strong in membership.  The Year Book gives it five hundred members last year, and it is composed almost entirely of the leading families in the place.  What I can do in such a church remains to be seen.  My predecessor there, Dr. Brown, was a profound sermonizer, and generally liked, I believe.  He was a man of the old school, and made no attempt, I understand, to bring the church into contact with the masses.  You will say that such a church is a poor place in which to attempt a different work.  I do not necessarily think so.  The Church of Christ is, in itself, I believe, a powerful engine to set in motion against all evil.  I have great faith in the membership of almost any church in this country to accomplish wonderful things for humanity.  And I am going to Milton with that faith very strong in me.  I feel as if a very great work could be done there.  Think of it, Alfred!  A town of fifty thousand working men, half of them foreigners, a town with more than sixty saloons in full blast, a town with seven churches of many different denominations all situated on one street, and that street the most fashionable in the place, a town where the police records show an amount of crime and depravity almost unparalleled in municipal annals—­surely such a place presents an opportunity for the true Church of Christ to do some splendid work.  I hope I do not over-estimate the needs of the place.  I have known the general condition of things in Milton ever since you and I did our summer work in the neighboring town of Clifton.  If ever there was missionary ground in America, it is there.  I cannot understand just why the call comes to me to go to a place and take up work that, in many ways, is so distasteful to me.  In one sense I shrink from it with a sensitiveness which no one except my wife and you could understand.  You know what an almost ridiculous excess of sensibility I have.  It seems sometimes impossible for me to do the work that the active ministry of this age demands of a man.  It almost kills me to know that I am criticised for all that I say and do.  And yet I know that the ministry will always be the target for criticism.  I have an almost morbid shrinking from the thought that people do not like me, that I am not loved by everybody, and yet I know that if I speak the truth in my preaching and speak it without regard to consequences some one is sure to become offended, and in the end dislike me.  I think God never made a man with so intense a craving for the love of his fellow-men as I possess.  And yet I am conscious that I cannot make myself understood by very many people.  They will always say, “How cold and unapproachable he is.”  When in reality I love them with yearnings of heart.  Now, then, I am going to Milton with all this complex thought of myself, and yet, dear chum, there is not the least doubt after all that I ought to go.  I hope that in the rush of the work there I shall be able to forget myself.  And then the work will stand out prominent as it ought.  With all my doubts of myself, I never question the wisdom of entering the ministry.  I have a very positive assurance as I work that I am doing what I ought to do.  And what can a man ask more?  I am not dissatisfied with the ministry, only with my own action within it.  It is the noblest of all professions; I feel proud of it every day.  Only, it is so great that it makes a man feel small when he steps inside.