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T. De Witt Talmage as I Knew Him

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Title: T. De Witt Talmage as I Knew Him

Author: T. De Witt Talmage
        Eleanor McCutcheon Collier Talmage


        
Release date: April 23, 2005 [eBook #15693]
                Most recently updated: December 14, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK T. DE WITT TALMAGE AS I KNEW HIM ***




Produced by David Newman, Melissa Er-Raqabi, Jeannie Howse and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net









T. DE WITT TALMAGE
AS I KNEW HIM

BY THE LATE
T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D.D.

WITH CONCLUDING CHAPTERS BY
MRS. T. DE WITT TALMAGE

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

NEW YORK:
E.P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
1912




CONTENTS

FIRST MILESTONE
SECOND MILESTONE
THIRD MILESTONE
FOURTH MILESTONE
FIFTH MILESTONE
SIXTH MILESTONE
SEVENTH MILESTONE
EIGHTH MILESTONE
NINTH MILESTONE
TENTH MILESTONE
ELEVENTH MILESTONE
TWELFTH MILESTONE
THIRTEENTH MILESTONE
FOURTEENTH MILESTONE
FIFTEENTH MILESTONE
SIXTEENTH MILESTONE
SEVENTEENTH MILESTONE
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF HIS LAST MILESTONES--
   FIRST MILESTONE
   SECOND MILESTONE
   THIRD MILESTONE
   LAST MILESTONE




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE REV. T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D.D.
DAVID AND CATHERINE TALMAGE--PARENTS OF DR. T. DE WITT TALMAGE
DR. TALMAGE IN HIS FIRST CHURCH, BELLEVILLE, NEW JERSEY
DR. TALMAGE AS CHAPLAIN OF THE THIRTEENTH REGIMENT OF NEW YORK
THE THIRD BROOKLYN TABERNACLE
THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D.C.
DR. AND MRS. T. DE WITT TALMAGE
FACSIMILE OF PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN'S LETTER




PREFACE

I write this story of my life, first of all for my children. How much
would I now give for a full account of my father's life written by his
own hand! That which merely goes from lip to ear is apt to be soon
forgotten. The generations move on so rapidly that events become
confused. I said to my son, "Do you remember that time in Philadelphia,
during the war, when I received a telegram saying several hundred
wounded soldiers would arrive next day, and we suddenly extemporised a
hospital and all turned in to the help of the suffering soldiers?" My
son's reply was, "My memory of that occurrence is not very distinct, as
it took place six years before I was born." The fact is that we think
our children know many things concerning which they know nothing at all.

But, outside my own family, I am sure that there are many who would like
to read about what I have been doing, thinking, enjoying, and hoping all
these years; for through the publication of my entire Sermons, as has
again and again been demonstrated, I have been brought into contact with
the minds of more people, and for a longer time, than most men. This I
mean not in boast, but as a reason for thinking that this autobiography
may have some attention outside of my own circle, and I mention it also
in gratitude to God, Who has for so long a time given me this unlimited
and almost miraculous opportunity.

Each life is different from every other life. God never repeats Himself,
and He never intended two men to be alike, or two women to be alike, or
two children to be alike. This infinite variety of character and
experience makes the story of any life interesting, if that story be
clearly and accurately told.

I am now in the full play of my faculties, and without any apprehension
of early departure, not having had any portents, nor seen the moon over
my left shoulder, nor had a salt-cellar upset, nor seen a bat fly into
the window, nor heard a cricket chirp from the hearth, nor been one of
thirteen persons at a table. But my common sense, and the family record,
and the almanac tell me it must be "towards evening."




T. DE WITT TALMAGE

AS I KNEW HIM




FIRST MILESTONE

1832-1845


Our family Bible, in the record just between the Old and the New
Testaments, has this entry: "Thomas DeWitt, Born January 7, 1832." I was
the youngest of a family of twelve children, all of whom lived to grow
up except the first, and she was an invalid child.

I was the child of old age. My nativity, I am told, was not heartily
welcomed, for the family was already within one of a dozen, and the
means of support were not superabundant. I arrived at Middlebrook, New
Jersey, while my father kept the toll-gate, at which business the older
children helped him, but I was too small to be of service. I have no
memory of residence there, except the day of departure, and that only
emphasised by the fact that we left an old cat which had purred her way
into my affections, and separation from her was my first sorrow, so far
as I can remember.

In that home at Middlebrook, and in the few years after, I went through
the entire curriculum of infantile ailments. The first of these was
scarlet fever, which so nearly consummated its fell work on me that I
was given up by the doctors as doomed to die, and, according to custom
in those times in such a case, my grave clothes were completed, the
neighbours gathering for that purpose. During those early years I took
such a large share of epidemics that I have never been sick since with
anything worthy of being called illness. I never knew or heard of anyone
who has had such remarkable and unvarying health as I have had, and I
mention it with gratitude to God, in whose "hand our breath is, and all
our ways."

The "grippe," as it is called, touched me at Vienna when on my way from
the Holy Land, but I felt it only half a day, and never again since.

I often wonder what has become of our old cradle in which all of us
children were rocked! We were a large family, and that old cradle was
going a good many years. I remember just how it looked. It was
old-fashioned and had no tapestry. Its two sides and canopy were of
plain wood, but there was a great deal of sound sleeping in that cradle,
and many aches and pains were soothed in it. Most vividly I remember
that the rockers, which came out from under the cradle, were on the top
and side very smooth, so smooth that they actually glistened. But it
went right on and rocked for Phoebe the first, and for DeWitt the last.

There were no lords or baronets or princes in our ancestral line. None
wore stars, cockade, or crest. There was once a family coat-of-arms, but
we were none of us wise enough to tell its meaning. Do our best, we
cannot find anything about our forerunners except that they behaved
well, came over from Wales or Holland a good while ago, and died when
their time came. Some of them may have had fine equipages and
postilions, but the most of them were sure only of footmen. My father
started in life belonging to the aristocracy of hard knuckles and
homespun, but had this high honour that no one could despise: he was the
son of a father who loved God and kept His commandments. Two eyes, two
hands, and two feet were the capital my father started with.

Benignity, kindness, keen humour, broad common sense and industry
characterised my mother. The Reverend Dr. Chambers was for many years
her pastor. He had fifty years of pastorate service, in Somerville,
N.J., and the Collegiate Church, New York. He said, in an address at the
dedication of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, that my mother was the most
consecrated Christian person he had ever known. My mother worked very
hard, and when we would come in and sit down at the table at noon, I
remember how she used to look. There were beads of perspiration along
the line of her grey hair, and sometimes she would sit down at the
table, and put her head against her wrinkled hand and say, "Well, the
fact is, I'm too tired to eat."

My father was a religious, hard-working, honest man. Every day began and
closed with family worship, led by my father, or, in case of his
absence, by Mother. That which was evidently uppermost in the minds of
my parents, and that which was the most pervading principle in their
lives, was the Christian religion. The family Bible held a perfect
fascination for me, not a page that was not discoloured either with time
or tears. My parents read out of it as long as I can remember. When my
brother Van Nest died in a foreign land, and the news came to our
country home, that night they read the eternal consolations out of the
old book. When my brother David died that book comforted the old people
in their trouble. My father in mid-life, fifteen years an invalid, out
of that book read of the ravens that fed Elijah all through the hard
struggle for bread. When my mother died that book illumined the dark
valley. In the years that followed of loneliness, it comforted my father
with the thought of reunion, which took place afterward in Heaven.

To the wonderful conversion of my grandfather and grandmother, in those
grand old days of our declaration of independence, I trace the whole
purpose, trend, and energies of my life. I have told the story of the
conversion of my grandfather and grandmother before. I repeat it here,
for my children.

My grandfather and grandmother went from Somerville to Baskenridge to
attend revival meetings under the ministry of Dr. Finney. They were so
impressed with the meetings that when they came back to Somerville they
were seized upon by a great desire for the salvation of their children.
That evening the children were going off for a gay party, and my
grandmother said to the children, "When you get all ready for the
entertainment, come into my room; I have something very important to
tell you." After they were all ready they came into my grandmother's
room, and she said to them, "Go and have a good time, but while you are
gone I want you to know I am praying for you and will do nothing but
pray for you until you get back." They did not enjoy the entertainment
much because they thought all the time of the fact that Mother was
praying for them. The evening passed. The next day my grandparents heard
sobbing and crying in the daughter's room, and they went in and found
her praying for the salvation of God, and her daughter Phoebe said, "I
wish you would go to the barn and to the waggon-house for Jehiel and
David (the brothers) are under powerful conviction of sin." My
grandparent went to the barn, and Jehiel, who afterward became a useful
minister of the Gospel, was imploring the mercy of Christ; and then,
having first knelt with him and commended his soul to Christ, they went
to the waggon-house, and there was David crying for the salvation of his
soul--David, who afterward became my father. David could not keep the
story to himself, and he crossed the fields to a farmhouse and told one
to whom he had been affianced the story of his own salvation, and she
yielded her heart to God. The story of the converted household went all
through the neighbourhood. In a few weeks two hundred souls stood up in
the plain meeting house at Somerville to profess faith in Christ, among
them David and Catherine, afterward my parents.

[Illustration: DAVID TALMAGE. CATHERINE TALMAGE. (_The Parents of Dr. T.
DeWitt Talmage_)]

My mother, impressed with that, in after life, when she had a large
family of children gathered around her, made a covenant with three
neighbours, three mothers. They would meet once a week to pray for the
salvation of their children until all their children were
converted--this incident was not known until after my mother's death,
the covenant then being revealed by one of the survivors. We used to
say: "Mother, where are you going?" and she would say, "I am just going
out a little while; going over to the neighbours." They kept on in that
covenant until all their families were brought into the kingdom of God,
myself the last, and I trace that line of results back to that evening
when my grandmother commended our family to Christ, the tide of
influence going on until this hour, and it will never cease.

My mother died in her seventy-sixth year. Through a long life of
vicissitude she lived harmlessly and usefully, and came to her end in
peace. We had often heard her, when leading family prayers in the
absence of my father, say, "O Lord, I ask not for my children wealth or
honour, but I do ask that they all may be the subjects of Thy converting
grace." Her eleven children brought into the kingdom of God, she had but
one more wish, and that was that she might see her long-absent
missionary son, and when the ship from China anchored in New York
harbour, and the long-absent one passed over the threshold of his
paternal home, she said, "Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in
peace, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation." The prayer was soon
answered.

My father, as long as I can remember, was an elder in churches. He
conducted prayer-meetings in the country, when he was sometimes the only
man to take part, giving out a hymn and leading the singing; then
reading the Scriptures and offering prayer; then giving out another hymn
and leading in that; and then praying again; and so continuing the
meeting for the usual length of time, and with no lack of interest.

When the church choir would break down, everybody looked around to see
if he were not ready with "Woodstock," "Mount Pisgah" or "Uxbridge." And
when all his familiar tunes failed to express the joy of his soul, he
would take up his own pen, draw five long lines across the sheet, put in
the notes, and then to the tune he called "Bound Brook," begin to sing:

    As when the weary traveller gains
      The height of some o'erlooking hill,
    His heart revives if 'cross the plains
      He eyes his home, though distant still;

    Thus, when the Christian pilgrim views,
      By faith, his mansion in the skies,
    The sight his fainting strength renews,
      And wings his speed to reach the prize.

    'Tis there, he says, I am to dwell
      With Jesus in the realms of day;
    There I shall bid my cares farewell
      And He will wipe my tears away.

He knew about all the cheerful tunes that were ever printed in old "New
Brunswick Collection," and the "Shunway," and the sweetest melodies that
Thomas Hastings ever composed. He took the pitch of sacred song on
Sabbath morning, and kept it through all the week.

My father was the only person whom I ever knew without any element of
fear. I do not believe he understood the sensation.

Seated in a waggon one day during a runaway that every moment threatened
our demolition, he was perfectly calm. He turned around to me, a boy of
seven years, and said, "DeWitt, what are you crying about? I guess we
can ride as fast as they can run."

There was one scene I remember, that showed his poise and courage as
nothing else could. He was Sheriff of Somerset County, N.J., and we
lived in the court house, attached to which was the County Jail. During
my father's absence one day a prisoner got playing the maniac, dashing
things to pieces, vociferating horribly, and flourishing a knife with
which he had threatened to carve any one who came near the wicket of his
prison, Constables were called in to quell this real or dramatised
maniac, but they fell back in terror from the door of the prison. Their
show of firearms made no impression upon the demented wretch. After
awhile my father returned and was told of the trouble, and indeed he
heard it before he reached home. The whole family implored him not to
go near the man who was cursing, and armed with a knife. But father
could not be deterred. He did not stand outside the door and at a safe
distance, but took the key and opened the door, and without any weapon
of defence came upon the man, thundering at him, "Sit down and give me
that knife!" The tragedy was ended. I never remember to have heard him
make a gloomy remark. This was not because he had no perception of the
pollutions of society. I once said to my father, "Are people so much
worse now than they used to-be?" He made no answer for a minute, for the
old people do not like to confess much to the boys. But after awhile his
eye twinkled and he said: "Well, DeWitt, the fact is that people were
never any better than they ought to be."

Ours was an industrious home. I was brought up to regard laziness as an
abominable disease. Though we were some years of age before we heard the
trill of a piano, we knew well all about the song of "The
Spinning-Wheel."

Through how many thrilling scenes my father had passed! He stood, at
Morristown, in the choir that chanted when George Washington was buried;
talked with young men whose fathers he had held on his knee; watched the
progress of John Adams's administration; denounced, at the time, Aaron
Burr's infamy; heard the guns that celebrated the New Orleans victory;
voted against Jackson, but lived long enough to wish we had another just
like him; remembered when the first steamer struck the North river with
its wheel-buckets; was startled by the birth of telegraphy; saw the
United States grow from a speck on the world's map till all nations dip
their flag at our passing merchantmen. He was born while the
Revolutionary cannon were coming home from Yorktown, and lived to hear
the tramp of troops returning from the war of the great Rebellion. He
lived to speak the names of eighty children, grand-children and
great-grand-children. He died just three years from the day when my
mother sped on.

