching the good news of better tools, and studying the work of other men and women, as truly salesmen as himself, who preached a more arresting and insistent gospel. ”

“ Drury, "I remember. Maybe saying it's the church's own fault is not just the way to put it. Say instead that you can't educate children, nor yet races that are developing, and expect them to turn out exactly according to your notions of the future. Because, when their minds are growing they are developing, not according to something in you, but according to something in them. So every teacher, and I suppose every parent, has moments of wondering how it ever happens that young people learn so much that is not taught them. ”

“ You have been fully Americanized for more generations than most other Americans. You have no need to strive after the American spirit. I have a friend of Greek birth, who thinks pridefully back to the Golden Age of Greece, and I envy him his glorying. But your pride of race, turning away from the unhappy past, sees your Golden Age in the days to come, not in the dim yesterdays. You are the makers, not the inheritors, of a great destiny. ”

“ And our church, your church, has set up these schools and these training homes I have mentioned, as though she were saying, in the words of one of your own wonderful songs, 'Let my people go!' And the results are coming. Your two bishops, one in the South and one in Africa, your leaders in the church's highest councils, your educators, your far-seeing business men, your great preachers, are part of the answer to your church's passion to give full freedom to all her people.
For you are _her_ people, the people of the Christian Church; we are all God's people. ”

“ A good hardware store in a country town is a center of democracy for town and country alike. In what other place do farmers and artisans, country women and city women meet on so nearly equal terms? Not in the postoffice, nor in the bank; and certainly not in the department store. But the hardware store's customers, men and women all, are masters of the tools they work with; and whoso loves the tools of his craft is brother to every other craftsman. ”

“ But it may as well be told that, even more than China, India made the deepest impress on the mind and heart of our tool-traveler. From the moment when he landed in Calcutta to the moment when he watched the low coasts of the Ganges delta merge into the horizon far astern, India would not let him alone. He saw poverty such as could scarcely be described, and religious rites the very telling of which might sear the tongue. ”

“ God's calling is not for the few, but for the many. And just now the man who puts his whole soul into being an out-and-out Christian in his daily business and in his personal life as a responsible citizen must have the genuine missionary spirit. He must live like a prophet, that is, a messenger from God. He must know the Christian meaning of all that happens in the world. And he must stand for the whole Christian program. Otherwise, not all the ministers and missionaries in the world can save our civilization. ”

“ But in a more than usually prosaic moment Jeannette said, "John Wesley, I wonder if there's any hope to get the Deep Creek young people interested in church the way they used to be? I'm just hungry for the sort of good times the older boys and girls used to have when you and Marty and I were nothing but children. They enjoyed themselves, and so did everybody else. What's the matter with so many country churches, nowadays?" ”

“ Now, our Saint Sheridan used to say that an Institute was a combination of college, circus, and camp meeting. I would venture a different putting of it. An Institute is a bit of young democracy in action. Its people play together, for play's sake and for finding their honest human level. They study together, to become decently intelligent about some of the real business of the kingdom of God, and how the church proposes to transact that business. They wait for new vision together, the Institute being a good time and a good place for seeing life clear and seeing it whole. ”

“ But don't you know that every Children's Day collection in the whole church goes to the Board of Education, and that it has become a big fund, never to be given away but always to be loaned to students getting ready to be preachers and such? It's no charity; it's the same broad-minded business you want me to go to college for. I can see that much without getting any nearer to college than the Delafield First Church Sunday School. You borrow the money, just as if you stepped up to a bank window, and you agree to pay it back as soon as you can after you graduate. ”

“ Now you seem to say that education makes people discontented."
"Of course it does," said Mr. Drury, "that's the reason it is good for them. Would you be content to call a one-room shack home, and live as the plantation hand lives? If you would, the world's profit out of you, and your own profit out of yourself, wouldn't be much. Real education does exactly mean discontent. And the people who are discontented may be uncomfortable to live with, if we think they ought to be docile, but they get us forward."
"Maybe you're right," J.W. conceded, "and the church is not to be blamed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Here was a Christian college older than many in America. Its results could not be measured by any visible standards, yet he had seen graduates of the school and students who did not stay long enough to graduate, men of light and leading, men of wealth and station, officials, men in whom the spirit of the new China burned, Christian workers; and all these bore convincing testimony that this college had been the one great mastering influence of their lives. A Christian college—in China! ”

“ Drury told him. "Yes, that's the Methodist theory. For the fifty years of the old Freedmen's Aid Society—now the Board of Education for Negroes—it has run these schools, eighteen of them now, with five thousand seven hundred and two earnest students enrolled, on a double theory. The first part of the theory is that every child—black, white, red or yellow—ought to have all the education he can use. Anything less than that would be as good as saying that America cares to develop its human resources only just so far, and not to the limit. ”

“ He taught me to talk the American way. He find me other friends, though I could do nothing at all for them to pay them back. Now I am Christian—real, not only baptized. The young people of the church take me in to whatever they do. They call me 'Phil' and never care that I am a foreigner, so when I heard about this Institute I say to myself, 'It is something strange to me, but I hear that many people like those in my church will be there.' I cannot quite believe that, but it sounded good, and I wanted to come and see. And now I know that many people are young people like those I first knew. ”

