“Then, Philip, I don’t see why you don’t reply to their call and tell them you will accept; and we will move at once to Elmdale, and live and die there.  It is a beautiful place, and I am sure we could live very comfortably on the salary and the vacation.  There is no vacation mentioned in the other call.”

“But, on the other hand,” continued the minister, almost as if he were alone and arguing with himself, and had not heard his wife’s words, “on the other hand, there is Milton, a manufacturing town of fifty thousand people, mostly operatives.  It is the centre of much that belongs to the stirring life of the times in which we live.  The labor question is there in the lives of those operatives.  There are seven churches of different denominations, to the best of my knowledge, all striving after popularity and power.  There is much hard, stern work to be done in Milton, by the true Church of Christ, to apply His teachings to men’s needs, and somehow I cannot help hearing a voice say, ’Philip Strong, go to Milton and work for Christ.  Abandon your dream of a parish where you may indulge your love of scholarship in the quiet atmosphere of a University town, and plunge into the hard, disagreeable, but necessary work of this age, in the atmosphere of physical labor, where great questions are being discussed, and the masses are engrossed in the terrible struggle for liberty and home, where physical life thrusts itself out into society, trampling down the spiritual and intellectual, and demanding of the Church and the preacher the fighting powers of giants of God to restore in men’s souls a more just proportion of the value of the life of man on earth.’

“So, you see, Sarah,” the minister went on after a little pause, “I want to go to Elmdale, but the Lord probably wants me to go to Milton.”

Mrs. Strong was silent.  She had the utmost faith in her husband that he would do exactly what he knew he ought to do, when once he decided what it was.  Philip Strong was also silent a moment.  At last he said, “Don’t you think so, Sarah?”

“I don’t see how we can always tell exactly what the Lord wants us to do.  How can you tell that He doesn’t want you to go to Elmdale?  Are there not great opportunities to influence young student life in a University town?  Will not some one go to Elmdale and become pastor of that church?”

“No doubt there is a necessary work to be done there.  The only question is, am I the one to do it, or is the call to Milton more imperative?  The more I think of it, the more I am convinced that I must go to Milton.”

“Then,” said the minister’s wife, rising suddenly and speaking with a mock seriousness that her husband fully understood, “I don’t see why you called me up here to decide what you had evidently settled before you called me.  Do you consider that fair treatment, sir?  It will serve you right if those biscuits I put in the oven when you called me are fallen as completely as Babylon.  And I will make you eat half a dozen of them, sir, to punish you.  We cannot afford to waste anything these times.”