When my father lay dying the old country minister said to him, "Mr.
Talmage, how do you feel now as you are about to pass the Jordan of
death?" He replied--and it was the last thing he ever said--"I feel
well; I feel very well; all is well"--lifting his hand in a benediction,
a speechless benediction, which I pray God may go down through all the
generations--"It is well!"

Four of his sons became ministers of the Gospel: Reverend James R.
Talmage, D.D., who was preaching before I was born, and who died in
1879; Reverend John Van Nest Talmage, D.D., who spent his life as a
missionary in China, and died in the summer of 1892; Reverend Goyn
Talmage, D.D., who after doing a great work for God, died in 1891. But
all my brothers and sisters were decidedly Christian, lived usefully and
died peacefully.

I rejoice to remember that though my father lived in a plain house the
most of his days, he died in a mansion provided by the filial piety of
his son who had achieved a fortune.

The house at Gateville, near Bound Brook, in which I was born, has gone
down. Not one stone has been left upon another. I one day picked up a
fragment of the chimney, or wall, and carried it home. But the home that
I associate with my childhood was about three miles from Somerville,
N.J. The house, the waggon-shed, the barn, are now just as I remember
them from childhood days. It was called "Uncle John's Place" from the
fact that my mother's uncle, John Van Nest, owned it, and from him my
father rented it "on shares." Here I rode the horse to brook. Here I
hunted for and captured Easter eggs. Here the natural world made its
deepest impression on me. Here I learned some of the fatigues and
hardships of the farmer's life--not as I felt them, but as my father and
mother endured them. Here my brother Daniel brought home his bride. From
here I went to the country school. Here in the evening the family were
gathered, mother knitting or sewing, father vehemently talking politics
or religion with some neighbour not right on the subject of the tariff,
or baptism, and the rest of us reading or listening. All the group are
gone except my sister Catherine and myself.

My childhood, as I look back upon it, is to me a mystery. While I always
possessed a keen sense of the ludicrous, and a hearty appreciation of
fun of all sorts, there was a sedate side of my nature that demonstrated
itself to the older members of the family, and of which they often
spoke. For half days, or whole days, at a time I remember sitting on a
small footstool beside an ordinary chair on which lay open "Scott's
Commentaries on the Bible." I not only read the Scriptures out of this
book, but long discourses of Thomas Scott, and passages adjoining. I
could not have understood much of these profound and elaborate
commentaries. They were not written or printed for children, but they
had for my childish mind a fascination that kept me from play, and from
the ordinary occupations of persons of my years.

So, also, it was with the religious literature of the old-fashioned
kind, with which some of the tables of my father's house were piled.
Indeed, when afterwards I was living at my brothers' house, he a
clergyman, I read through and through and through the four or five
volumes of Dwight's "Theology," which must have been a wading-in far
beyond my depth. I think if I had not possessed an unusual resiliency of
temperament, the reading and thinking so much of things pertaining to
the soul and a future state would have made me morbid and unnatural.
This tendency to read and think in sacred directions was not a case of
early piety. I do not know what it was. I suppose in all natures there
are things inexplicable. How strange is the phenomenon of childhood days
to an old man!

How well I remember Sanderson's stage coach, running from New Brunswick
to Easton, as he drove through Somerville, New Jersey, turning up to the
post-office and dropping the mail-bags with ten letters and two or three
newspapers! On the box Sanderson himself, six feet two inches, and well
proportioned, long lash-whip in one hand, the reins of six horses in the
other, the "leaders" lathered along the lines of the traces, foam
dripping from the bits! It was the event of the day when the stage came.
It was our highest ambition to become a stage-driver. Some of the boys
climbed on the great leathern boot of the stage, and those of us who
could not get on shouted "Cut behind!" I saw the old stage-driver not
long ago, and I expressed to him my surprise that one around whose head
I had seen a halo of glory in my boyhood time was only a man like the
rest of us. Between Sanderson's stage-coach and a Chicago express train,
what a difference!

And I shall always marvel at our family doctor. Dear old Dr. Skillman!
My father's doctor, my mother's doctor, in the village home! He carried
all the confidences of all the families for ten miles around. We all
felt better as soon as we saw him enter the house. His face pronounced a
beatitude before he said a word. He welcomed all of us children into
life, and he closed the old people's eyes.




THE SECOND MILESTONE

1845-1869


When moving out of a house I have always been in the habit, after
everything was gone, of going into each room and bidding it a mute
farewell. There are the rooms named after the different members of the
family. I suppose it is so in all households. It was so in mine; we
named the rooms after the persons who occupied them. I moved from the
house of my boyhood with a sort of mute affection for its remembrances
that are most vivid in its hours of crisis and meditation. Through all
the years that have intervened there is no holier sanctuary to me than
the memory of my mother's vacant chair. I remember it well. It made a
creaking noise as it moved. It was just high enough to allow us children
to put our heads into her lap. That was the bank where we deposited all
our hurts and worries.

Some time ago, in an express train, I shot past that old homestead. I
looked out of the window and tried to peer through the darkness. While I
was doing so, one of my old schoolmates, whom I had not seen for many
years, tapped me on the shoulder, and said: "DeWitt, I see you are
looking out at the scenes of your boyhood."

"Oh, yes," I replied, "I was looking out at the old place where my
mother lived and died."

I pass over the boyhood days and the country school. The first real
breath of life is in young manhood, when, with the strength of the
unknown, he dares to choose a career. I first studied for the law, at
the New York University.

New York in 1850 was a small place compared to the New York of to-day,
but it had all the effervescence and glitter of the entire country even
then. I shall never forget the excitement when on September 1st, 1850,
Jenny Lind landed from the steamer "Atlantic." Not merely because of her
reputation as a singer, but because of her fame for generosity and
kindness were the people aroused to welcome her. The first $10,000 she
earned in America she devoted to charity, and in all the cities of
America she poured forth her benefactions. Castle Garden was then the
great concert hall of New York, and I shall never forget the night of
her first appearance. I was a college boy, and Jenny Lind was the first
great singer I ever heard. There were certain cadences in her voice that
overwhelmed the audience with emotion. I remember a clergyman sitting
near me who was so overcome that he was obliged to leave the auditorium.
The school of suffering and sorrow had done as much for her voice as the
Academy of Stockholm.

The woman who had her in charge when a child used to lock her in a room
when she went off to the daily work. There by the hour Jenny would sit
at the window, her only amusement singing, while she stroked her cat on
her lap. But sitting there by the window her voice fell on a listener in
the street. The listener called a music master to stand by the same
window, and he was fascinated and amazed, and took the child to the
director of the Royal Opera, asking for her the advantages of musical
education, and the director roughly said: "What shall we do with that
ugly thing? See what feet she has. And, then, her face; she will never
be presentable. No, we can't take her. Away with her!" But God had
decreed for this child of nature a grand career, and all those sorrows
were woven into her faculty of song. She never could have been what she
became, royally arrayed on the platforms of Berlin and Vienna and Paris
and London and New York, had she not first been the poor girl in the
garret at Stockholm. She had been perfected through suffering. That she
was genuinely Christian I prove not more from her charities than from
these words which she wrote in an album during her triumphal American
tour:

    In vain I seek for rest
      In all created good;
    It leaves me still unblest
      And makes me cry for God.
    And safe at rest I cannot be
      Until my heart finds rest in Thee.

There never was anyone who could equal Jenny Lind in the warble. Some
said it was like a lark, but she surpassed the lark. Oh, what a warble!
I hear it yet. All who heard it thirty-five years ago are hearing it
yet.

I should probably have been a lawyer, except for the prayers of my
mother and father that I should preach the Gospel. Later, I entered the
New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Why I ever thought of any other work
in the world than that which I have done, is another mystery of my
youth. Everything in my heredity and in my heart indicated my career as
a preacher. And yet, in the days of my infancy I was carried by
Christian parents to the house of God, and consecrated in baptism to the
Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; but that did not save me. In
after time I was taught to kneel at the Christian family altar with
father and mother and brothers and sisters. In after time I read
Doddridge's "Rise and Progress," and Baxter's "Call to the Unconverted,"
and all the religious books around my father's household; but that did
not save me. But one day the voice of Christ came into my heart saying,
"Repent, repent; believe, believe," and I accepted the offer of mercy.

It happened this way: Truman Osborne, one of the evangelists who went
through this country some years ago, had a wonderful art in the right
direction. He came to my father's house one day, and while we were all
seated in the room, he said: "Mr. Talmage, are all your children
Christians?" Father said: "Yes, all but De Witt." Then Truman Osborne
looked down into the fireplace, and began to tell a story of a storm
that came on the mountains, and all the sheep were in the fold; but
there was one lamb outside that perished in the storm. Had he looked me
in the eye, I should have been angered when he told me that story; but
he looked into the fireplace, and it was so pathetically and beautifully
done that I never found any peace until I was inside the fold, where the
other sheep are.

When I was a lad a book came out entitled "Dow Junior's Patent Sermons";
it made a great stir, a very wide laugh all over the country, that book
did. It was a caricature of the Christian ministry and of the Word of
God and of the Day of Judgment. Oh, we had a great laugh! The commentary
on the whole thing is that the author of that book died in poverty,
shame, debauchery, kicked out of society.

I have no doubt that derision kept many people out of the ark. The
world laughed to see a man go in, and said, "Here is a man starting for
the ark. Why, there will be no deluge. If there is one, that miserable
ship will not weather it. Aha! going into the ark! Well, that is too
good to keep. Here, fellows, have you heard the news? This man is going
into the ark." Under this artillery of scorn the man's good resolution
perished.

I was the youngest of a large family of children. My parents were
neither rich nor poor; four of the sons wanted collegiate education, and
four obtained it, but not without great home-struggle. The day I left
our country home to look after myself we rode across the country, and my
father was driving. He began to tell how good the Lord had been to him,
in sickness and in health, and when times of hardship came how
Providence had always provided the means of livelihood for the large
household; and he wound up by saying, "De Witt, I have always found it
safe to trust the Lord." I have felt the mighty impetus of that lesson
in the farm waggon. It has been fulfilled in my own life and in the
lives of many consecrated men and women I have known.

In the minister's house where I prepared for college there worked a man
by the name of Peter Croy. He could neither read nor write, but he was a
man of God. Often theologians would stop in the house--grave
theologians--and at family prayer Peter Croy would be called upon to
lead; and all those wise men sat around, wonder-struck at his religious
efficiency.

In the church at Somerville, New Jersey, where I was afterwards pastor,
John Vredenburgh preached for a great many years. He felt that his
ministry was a failure, and others felt so, although he was a faithful
minister preaching the Gospel all the time. He died, and died amid some
discouragements, and went home to God; for no one ever doubted that John
Vredenburgh was a good Christian minister. A little while after his
death there came a great awakening in Somerville, and one Sabbath two
hundred souls stood up at the Christian altar espousing the cause of
Christ, among them my own father and mother. And what was peculiar in
regard to nearly all of those two hundred souls was that they dated
their religious impressions from the ministry of John Vredenburgh.

I had no more confidence in my own powers when I was studying for the
ministry than John Vredenburgh. I was often very discouraged. "DeWitt,"
said a man to me as we were walking the fields at the time I was in the
theological school, "DeWitt, if you don't change your style of thought
and expression, you will never get a call to any church in Christendom
as long as you live." "Well," I replied, "if I cannot preach the Gospel
in America, then I will go to heathen lands and preach it." I thought I
might be useful on heathen ground, if I could ever learn the language of
the Chinese, about which I had many forebodings. The foreign tongue
became to me more and more an obstacle and a horror, until I resolved if
I could get an invitation to preach in the English language, I would
accept it. So one day, finding Rev. Dr. Van Vranken, one of our
theological professors (blessed be his memory), sauntering in the campus
of Rutgers College, I asked him, with much trepidation, if he would by
letter introduce me to some officer of the Reformed Church at
Belleville, N.J., the pulpit of which was then vacant. With an outburst
of heartiness he replied: "Come right into my house, and I will give you
the letter now." It was a most generous introduction of me to Dr.
Samuel Ward, a venerable elder of the Belleville church. I sent the
letter to the elder, and within a week received an invitation to occupy
the vacant pulpit.

I had been skirmishing here and there as a preacher, now in the basement
of churches at week-night religious meetings, and now in school-houses
on Sunday afternoons, and here and there in pulpits with brave pastors
who dared risk having an inexperienced theological student preach to
their people.

But the first sermon with any considerable responsibility resting upon
it was the sermon preached as a candidate for a pastoral call in the
Reformed Church at Belleville, N.J. I was about to graduate from the New
Brunswick Theological Seminary, and wanted a Gospel field in which to
work. I had already written to my brother John, a missionary at Amoy,
China, telling him that I expected to come out there.

I was met by Dr. Ward at Newark, New Jersey, and taken to his house.
Sabbath morning came. With one of my two sermons, which made up my
entire stock of pulpit resources, I tremblingly entered the pulpit of
that brown stone village church, which stands in my memory as one of the
most sacred places of all the earth, where I formed associations which I
expect to resume in Heaven.

