And now what had this ardent student, with splendid talents and high education, rich in special studies, who had in mind a great sphere of usefulness, to do with this call but to take it to Him to whom he had once for all consecrated himself, “with all sincerity of heart”? In that little room, Oberlin, on bended knee, lifted up his voice and prayed, “Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth,” and in agony he listened for the still, small voice. He could not wish to go, but he could not refuse to hear. And a great battle went on in his soul. There have been many battles in Strasbourg. The Roman armies fought there; the Germans triumphed there; the tri-colors of France have waved in the glory of victory there, but never a greater conflict, perhaps, or a more glorious conquering, than this between faith and sight, the issues of which God and the centuries were awaiting—a great soul meeting the questions of this world and the questions of eternity. When he arose from his prayer, he said: “I will go.” Conviction was action. Soon among them, his quick eye perceived that preaching to them in their condition would fall far short of their needs. He must save souls, but he must also save men and women. And here developed his missionary idea. It was not new, for Christ taught it and lived it, but it was new, for Christians had forgotten it. Christ was divinity in humanity, and the people must realize the divinity in the humanity. He must save their souls, but their souls are in their bodies. So he would not deal with them as if they were disembodied spirits, but seeing them in all their ignorance and material poverty, he would teach them how to meet their physical destitutions and their mental destitutions, and would go to them as persons who have a life in this world as well as in the world to come. Salvation for this people was not to rescue here and there merely a vacant mind, nor out of multitudes of shipwrecked souls to save here and there one from the wreck; but to him the Kingdom of God was like unto seed which a man put in his ground and which should grow—he knoweth not how—by all kinds of help, but which might call for long watching and long waiting. Therefore he said, “Education is indispensable to the uplifting of such a people,” and schools were planted. Home life must be redeemed, and home industries were taught. They need the industrial arts; hence he began to instruct them in carpentry, in masonry, in smithing and in agriculture. He introduced the planting of trees; societies of agriculture; instituted arbor days; taught them how to drain their lands, how to irrigate them, how to enrich them, how to make roads, and how to construct bridges across their mountain streams. There he went to stay, and among them built his own house and brought into it a like-minded, large-minded, cultivated, earnest-spirited wife, who with him taught the lessons of home life, its divinity, its sacredness and its glory.