Authority, yes, but always tempered with tolerance, compassion, and
the idea of service. Orthodox piety, good, but with some reservations.
In religious matters Dr. Woodsworth Was a moderate liberal and dis-
cussions at the family dinner-table prepared the children for the
heresies of the "higher criticism" which they would all sooner or later
have to face. There was much less preparation along the lines of the
"social gospel" that was beginning to be important in the United
States; for in Canada the Methodist church in the 1880's and 1890's
was consolidating itself as a church of the well-to-do. Its message in
the West tended to be a call to a new puritanism.

Young James completed his high-school work in 1891, and that
autumn he entered Wesley College at Winnipeg. Study in the Depart-
ment of Mental and Moral Science absorbed most of his time, but he
also became a leader in football and in student organizations. In 1893,
to help the family budget, he took a short normal school course in
Brandon and taught for a year in rural schools. In the following year,
1896, he returned to Wesley to be elected Senior Stick, and to win
the bronze medal for second position in his graduating class.

At Wesley he had encountered the semi-classical education of a
small church college of the day. Every encouragement to join the
ministry had been given him. The natural inclinations of his parents,
his own strong desire to serve, and the influence of his professors led
him almost automatically into the ministry. Here he followed the
normal procedure and spent two years as a probationer or circuit-rider
in the mission field of southwestern Manitoba.

In July, 1896, Woodsworth left Brandon to enter this new work.
He did so with a high sense of dedication, and yet it would be incorrect
to say that the choice had been made entirely without misgivings.
The following two years contained for him many periods of struggle
and doubt. He was well aware that the ordinary Methodist minister
had experienced a personal religious "conversion," that there was
much of revivalism in western Methodism. He also knew that by
temperament he found emotional religious experience difficult to
achieve. His period as probationer was a continual struggle to con-
vince himself that he had experienced a personal conversion. There
can be no doubt of the intensity of this struggle: the attempts to hold
himself to the most puritanical existence, the conducting of tiny
prayer meetings in isolated prairie farms with their revivalistic ritual,
the passionate prayer for greater power to convince others of sin and
the need of salvation.

At one point he greatly doubted the wisdom of the course he was
following and noted in his diary, "It appears to me that in my life I

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