On the 7th of January, 1861, he received a letter from his mother, in which she gave her consent that he should be a foreign missionary, naming only one or two conditions which involved no insuperable difficulty. In a student prayer meeting about three weeks later he took occasion in some remarks to tell them that he had decided to offer himself for this work. Still, it was not until the 5th of April, and when within two weeks of graduation, that he, in a full and formal letter, such as is expected and is appropriate, offered himself to the Board. In his Journal of that date, after recording the character of his letter, he says: “This is a solemn and important step which I have now taken. During this week, while writing this letter, I have, I trust, looked again at the whole matter, and asked help and guidance from God. I fully believe it is my duty to go. My greatest fear has been that I was not as willing to go as I should be, but I cast myself on Christ and go forward.” On the 13th of April he received word from the Board that he had been accepted, the time of his going out and his field of labor being yet undetermined. So the problem of his life work was at length solved, as surely as it could be by human agency. It had been his mother’s wish that he should wait a year before going to his field, and to this he had no serious objection; but as matters turned out, more than two years elapsed before he was able to leave this country. This long delay was caused by the outbreak of the Civil War, and the financial stringency which made it impossible for the Foreign Board to assume any additional obligations. Much of the time the outlook was so dark that he almost abandoned hope of entering on his chosen work, though the thought of this filled his heart with grief. He was intensely loyal to the cause of the Union, and if he had not been a licentiate for the ministry he almost certainly would have enlisted in the army. He records his determination to go if drafted. Once, indeed, during this period of waiting he was a sort of candidate for a chaplaincy to a regiment, which fortunately he did not secure. For several months he preached here and there in the churches of the general region about Pittsburg, and also made a visit to towns in central Ohio, one of these being Delaware, the seat of the Ohio Wesleyan University. Not long afterward he received an urgent request from the Old School Presbyterian Church in that town to come and supply them. About the same time the churches of Fairmount and Plains in Pennsylvania gave him a formal call to become their pastor, but this he declined. He accepted the invitation to Delaware, I suppose partly because it left him free still to go as a missionary whenever the way might open. At Delaware he remained eighteen months, until at last, in the good providence of God, he was ordered “to the front” out in China.