The sermon was fully written, and was on the weird battle between the
Gideonites and Midianites, my text being in Judges vii. 20, 21: "The
three companies blew the trumpets, and brake the pitchers, and held the
lamps in their left hands, and the trumpets in their right hands to blow
withal; and they cried, The sword of the Lord, and of Gideon. And they
stood every man in his place round about the camp; and all the host ran,
and cried, and fled." A brave text, but a very timid man to handle it.
I did not feel at all that hour either like blowing Gideon's trumpet, or
holding up the Gospel lamp; but if I had, like any of the Gideonites,
held a pitcher, I think I would have dropped it and broken that lamp. I
felt as the moment approached for delivering my sermon more like the
Midianites, who, according to my text, "ran, and cried, and fled." I had
placed the manuscript of my sermon on the pulpit sofa beside where I
sat. Looking around to put my hand on the manuscript, lo! it was gone.
But where had it gone? My excitement knew no bound. Within three minutes
of the greatest ordeal of my life, and the sermon on which so much
depended mysteriously vanished! How much disquietude and catastrophe
were crowded into those three minutes it would be impossible to depict.
Then I noticed for the first time that between the upper and lower parts
of the sofa there was an opening about the width of three
finger-breadths, and I immediately suspected that through that opening
the manuscript of my sermon had disappeared. But how could I recover it,
and in so short a time? I bent over and reached under as far as I could.
But the sofa was low, and I could not touch the lost discourse. The
congregation were singing the last verse of the hymn, and I was reduced
to a desperate effort. I got down on my hands and knees, and then down
flat, and crawled under the sofa and clutched the prize. Fortunately,
the pulpit front was wide, and hid the sprawling attitude I was
compelled to take. When I arose to preach a moment after, the fugitive
manuscript before me on the Bible, it is easy to understand why I felt
more like the Midianites than I did like Gideon.

This and other mishaps with manuscripts helped me after a while to
strike for entire emancipation from such bondage, and for about a
quarter of a century I have preached without notes--only a sketch of the
sermon pinned in my Bible, and that sketch seldom referred to.

When I entered the ministry I looked very pale for years, for four or
five years, many times I was asked if I had consumption; and, passing
through the room, I would sometimes hear people sigh and say, "A-ah! not
long for this world!" I resolved in those times that I never, in any
conversation, would say anything depressing, and by the help of God I
have kept the resolution.

The day for my final examination for a licence to preach the Gospel for
ordination by the laying on of hands, and for installation as pastor for
the Reformed Church of Belleville, N.J., had arrived. The examination as
to my qualifications was to take place in the morning, and if the way
proved clear, the ordination and installation were to be solemnised in
the afternoon of the same day. The embarrassing thought was that members
of the congregation were to be present in the morning, as well as the
afternoon. If I made a mistake or failure under the severe scrutiny of
the Ecclesiastical Court, I would ever after be at a great disadvantage
in preaching to those good people.

It so happened, however, that the Classis, as the body of clergy were
called, was made up mostly of genial, consecrated persons, and no honest
young man would suffer anything at their hands. Although I was
exceedingly nervous, and did not do myself justice, and no doubt
appeared to know less than I really did know, all went well until a
clergyman, to whom I shall give the fictitious name of "Dr. Hardman,"
took me in hand. This "Dr. Hardman" had a dislike for me. He had once
wanted me to do something for him and take his advice in matters of a
pastoral settlement, which I had, for good reasons, declined to take. I
will not go further into the reasons of this man's antipathy, lest
someone should know whom I mean. One thing was certain to all present,
and that was his wish to defeat my installation as pastor of that
church, or make it to me a disagreeable experience.

As soon as he opened upon me a fire of interrogations, what little
spirit I had in me dropped. In the agitation I could not answer the
simplest questions. But he assailed me with puzzlers. He wanted to know,
among other things, if Christ's atonement availed for other worlds; to
which I replied that I did not know, as I had never studied theology in
any world but this. He hooked me with the horns of a dilemma. A Turkish
bath, with the thermometer up to 113, is cool compared to the
perspiration into which he threw me. At this point Rev. James W. Scott,
D.D. (that was his real name, and not fictitious) arose. Dr. Scott was a
Scotchman of about 65 years of age. He had been a classmate of the
remarkable Scottish poet, Robert Pollock. The Doctor was pastor of a
church at Newark, N.J. He was the impersonation of kindness, and
generosity, and helpfulness. The Gospel shone from every feature. I
never saw him under any circumstances without a smile on his face. He
had been on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the glory had never left
his countenance.

I calculate the value of the soul by its capacity for happiness. How
much joy it can get in this world--out of friendships, out of books, out
of clouds, out of the sea, out of flowers, out of ten thousand things!
Yet all the joy it has here does not test its capacity.

As Dr. Scott rose that day he said, "Mr. President, I think this
examination has gone on long enough, and I move it be stopped, and that
the examination be pronounced satisfactory, and that this young man be
licensed to preach the Gospel, and that this afternoon we proceed to his
ordination and installation." The motion was put and carried, and I was
released from a Protestant purgatory.

But the work was not yet done. By rule of that excellent denomination,
of which I was then a member, the call of a church must be read and
approved before it can be lawfully accepted. The call from that dear old
church at Belleville was read, and in it I was provided with a month's
summer vacation. Dr. Hardman rose, and said that he thought that a month
was too long a vacation, and he proposed two weeks. Then Dr. Scott arose
and said, if any change were made he would have the vacation six weeks;
"For," said he, "that young man does not look very strong physically,
and I believe he should have a good long rest every summer." But the
call was left as it originally read, promising me a month of
recuperation each year.

At the close of that meeting of Classis, Dr. Scott came up to me, took
my right hand in both his hands, and said, "I congratulate you on the
opportunity that opens here. Do your best, and God will see you through;
and if some Saturday night you find yourself short of a sermon, send
down to Newark, only three miles, and I will come up and preach for
you." Can anyone imagine the difference of my appreciation of Dr.
Hardman and Dr. Scott?

Only a few weeks passed on, and the crisis that Dr. Scott foresaw in my
history occurred, and Saturday night saw me short of a sermon. So I sent
a messenger to Dr. Scott. He said to the messenger, "I am very tired;
have been holding a long series of special services in my church, but
that young Talmage must be helped, and I will preach for him to-morrow
night." He arrived in time, and preached a glowing and rousing sermon on
the text, "Have ye received the Holy Ghost?" As I sat behind him in the
pulpit and looked upon him I thought, "What a magnificent soul you are!
Tired out with your own work, and yet come up here to help a young man
to whom you are under no obligation!" Well, that was the last sermon he
ever preached. The very next Saturday he dropped dead in his house.
Outside of his own family no one was more broken-hearted at his
obsequies than myself, to whom he had, until the meeting of Classis,
been a total stranger.

I stood at his funeral in the crowd beside a poor woman with a faded
shawl and worn-out hat, who was struggling up to get one look at the
dear old face in the coffin. She was being crowded back. I said, "Follow
me, and you shall see him." So I pushed the way up for her as well as
myself, and when we got up to the silent form she burst out crying, and
said, "That is the last friend I had in the world."

Dr. Hardman lived on. He lived to write a letter when I was called to
Syracuse, N.Y., a letter telling a prominent officer of the Syracuse
Church that I would never do at all for their pastor. He lived on until
I was called to Philadelphia, and wrote a letter to a prominent officer
in the Philadelphia Church telling them not to call me. Years ago he
went to his rest. But the two men will always stand in my memory as
opposites in character. The one taught me a lesson never to be forgotten
about how to treat a young man, and the other a lesson about how not to
treat a young man. Dr. Scott and Dr. Hardman, the antipodes!

So my first settlement as pastor was in the village of Belleville, N.J.
My salary was eight hundred dollars and a parsonage. The amount seemed
enormous to me. I said to myself: "What! all this for one year?" I was
afraid of getting worldly under so much prosperity! I resolved to invite
all the congregation to my house in groups of twenty-five each. We [A]
began, and as they were the best congregation in all the world, and we
felt nothing was too good for them, we piled all the luxuries on the
table. I never completed the undertaking. At the end of six months I was
in financial despair. I found that we not only had not the surplus of
luxuries, but we had a struggle to get the necessaries.

     [A] _While at Belleville Dr. Talmage married Miss Mary
         Avery, of Brooklyn, N.Y., by whom he had two children--a
         son, Thomas De Witt, and a daughter, Jessie. Mrs. Talmage
         was accidentally drowned in the Schuylkill River while Dr.
         Talmage was pastor of the Second Reformed Church of
         Philadelphia._

Although the first call I ever had was to Piermont, N.Y., my first real
work began in the Reformed Church of Belleville, N.J. I preached at
Piermont in the morning, and at the Congregational meeting held in the
afternoon of the same day it was resolved to invite me to become pastor.
But for the very high hill on which the parsonage was situated I should
probably have accepted. I was delighted with the congregation, and with
the grand scenery of that region.

I was ordained to the Gospel Ministry and installed as pastor July 29th,
1856, my brother Goyn preaching the sermon from the text, First
Corinthians iii. 12, 13. Reverend Dr. Benjamin C. Taylor, the oldest
minister present, offered the ordaining prayer, and about twenty hands
were laid upon my head. All these facts are obtained from a memorandum
made by a hand that long since forgot its cunning and kindness. The
three years passed in Belleville were years of hard work. The hardest
work in a clergyman's lifetime is during the first three years. No other
occupation or profession puts such strain upon one's nerves and brain.
Two sermons and a lecture per week are an appalling demand to make upon
a young man. Most of the ministers never get over that first three
years. They leave upon one's digestion or nervous system a mark that
nothing but death can remove. It is not only the amount of mental
product required of a young minister, but the draft upon his sympathies
and the novelty of all that he undertakes; his first sermon; his first
baptism; his first communion season; his first pastoral visitation; his
first wedding; his first funeral.

My first baptism was of Lily Webster, a black-eyed baby, who grew up to
be as beautiful a woman as she was a child.

I baptised her. Rev. Dr. John Dowling, of the Baptist Church, New York,
preached for me and my church his great sermon on, "I saw a great
multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and
people, and tongues, clothed in white robes." In my verdancy I feared
that the Doctor, who did not believe in the baptism of infants, might
take it for a personal affront that I had chosen that evening for this
my first baptism.

[Illustration: DR. TALMAGE IN HIS FIRST CHURCH, BELLEVILLE, NEW JERSEY.]

Sometimes at the baptism of children, while I have held up one hand in
prayer, I have held up the other in amazement that the parents should
have weighted the babe with such a dissonant and repulsive nomenclature.
I have not so much wondered that some children should cry out at the
Christening font, as that others with such smiling faces should take a
title that will be the burden of their lifetime. It is no excuse
because they are Scriptural names to call a child Jehoiakim, or Tiglath
Pileser. I baptised one by the name of Bathsheba. Why, under all the
circumambient heaven, any parent should want to give a child the name of
that loose creature of Scripture times, I cannot imagine. I have often
felt at the baptismal altar when names were announced somewhat like
saying, as did the Rev. Dr. Richards, of Morristown, New Jersey, when a
child was handed to him for baptism, and the names given, "Hadn't you
better call it something else?"

On this occasion I had adopted the theory, which I long since abandoned,
that an officiating clergyman at baptism should take the child in his
arms. Now, there are many ministers who do not know how to hold a baby,
and they frighten the child and increase the anxiety of the mother, and
may create a riot all along the line if there be other infants waiting
for the ceremony.

After reading the somewhat prolonged liturgy of the dear old Reformed
Church, I came down from the pulpit and took the child in my arms. She
was, however, far more composed than myself, and made no resistance; but
the overpowering sensation attached to the first application of the holy
chrism is a vivid and everlasting memory.

Then, the first pastoral visitation! With me it was at the house of a
man suffering from dropsy in the leg. He unbandaged the limb and
insisted upon my looking at the fearful malady. I never could with any
composure look at pain, and the last profession in all the world suited
to me would have been surgery. After praying with the man and offering
him Scriptural condolence, I started for home.

My wife met me with anxious countenance, and said, "How did you get
hurt, and what is the matter?" The sight of the lame leg had made my leg
lame, and unconsciously I was limping on the way home.

But I had quite another experience with a parishioner. He was a queer
man, and in bad odour in the community. Some time previously his wife
had died, and although a man of plenty of means, in order to economise
on funeral expenses, he had wheeled his wife to the grave on a
wheelbarrow. This economy of his had not led the village to any higher
appreciation of the man's character. Having been told of his inexpensive
eccentricities, I was ready for him when one morning he called at the
parsonage. As he entered he began by saying: "I came in to say that I
don't like you." "Well," I said, "that is a strange coincidence, for I
cannot bear the sight of you. I hear that you are the meanest man in
town, and that your neighbours despise you. I hear that you wheeled your
wife on a wheelbarrow to the graveyard." To say the least, our
conversation that day was unique and spirited, and it led to his
becoming a most ardent friend and admirer. I have had multitudes of
friends, but I have found in my own experience that God so arranged it
that the greatest opportunities of usefulness that have been opened
before me were opened by enemies. And when, years ago, they conspired
against me, their assault opened all Christendom to me as a field in
which to preach the Gospel. So you may harness your antagonists to your
best interests and compel them to draw you on to better work. He allowed
me to officiate at his second marriage, did this mine enemy. All the
town was awake that night. They had somehow heard that this economist at
obsequies was to be remarried. Well, I was inside his house trying,
under adverse circumstances, to make the twain one flesh. There were
outside demonstrations most extraordinary, and all in consideration of
what the bridegroom had been to that community. Horns, trumpets,
accordions, fiddles, fire-crackers, tin pans, howls, screeches, huzzas,
halloos, missiles striking the front door, and bedlam let loose! Matters
grew worse as the night advanced, until the town authorities read the
Riot Act, and caused the only cannon belonging to the village to be
hauled out on the street and loaded, threatening death to the mob if
they did not disperse. Glad am I to say that it was only a farce, and no
tragedy. My mode of first meeting this queer man was a case in which it
is best to fight fire with fire. I remember also the first funeral. It
nearly killed me. A splendid young man skating on the Passaic River in
front of my house had broken through the ice, and his body after many
hours had been grappled from the water and taken home to his distracted
parents. To be the chief consoler in such a calamity was something for
which I felt completely incompetent. When in the old but beautiful
church the silent form of the young man whom we all loved rested beneath
the pulpit, it was a pull upon my emotions I shall never forget. On the
way to the grave, in the same carriage with the eminent Reverend Dr.
Fish, who helped in the services, I said, "This is awful. One more
funeral like this will be the end of us." He replied, "You will learn
after awhile to be calm under such circumstances. You cannot console
others unless you preserve your own equipoise."

