J.W. was in his stateroom; he paced the narrow aisle between the berths—­three steps forward, three steps back, like a caged wild thing.  Something was coming to new reality in his soul; he was scarce conscious of the walls that shut him in.  Once he stopped by the open port.  He looked out at the tumbling rollers of the wide Pacific.  And as he looked he thought of the vastness of this sea, how its waters washed the icy shores of Alaska and the palm-fronded atolls of the Marquesas; how they carried on their bosom the multitudinous commerce of a hundred peoples; how from Santiago to Shanghai and from the Yukon to New Zealand it was one ocean, serving all lands, and taking toll of all.

In spite of all the complexities and diversities of the lands about this ocean, they had one possession which all might claim, as it claimed them—­the sea.  It gave them neighbors and trade, climate and their daily bread.  In the sociology and geography and economics of the Orient this Pacific Ocean was the great common denominator. And in the geography and economics and sociology of the kingdom of God?  Might it not be—­must it not be, the church!

Not only the Pacific basin, but the round world was like that, every part of it dependent on all the rest, and growing every day more and more conscious of all the rest.  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.