What ideals and plans were his immediately after his conversion we
do not know. It was not long, however, until he decided that a more
advanced education was needful. Nothing will give a young person
nobler ambitions and greater desire to rise to all that is good
and associated with usefulness than Christianity. On the 5th of
September of the same year of his conversion he started to school
at Oberlin College and enrolled for an English preparatory course.
The details of his study at Oberlin and just how long he remained
have not been learned. An old memorandum of his accounts indicates
that he attended there only two months at first, and then taught
school through the winter at Corunna, Ind., returning to Oberlin
in the spring, and that he started again with the new school year
in September, 1866. It is known, however, that his excellency of
character shone while he was at school and was the subject of remark.
He did not attend college as long as he had expected to; for it was
while he was there that he began to feel God's hand upon him for the
ministry. When he saw how long it would take to complete his college
work and the need of laboring in the Lord's harvest while it was
day, he felt impressed that God wanted him to cut short his college
course and to prepare at once for the ministry. He accordingly went
home, arranged for a room in his father's house, and spent one season
there in applying himself to prayer, Bible-study, and those other
things which he believed were directly necessary to his ministerial
preparation.
Preparation for the ministry is more successful when, along with it,
there can be more or less of actual practise. We can believe that
Brother Warner was spiritual enough to keep in touch with God and
to discern the divine leading in the important matter to which he
had committed himself. At any rate, in connection with his work of
preparation he began to engage in ministering the gospel. He preached
his first sermon on Easter night, 1867, in a Methodist Episcopal
protracted meeting in the Cogswell Schoolhouse, not far from where
he lived. Text, Acts 3:18--"But those things, which God before had
showed by the mouth of all his prophets, that Christ should suffer,
he hath so fulfilled."