see so many Christians living in luxury and singing 'Jesus, I my
cross have taken, all to leave and follow Thee,' and remember how my
wife died in a tenement in New York City, gasping for air and asking
God to take the little girl too. Of course I don't expect you people
can prevent every one from dying of starvation, lack of proper
nourishment and tenement air, but what does following Jesus mean? I
understand that Christian people own a good many of the tenements. A
member of a church was the owner of the one where my wife died, and
I have wondered if following Jesus all the way was true in his case.
I heard some people singing at a church prayer meeting the other
night,

'All for Jesus, all for Jesus,
All my being's ransomed powers,
All my thoughts, and all my doings,
All my days, and all my hours.'

and I kept wondering as I sat on the steps outside just what they
meant by it. It seems to me there's an awful lot of trouble in the
world that somehow wouldn't exist if all the people who sing such
songs went and lived them out. I suppose I don't understand. But
what would Jesus do? Is that what you mean by following His steps?
It seems to me sometimes as if the people in the big churches had
good clothes and nice houses to live in, and money to spend for
luxuries, and could go away on summer vacations and all that, while
the people outside the churches, thousands of them, I mean, die in
tenements, and walk the streets for jobs, and never have a piano or
a picture in the house, and grow up in misery and drunkenness and
sin."