purpose of propagating an idea, championing a cause, seeking the
best and the highest that I know in terms of God and of his holy
will. I am here, in other words, not to make or to keep friends, not
to enjoy pleasant associations of hand and heart, not even to serve
a particular church, but to serve, perhaps at the cost of these
other and more personal things, the great idea of which I speak. To
allow my individual sentiments to fix the place and fashion of my
professional service, would be to me as dastardly a thing as to
allow considerations of profit or prestige to make decision. Not
even my wife or my children could interfere in this case. My problem
was to determine where I could best advance the ideals to which I
have given my life--where I could find the weapons or tools best
fitted to my hand for the doing of my work--and there to stand. To
remain in this church and city might be infinitely desirable to me
as a man; but I must decide not as a man but as a minister, and
therefore if I remained, it must be because I could do no other!

But there was another consideration which held me to this impersonal
relation to the problem. I refer to the fact that the Great War had
brought to a focus in my own soul the inward and largely unconscious
spiritual development of a decade. I had discovered, through [4]
much tribulation of mind and heart, the ideal which I sought to
serve, and disclosed to myself at least the picture of the
realization of this ideal in institutional form. This same Great
War, however, had distracted my parish, absorbed the energies and
attention of my people, and in spite of wellnigh unexampled
forbearance, had introduced elements of misunderstanding and even
alienation. The conflict, in other words, had no more left our
church unchanged than the world itself. We had been shaken and
distressed and tortured and driven, so that we were no longer the