The Crucifixion of Philip Strong
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"I cannot conceive that he would say anything else than this to the people of this town and this church: He would say it was our duty to make this day different from all other days in the two particulars of rest and worship. He would say that we owe it to the Father of our souls in common gratitude for his mighty love toward us that we spend the day in ways pleasing to him. He would say that the wonderful civilization of our times should study how to make this day a true rest day to the workingman of the world, and that all unnecessary carrying of passengers or merchandise should stop, so as to give all men, if possible, every seven days, one whole day of rest and communion with something better than the things that perish with the using. He would say that the Church and the church-member and the Christian everywhere should do all in his power to make the day a glad, powerful, useful, restful, anticipated twenty-four hours, looked forward to with pleasant longing by little children and laboring men and railroad men and street-car men as the one day of all the week, the happiest and best because different in its use. And so different that when Monday's toil begins the man feels refreshed in body and in soul because he has paused a little while in the mad whirl of his struggle for bread or fame, and has fellow-shipped with heavenly things, and heard something diviner than the Jangling discords of this narrow, selfish earth.
"If this thought of Sunday is bigotry or narrowness, then I stand convicted as a bigot living outside of the nineteenth century. But I am not concerned about that. What I am concerned about is Christ's thought of this day. If I understand his spirit right I believe he would say what I have said. He would say that it is not a right use of this day for the men and women of this generation to buy and sell merchandise, to attend or countenance places or spectacles of amusement, to engage in card parties at their homes, to fill their thoughts full of the ordinary affairs of business or the events of the world. He would say that it was the Christian's duty and privilege in this age to elevate the uses of this day so that everything done and said should tend to lift the race higher, and make it better acquainted with the nature of God and its own eternal destiny. If Christ would not take that view of this great question, then I have totally misconceived and misunderstood his character. 'The Sabbath was made for man.' It was made for him that he might make of it a shining jewel in the string of pearls which should adorn all the days of the week, every day speaking of divine things to the man, but Sunday opening up the beauty and grandeur of the eternal life a little wider yet.
"This, dear friends all, has been my message to you this morning. May God forgive whatever has been spoken contrary to the heart and spirit of our dear Lord."
If Philip's sermon two months before made him enemies, this sermon made even more. He had unconsciously this time struck two of his members very hard. One of them was part owner in a meat market which his partner kept open on Sunday. The other leased one of the parks where the baseball games had been played. Other persons in the congregation felt more or less hurt by the plain way Philip had spoken, especially the members who took and read the Sunday paper. They went away feeling that, while much that he said was true, there was too much strictness in the minister's view of the whole subject. This feeling grew as days went on. People said Philip did not know all the facts in regard to people's business and the complications which necessitated Sunday work, and so forth.
These were the beginnings of troublesome times for Philip. The trial of the saloon-keeper was coming on in a few days, and Philip would be called to witness in the case. He dreaded it with a nervous dread peculiar to his sensitive temper. Nevertheless, he went on with his church work, studying the problem of the town, endearing himself to very many in and out of his church by his manly, courageous life, and feeling the heart-ache grow in him as the sin burden of the place weighed heavier on him. Those were days when Philip did much praying, and his regular preaching, which grew in power with the common people, told the story of his night vigils with the Christ he adored.
It was at this particular time that a special event occurred which put its mark on Philip's work in Milton and became a part of its web and woof—a thing hard to tell, but necessary to relate as best one may.
He came home late one evening from church meeting, letting himself into the parsonage with his night-key, and, not seeing his wife in the sitting-room, where she was in the habit of reading and sewing, he walked on into the small sewing-room, where she sometimes sat at special work, thinking to find her there. She was not there, and Philip opened the kitchen door and inquired of the servant, who sat there reading, where his wife was.
"I think she went upstairs a little while ago," was the reply.
Philip went at once upstairs into his study, and, to his alarm, found that his wife had fainted. She lay on the floor in front of his desk. As Philip stooped to raise her he noticed two pieces of paper, one of them addressed to "The Preacher," and the other to "The Preacher's Wife." They were anonymous scrawls, threatening the lives of the minister and his wife. On his desk, driven deep into the wood, was a large knife. Then, said Philip with a prayer: "Verily, an enemy hath done this."
CHAPTER VII
The anonymous letters, or rather scrawls, which Philip found by the side of his unconscious wife as he stooped to raise her up, read as follows:
"PREACHER: Better pack up and leave. Milton is not big enough to hold you alive. Take warning in time."
"PREACHER'S WIFE: As long as you stay in Milton there is danger of two funerals. Dynamite kills women as well as men."
