There were people in Milton who could not undersatnd[sic] how a person of such refined and even naturally expensive and luxurious habits as the minister’s wife possessed could endure the life he had planned for himself, and his idea of Christian living in general.  Philip could have told them if he had been so minded.  And this scene could have revealed it to any one who knew the minister and his wife as they really were.  That was a sacred scene to husband and wife, something that belonged to them, one of those things which the world did not know and had no business to know.

When the first Sunday of another month had come, Mr. Strong felt quite well again.  A rumor of his call to Fairview had gone out, and to the few intimate friends who asked him about it he did not deny, but he said little.  The time was precious to him.  He plunged into the work with an enthusiasm and a purpose which sprang from his knowledge that he was at last really gaining some influence in the tenement district.

The condition of affairs in that neighborhood was growing worse instead of better.  The amount of vice, drunkenness, crime and brutality made his sensitive heart quiver a hundred times a day as he went his way through it all.  His study of the whole question led him to the conviction that one of the great needs of the place was a new home life for the people.  The tenements were owned and rented by men of wealth and influence.  Many of these men were in the church.  Discouraged as he had so often been in his endeavor to get the moneyed men of the congregation to consecrate their property to Christian uses, Philip came up to that first Sunday with a new phase of the same great subject which pressed so hard for utterance that he could not keep it back.

As he faced the church this morning he faced an audience composed of very conflicting elements.  Representatives of labor were conspicuous in the galleries.  People whom he had assisted at one time and another were scattered through the house, mostly in the back seats under the choir gallery.  His own membership was represented by men who, while opposed to his idea of the Christian life and his interpretation of Christ, nevertheless continued to go and hear him preach.  The incident of the sexton’s application for membership and his rejection by vote had also told somewhat in favor of the minister.  Many preachers would have resigned after such a scene.  He had said his say about it, and then refused to speak or be interviewed by the papers on the subject.  What it cost him in suffering was his own secret.  But this morning, as he rose to give his message in the person of Christ, the thought of the continued suffering and shame and degradation in the tenement district, the thought of the great wealth in the possession of the church which might be used almost to transform the lives of thousands of people, if the men of riches in Calvary Church would only see the kingdom of God in its demands on them—­this voiced his cry to the people, and gave his sermon the significance and solemnity of a prophet’s inspiration.