So, at the camp fires a man talked to the boys and a woman to the girls, not about the Institute, but about life.  These speakers knew the strange effect an Institute week has on impressionable and romantic youth; they knew that by this time scores of the students were either saying to themselves, “I’ve got to do something big before this thing’s over,” or were vainly trying to put the conviction away.

The woman who talked to the girls happened to be a preacher’s wife.  This gave her a certain advantage when she told the listening girls that the greatest of all occupations for them was not some special vocation, but what Ida Tarbell has called “the business of being a woman.”  It was good preparation for the next day’s program, with its specific and glamorous appeal, for it put first the great claim, so that special vocations could be seen in clear air and could be fairly measured.

Pastor Drury, who talked to the boys, was talking to them all, as J.W. very well knew, but every word seemed for him; as, indeed, it was, in a sense that he did not suspect.  He was not surprised that his pastor should present the Christian life as effectively livable by bricklayers and business men as surely as by missionaries.  He had heard that before.  But to J.W. the old message had a new setting, a new force.  And never before had he been so ready to receive it.

The songs had sung themselves out, as the fire changed from roaring flame and flying sparks to a great bed of living coals.  From the world’s beginning a glowing hearth has been perfect focus for straight thought and plain speech.  The boys found it so this night.

The minister began so simply that it seemed almost as if his voice were only the musings of many, just become audible.  “I know,” said he, “that to-morrow some of you will find yourselves, and will eagerly offer your lives for religious callings.  We shall all be proud of you and glad to see it.  But most of you cannot do that.  You are already sure that you must be content to live ‘ordinary Christian lives,’ It is possible that to-morrow you may feel a little out of the picture.  And those who are hearing a special call might regard you, quite unconsciously, of course, as not exactly on their level.”

“Now, suppose we get this thing straight to-night.  There is no great nor small, no high nor low, in real service.  The differences are only in the forms of work you do.  The quality may be just as fine in one place as in another.  The boy who goes into the ministry, or who becomes a medical missionary, will have peculiar chances for usefulness.  So also will the boy who goes into business or farming or teaching, or any other so-called secular occupation.  Just because he is not called to religious work as a daily business he dare not think that he has no call.  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