Those years at Belleville were to me memorable. No vacation, but three
times a day I took a row on the river. Those old families in my
congregation I can never forget--the Van Rensselaers, the Stevenses,
the Wards. These families took us under their wing. At Mr. Van
Rensselaer's we dined every Monday. It had been the habit of my
predecessors in the pulpit. Grand old family! Their name not more a
synonym for wealth than for piety. Mrs. Van Rensselaer was one of the
saints clear up in the heaven of one's appreciation.

Wm. Stevens was an embodiment of generosity. He could not pray in
public, or make a speech; but he could give money, and when he had
plenty of it he gave in large sums, and when monetary disaster came, his
grief was that he had nothing to give. I saw him go right through all
the perturbations of business life. He was faithful to God. I saw him
one day worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. I saw him the next day
and he was not worth a farthing. Stevens! How plainly he comes before me
as I think of the night in 1857 after the New York banks had gone down,
and he had lost everything except his faith in God, and he was at the
prayer meeting to lead the singing as usual! And, not noticing that from
the fatigues of that awful financial panic he had fallen asleep, I arose
and gave out the hymn, "My drowsy powers, why sleep ye so?" His wife
wakened him, and he started the hymn at too high a pitch, and stopped,
saying, "That is too high"; then started it at too low a pitch, and
stopped, saying, "That is too low." It is the only mistake I ever heard
him make. But the only wonder is that amid the circumstances of broken
fortunes he could sing at all.

Dr. Samuel Ward! He was the angel of health for the neighbourhood.
Before anyone else was up any morning, passing along his house you would
see him in his office reading. He presided at the first nativity in my
household. He it was that met me at the railroad station when I went to
preach my first sermon as candidate, at Belleville. He medicated for
many years nearly all the wounds for body and mind in that region. An
elder in the Church, he could administer to the soul as well as to the
perishable nature of his patients.

And the Duncans! Broad Scotch as they were in speech! I was so much with
them that I got unconsciously some of the Scottish brogue in my own
utterance. William, cautious and prudent; John, bold and
venturesome--both so high in my affections! Among the first ones that I
ask for in Heaven will be John and William Duncan.

Gasherie De Witt! He embodied a large part of the enterprise and
enthusiasm of the place. He had his head full of railroads long before
the first spike was driven for an iron pathway to the village. We were
much together and ardently attached; went fishing together on long
summer days, he catching the fish, and I watching the process. When we
dedicated the first Brooklyn Tabernacle, he was present, and gave the
money for building a baptistry in the pulpit, and gave besides $100 for
his wife and each one of his children. When we parted from each other at
Oxford, England, he to go to Geneva, Switzerland, to die, and I to come
back to America, much of sweet acquaintanceship and complete confidence
ended for this world, only to be taken up under celestial auspices.

But time and space would fail to tell of the noble men and women that
stood around me in those early years of my ministry. They are all gone,
and their personality makes up a large part of my anticipation of the
world to come.




THE THIRD MILESTONE

1856-1862


My first sermons were to me the most tremendous endeavours of my life,
because I felt the awful responsibility of standing in a pulpit, knowing
that a great many people would be influenced by what I said concerning
God, or the soul, or the great future.

When I first began to preach, I was very cautious lest I should be
misrepresented, and guarded the subject on all sides. I got beyond that
point. I found that I got on better when, without regard to
consequences, I threw myself upon the hearts and consciences of my
hearers.

In those early days of my pastoral experience I saw how men reason
themselves into scepticism. I knew what it was to have a hundred nights
poured into one hour.

I remember one infidel book in the possession of my student companion.
He said, "DeWitt, would you like to read that book?" "Well," said I, "I
would like to look at it." I read it a little while. I said to him, "I
dare not read that book; you had better destroy it. I give you my
advice, you had better destroy it. I dare not read that book. I have
read enough of it." "Oh," he said, "haven't you a stronger mind than
that? Can't you read a book you don't exactly believe, and not be
affected by it?" I said, "You had better destroy it." He kept it. He
read it until he gave up the Bible; his belief in the existence of a
God, his good morals; until body, mind and soul were ruined--and he went
into the insane asylum. I read too much of it. I read about fifteen or
twenty pages of it. I wish I had never read it. It never did me any
good; it did me harm. I have often struggled with what I read in that
book. I rejected it, I denounced it, I cast it out with infinite scorn,
I hated it; yet sometimes its caricature of good and its eulogium of
evil have troubled me.

With supreme gratitude, therefore, I remember the wonderful impression
made upon me, when I was a young man, of the presence of a consecrated
human being in the pulpit.

It was a Sabbath evening in spring at "The Trinity Methodist Church,"
Jersey City. Rev. William P. Corbit, the pastor of that church, in
compliment to my relatives, who attended upon his services, invited me
to preach for him. I had only a few months before entered the Gospel
ministry, and had come in from my village settlement to occupy a place
in the pulpit of the great Methodist orator. In much trepidation on my
part I entered the church with Mr. Corbit, and sat trembling in the
corner of the "sacred desk," waiting for the moment to begin the
service. A crowded audience had assembled to hear the pastor of that
church preach, and the disappointment I was about to create added to my
embarrassment.

The service opened, and the time came to offer the prayer before sermon.
I turned to Mr. Corbit and said, "I wish you would lead in prayer." He
replied, "No! sharpen your own knife!" The whole occasion was to me
memorable for its agitations. But there began an acquaintanceship that
became more and more endearing and ardent as the years went by. After he
ceased, through the coming on of the infirmities of age, to occupy a
pulpit of his own, he frequented my church on the Sabbaths, and our
prayer-meetings during the week. He was the most powerful exhorter I
ever heard. Whatever might be the intensity of interest in a revival
service, he would in a ten minute address augment it. I never heard him
deliver a sermon except on two occasions, and those during my boyhood;
but they made lasting impressions upon me. I do not remember the texts
or the ideas, but they demonstrated the tremendous reality of spiritual
and eternal things, and showed possibilities in religious address that I
had never known or imagined.

He was so unique in manners, in pulpit oratory, and in the entire type
of his nature, that no one will ever be able to describe what he was.
Those who saw and heard him the last ten or fifteen years of his
decadence can have no idea of his former power as a preacher of the
Gospel.

There he is, as I first saw him! Eye like a hawk's. Hair long and
straight as a Chippewa Indian's. He was not straight as an arrow, for
that suggests something too fragile and short, but more like a
column--not only straight, but tall and majestic, and capable of holding
any weight, and without fatigue or exertion. When he put his foot down,
either literally of figuratively, it was down. Vacillation, or fear, or
incertitude, or indecision, were strangers to whom he would never be
introduced. When he entered a room you were, to use a New Testament
phrase, "exceedingly filled with his company."

He was as affectionate as a woman to those whom he liked, and cold as
Greenland to those whose principles were an affront. He was not only a
mighty speaker, but a mighty listener. I do not know how any man could
speak upon any important theme, standing in his presence, without being
set on fire by his alert sympathy.

But he has vanished from mortal sight. What the resurrection will do for
him I cannot say. If those who have only ordinary stature and
unimpressive physique in this world are at the last to have bodies
resplendent and of supernal potency, what will the unusual corporiety of
William P. Corbit become? In his case the resurrection will have unusual
material to start with. If a sculptor can mould a handsome form out of
clay, what can he not put out of Parian marble? If the blast of the
trumpet which wakes the dead rouses life-long invalidism and emaciation
into athletic celestialism, what will be the transfiguration when the
sound of final reanimation touches the ear of those sleeping giants
among the trees and fountains of Greenwood?

Good-bye, great and good and splendid soul! Good-bye, till we meet
again! I will look around for you as soon as I come, if through the
pardoning grace of Christ I am so happy as to reach the place of your
destination. Meet me at the gate of the city; or under the tree of life
on the bank of the river; or just inside of the door of the House of
Many Mansions; or in the hall of the Temple which has no need of stellar
or lunar or solar illumination, "For the Lamb is the Light thereof."

After three years of grace and happiness at Belleville I accepted a call
to a church in Syracuse. My pastorate there, in the very midst of its
most uplifting crisis, was interrupted, as I believe, by Divine orders.
The ordeal of deciding anything important in my life has always been a
desperate period of anxiety. I never have really decided for myself. God
has told me what to do. The first great crisis of this sort came to me
in Syracuse. While living there I received a pastoral call from the
Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia. Six weeks of agony followed.

I was about 30 years of age. The thick shock of hair with which I had
been supplied, in those six weeks was thinned out to its present
scarcity. My church in Syracuse was made up of as delightful people as
ever came together; but I felt that the climate of Philadelphia would be
better adapted to my health, and so I was very anxious to go. But a
recent revival in my Syracuse Church, and a movement at that time on
foot for extensive repairs of our building, made the question of my
leaving for another pastorate very doubtful. Six weeks of sleeplessness
followed. Every morning I combed out handfuls of hair as the result of
the nervous agitation. Then I decided to stay, and never expected to
leave those kind parishioners of Syracuse.

A year afterward the call from Philadelphia was repeated, and all the
circumstances having changed, I went. But I learned, during those six
weeks of uncertainty about going from Syracuse to Philadelphia, a lesson
I shall never forget, and a lesson that might be useful to others in
like crisis: namely, that it is one's duty to stay where you are until
God makes it evident that you should move.

In all my life I never had one streak of good luck. But I have had a
good God watching and guiding me.

While I was living in Syracuse I delivered my first lecture. It was a
literary lecture. My ideas of a literary lecture are very much changed
from what they used to be. I used to think that a lecture ought to be
something very profound. I began with three or four lectures of that
kind in stock. My first lecture audience was in a patient community of
the town of Hudson, N.Y. All my addresses previously had been literary.
I had made speeches on literature and patriotism, and sometimes filled
the gaps when in lecture courses speakers announced failed to arrive.

But the first paid lecture was at Hudson. The fifty dollars which I
received for it seemed immense. Indeed it was the extreme price paid
anyone in those days. It was some years later in life that I got into
the lecturing field. It was always, however, subordinate to my chief
work of preaching the Gospel.

Syracuse in 1859 was the West. I felt there all the influences that are
now western. Now there is no West left. They have chased it into the
Pacific Ocean.

In 1862 I accepted a call to the Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia.

What remembrances come to me, looking backward to this period of our
terrific national carnalism! I shall never forget the first time I ever
saw Abraham Lincoln. We followed into his room, at the White House, a
committee that had come to Washington to tell the President how to
conduct the war. The saddest-looking man I ever saw was Abraham Lincoln.
He had a far-away look while he stood listening to an address being made
to him by one of the committee, as though beyond and far and wide he
could see the battlefields and hospitals and conflagrations of national
bereavement. One of our party asked for his autograph; he cheerfully
gave it, asking, "Is that all I can do for you?" He was at that time
the most abused man in America.

I remember the alarm in Philadelphia when General Lee's army invaded
Pennsylvania. Merchants sent their goods quietly to New York. Residents
hid their valuables. A request for arms was made at the arsenals, and
military companies were organised. Preachers appealed to the men in
their congregations, organised companies, engaged a drill sergeant, and
carried on daily drills in the yards adjoining their churches.

In the regiment I joined for a short time there were many clergymen. It
was the most awkward squad of men ever got together. We drilled a week
or two, and then disbanded. Whether General Lee heard of the formation
of our regiment or not I cannot say, but he immediately retreated across
the Potomac.

There were in Philadelphia and its vicinity many camps of prisoners of
war, hospitals for the sick and wounded. Waggon trains of supplies for
the soldiers were constantly passing through the streets. I was
privileged to be of some service in the field to the Christian
Commission. With Dr. Brainerd and Samuel B. Falls I often performed some
duty at the Cooper shop; while with George H. Stuart and George T.
Merigens I invited other cities to make appeals for money to forward the
great work of the Secretary and Christian Commissions. In our churches
we were constantly busy getting up entertainments and fairs to help
those rendered destitute by the loss of fathers and brothers in the
field.

Just before the battle of Gettysburg a long procession of clergymen,
headed by Dr. Brainerd, marched to Fairmount Park with spades over their
shoulders to throw up entrenchments. The victory of the Federal troops
at Vicksburg and Gettysburg rendered those earthworks unnecessary.

A distinguished gentleman of the Civil War told me that Abraham Lincoln
proposed to avoid our civil conflict by purchasing the slaves of the
South and setting them free. He calculated what would be a reasonable
price for them, and when the number of millions of dollars that would be
required for such a purpose was announced the proposition was scouted,
and the North would not have made the offer, and the South would not
have accepted it, if made.

"But," said my military friend, "the war went on, and just the number of
million dollars that Mr. Lincoln calculated would have been enough to
make a reasonable purchase of all the slaves were spent in war, besides
all the precious lives that were hurled away in 250 battles."

There ought to be some other way for men to settle their controversies
without wholesale butchering.

It was due partly to the national gloom that overspread the people
during the Civil War that I took to the lecture platform actively. I
entered fully into the lecturing field when I went to Philadelphia,
where DeWitt Moore, officer in my church and a most intimate friend,
asked me to lecture for the benefit of a Ball Club to which he belonged.
That lecture in a hall in Locust Street, Philadelphia, opened the way
for more than I could do as lecturer.

I have always made such engagements subordinate to my chief work of
preaching the Gospel. Excepting two long journeys a year, causing each
an absence of two Sundays, I have taken no lecturing engagements, except
one a week, generally Thursdays. Lecturing has saved my life and
prolonged my work. It has taken me from an ever-ringing door-bell, and
freshened me for work, railroad travelling being to me a recuperation.