Philip sat by the study lounge holding these scrawls in his hand as his wife recovered from her fainting fit after he had applied restoratives. His heart was filled with horror at the thought of the complete cowardice which could threaten the life of an innocent woman. There was with it all a feeling of intense contempt of such childish, dime-novel methods of intimidation as that of sticking a knife into the study desk. If it had not been for its effect on his wife, Philip would have laughed at the whole thing. As it was, he was surprised and alarmed that she had fainted—a thing he had never known her to do; and as soon as she was able to speak he listened anxiously to her story.
"It must have been an hour after you had gone, Philip, that I thought I heard a noise upstairs, and thinking perhaps you had left one of your windows down at the top and the curtain was flapping, I went right up, and the minute I stepped into the room I had the feeling that some one was there."
"Didn't you carry up a light?"
"No. The lamp was burning at the end of the upper hall, and so I never thought of needing more. Well, as I moved over toward the window, still feeling that strange, unaccountable knowledge of some one there, a man stepped out from behind your desk, walked right up to me and held out those letters in one hand, while with the other he threw the light from a small bull's-eye or burglar's lantern upon them."
Philip listened in amazement.
"Sarah, you must have dreamed all that! It isn't likely that any man would do such a thing!"
"Philip, I did not dream. I was terribly wide-awake, and so scared that I couldn't even scream. My tongue seemed to be entirely useless. But I felt compelled to read what was written, and the man held the papers there until the words seemed to burn my eyes. He then walked over to the desk, and with one blow drove the knife down into the wood, and then I fainted away, and that is all I can remember."
"And what became of the man?" asked Philip, still inclined to think that his wife had in some way fallen asleep and dreamed at least a part of this strange scene, perhaps before she went up to the study and discovered the letters.
"I don't know; maybe he is in the house yet. Philip, I am almost dead for fear—not for myself, but for your life."
"I never had any fear of anonymous letters or of threats," replied Philip, contemptuously eyeing the knife, which was still sticking in the desk. "Evidently the saloon men think I am a child to be frightened with these bugaboos, which have figured in every sensational story since the time of Captain Kidd."
"Then you think this is the work of the saloon men?"
"Who else can it be? We have no other enemies of this sort in Milton."
"But they will kill you! Oh, Philip, I cannot bear the thought of living here in this way. Let us leave this dreadful place!"
"Little woman," said Philip, while he bravely drove away any slight anxiety he may have had for himself, "don't you think it would be cowardly to run away so soon?"
"Wouldn't it be better to run away so soon than to be killed? Is there any bravery in staying in a place where you are likely to be murdered by some coward?"
"I don't think I shall be," said Philip, confidently. "And I don't want you to be afraid. They will not dare to harm you."
"No, Philip!" exclaimed his wife, eagerly; "you must not be mistaken. I did not faint away to-night because I was afraid for myself. Surely I have no fear there. It was the thought of the peril in which you stand daily as you go out among these men, and as you go back and forth to your meetings in the dark. I am growing nervous and anxious ever since the shooting; and when I was startled by the man here to-night I was so weak that I fainted. But I am sure that they do not care to harm me; you are the object of their hatred. If they strike any one it will be you. That is the reason I want you to leave this place. Say you will, Philip. Surely there are other churches where you could preach as you want to, and still not be in such constant danger."
It required all of Philip's wisdom and love and consciousness of his immediate duty to answer his wife's appeal and say no to it. It was one of the severest struggles he ever had. There was to be taken into the account not only his own safety, but that of his wife as well. For, think what he would, he could not shake off the feeling that a man so cowardly as to resort to the assassination of a man would not be over particular even if it should chance to be a woman. Philip was man enough to be entirely unshaken by anonymous threats. A thousand a day would not have unnerved him in the least. He would have writhed under the sense of the great sin which they revealed, but that is all the effect they would have had.
When it came to his wife, however, that was another question. For a moment he felt like sending in his resignation and moving out of Milton as soon as possible. But he finally decided that he ought to remain; and Mrs. Strong did not oppose his decision when once he had declared his resolve. She knew Philip must do what to him was the will of his Master, and with that finally she was content.
She had overcome her nervousness and dread now that Philip's courageous presence strengthened her, and she began to tell him that he had better hunt for the man who had appeared so mysteriously in the study.
"I haven't convinced myself yet that there is any man. Confess, Sarah, that you dreamed all that."
"I did not," replied his wife, a little indignantly. "Do you think I wrote those letters and stuck that knife into the desk myself?"
"Of course not. But how could a man get into the study and neither you nor the girl know it."
"I did hear a noise, and that is what started me upstairs. And he may be in the house yet. I shall not rest easy until you look into all the closets and down cellar and everywhere."
