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.  We’ve just got to do it, or be quitters.  As Phil Khamis said at Morning Watch yesterday, ’Everything we have has come to us by the goodness of Christian people.’  We aren’t willing to be the last links of that chain.

We don’t want any special recognition, but I hope the Bishop and the General Secretary and the Dean and all the rest of the League leaders will know they can count on us just as we know they can count on these friends of ours who have just become life service volunteers.

Nobody knows what might have happened if some one had not spoken like that, but as the group of new volunteers stood about the platform at the close of the meeting, the other young people, instead of wandering off and feeling themselves of no significance, came crowding about them, to say to them, boy-and-girl fashion, something of what J.W.’s little speech had suggested.  Out of some four hundred Epworthians enrolled in the Institute, about forty had made definite decisions; but certainly not less than two hundred more had also faced the future, and in some sort had made a new contract with themselves and with God.

The Institute ended there, except for a simple vesper service after the evening meal, and on Monday morning the whole company was homeward bound.

The Delafield delegation had separated.  The larger group went home by train, but Joe Carbrook’s insistence was not to be withstood, so J.W. and Marty, Marcia Dayne and Pastor Drury were Joe’s passengers for the fifty-odd miles between Institute and home.

They sang, they cheered, they yelled the Institute yells.  They lived over the crowded days of the week that had so swiftly passed.  But most of all they deeply resolved that so far as they could help to do it while they were at home the League Chapter of Delafield should be made over into something of more use to the church to which it belonged.

It was Marty who put their purpose into the fewest words.  “We, and the others who have been to the Institute, don’t think we know every little League thing,” said he, “and we don’t think we are the whole League either.  But every time anybody in our Chapter starts anything good, he’s going to have more and better help than he ever had before.”

Which thing came to pass, as may one day be recorded.  The Rev. Walter Drury kept his own counsel, but he knew that more had happened than the putting of new life into the League.  The Experiment had progressed safely through some most difficult stages.