I have lectured in nearly all the cities of the United States, Canada,
England, Ireland and Scotland, and in most of them many times. The
prices paid me have seemed too large, but my arrangements have generally
been made through bureaus, and almost invariably local committees have
cleared money. The lecture platform seemed to me to offer greater
opportunity for usefulness. Things that could not be said in the pulpit,
but which ought to be said, may be said on the lyceum platform. And
there was so much that had to be said then, to encourage, to cheer, to
brighten, to illumine the sorrow and bereavement. From the first I
regarded my lecture tours as an annex to my church. The lecture platform
has been to me a pastoral visitation. It has given me an opportunity of
meeting hundreds of thousands of people to whom, through the press, I
have for many years administered the Gospel.

People have often asked me how much money I received for my lectures.
The amounts have been a great surprise to me, often.

For many years I have been paid from $400 to $1,000 a lecture. The
longer the journey the bigger the fee usually. The average remuneration
was about $500 a night. In Cleveland and in Cincinnati I received $750.
In Chicago, $1,000. Later I was offered $6,000 for six lectures in
Chicago, to be delivered one a month, during the World's Fair, but I
declined them.

My expenses in many directions have been enormous, and without a large
income for lectures I could not have done many things which I felt it
important to do. I have always been under obligation to the press.
Sometimes it has not intended to help me, but it has, being hard pressed
for news.

During the Civil War, when news was sufficiently exciting for the most
ambitious journalist, they used to come to my church for a copy of my
Sermons. News in those days was pretty accurate, but it sometimes went
wrong.

On a Sabbath night, at the close of a preaching service in Philadelphia,
a reporter of one of the prominent newspapers came into my study
adjoining the pulpit and asked of me a sketch of the sermon just
delivered, as he had been sent to take it, but had been unavoidably
detained. His mind did not seem to be very clear, but I dictated to him
about a column of my sermon. He had during the afternoon or evening been
attending a meeting of the Christian Commission for raising funds for
the hospitals, and ex-Governor Pollock had been making a speech. The
reporter had that speech of the ex-Governor of Pennsylvania in his hand,
and had the sketch of my sermon in the same bundle of reportorial notes.
He opened the door to depart and said, "Good evening," and I responded,
"Good evening." The way out from my study to the street was through a
dark alley across which a pump handle projected to an unreasonable
extent. "Look out for that pump handle," I said, "or you may get hurt."
But the warning did not come soon enough. I heard the collision and then
a hard fall, and a rustle of papers, and a scramble, and then some words
of objurgation at the sudden overthrow.

There was no portable light that I could take to his assistance. Beside
that, I was as much upset with cruel laughter as the reporter had been
by the pump handle. In this state of helplessness I shut the door. But
the next morning newspaper proved how utter had been the discomfiture
and demoralisation of my journalistic friend. He put my sermon under the
name of ex-Governor Pollock at the meeting of the Christian Commission,
and he made my discourse begin with the words, "When I was Governor of
Pennsylvania."

Never since John Gutenberg invented the art of printing was there such a
riot of types or such mixing up of occasions. Philadelphia went into a
brown study as to what it all meant, and the more the people read of
ex-Governor Pollock's speech and of my sermon of the night before, the
more they were stunned by the stroke of that pump handle.

But it was soon forgotten--everything is. The memory of man is poor. All
the talk about the country never forgetting those who fought for it is
an untruth. It does forget. Picture how veterans of the war sometimes
had to turn the hand-organs on the streets of Philadelphia to get a
living for their families! How ruthlessly many of them have been turned
out of office that some bloat of a politician might take their place!
The fact is, there is not a man or woman under thirty years of age, who,
born before the war, has any full appreciation of the four years
martyrdom of 1861 to 1865, inclusive. I can scarcely remember, and yet I
still feel the pressure of domestic calamity that overshadowed the
nation then.

Since things have been hardened, as was the guardsman in the Crimean War
who heartlessly wrote home to his mother: "I do not want to see any more
crying letters come to the Crimea from you. Those I have received I have
put into my rifle, after loading it, and have fired them at the
Russians, because you appear to have a strong dislike of them. If you
had seen as many killed as I have you would not have as many weak ideas
as you now have."

After the War came a period of great national rejoicing. I shall never
forget, in the summer of 1869, a great national peace jubilee was held
in Boston, and DeWitt Moore, an elder of my church, had been honoured by
the selection of some of his music to be rendered on that occasion. I
accompanied him to the jubilee. Forty thousand people sat and stood in
the great Colosseum erected for that purpose. Thousands of wind and
stringed instruments; twelve thousand trained voices! The masterpieces
of all ages rendered, hour after hour, and day after day--Handel's
"Judas Maccabæus," Spohr's "Last Judgment," Beethoven's "Mount of
Olives," Haydn's "Creation," Mendelssohn's "Elijah," Meyerbeer's
"Coronation March," rolling on and up in surges that billowed against
the heavens! The mighty cadences within were accompanied on the outside
by the ringing of the bells of the city, and cannon on the common, in
exact time with the music, discharged by electricity, thundering their
awful bars of a harmony that astounded all nations. Sometimes I bowed my
head and wept. Sometimes I stood up in the enchantment, and sometimes
the effect was so overpowering I felt I could not endure it.

When all the voices were in full chorus, and all the batons in full
wave, and all the orchestra in full triumph, and a hundred anvils under
mighty hammers were in full clang, and all the towers of the city rolled
in their majestic sweetness, and the whole building quaked with the boom
of thirty cannon, Parepa Rosa, with a voice that will never again be
equalled on earth until the archangelic voice proclaims that time shall
be no longer, rose above all other sounds in her rendering of our
national air, the "Star Spangled Banner." It was too much for a mortal,
and quite enough for an immortal, to hear: and while some fainted, one
womanly spirit, released under its power, sped away to be with God. It
was a marvel of human emotion in patriotic frenzy.

Immediately following the Civil War there was a great wave of
intemperance, and bribery swept over our land. The temptation to
intemperance in public places grew more and more terrific. Of the men
who were prominent in political circles but few died respectably. The
majority among them died of delirium tremens. The doctor usually fixed
up the case for the newspapers, and in his report to them it was usually
gout, or rheumatism, or obstruction of the liver, or exhaustion from
patriotic services--but we all knew it was whiskey. That which smote the
villain in the dark alley smote down the great orator and the great
legislator. The one you wrapped in a rough cloth, and pushed into a
rough coffin, and carried out in a box waggon, and let him down into a
pauper's grave, without a prayer or a benediction. Around the other
gathered the pomp of the land; and lordly men walked with uncovered
heads beside the hearse tossing with plumes on the way to a grave to be
adorned with a white marble shaft, all four sides covered with eulogium.
The one man was killed by logwood rum at two cents a glass, the other by
a beverage three dollars a bottle. I write both their epitaphs. I write
the one epitaph with my lead pencil on the shingle over the pauper's
grave; I write the other epitaph with a chisel, cutting on the white
marble of the senator: "Slain by strong drink." The time came when
dissipation was no longer a hindrance to office in this country. Did we
not at one time have a Secretary of the United States carried home dead
drunk? Did we not have a Vice-President sworn in so intoxicated the
whole land hid its head in shame? Judges and jurors and attorneys
sometimes tried important cases by day, and by night caroused together
in iniquity.

During the war whiskey had done its share in disgracing manhood. What
was it that defeated the armies sometimes in the late war? Drunkenness
in the saddle! What mean those graves on the heights of Fredericksburg?
As you go to Richmond you see them. Drunkenness in the saddle. In place
of the bloodshed of war, came the deformations of character,
libertinism!

Again and again it was demonstrated that impurity walked under the
chandeliers of the mansion, and dozed on damask upholstery. In Albany,
in Harrisburg, in Trenton, in Washington, intemperance was rife in
public places.

The two political parties remained silent on the question. Hand in hand
with intemperance went the crime of bribery by money--by proffered
office.

For many years after the war had been almost forgotten, in many of the
legislatures it was impossible to get a bill through unless it had
financial consideration.

The question was asked softly, sometimes very softly, in regard to a
bill: "Is there any money in it?" And the lobbies of the Legislatures
and the National Capitol were crowded with railroad men and
manufacturers and contractors. The iniquity became so great that
sometimes reformers and philanthropists have been laughed out of
Harrisburg, and Albany, and Trenton, and Washington, because they came
empty-handed. "You vote for this bill, and I'll vote for that bill."
"You favour that monopoly of a moneyed institution, and I'll favour the
other monopoly of another institution." And here is a bill that is going
to be very hard to get through the Legislature, and some friends met
together at a midnight banquet, and while intoxicated promised to vote
the same way. Here are $5,000 for prudent distribution in this
direction, and here are $1,000 for prudent distribution in that
direction. Now, we are within four votes of having enough. $5,000 to
that intelligent member from Westchester, and $2,000 to that stupid
member from Ulster, and now we are within two votes of having it. Give
$500 to this member, who will be sick and stay at home, and $300 to this
member, who will go to see his great-aunt languishing in her last
sickness. The day has come for the passing of the bill. The Speaker's
gavel strikes. "Senators, are you ready for the question? All in favour
of voting away these thousands of millions of dollars will say, 'Ay.'"
"Ay! Ay! Ay! Ay!" "The Ays have it." It was a merciful thing that all
this corruption went on under a republican form of government. Any other
style of government would have been consumed by it long ago. There were
enough national swindles enacted in this country after the war--yes,
thirty years afterwards--to swamp three monarchies.

The Democratic party filled its cup of iniquity as it went out of power,
before the war. Then the Republican party came along and it filled its
cup of iniquity a little sooner; and there they lie, the Democratic
party and the Republican party, side by side, great loathsome carcasses
of iniquity, each one worse than the other.

These are reminiscences of more than thirty years ago, and yet it seems
that I have never ceased to fight the same sort of human temptations and
frailties to this very day.




THE FOURTH MILESTONE

1862-1877


I spent seven of the most delightful years of my life in Philadelphia.
What wonderful Gospel men were round me in the City of Brotherly Love at
this time--such men as Rev. Alfred Barnes, Rev. Dr. Boardman, Rev. Dr.
Berg, Rev. Charles Wadsworth, and many others equally distinguished. I
should probably never have left Philadelphia except that I was afraid I
would get too lazy. Being naturally indolent I wanted to get somewhere
where I would be compelled to work. I have sometimes felt that I was
naturally the laziest man ever born. I am afraid of indolence--as afraid
of indolence as any reformed inebriate is afraid of the wine cup. He
knows if he shall take one glass he will be flung back into inebriety. I
am afraid, if I should take one long pull of nothing to do, I should
stop forever.

My church in Philadelphia was a large one, and it was crowded with
lovely people. All that a congregation could do for a pastor's happiness
they were doing, and always had done.

We ministers living in Philadelphia at this time may have felt the need
for combating indolence, for we had a ministerial ball club, and twice a
week the clergymen of all denominations went out to the suburbs of the
city and played baseball. We went back to our pulpits, spirits
lightened, theology improved, and able to do better service for the
cause of God than we could have done without that healthful shaking up.

The reason so many ministers think everything is going to ruin is
because their circulation is lethargic, or their lungs are in need of
inflection by outdoor exercise. I have often wished since that this
splendid idea among the ministers in Philadelphia could have been
emulated elsewhere. Every big city should have its ministerial ball
club. We want this glorious game rescued from the roughs and put into
the hands of those who will employ it in recuperation.

My life in Philadelphia was so busy that I must have had very little
time for keeping any record or note-books. Most of my warmest and
life-long friendships were made in Philadelphia, however, and in the
retrospect of the years since I left there I have sometimes wondered how
I ever found courage to say good-bye.

I was amazed and gratified one day at receiving a call from four of the
most prominent churches at that time in America: Calvary Church of
Chicago, the Union Church of Boston, the First Presbyterian Church of
San Francisco, and the Central Church of Brooklyn. These invitations all
came simultaneously in February, 1869. The committees from these various
churches called upon me at my house in Philadelphia. It was a period of
anxious uncertainty with me. One morning, I remember, a committee from
Chicago was in one room, a committee from Brooklyn in another room of my
house, and a committee from my Philadelphia church in another room. My
wife [B] passed from room to room entertaining them to keep the three
committees from meeting. It would have been unpleasant for them to meet.

     [B] _In 1863, Dr. Talmage married his second wife, Miss
         Susan C. Whittemore, of Greenport, N.Y. They had five
         children: May, Edith, Frank, Maud, and Daisy._

At this point my Syracuse remembrance of perplexity returned, and I
resolved to stay in Philadelphia unless God made it very plain that I
was to go and where I was to go. An engagement to speak that night in
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, took me to the depot. I got on the train, my
mind full of the arguments of the three committees, and all a
bewilderment. I stretched myself out upon the seats for a sound sleep,
saying, "Lord, what wilt Thou have me to do? Make it plain to me when I
wake up." When I awoke I was entering Harrisburg, and as plainly as
though the voice had been audible God said to me, "Go to Brooklyn." I
went, and never have doubted that I did right to go. It is always best
to stay where you are until God gives you marching orders, and then move
on.

I succeeded the Rev. J.E. Rockwell in the Brooklyn Church, who resigned
only a month or so before I accepted the call. Mr. Charles Cravat
Converse, LL.D., an elder of the Church, presented the call to me, being
appointed to do so by the Board of Trustees and the Session, after I had
been unanimously elected by the congregation at a special meeting for
that purpose held on February 16, 1869. The salary fixed was $7,000,
payable monthly.

In looking over an old note-book I carried in that year I find, under
date of March 22, 1869, the word "installed" written in my own
handwriting. It was written in pencil after the service of installation
held in the church that Monday evening. The event is recorded in the
minutes of the regular meetings of the church as follows:

"Monday evening, March 22, the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage having been
received as a member of the Presbytery of Nassau, was this evening
installed pastor of this church. The Rev. C.S. Pomeroy preached the
sermon and proposed the constitutional questions. Rev. Mr. Oakley
delivered the charge to the pastor, and Rev. Henry Van Dyke, D.D.,
delivered the charge to the people; and the services were closed with
the benediction by the pastor, and a cordial shaking of hands by the
people with their new pastor."

