in upon the
experience of Mr. Strong. To tell them all would be to write another
story. Sometimes into men's lives, under certain conditions of society,
or of men's own mental and spiritual relation to certain causes of
action, time, as reckoned by days or weeks, cuts no figure. A man can
live an eternity in a month. He feels it. It was so with Philip Strong.
We have spoken of the rapidity of his habit in deciding questions of
right or expediency. The same habit of mind caused a possibility in him
of condensed experience. In a few days he reached the conclusion of a
year's thought. That month, while the Brother Man was peacefully
watching by the side of the patient, and relieving Mrs. Strong and a
neighbor who had helped before he came, Philip fought some tremendous
battles with himself, with his thought of the church, and with the world
about. It is necessary to understand something of this in order to
understand something of the meaning of his last Sunday in Milton--a
Sunday that marked an era in the place, from which the people almost
reckoned time itself.

As spring had blossomed into summer and summer ripened into autumn,
every one had predicted better times. But the predictions did not bring
them. The suffering and sickness and helplessness of the tenement
district grew every day more desperate. To Philip it seemed like the
ulcer of Milton. All the surface remedies proposed and adopted by the
city council and the churches and the benevolent societies had not
touched the problem. The mills were going on part time. Thousands of men
yet lingered in the place hoping to get work. Even if the mills had been
running as usual that would not have diminished one particle of the sin
and vice and drunkenness that saturated the place. And as Philip studied
the matter with brain and soul he came to a conclusion regarding the
duty of the church. He did not pretend to go beyond that, but as the
weeks went by and fall came on and another winter stared the people
coldly in the face, he knew that he must speak out what burned in him.

He had been a year in Milton now. Every month of that year had impressed
him with the deep and apparently hopeless chasm that yawned between the
working world and the church. There was no point of contact. One was
suspicious, the other was indifferent. Something was radically wrong,
and something radically positive and Christian must be done to right the
condition that faced the churches of Milton. T