ls and Annual Conferences,
of deaconesses visiting dreary homes, and soft-footed nurses going about
in great hospitals; of beginners' departments and old people's homes; of
kindergartens and clinics and preparatory classes. There seemed no end
to it all, every moment some new aspect of the church's activity showed
itself and then was gone.

It was a most confused and confusing experience; and all through the
rest of the day J.W. caught himself wondering again and again at the
variety and complexity of the church's affairs.

Why should a church be occupied with all this medley? Why should it be
so distracted from its main purpose, to be a Jack of all trades? Why
should it open its doors and train its workers and spend its money in
persistent response to every imaginable human appeal?

Perhaps that might be it; "_human_." Once a philosopher had said, "I am
a man, and therefore nothing human is foreign to me." What if the church
by its very nature must be like that? what if this really were its main
purpose--all these varied and sometimes almost conflicting activities no
more than its effort to obey the central law of its life?

J.W. was in his stateroom; he paced the narrow aisle between the
berths--three steps forward, three steps back, like a caged wild thing.
Something was coming to new reality in his soul; he was scarce conscious
of the walls that shut him in. Once he stopped by the open port. He
looked out at the tumbling rollers of the wide Pacific. And as he looked
he thought of the vastness of this sea, how its waters washed the icy
shores of Alaska and the palm-fronded atolls of the Marquesas; how they
carried on their bosom the multitudinous commerce of a hundred peoples;
how from Santiago to Shanghai and from the Yukon to New Zealand it was
one ocean, serving all lands, and taking toll of all.

In spite of all the complexities and diversities of the lands about this
ocean, they had one possession which all might claim, as it claimed
them--the sea. It gave them neighbors and trade, climate and their daily
bread. In the sociology and geography and economics of the Orient this
Pacific Ocean was the great common denominator. _And in the geography
and economics and sociology of the kingdom of God? Might it not be--must
it not be, the church_!

Not only the Pacific basin, but the round world was like that, every
part of it dependent on all the rest, and growing every day more and
more conscious of all the rest.