The old church stood on Schemerhorn Street, between Nevins and Power
Streets. It was a much smaller church community than the one I had left
in Philadelphia, but there was a glorious opportunity for work in it. I
remember hearing a minister of a small congregation complain to a
minister of a large congregation about the sparseness of attendance at
his church. "Oh," said the one of large audience, "my son, you will find
in the day of judgment that you had quite enough people for whom to be
held accountable."

My church in Brooklyn prospered. In about three months from the date of
my installation it was too small to hold the people who came there to
worship. This came about, not through any special demonstration of my
own superior gifts, but by the help of God and the persecution of
others.

During my pastorate in Brooklyn a certain group of preachers began to
slander me and to say all manner of lies about me; I suppose because
they were jealous of my success. These calumnies were published in every
important newspaper in the country. The result was that the New York
correspondents of the leading papers in the chief cities of the United
States came to my church on Sundays, expecting I would make counter
attacks, which would be good news. I never said a word in reply, with
the exception of a single paragraph.

The correspondents were after news, and, failing to get the sensational
charges, they took down the sermons and sent them to the newspaper.

Many times have I been maligned and my work misrepresented; but all such
falsehood and persecution have turned out for my advantage and enlarged
my work.

Whoever did escape it?

I was one summer in the pulpit of John Wesley, in London--a pulpit where
he stood one day and said: "I have been charged with all the crimes in
the calendar except one--that of drunkenness," and his wife arose in the
audience and said: "You know you were drunk last night."

I saw in a foreign journal a report of one of George Whitefield's
sermons--a sermon preached a hundred and twenty or thirty years ago. It
seemed that the reporter stood to take the sermon, and his chief idea
was to caricature it, and these are some of the reportorial interlinings
of the sermon of George Whitefield. After calling him by a nickname
indicative of a physical defect in the eye, it goes on to say: "Here the
preacher clasps his chin on the pulpit cushion. Here he elevates his
voice. Here he lowers his voice. Holds his arms extended. Bawls aloud.
Stands trembling. Makes a frightful face. Turns up the whites of his
eyes. Clasps his hands behind him. Clasps his arms around him, and hugs
himself. Roars aloud. Holloas. Jumps. Cries. Changes from crying.
Holloas and jumps again."

One would have thought that if any man ought to have been free from
persecution it was George Whitefield, bringing great masses of the
people into the kingdom of God, wearing himself out for Christ's sake:
and yet the learned Dr. Johnson called him a mountebank. Robert Hall
preached about the glories of heaven as no uninspired man ever preached
about them, and it was said when he preached about heaven his face shone
like an angel's, and yet good Christian John Foster writes of Robert
Hall, saying: "Robert Hall is a mere actor, and when he talks about
heaven the smile on his face is the reflection of his own vanity." John
Wesley stirred all England with reform, and yet he was caricatured by
all the small wits of his day. He was pictorialised, history says, on
the board fences of London, and everywhere he was the target for the
punsters; yet John Wesley stands to-day before all Christendom, his name
mighty. I have preached a Gospel that is not only appropriate to the
home circle, but is appropriate to Wall Street, to Broadway, to Fulton
Street, to Montague Street, to Atlantic Street, to every street--not
only a religion that is good for half past ten o'clock Sunday morning,
but good for half past ten o'clock any morning. This was one of the
considerations in my work as a preacher of the Gospel that extended its
usefulness. A practical religion is what we all need. In my previous
work at Belleville, N.J., and in Syracuse, I had absorbed other
considerations of necessity in the business of uniting the human
character with the church character.

Although the Central Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn of which I was
pastor was one of the largest buildings in that city then, it did not
represent my ideal of a church.

I learned in my village pastorates that the Church ought to be a great
home circle of fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters. That would be a
very strange home circle where the brothers and sisters did not know
each other, and where the parents were characterised by frigidity and
heartlessness. The Church must be a great family group--the pulpit the
fireplace, the people all gathered around it. I think we sometimes can
tell the people to stay out by our church architecture. People come in
and find things angular and cold and stiff, and they go away never again
to come; when the church ought to be a great home circle.

I knew a minister of religion who had his fourth settlement. His first
two churches became extinct as a result of his ministry, the third
church was hopelessly crippled, and the fourth was saved simply by the
fact that he departed this life. On the other hand, I have seen
pastorates which continued year after year, all the time strengthening,
and I have heard of instances where the pastoral relation continued
twenty years, thirty years, forty years, and all the time the confidence
and the love were on the increase. So it was with the pastorate of old
Dr. Spencer, so it was with the pastorate of old Dr. Gardiner Spring, so
it was with the pastorate of a great many of those old ministers of
Jesus Christ, of whom the world was not worthy.

I saw an opportunity to establish in Brooklyn just such a church as I
had in my mind's eye--a Tabernacle, where all the people who wanted to
hear the Gospel preached could come in and be comfortable. I projected,
designed, and successfully established the Brooklyn Tabernacle within a
little over a year after preaching my first sermon in Brooklyn. The
church seated 3,500 people, and yet we were compelled to use the old
church to take care of all our active Christian work besides.

The first Brooklyn Tabernacle was, I believe, the most buoyant
expression of my work that I ever enjoyed. It drew upon all my energies
and resources, and as the sacred walls grew up towards the skies, I
prayed God that I might have the strength and spiritual energy to grow
with it.

Prayer always meets the emergency, no matter how difficult it may be.

That was the substantial backing of the first Brooklyn
Tabernacle--prayer. Prayer furnished the means as well as the faith that
was behind them. I was merely the promoter, the agent, of a company
organised in Heaven to perpetuate the Gospel of Christ. It was
considered a great thing to have done, and many were the reasons
whispered by the worldly and the envious and the orthodox, for its
success. Some said it was due to magnetism.

As a cord or rope can bind bodies together, there may be an invisible
cord binding souls. A magnetic man throws it over others as a hunter
throws a lasso. Some men are surcharged with this influence, and have
employed it for patriotism and Christianity and elevated purposes.

It is always a surprise to a great majority of people how churches are
built, how money for which the world has so many other uses can be
obtained to build churches. There are names of men and women whom I have
only to mention and they suggest at once not only great wealth, but
religion, generosity, philanthropy, such as Amos Laurence, James Lennox,
Peter Cooper, William E. Dodge, Miss Wolfe, Mrs. William Astor. A good
moral character can be accompanied by affluent circumstances.

In the '70's and '80's in Brooklyn and in New York there were merchants
who had prospered, but by Christian methods--merchants who took their
religion into everyday life. I became accustomed, Sabbath after Sabbath,
to stand before an audience of bargain-makers. Men in all
occupations--yet the vast majority of them, I am very well aware, were
engaged from Monday morning to Saturday night in the store. In many of
the families of my congregations across the breakfast table and the tea
table were discussed questions of loss and gain. "What is the value of
this? What is the value of that?" They would not think of giving
something of greater value for that which is of lesser value. They would
not think of selling that which cost ten dollars for five dollars. If
they had a property that was worth $15,000, they would not sell it for
$4,000. All were intelligent in matters of bargain-making.

But these were not the sort of men who made generous investments for
God's House. There was one that sort, however, among my earliest
remembrances, Arthur Tappen. There were many differences of opinion
about his politics, but no one who ever knew Arthur Tappen, and knew him
well, doubted his being an earnest Christian. Arthur Tappen was derided
in his day because he established that system by which we come to find
out the commercial standing of business men. He started that entire
system, was derided for it then; I knew him well, in moral character A1.
Monday mornings he invited to a room in the top of his storehouse in New
York the clerks of his establishment. He would ask them about their
worldly interests and their spiritual interests, then giving out a hymn
and leading in prayer he would give them a few words of good advice,
asking them what church they attended on the Sabbath, what the text was,
whether they had any especial troubles of their own.

Arthur Tappen, I have never heard his eulogy pronounced. I pronounce it
now. There were other merchants just as good--William E. Dodge in the
iron business, Moses H. Grinnell in the shipping business, Peter Cooper
in the glue business, and scores of men just as good as they were.

I began my work of enlarging and improving the Brooklyn Church almost
the week following my installation. My first vacation, a month, began on
June 25, 1869, the trustees of the church having signified and ordered
repairs, alterations and improvements at a meeting held that day, and
further suspending Sabbath services for four weeks. I spent part of my
vacation at East Hampton, L.I., going from there for two or three short
lecturing trips. I find that I can never rest over two weeks. More than
that wearies me. Of all the places I have ever known East Hampton is the
best place for quiet and recuperation.

I became acquainted with it through my brother-in-law, Rev. S.L.
Mershon. His first pastorate was at the Presbyterian Church in East
Hampton, where, as a young man, I preached some of my first sermons.
East Hampton is always home to me. When a boy in grammar-school and
college I used to visit my brother-in-law and his wife, my sister Mary.
Later in life I established a summer home there myself. I particularly
recall one incident of this month's vacation that has affected my whole
life. One day while resting at Sharon Springs, New York, walking in the
Park of that place, I found myself asking the question: "I wonder if
there is any special mission for me to execute in this world? If there
is, may God show it to me!"

There soon came upon me a great desire to preach the Gospel through the
secular printing-press. I realised that the vast majority of people,
even in Christian lands, never enter a church, and that it would be an
opportunity of usefulness infinite if that door of publication were
opened. And so I recorded that prayer in a blank book, and offered the
prayer day in and day out until the answer came, though in a way
different from that which I had expected, for it came through the
misrepresentation and persecution of enemies; and I have to record it
for the encouragement of all ministers of the Gospel who are
misrepresented, that if the misrepresentation be virulent enough and
bitter enough and continuous enough, there is nothing that so widens
one's field of usefulness as hostile attack, if you are really doing the
Lord's work. The bigger the lie told about me the bigger the demand to
see and hear what I really was doing. From one stage of sermonic
publication to another the work has gone on, until week by week, and for
about twenty-three years, I have had the world for my audience as no man
ever had. The syndicates inform me that my sermons go now to about
twenty-five millions of people in all lands. I mention this not in vain
boast, but as a testimony to the fact that God answers prayer. Would God
I had better occupied the field and been more consecrated to the work!

The following summer, or rather early spring, I requested an extension
of my vacation time, in order to carry out a plan to visit the "Old
World." As the trustees of the church considered that the trip might be
of value to the church as well as to myself, I was given "leave of
absence from pastoral duties" for three months' duty from June 18, 1870.
All that I could do had been done in the plans in constructing the new
Tabernacle. I could do nothing by staying at home.

I have crossed the Atlantic so often that the recollections of this
first trip to Europe are, at this writing, merely general. I think the
most terrific impression I received was my first sight of the ocean the
morning after we sailed, the most instructive were the ruins of church
and abbey and palaces. I walked up and down the stairs of Holyrood
Palace, once upon a time considered one of the wonders of the world, and
I marvelled that so little was left of such a wonderful place. Ruins
should be rebuilt.

The most spiritual impression I received was from the music of church
organs in the old world.

I stopped one nightfall at Freyburg, Switzerland, to hear the organ of
world-wide celebrity in that place. I went into the cathedral at
nightfall. All the accessories were favourable. There was only one light
in all the cathedral, and that a faint taper on the altar. I looked up
into the venerable arches and saw the shadows of centuries; and when the
organ awoke the cathedral awoke, and all the arches seemed to lift and
quiver as the music came under them. That instrument did not seem to be
made out of wood and metal, but out of human hearts, so wonderfully did
it pulsate with every emotion; now laughing like a child, now sobbing
like a tempest. At one moment the music would die away until you could
hear the cricket chirp outside the wall, and then it would roll up until
it seemed as if the surge of the sea and the crash of an avalanche had
struck the organ-pipes at the same moment. At one time that night it
seemed as if a squadron of saddened spirits going up from earth had met
a squadron of descending angels whose glory beat back the woe.

In Edinburgh I met Dr. John Brown, author of the celebrated "Rab and his
Friends." That one treatise gave him immortality and fame, and yet he
was taken at his own request to the insane asylum and died insane.

"What are you writing now, Dr. Brown?" I said to him in his study in
Edinburgh.

"Oh, nothing," he replied, "I never could write. I shall never try
again."

I saw on his face and heard in his voice that melancholy that so often
unhorsed him.

I went to Paris for the first time in this summer of 1870. It was during
the Franco-German war. I stood studying the exquisite sculpturing of the
gate of the Tuileries. Lost in admiration of the wonderful art of that
gate I knew not that I was exciting suspicion. Lowering my eyes to the
crowds of people I found myself being closely inspected by government
officials, who from my complexion judged me to be a German, and that for
some belligerent purpose I might be examining the gates of the palace.
My explanations in very poor French did not satisfy them, and they
followed me long distances until I reached my hotel, and were not
satisfied until from my landlord they found that I was only an
inoffensive American. Inoffensive Americans were quite as welcome in
Europe in 1870 as they are now. I was not curious of the signs I found
anywhere about me of aristocratic grandeur, of the deference paid to
lineage and ancient family name. I know in America some people look back
on the family line, and they are proud to see that they are descended
from the Puritans or the Huguenots, and they rejoice in that as though
their ancestors had accomplished a great thing to repudiate a Catholic
aristocracy.

I look back on my family line, and I see there such a mingling and
mixture of the blood of all nationalities that I feel akin to all the
world. I returned from my first visit to Europe more thankful than ever
for the mercy of having been born in America. The trip did me
immeasurable good. It strengthened my faith in the breadth and
simplicity of a broadminded religion. We must take care how we extend
our invitation to the Church, that it be understandable to everyone.
People don't want the scientific study of religion.

On Sunday morning, September 25, 1870, the new Tabernacle erected on
Schemerhorn Street was dedicated to the worship of Almighty God. It was
to my mind a common-sense church, as I had planned it to be. In many of
our churches we want more light, more room, more ventilation, more
comfort. Vast sums of money are expended on ecclesiastical structures,
and men sit down in them, and you ask a man how he likes the church: he
says, "I like it very well, but I can't hear." The voice of the preacher
dashes against the pillars. Men sit down under the shadows of the Gothic
arches and shiver, and feel they must be getting religion, or something
else, they feel so uncomfortable.