So Philip, to quiet his wife, searched the house thoroughly, but found nothing. The servant and the minister's wife followed along at a respectful distance behind Philip, one armed with the poker and the other with a fire-shovel, while he pulled open closet doors with reckless disregard of any possible man hiding within, and pretended to look into the most unlikely places for him, joking all the while to reassure his trembling followers.
They found one of the windows in Philip's study partly open. But that did not prove anything, although a man might have crawled in and out again through that window from an ell of the parsonage, the roof of which ran near enough to the window so that an active person could gain entrance that way. The whole affair remained more or less a mystery to Philip. However, the letters and the knife were real. He took them down town next day to the office of the evening paper, and asked the editor to publish the letters and describe the knife. It was too good a piece of news to omit, and Milton people were treated to a genuine sensation when the article came out. Philip's object in giving the incident publicity was to show the community what a murderous element it was fostering in the saloon power. Those threats and the knife preached a sermon to the thoughtful people of Milton, and citizens who had never asked the question before began to ask now: "Are we to endure this saloon monster much longer?"
As for Philip, he went his way the same as ever. Some of his friends and church members even advised him to carry a revolver and be careful about going out alone at night. Philip laughed at the idea of a revolver and said: "If the saloon men want to get rid of me without the trouble of shooting me themselves they had better make me a present of a silver-mounted pistol; then I would manage the shooting myself. And as for being careful about going out evenings, what is this town thinking of, that it will continue to license and legalize an institution that makes its honest citizens advise new-comers to stay at home for fear of assassination? No. I shall go about my work just as if I lived in the most law-abiding community in America. And if I am murdered by the whiskey men, I want the people of Milton to understand that the citizens are as much to blame for the murder as the saloon men. For a community that will license such a curse ought to bear the shame of the legitimate fruits of it."
The trial of the man with the hare-lip had been postponed for some legal reason, and Philip felt relieved somewhat. He dreaded the ordeal of the court scene. And one or two visits made at the jail had not been helpful to him. The man had refused each time to see the minister, and he had gone away feeling hungry in his soul for the man's redemption, and realizing something of the spirit of Christ when he was compelled to cry out: "They will not come unto me that they might have eternal life." That always seemed to Philip the most awful feature of the history of Christ—that the very people he loved and yearned after spit upon him and finally broke his heart with their hatred.
He continued his study of the problem of the town, believing that every place has certain peculiar local characteristics which every church and preacher ought to study. He was struck by the aspect of the lower part of the town, where nearly all the poorer people lived. He went down there and studied the situation thoroughly. It did not take a very great amount of thinking to convince him that the church power in Milton was not properly distributed. The seven largest churches in the place were all on one street, well up in the wealthy residence portion, and not more than two or three blocks apart. Down in the tenement district there was not a single church building, and only one or two weak mission schools which did not touch the problem of the district at all. The distance from this poor part of the town to the churches was fully a mile, a distance that certainly stood as a geographical obstacle to the church attendance of the neighborhood, even supposing the people were eager to go to the large churches, which was not at all the fact. Indeed, Philip soon discovered that the people were indifferent in the matter. The churches on the fashionable street in town meant less than nothing to them. They never would go to them, and there was little hope that anything the pastor or members could do would draw the people that distance to come within church influence. The fact of the matter was, the seven churches of different denominations in Milton had no living connection whatever with nearly one-half the population, and that the most needy half, of the place.
The longer Philip studied the situation, the more un-Christian it looked to him, and the more he longed to change it. He went over the ground again and again very carefully. He talked with the different ministers, and the most advanced Christians in his own church. There was a variety of opinion as to what might be done, but no one was ready for the radical move which Philip advocated when he came to speak on the subject the first Sunday of the month.
CHAPTER VIII
The first Sunday was beginning to be more or less dreaded or anticipated by Calvary Church people. They were learning to expect something radical, sweeping, almost revolutionary in Philip's utterances on Christ and Modern Society. Some agreed with him as far as he had gone. Very many had been hurt at his plainness of speech. This was especially true of the property owners and the fashionable part of the membership. Yet there was a fascination about Philip's preaching that prevented, so far, any very serious outbreak or dissension in the church. He was a recognized leader. In his presentation of truth he was large-minded. He had the faculty of holding men's respect. There was no mistaking the situation, however. Mr. Winter, with others, was working against him. Philip was vaguely conscious of much that did not work out into open, apparent fact. Nevertheless, when he came up on the first Sunday of the next month and began to announce his subject, he found an audience that crowded the house to the doors, and among them were scattered numbers of men from the working-men's district with whom Philip had talked while down there. It was, as before, an inspiring congregation, and Philip faced it feeling sure in his heart that he had a great subject to unfold, and a message to deliver to the Church of Christ such as he could not but believe Christ would most certainly present if he were living to-day in Milton.
