message came to me to sell and give, I did not seem to have any thing that I could sell, and hence had nothing to give, but now I have been able to give . . . and still I have a great abundance left. I can gratefully trace the Lord’s hand in His dealings with me, and can say that even my darkest days have been my best days.” As early as 1911, Stewart spoke with fervor of his desire to draw away from the business world and to spend more time with spiritual things. To his brother Milton he wrote: “It is time we were becom ing disentangled from the affairs of this life, and shaping up our mat ters so that the greatest glory pos sible to the Lord may result from our work, not as a business matter, but through the constraining love of Christ. There is nothing that will count in the way of building a man up and enlarging his soul like the study of the Scriptures. You and I have been robbed of our birthright in this respect by reason of having so much business to encumber us. We must try to become disentan gled.” JsJow that the Institute was debt- free, Stewart wanted to make cer tain it would remain that way. He
of that year that the entire indebt edness of the Institute buildings, amounting to $430,000 in bonds, had been liquidated, that funds with which to retire these bonds were in the hands of the trustee, a receipt from whom stated that the bonds we r e a l l pa i d for , and destroyed so far as they had been turned in. W ith the advent of “the roaring twenties,” B i o l a was a firmly es tablished Bible school, debt-free and robust. Stewart was 80 and could look back with humble satis faction on what had been accom plished. He could recall his early California oil p r o s p e c t i n g days when each hole was dry and failure seemed almost a certainty. He could say, “The world looked pretty dark during all this period. The passage of Scripture contained in Luke 12:33 was impressed very strongly upon my mind, and I could not get rid of it — it kept flashing before me day and night: ‘Sell that ye have, and give alms; provide yourself bags which wax not old, a treasure in the heavens that faileth not, where no thief ap- proacheth, neither moth corrupt- eth.’ ” He liked to recall, “When the
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