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.