memory of it. I could go there as the pastor of the Elmdale church and
preach to an audience of college boys eight months in the year and to
about eighty refined, scholarly people the rest of the time. I could
indulge my taste for reading and writing and enjoy a quiet pastorate
there to the end of my days."

"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