“ He said nothing of the two great classes, the rulers with much European blood, and the peons, largely or altogether Indian. There must be all sorts of Latin Americans, rich and poor, mixed blood of many strains, Castilian and Aztec and Inca, and whatever other people were here when Columbus set the fashion for American voyages. But this is where this 'missionary father-in-law' hit the heart of the trouble: Latin America has all sorts and conditions of men, but everywhere it has the same church. And it is a church that can't ever make good any more. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Albert Drury laughed. "That's easy, only a preacher couldn't be expected to see it. If any country boy really knows the stuff he handles, whether it is hardware or candy or hides, he can get the chance all right. This town wants him. Don't you know that the big wholesale houses recruit their sales forces by spotting just such boys as your John Wesley Farwell may be? But what do you mean by calling him average, if he's such a keen judge of hardware?" ”

“ All you have to-day—this Institute, your religion, your church, your friends, the kind of a home you have and are so proud of—everything has come to you by what Phil calls the goodness of Christian people. ”

“ I've thought lately that exclusiveness may be just as bad for people inside the gates, as for the people outside. But here we are, as the Atlantic City whale said when the ebb tide stranded it in front of the Board Walk. What are we up to, us three?"
"We're up to finding out about the town churches," said J.W. "Maybe they can help the town more than they do, but we don't know how, and so far we haven't found anybody else who knows how."
And Marcia said: "At least we know some things. We have the figures. About one Delafield citizen in seven goes to church or Sunday school on Sunday. ”

“ The great need is the strongest argument for the highest education. Because of your great numbers, and because of your ever intenser racial self-respect, the Negro must educate the Negro, be physician for the Negro, preach to the Negro, nurse the Negro, lead the Negro in all his upward effort. Otherwise these things will be done badly, or patronizingly, or not at all.
But if you are to do your own educational work, your educators must be fully equipped. It is not possible to send the whole race to college, but it is possible to send college-trained youth to the race. ”

“ Abraham was the superintendent of a Sunday school in Cawnpore. He was giving himself to all sorts of betterment work which would lessen the misery of the poor. He had a seat in the city council. A hostel for boys was one of his enterprises. Here was a man doing his utmost to Christianize the industry in which thousands of his country men spent their lives; a second-generation Christian, and a man who must be reckoned with, no longer spurned and despised as a casteless nobody. ”

“ The Cummings Hardware Corporation may be without a soul, as corporations are known to be, but it has many eyes.
These eyes followed J.W.'s progress from Shanghai to Foochow, to Hong Kong, to Manila. They observed how he studied artisans and their ways with tools, and the ways of builders with house fittings, and the various devices with which in field and garden the toilers set themselves to their endless labor. As the eyes of the Cummings organization saw these things, the word went back across the water to Saint Louis, and Peter McDougall took credit to himself for a commendable shrewdness. ”

“ He had no fear of failing to become a salesman, after the first few experiences under Finch's watchful eye; his father had taught him a sort of salesmanship which experience could only make more effective. He knew already never to sell what he could see his customer ought not to buy, and he knew always to contrive as much as possible that the customer should do the selling to himself. The elder Farwell used to say, "Let your customer once see the advantage that buying is to him, and he won't care what advantage selling is to you." ”

“ J.W. persisted. "Is our Christianity, as the Chinese get it, any advance on their own religion? Or is their religion all right, if they would work it as we hope they may work the Christian program?"
"That's two questions," said Rutledge, dryly, "but, after all, it is only one. Our Christianity as the Chinese get it is far ahead of the best they have, in ideals, in human values, everything, even if they were more consistent in responding to its claims than Christians are. The old religions—and China has several—are helpless. We are not killing off the old faiths. ”

“ 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?"
The pastor stood up and came over to J.W.'s chair. "My boy, I know just what you are facing. It is a pretty old struggle, and there's only one way out of it. God hasn't any first place and second place for the people that let him guide them. A man may refuse his call, either to go or to stay, and then no matter what he does it will be a second best. ”

“ The first concern of all the churches should be to reach the unchurched and to make church friends of the church-haters. This goes for all the churches; it is more important to get the sense of God and principles of Jesus into the thought of the whole town than to set Protestant and Roman Catholic in mutually suspicious and hateful opposition; devout Jew and sincere Christian must realize that righteousness in Delafield cannot be attended to by either without the other. ”

“ For once a woman made the address—a wise woman, let it be said, who made skillful and sure distinctions between the Christian life as a life and the work of the Christian Church as one way of living that life. ”

“ But I've got to talk like a Christian, whether I feel like one or not."
"My son," his father answered him, sententiously, "it's your speech, not mine. But if an old fogy may suggest something, why not forget all about the usual sort of welcome address? Why not say something of the whole program of our church as it affects our colored people? It touches the young folks more than any others. Welcome them to that."
"That's all very fine," J.W. objected. "Everybody who's on for an address of welcome is advised by his friends to cut out the old stuff, but it means work. ”

“ Well, to get to the point, I think she wants me to say, and I'm saying it to myself most of all, that for nearly all of us young people, Christian lifework must mean making an honest living, doing all we can to make our religion count at home, and then backing up with all we've got, by prayer and money and brains, all these others like Joe Carbrook and Marty Shenk, who are going into the hardest places to put up the biggest fight that's in them. ”