here in this town, where distress walks the streets and actual want already has its clutch on many a poor devil, society goes on giving its expensive parties and living in its little round of selfish pleasure just as if the volcano was a downy little bed of roses for it to go to sleep in whenever it wearies of the pleasure and wishes to retire to happy dreams.  Oh, but the bubble will burst one of these days, and then——­”

Philip swept his hand upward with a fine gesture, and sunk back upon the couch, groaning.

“Don’t you exaggerate?” The minister’s wife put the question gently.

“Not a bit!  Not a bit!  All true.  I am not one of the French Revolution fellows, always lugging in blood and destruction, and prophesying ruin to the nation and the world if it doesn’t gee and haw the way I tell it to.  But I tell you, Sarah, it takes no prophet to see that a man who is hungry and out of work is a dangerous man to have around.  And it takes no extraordinary-sized heart to swell a little with righteous wrath when in such times as these people go right on with their useless luxuries of living, and spend as much on a single evening’s entertainment as would provide a comfortable living for a whole month to some deserving family.”

“How do you know they do?”

“Well, I’ll tell you.  I’ve figured it out.  I will leave it to any one of good judgment that any one of these projected parties mentioned here in the evening paper,” Philip smoothed the paper on the head of the couch—­“any one of them will cost in the neighborhood of one hundred to one hundred and fifty dollars.  Look here!  Here’s the Goldens’ party—­members of Calvary Church.  They will spend at least twenty-five to thirty dollars in flowers; and refreshments will cost fifty more; and music another twenty-five; and incidentals twenty-five extra—­and so on.  Is that right, Sarah, these times, and as people ought to live now?”

“But some one gets the benefit of all this money spent.  Surely that is a help to some of the working people.”

“Yes, but how many people are helped by such expenditures?  Only a select few, and they are the very ones who are least in need of it.  I say that Christian people and members of churches have no right to indulge their selfish pleasures to this extent in these ways.  I know that Christ would not approve of it.”

“You think he would not, Philip.”

“No, I know he would not.  There is not a particle of doubt in my mind about it.  What right has a disciple of Jesus Christ to spend for the gratification of his physical aesthetic pleasures money which ought to be feeding the hungry bodies of men or providing some useful necessary labor for their activity?—­I mean, of course, the gratification of those senses which a man can live without.  In this age of the world society ought to dispense with some of its accustomed pleasures and deny itself for the sake of the great suffering, needy world.