“Probably made him mad,” thought J.W.  “I wonder why I said it.  Joe’s the last boy in the world to have any such notion.  But—­well, something’s already begun to happen to him, that’s sure—­and to me too.”

On Sunday the little world of the Institute assumed a new and no less attractive aspect.  Everybody was dressed for Sunday, as at home.  Classes were over; and games also; the dining room became for the first time a place of comparative quiet, with now and then the singing of a great old hymn, just to voice the Institute consciousness.

The Morning Watch talk had been a little more direct, a little more tense.  And before the Bishop’s sermon came the love feast.  Now, the Methodists of the older generation made much of their love feasts, but in these days, except at the Annual Conference, an occasional Institute is almost the only place where it flourishes with something of the ancient fervor.

Many changes have come to Methodism since the great days of the love feast; changes of custom and thought and speech.  But your ardent young Methodist of any period, Chaplain McCabe, Peter Cartwright, Jesse Lee, Captain Webb, would have understood and gloried in this Institute love feast.  It spoke their speech.

Our group from Delafield will never forget it.

Nearly all of them spoke; Marcia Dayne first because she was usually expected to lead in everything of the sort, then Marty, then J.W., and, last of all and most astounding, Joe Carbrook.

Marty looked the soldier, and he put his confession into military terms.  He spoke about his Captain and waiting for orders, and a new understanding of obedience.

Before J.W. got his chance to speak, the leader read a night letter from an Institute far away, conveying the greetings of six hundred young people to their fellow Epworthians.

J.W. could not bring himself to speak in terms of personal experience.  He was still under the spell of last night’s camp fire, and his brief encounter with Joe Carbrook, but without quite knowing what could possibly come of all that.  And the telegram gave him an excuse to speak in another vein.  You must remember that up to now he had been wholly local in his League interests.  He had gone to no conventions, he was not a reader of The Epworth Herald, and to him the Central Office was as though it had not been.

“I wonder if anybody else feels as I do,” he said, “about this League of ours?  Until this last week I never thought much about it.  But we’ve just heard that telegram from an Institute bigger than this, a thousand miles off.  And there’s fifty-five or sixty Institutes going on this year, besides the winter Institutes, the conventions, and all the other gatherings.  We seem to belong to a movement that enrolls almost a million young people, with all sorts of chances to learn how it can do all sorts of Christian work by actually doing it.  This isn’t the only thing I’ve found out