We want more common sense in the rearing of churches. There is no excuse
for lack of light when the heavens are full of it, no excuse for lack of
fresh air when the world swims in it. It ought to be an expression, not
only of our spiritual happiness, but of our physical comfort, when we
say: "How amiable are Thy tabernacles, O Lord God of Hosts! A day in
Thy courts is better than a thousand."

My dedication sermon was from Luke xiv. 23, "And the Lord said unto the
servants, go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come
in that my house may be filled." The Rev. T.G. Butter, D.D., offered the
dedicatory prayer. Other clergymen, whose names I do not recall, were
present and assisted at the services. The congregation in attendance was
very large, and at the close of the services a subscription and
collection were taken up amounting to $13,000, towards defraying the
expenses and cost of the church.

In less than a year later the congregation had grown so large and the
attendance of strangers so pressing that the new church was enlarged
again, and on September 10, 1871, the Tabernacle was rededicated with
impressive services. The sermon was preached by my friend the Rev.
Stephen H. Tyng, D.D. He was a great worker, and suffered, as many of us
in the pulpit do, from insomnia. He was the consecrated champion of
everything good, a constant sufferer from the lash of active work. He
often told me that the only encouragement he had to think he would sleep
at night was the fact that he had not slept the night before. Insomnia
may be only a big word for those who do not understand its effect. It
has stimulated intellectuality, and exhausted it. One of the greatest
English clergymen had a gas jet on each side of his bed, so that he
might read at nights when he could not sleep. Horace Greeley told me he
had not had a sound sleep in fifteen years. Charles Dickens understood
London by night better than any other writer, because not being able to
sleep he spent that time in exploring the city.

I preached at the evening service from the text in Luke xvi. 5: "How
much owest thou unto my Lord?" It was a wonderful day for us all. Enough
money was taken in by collections and subscriptions at the morning and
evening services to pay the floating debt of the church. We received
that one day $21,000.

I quote the following resolution made at a meeting in my study the next
Thursday evening of the Session, from the records of the Tabernacle:

"In regard to the payment of the floating debt of this church and
congregation, the Session adopted the following resolution, viz.:--

"In view of the manifest instance that God has heard the supplications
of this people regarding the floating debt of the Church, and so
directed their hearts as to accomplish the object, it is therefore
resolved that we set apart next Wednesday evening as a special season of
religious thanksgiving to God for his great goodness to us as a Church,
in granting unto us this deliverance."

I reverently and solemnly believe the new Tabernacle was built by
prayer.

My congregation with great munificence provided for all my wants, and so
I can speak without any embarrassment on the subject while I denounce
the niggardliness of many of the churches of Jesus Christ, keeping some
men, who are very apostles for piety and consecration, in circumstances
where they are always apologetic, and have not that courage which they
would have could they stand in the presence of people whom they knew
were faithful in the discharge of their financial duties to the
Christian Church. Alas, for those men of whom the world is not worthy!
In the United States to-day the salary of ministers averages less than
six hundred dollars, and when you consider that some of the salaries are
very large, see to what straits many of God's noblest servants are this
day reduced! A live church will look after all its financial interests
and be as prompt in the meeting of those obligations as any bank in any
city.

My church in Brooklyn prospered because it was a soul-saving church. It
has always been the ambition of my own church that it should be a
soul-saving church. Pardon for all sin! Comfort for all trouble! Eternal
life for all the dead!

Moral conditions in the cities of New York and Brooklyn were deplorably
bad during the first few years I went there to preach. There was an
onslaught of bad literature and stage immorality. For instance, there
was a lady who came forth as an authoress under the assumed name of
George Sand. She smoked cigars. She dressed like a man. She wrote in
style ardent and eloquent, mighty in its gloom, terrible in its
unchastity, vivid in its portraiture, damnable in its influence, putting
forth an evil which has never relaxed, but has hundreds of copyists. Yet
so much worse were many French books that came to America than anything
George Sand ever wrote, that if she were alive now she might be thought
almost a reformer. What an importation of unclean theatrical stuff was
brought to our shores at that time! And yet professors of religion
patronised such things. I remember particularly the arrival of a foreign
actress of base morals. She came intending to make a tour of the States,
but the remaining decency of our cities rose up and cancelled her
contracts, and drove her back from the American stage, a woman fit for
neither continent. I hope I was instrumental to some degree in her
banishment. We were crude in our morals then. I hope we are not merely
civilised in them to-day. I hope we understand how to live better than
we did then.

Scarcely a year after the final dedication of our Tabernacle in 1871 it
was completely burned, just before a morning Sabbath service in
December, 1872.

I remember that Sabbath morning. I was coming to the church, when I saw
the smoke against the sky. I was living in an outlying section of the
city. I had been absent for three weeks, and, as I saw that smoke, I
said to my wife: "I should not wonder if that is the Tabernacle"; at the
same time, this was said in pleasantry and not in earnest. As we came on
nearer where the church stood, I said quite seriously: "I shouldn't
wonder if it is the Tabernacle."

When I came within a few blocks, and I saw a good many people in
distress running across the street, I said: "It is the Tabernacle"; and
when we stood together in front of the burning house of God, it was an
awfully sad time. We had stood together through all the crises of
suffering, and we must needs build a church in the very hardest of
times.

To put up a structure in those days, and so large a structure and so
firm a structure as we needed, was a very great demand upon our
energies. The fact that we had to make that struggle in the worst
financial period was doubly hard.

It was a merciful providence that none of the congregation was in the
church at the time. It was an appalling situation. In spite of the best
efforts of the fire department, the building was in ruins in a few
hours. My congregation was in despair, but, in the face of trial, God
has always given me all but superhuman strength. In a thousand ways I
had been blessed; the Gospel I had preached could not stop then, I
knew, and while my people were completely discouraged I immediately
planned for a newer, larger, more complete Tabernacle. We needed more
room for the increasing attendance, and I realised that opportunity
again was mine.

We continued our services in the Academy of Music, in Brooklyn, while
the new Tabernacle was being built. Not for a minute did I relax my
energies to keep up the work of a practical religion. There were 300,000
people in Brooklyn who had never heard the Gospel preached, an army
worthy of Christian interest. There was room for these 300,000 people in
the churches of the city.

There was plenty of room in heaven for them.

An ingenious statistician, taking the statement made in Revelation xxi.
that the heavenly Jerusalem was measured and found to be twelve thousand
furlongs, and that the length and height and breadth of it are equal,
says that would make heaven in size nine hundred and forty-eight
sextillion, nine hundred and eighty-eight quintillion cubic feet; and
then reserving a certain portion for the court of heaven and the
streets, and estimating that the world may last a hundred thousand
years, he ciphers out that there are over five trillion rooms, each room
seventeen feet long, sixteen feet wide, fifteen feet high. But I have no
faith in the accuracy of that calculation. He makes the rooms too small.
From all I can read the rooms will be palatial, and those who have not
had enough room in this world will have plenty of room at the last. The
fact is that most people in this world are crowded, and though out on a
vast prairie or in a mountain district people may have more room than
they want, in most cases it is house built close to house, and the
streets are crowded, and the cradle is crowded by other cradles, and the
graves crowded in the cemetery by other graves; and one of the richest
luxuries of many people in getting out of this world will be the gaining
of unhindered and uncramped room. And I should not wonder if, instead of
the room that the statistician ciphered out as only seventeen feet by
sixteen, it should be larger than any of the rooms at Berlin, St. James,
or Winter Palace.

So we built an exceedingly large church. The new Tabernacle seated
comfortably 5,000 people. It was open on February 22, 1874, for worship,
and completed a few months later.




THE FIFTH MILESTONE

1877-1879


Without boast it may be said that I was among those men who with eager
and persistent vigilance made the heart of Brooklyn feel the Christian
purpose of the pulpit, and the utility of religion in everyday life. The
fifteen years following the dedication of the new Tabernacle in 1872
mark the most active milestone of my career as a preacher.

A minister's recollections are confined to his interpretation of the
life about him; the men he knows, the events he sees, the good and the
bad of his environment and his period become the loose leaves that
litter his study table.

I was in the prime of life, just forty years of age. From my private
note-books and other sources I begin recollections of the most
significant years in Brooklyn, preceding the local elections in 1877.
New York and Brooklyn were playmates then, seeming rivals, but by
predestined fate bound to grow closer together. I said then that we need
not wait for the three bridges which would certainly bind them together.
The ferry-boat then touching either side was only the thump of one great
municipal heart. It was plain to me that this greater Metropolis,
standing at the gate of this continent, would have to decide the moral
and political destinies of the whole country.

Prior to the November Elections in 1877, the only cheering phase of
politics in Brooklyn and New York was that there were no lower political
depths to reach.

There was in New York at that time political infamy greater than the
height of Trinity Church steeple, more stupendous in finance than the
$10,000,000 spent in building their new Court House. It was a fact that
the most notorious gambler in the United States was to get the
nomination for the high office of State Senator. Both Democrats and
Republicans struggled for his election--John Morrisey, hailed as a
reformer! On behalf of all the respectable homes of Brooklyn and New
York I protested against his election. He had been indicted for
burglary, indicted for assault and battery with intent to kill, indicted
eighteen times for maintaining gambling places in different parts of the
country. He almost made gambling respectable. Tweed trafficked in
contracts, Morrisey in the bodies and souls of young men. The District
Attorney of New York advocated him, and prominent Democrats talked
themselves hoarse for him. This nomination was a determined effort of
the slums of New York to get representation in the State Government. It
was argued that he had _reformed_. The police of New York knew better.

In Brooklyn the highest local offices in 1877, those of the Collector,
Police Commissioners, Fire Commission, Treasurer, and the City Works
Commissioners, were under the control of one Patrick Shannon, owner of
two gin mills. Wearing the mask of reformers the most astute and
villainous politicians piloted themselves into power. They were all
elected, and it was necessary. It was necessary that New York should
elect the foremost gambler of the United States for State Senator,
before the people of New York could realise the depths of degradation to
which the politics of that time could sink. If Tweed had stolen only
half as much as he did, investigation and discovery and reform would
have been impossible. The re-election of Morrisey was necessary. He was
elected not by the vote of his old partisans alone, but by Republicans.
Hamilton Fish, General Grant's secretary, voted for him. Peter Cooper,
the friend of education and the founder of a great institute, voted for
him. The brown-stone-fronts voted for him. The Fifth Avenue equipage
voted for him. Murray Hill voted for him. Meanwhile gambling was made
honourable. And so the law-breaker became the law-maker.

Among a large and genteel community in Brooklyn there was a feeling that
they were independent of politics. No one can be so. It was felt in the
home and in the business offices. It was an influence that poisoned all
the foundations of public and private virtue in Brooklyn and New York.
The conditions of municipal immorality and wickedness were the worst at
this time that ever confronted the pulpits of the City of Churches, as
Brooklyn was called.

There was one bright spot in the dark horizon of life around me then,
however, which I greeted with much pleasure and amusement.

In the early part of November, 1877, President Hayes offered to Colonel
Robert Ingersoll the appointment of Minister to Germany. The President
was a Methodist, and perhaps he thought that was a grand solution of
Ingersollism. It was a mirthful event of the hour--the joke of the
administration. Germany was the birthplace of what was then modern
infidelity, Colonel Ingersoll had been filling the land with belated
infidelism.

On the stage of the Academy of Music in Brooklyn he had attacked the
memory of Tom Paine, assaulted the character of Rev. Dr. Prime, one of
my neighbours, the Nestor of religious journalism, and on that same
stage expressed his opinion that God was a great Ghost. This action of
President Hayes kept me smiling for a week--I appreciated the joke among
others.

During this month the American Stage suffered the loss of three
celebrities: Edwin Adams, George L. Fox, and E.L. Davenport. While the
Theatre never interested me, and I never entered one, I cannot criticise
the dead. Four years before in the Tabernacle I preached a sermon
against the Theatre. I saw there these men, sitting in pews in front of
me, and that was the only time. They were taking notes of my discourse,
to which they made public replies on the stage of the Chestnut Street
Theatre, Philadelphia, and on other stages at the close of their
performances. Whatever they may have said of me, I stood uncovered in
the presence of the dead, while the curtain of the great future went up
on them. My sympathy was with the destitute households left behind.
Public benefits relieved this. I would to God clergymen were as liberal
to the families of deceased clergymen as play-actors to the families of
dead play-actors. What a toilsome life, the play-actor's! On the 25th of
March, 1833, Edmund Kean, sick and exhausted, trembled on to the English
stage for the last time, when he acted in the character of Othello. The
audience rose and cheered, and the waving of hats and handkerchiefs was
bewildering, and when he came to the expression, "Farewell! Othello's
occupation's gone!" his chin fell on his breast, and he turned to his
son and said: "O God, I am dying! speak to them Charles," and the
audience in sympathy cried, "Take him off! take him off!" and he was
carried away to die. Poor Edmund Kean! When Schiller, the famous
comedian, was tormented with toothache, some one offered to draw the
tooth. "No," said he, "but on the 10th of June, when the house closes,
you may draw the tooth, for then I shall have nothing to eat with it."
The impersonation of character is often the means of destroying health.
Molière, the comedian, acted the sick man until it proved fatal to him.
Madame Clarion accounts for her premature old age by the fact that she
had been obliged so often on the stage to enact the griefs and
distresses of others. Mr. Bond threw so much earnestness into the
tragedy of "Zarah," that he fainted and died. The life of the actor and
actress is wearing and full of privation and annoyance, as is any life
that depends upon the whims of the public for success.