He began by describing the exact condition of affairs in Milton. To assist this description he had brought with him into the church his map of the town.
"Look now," he said, pointing out the different localities, "at B street, where we now are. Here are seven of the largest churches of the place on this street. The entire distance between the first of these church buildings and the last one is a little over a mile. Three of these churches are only two blocks apart. Then consider the character of the residences and people in the vicinity of this street. It is what is called desirable; that is, the homes are the very finest, and the people almost without exception are refined, respectable, well educated, and Christian in training. All the wealth of the town centres about B street. All the society life extends out from it on each side. It is considered the most fashionable street for drives and promenades. It is well lighted, well paved, well kept. The people who come out of the houses on B street are always well dressed. The people who go into these seven churches are, as a rule, well-dressed and comfortable looking. Mind you," continued Philip, raising his hand with a significant gesture, "I do not want to have you think that I consider good clothes and comfortable looks as unchristian or anything against the people who present such an appearance. Far from it. I simply mention this fact to make the contrast I am going to show you all the plainer. For let us leave B street now and go down into the flats by the river, where nearly all the mill people have their homes. I wish you would note first the distance from B street and the churches to this tenement district. It is nine blocks—that is, a little over a mile. To the edge of the tenement houses farthest from our own church building it is a mile and three-quarters. And within that entire district, measuring nearly two by three miles, there is not a church building. There are two feeble mission-schools, which are held in plain, unattractive halls, where every Sunday a handful of children meet; but nothing practically is being done by the Church of Christ in this place to give the people in that part of the town the privileges and power of the life of Christ, the life more abundantly. The houses down there are of the cheapest description. The people who come out of them are far from well-dressed. The streets and alleys are dirty and ill-smelling. And no one cares to promenade for pleasure up and down the sidewalks in that neighborhood. It is not a safe place to go to at night. The most frequent disturbances come from that part of the town. All the hard characters find refuge there. And let me say that I am not now speaking of the working people. They are almost without exception law-abiding. But in every town like ours the floating population of vice and crime seeks naturally that part of a town where the poorest houses are, and the most saloons, and the greatest darkness, both physically and moral.
"If there is a part of this town which needs lifting up and cleaning and healing and inspiring by the presence of the Church of Christ, it is right there where there is no church. The people on B street and for six or eight blocks each side know the gospel. They have large numbers of books and papers and much Christian literature. They have been taught the Bible truths; they are familiar with them. Of what value is it then to continue to support on this short street, so near together, seven churches of as many different denominations which have for their members the respectable, moral people of the town? I do not mean to say that the well-to-do, respectable people do not need the influence of the church and the preaching of the gospel. But they can get these privileges without such a fearful waste of material and power. If we had only three or four churches on this street they would be enough. We are wasting our Christianity with the present arrangement. We are giving the rich and the educated and well-to-do people seven times as much church as we are giving the poor, the ignorant, and the struggling workers in the tenement district. There is no question, there can be no question, that all this is wrong. It is opposed to every principle that Christ advocated. And in the face of these plain facts, which no one can dispute, there is a duty before these churches on this street which cannot be evaded without denying the very purpose of a church. It is that duty which I am now going to urge upon this Calvary Church.
"It has been said by some of the ministers and members of the churches that we might combine in an effort and build a large and commodious mission in the tenement district. But that, to my mind, would not settle the problem at all, as it should be settled. It is an easy and a lazy thing for church-members to put their hands in their pockets and say to a few other church-members, 'We will help build a mission, if you will run it after it is up; we will attend our church up-town here, while the mission is worked for the poor people down there.' That is not what will meet the needs of the situation. What that part of Milton needs is the Church of Christ in its members—the whole Church, on the largest possible scale. What I am now going to propose, therefore, is something which I believe Christ would advocate, if not in the exact manner I shall explain, at least in the same spirit."
Philip paused a moment and looked over the congregation earnestly. The expectation of the people was roused almost to the point of a sensation as he went on.
"I have consulted competent authorities, and they say that our church building here could be moved from its present foundation without serious damage to the structure. A part of it would have to be torn down to assist the moving, but it could easily be replaced. The expense would not be more than we could readily meet. We are out of debt, and the property is free from incumbrance. What I propose, therefore, is a very simple thing—that we move our church edifice down into the heart of the tenement district, where we can buy a suitable lot for a comparatively small sum, and at once begin the work of a Christian Church in the very neighborhood where such work is most needed.