John Wesley, Jr.: The Story of an Experiment — John Shaqi
John Wesley, Jr.: The Story of an ExperimentBrummitt, Dan B. (Dan Brearley)
Religion
John Wesley, Jr.: The Story of an Experiment
Brummitt, Dan B. (Dan Brearley)
Christian fiction; Methodists -- Fiction
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 here, but it makes me want to see the whole League
become as good as it is big. I don't want to be dazzled by the size of
it, because I know how many other members are just as little use as I've
been. Only when I get home I hope I'm going to be a different sort of an
Epworthian, and I can't help wishing that we all felt that way about
being more good in the League. We can make it a hundred times more
useful to the church and to our Master."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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