"I would like to see it done. I don't believe I shall, though."

"Why?"

"Your church won't agree to it."

"Maybe they will in time."

"I hope they will. And yet let me tell you, Mr. Strong, if you succeeded
in getting your church and people to come into the tenement district, you
would find plenty of people there who wouldn't go hear you."

"I suppose that is so. But oh, that we might do something!" Philip
clasped his hand over his knee and gazed earnestly at the man opposite.
The man returned the gaze almost as earnestly. It was the
personification of the Church confronting the laboring man, each in a
certain way asking the other, "What will the Church do?" And it was a
noticeable fact that the minister's look revealed more doubt and anxiety
than the other man's look, which contained more or less of indifference
and distrust. Philip sighed, and his visitor soon after took his leave.

So it came about that Philip Strong plunged into a work which from the
time he stepped into the dingy little hall and faced the crowd peculiar
to it, had a growing influence on all his strange career, grew in
strangeness rapidly as days came on.

He was invited again and again to address the men in that part of
Milton. They were almost all of them mill-employes. They had a simple
organization for debate and discussion of questions of the day.
Gradually the crowds increased as Philip continued to come, and