Isn’t there a wolf any longer in times that are modern? Or may he perhaps be just a playful cub? Or possibly, by this time, a toothless, plain, doddering beastling? Has the age of lofty heroism in religion--the age of sheer contempt of some of the traditional goods of life--clean passed away? And does economics furnish the better clue in modern days to those who are called of God to preach? Do we need any 30,000 more preachers in the country trenches? Do we need any shock troops at all? Isn’t it perfectly orthodox pacifism in these days for all the picked soldiers in the war on the devil to fall back into comfortable winter quarters? _Side-stepping the Law of Hire_ I try to find my answer to these troubling queries in a glance down the centuries. There are the barefoot Black Friars of Dominic and the Gray Friars of Francis of Assisi (him who took poverty for his bride) in the thirteenth century. They gloried in mean clothes, mean shelter, mean food, as they ministered out of their own poverty to the poor, the overlooked, the no-accounts (in cities, then, because the troop of comfortable parsons were fattening in the popular country districts). There are the visionaries and enthusiasts: John Bunyan in the seventeenth century; John and Charles Wesley in the eighteenth. In the very face of the plentiful, complacent clergy, they fought the wolf as if they had been apostles living in the first century. There is Jean Frederick Oberlin, in the early part of the nineteenth century, who protested, “I do not wish to labor in some comfortable pastoral charge where I can be at ease. I want a work to do which no one else wishes to do, and which will not be done unless I do it.” Oberlin had just won his degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Strasburg, at a time when Strasburg was a city of France. His “call” to pastoral duty came all of a sudden with the wind of a February evening rushing in at the door as a stranger stepped into the bare room. Struck with the poverty of the place, Pastor Stuber introduced himself. Beard’s translation from the French presents us with the picture: “I have learned about you, Herr Oberlin. Your name has been mentioned to me as one who does not follow the beaten paths of ministerial candidates. You have studied surgery and medicine. You have a knowledge of botany and herbs. Is this not so?” “In my leisure hours I have paid some attention to botany, to blood-letting, and the experiences of the anatomical room,” replied Oberlin. “Will you be kind enough to explain to me what this little pan means that I see here by your lamp?” asked Stuber. A deep blush ran over Oberlin’s face. “Pardon the cooking, Herr Pastor. I take my dinner with my parents, and I bring away some bread which my mother gives me. At eight o’clock I put this little pan over my lamp, place my bread in it, with a little water and salt. Then I go on with my studies.”