CHAPTER IV.


Pursuing the plan he had originally mapped out when he came to Milton,
he spent much of his time in the afternoons studying the social and
civic life of the town. As the first Sunday of the next month drew near,
when he was to speak again on the attitude of Christ to some aspect of
modern society, he determined to select the saloon as one of the
prominent features of modern life that would naturally be noticed by
Christ, and doubtless be denounced by him as a great evil.

In his study of the saloon question he did a thing which he had never
done before, and then only after very much deliberation and prayer. He
went into the saloons themselves on different occasions. He had never
done such a thing before. He wanted to know from actual knowledge what
sort of places the saloons were. What he saw after a dozen visits to as
many different groggeries added fuel to the flame of indignation that
burned already hot in him. The sight of the vast army of men turning
into beasts in these dens created in him a loathing and a hatred of the
whole iniquitous institution that language failed to express. He
wondered with unspeakable astonishment in his soul that a civilized
community in the nineteenth century would tolerate for one moment the
public sale of an article that led, on the confession of society
itself, to countless crimes against the law of the land and of God. His
indignant astonishment deepened yet more, if that were possible, when he
found that the license of five hundred dollars a year for each saloon
was used by the town to support the public school system. That, to
Philip's mind, was an awful sarcasm on Christian civilization. It seemed
to him like selling a man poison according to law, and then taking the