The church to whose work he had joyfully given himself from his youth had grown to be a mighty and a highly complex machine.  Some thought it was more machinery than life, more organization than organism.  But Walter Drury knew better.  It was a wonderful machine, wheels within wheels, but there was within the wheels the living spirit of the prophet’s vision.

Partly because the church was so vast and its work of such infinite variety, very few of its members knew what it did, or how, or why.  It was all over the land, and in the ends of the earth, for people joined it; and they lived their lives in the cheerful and congenial circle of its fellowship.  But the planetary sweep of its program and its enterprises was to most of them not even as a tale that is told.  They were content to be busy with their own affairs, and had small curiosity to know what meanings and mysteries might be discovered out in places they had never explored, even though just ’round the corner from the week-by-week activities of the familiar home congregation.

Walter Drury, at the end of one reasonably successful pastorate, had stood bewildered and baffled as he looked back over his five years of effort against this persistent and amiable passivity.  It was not a deliberate sin, or he might have denounced it; nor a temporary numbness, or he might have waited for it to disappear.  All the more it dismayed him.

At the beginning of his ministry he had set this goal before him, that every soul under his care might see as he saw, and see with him more clearly year by year, the church’s great work; its true and total business.  He had not failed, as the Annual Conference reckons failure.  But he knew he had been less than successful.  The people of his successive appointments were receptive people as church folk go.  Then who was to blame, that sermons and books and Advocates and pictures and high officials and frequent great assemblies, always accomplishing something, always left behind them the untouched, unmoved majority of the people called Methodists?

It was all this and more of the same sort, which at last took shape in Drury’s thought and fixed the manner and matter of the Experiment.  This boy he had found, with a name that might be either prophecy or mockery, he would study like a book.  He would brood over his life.  Mind you, he would take no advantage, use no influence unfairly.  He would neither dictate nor drive.  He would not trespass even so far as to the outer edges of the boy’s free personality.  For the most part he would stay in the background.  But he would watch the boy, as for lesser outcomes Darwin watched the creatures of wood and field.  Without revealing all his purpose he would set before this boy good and evil; the lesser good and the greater.  He would use for high and holy ends the method which the tempter never tires of using for confusion.  He would show this boy the kingdoms of the children of God, and the glories of them, and would promise them to him, not for a moment’s shame but for a life’s devotion.