One of the events in Church matters, towards the close of this year, was
a pastoral letter of the Episcopal Bishops against Church fairs. So many
churches were holding fairs then, they were a recognised social
attribute of the Church family. This letter aroused the question as to
whether it was right or wrong to have Church fairs, and the newspapers
became very fretful about it. I defended the Church fairs, because I
felt that if they were conducted on Christian principles they were the
means of an universal sociality and spiritual strength. So far as I had
been acquainted with them, they had made the Church purer, better. Some
fairs may end in a fight; they are badly managed, perhaps. A Church
fair, officered by Christian women, held within Christian hours,
conducted on Christian plans, I approved, the pastoral letter of the
Episcopal Bishops notwithstanding.

Just when we were in the midst of this religious tempest of small
finances, the will of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt came up in the
court for discussion. The whole world was anxious then to know if the
Vanderbilt will could be broken. After battling half a century with
diseases enough to kill ten men, Mr. Vanderbilt died, an octogenarian,
leaving over $100,000,000--$95,000,000 to his eldest son--$5,000,000 to
his wife, and the remainder to his other children and relations, with
here and there a slight recognition of some humane or religious
institution. I said then that the will could not be broken, because
$95,000,000 in this country seemed too mighty for $5,000,000. It was a
strange will, and if Mr. Vanderbilt had been his own executor of it,
without lawyers' interference, I believe it would have been different.
It suggests a comparison with George Peabody, who executed the
distribution of his property without legal talent. Peabody gave $250,000
for a library in his own town in Massachusetts, and in his will left
$10,000 to the Baltimore Institute, $20,000 to the poor of London,
$10,000 to Harvard, $150,000 to Yale, $50,000 to Salem, Massachusetts,
and $3,000,000 to the education of the people of the South in this
country. No wonder he refused a baronetcy which the Queen of England
offered him, he was a king--the king of human benefaction. That
Vanderbilt will was the seven days wonder of its time.

It made way only for the President's message issued the first week in
December, 1877. It was, in fact, Mr. Hayes's repudiation of a dishonest
measure prepared by members of Congress to pay off our national debt in
silver instead of in gold as had been promised.

The newspapers received the President's message with indifferent
opinion. "It is disappointing," said one. "As a piece of composition it
is terse and well written," said another. "The President used a good
many big words to say very little," said another. "President Hayes will
secure a respectful hearing by the ability and character of this
document," said another. "Leaving out his bragging over his policy of
pacification and concerning things he claims to have done, the space
remaining will be very small," said another.

But all who read the message carefully realised that in it the President
promised the people to put an end to the dishonour of thieving politics.
There was something in the air in Washington that seemed to afflict the
men who went there with moral distemper. I was told that Coates Ames was
almost a Christian in Massachusetts, while in Washington, from his
house, was born that monster--The Credit Mobilier. Congressmen who in
their own homes would insist upon paying their private obligations,
dollar for dollar, forgot this standard of business honour when they
advocated a swindling policy for the Government of the United States. In
its day of trouble the Government was glad to promise gold to the people
who had confidence in them, and just as gladly the Government proposed
to swindle them by a silver falsehood in 1877. But the Nation was just
recovering from a four years' drunk; Mr. Hayes undertook to steady us,
during the aftereffects of our war-spree. Why should we neglect to pay
in full the price of our four years' unrighteousness? As a nation we
had so often been relieved from financial depression up to that time,
but, we were just entering a period of unlicensed ethics, not merely in
public life, but in all our private standards of morality.

It seems to me, as I recall the character of Brooklyn life at this time,
there never was a period in its history when it was so intolerably
wicked. And yet, we had 276 churches. One night about Christmas time, in
1877, Brooklyn Heights was startled by a pistol shot that set everyone
in New York and Brooklyn to moralising. It was the Johnson tragedy. A
young husband shot his young wife, with intent to kill. She was
seriously wounded. He went to prison. There was a child, and for the
sake of that child, who is now probably grown up, I will not relate the
details. In all my experience of life I have heard many stories of
domestic failure, but there are always two sides. Those who moralised
about it said, "That's what comes of marrying too young!" Others,
moralising too, said, "That's what comes of not controlling one's
temper." Who does control his temper, always?

To my mind the chief lesson was in the fact that the young men of
Brooklyn had taken too much of a notion to carry firearms. There was a
puppyism sprang up in Brooklyn that felt they couldn't live unless they
were armed. Young boys went about their daily occupations armed to the
teeth, as if Fulton Street were an ambush for Indians. I mention this,
because it was a singular phase of the social restlessness and tremor of
the times.

In commercial evolution there was the same indistinctness of standards.
The case of Dr. Lambert--the Life Insurance fraud--had no sooner been
disposed of, and Lambert sent to Sing-Sing, than the sudden failure of
Bonner & Co., brokers in Wall Street, presented us with the problem of
business "rehypothecation."

In my opinion a man has as much right to fail in business as he has to
get sick and die. In most cases it is more honourable to fail than to go
on. Every insolvent is not necessarily a scoundrel. The greatest crime
is to fail rich. John Bonner & Co., as brokers, had loaned money on
deposited collaterals, and then borrowed still larger sums on the same
collaterals. Their creditors were duped to the extent of from one to
three millions of dollars. It was the first crime of "rehypothecation."
It was not a Wall Street theft; it was a new use for an almost unknown
word in Noah Webster's dictionary. It was a new word in the rogue's
vocabulary. It was one of the first attempts made, in my knowledge, to
soften the aspect of crime by baptising it in that way. Crime in this
country will always be excused in proportion to how great it is. But
even in the face of Wall Street tricksters there were signs that the
days were gone when the Jay Goulds and the Jim Fisks could hold the
nation at their mercy.

The comedy of life is sometimes quite as instructive as a tragedy. There
was a flagrant disposition in America, in the late 'seventies, to
display family affairs in the newspapers. It became an epidemic of
notoriety. What a delicious literature it was! The private affairs of
the household printed by the million copies. Chief among these
novelettes of family life was the Hicks-Lord case. The world was
informed one morning in February, 1878, that a Mr. Lord, a millionaire,
had united his fortune with a Mrs. Hicks. The children of the former
were offended at the second marriage of the latter, more especially so
as the new reunion might change the direction of the property. The
father was accused of being insane by his children, and incapable of
managing his own affairs. The Courts were invoked. One thing was made
plain to all the world, though, that Mr. Lord at eighty knew more than
his children did at thirty or forty. The happy pair were compelled to
remain in long seclusion because of murderous threats against them, the
children having proposed a corpse instead of a bride. The absorbing
question of weeks, "Where is Mr. Lord?" was answered. He was in the
newspapers--and the children? they were across the old man's knee, where
they belonged. Mr. Lord was right. Mrs. Hicks was right. It was nobody's
business but their own. Brooklyn and New York were exceeding busy-bodies
in the late 'seventies. It was a relief to turn one's back upon them
occasionally, in the pulpit, and search the furthest horizon of Europe.

Scarcely had Victor Emmanuel been entombed when on Feb. 7th a tired old
man, eighty-four years of age, died in the Vatican, Pius IX., a kind and
forgiving man. His trust was not wholly in the crucifix, but something
beyond the crucifix; and yet, how small a man is when measured by the
length of his coffin! Events in Europe marshalled themselves into a
formula of new problems at the beginning of 1878. The complete defeat of
Turkey by the Russians left England and the United States--allies in the
great causes of civilisation and Christianity--aghast. It was the most
intense political movement in Europe of my lifetime. I was glad the
Turkish Empire had perished, but I had no admiration then for Russia,
once one of the world's greatest oppressors.

My deepest sympathies at that time were with England. When England is
humiliated the Christian standards of the world are humiliated. Her
throne during Queen Victoria's reign was the purest throne in all the
world. Remember the girl Victoria, kneeling with her ecclesiastical
adviser in prayer the night before her coronation, making religious
vows, not one of which were broken. I urged then that all our American
churches throughout the land unite with the cathedrals and churches in
England in shouting "God Save the Queen." England held the balance of
the world's power for Christianity in this crisis abroad.

About this time, in February, 1878, Senator Pierce presented a Bill
before the Legislature in Albany for a new city charter for Brooklyn. In
its reform movement it meant that in three years at the most Brooklyn
and New York would be legally married. Instead of Brooklyn being
depressed by New York, New York was to be elevated by Brooklyn. Already
we felt at that time, in the light of Senator Pierce's efforts, that
Brooklyn would become a reformed New York; it would be--New York with
its cares set aside, New York with its arms folded at rest, New York
playing with the children, New York at the tea table, New York gone to
prayer-meeting. Nine-tenths of the Brooklynites then were spending their
days in New York, and their nights in Brooklyn. In the year 1877,
80,000,000 of people crossed the Brooklyn ferries. Paris is France,
London is England, why not New York the United States?

The new charter recommended by Senator Pierce urged other reforms in a
local government that was too costly by far. Under right administration
who could tell what our beloved city is to be? Prospect Park, the
geographical centre, a beautiful picture set in a great frame of
architectural affluence. The boulevards reaching to the sea, their
sides lined the whole distance with luxurious homes and academies of
art. Our united city a hundred Brightons in one, and the inland
populations coming down here to summer and battle in the surf. The great
American London built by a continent on which all the people are free;
her vast populations redeemed; her churches thronged with worshipful
auditories! Before that time we may have fallen asleep amid the long
grass of the valleys, but our children will enjoy the brightness and the
honour of residence in the great Christian city of the continent and of
the world.

It was this era of optimism in the civic life of Brooklyn that helped to
defeat the Lafayette Avenue railroad.

It was a scheme of New York speculators to deface one of the finest
avenues in Brooklyn. The most profitable business activity in this
country is to invest other people's money. It seemed to me that the
Lafayette railroad deal was only a sort of blackmailing institution to
compel the property holders to pay for the discontinuance of the
enterprise, or the company would sell out to some other company; and as
the original company paid nothing all they get is clear gain; and
whether the railroad is built or not, the people for years, all along
the beautiful route, would be kept in suspense. There was no more need
of a car track along Lafayette avenue than there was need of one from
the top of Trinity Church steeple to the moon! The greater facility of
travel, the greater prosperity! But I am opposed to all railroads, the
depot for which is an unprincipled speculator's pocket.

It was only a few weeks later that I had to condemn a much greater
matter, a national event.

On March 1, 1878, the Silver Bill was passed in Washington,
notwithstanding the President's veto. The House passed it by a vote of
196 against 73, and the Senate agreed with a vote of 46 against 10. It
would be asking too much to expect anyone to believe that the 196 men in
Congress were bought up. So far as I knew the men, they were as honest
on one side of the vote as on the other. Senator Conkling, that giant of
integrity, opposed it. Alexander H. Stephens voted for it. I talked with
Mr. Stephens about it, and he said to me at the time, "Unless the Silver
Bill pass, in the next six months there will not be two hundred business
houses in New York able to stand." Still, the Silver Bill seemed like
the first step towards repudiation of our national obligation, but I
believe that at least 190 out of those 196 men who voted for it would
have sacrificed their lives rather than repudiate our national debt.

I had an opportunity to comprehend the political explosion of the
passage of this Bill all over the country, for it so happened I made a
lecturing trip through the South and South-west during the month of
March, 1878.

There is one word that described the whole feeling in the South at this
time, and that was "hope." The most cheerful city, I found, was New
Orleans. She was rejoicing in the release from years of unrighteous
government. Just how the State of Louisiana had been badgered, and her
every idea of self-government insulted, can be appreciated only by those
who come face to face with the facts. While some of the best patriots of
the North went down with the right motives to mingle in the
reconstruction of the State governments of the South, many of these
pilgrimists were the cast-off and thieving politicians of the North,
who, after being stoned out of Northern waters, crawled up on the beach
at the South to sun themselves. The Southern States had enough dishonest
men of their own without any importation. The day of trouble passed.
Louisiana and South Carolina for the most part are free. Governor
Nichols of the one, and Governor Wade Hampton of the other, had the
confidence of the great masses of the people.

It was my opinion then that the largest fortunes were yet to be made in
the South, because there was more room to make them there. During my two
weeks in the South, at that time, mingling with all classes of people, I
never heard an unkind word against the North, and that only a little
over ten years since the close of the war. Congressional politicians
were still enlarging upon the belligerency of the South, but they had
personal designs at President making. There was no more use for Federal
military in New Orleans than there was need of them in Brooklyn. I was
the guest in New Orleans of the Hon. E.J. Ellis, many years in Congress,
and I had a taste of real Southern hospitality. It was everywhere. The
spirit of fraternity was in the South long before it reached the North.
Up to this time I had echoed Horace Greeley's advice, "Go West." For
years afterwards I changed it. In my advice to young men I said to all,
"Go South."

In the spring of 1878, however, things in Brooklyn began to look more
promising for young men and young women. I remember after closely
examining Mayor Howell's report and the Police Commissioner's report I
was much pleased. Mayor Howell was one of the most courteous and genial
men I ever knew, and Superintendent Campbell was a good police officer.
These two men, by their individual interest in Brooklyn reforms, had
gained the confidence of our tax-payers and our philanthropists. The
police force was too small for a city of 5,000,000 people. The taxes
were not big enough to afford an adequate equipment. There was a
constant depreciation of our police and excise officials in the
churches. City officials should not be caricatured--they should be
respected, or dismissed. It was about this time a mounted police
department was started in Brooklyn, and though small it was needed. What
the miscreant community of Brooklyn most needed at this time was not
sermons or lessons in the common schools, but a police club--and they
got it.

There was a political avarice in Brooklyn in the management of our
public taxes which handicapped the local government. For a long while I
had been thinking about some way of presenting this sin to my people,
when one day a woman, Barbara Allen by name, dropping in fatal illness,
was picked up at the Fulton Ferry House, and died in the ambulance. On
her arm was a basket of cold victuals she had lugged from house to
house. In the rags of her clothing were found deposit slips in the
savings banks of Brooklyn--for $20,000. The case was unique at that
time, because in those days great wealth was unknown, even in New York,
and the houses in Brooklyn were homes--not museums. Twenty thousand
dollars was a fortune. It was a precedent that established miserliness
as an actual sin, a dissipation just as deadly as that of the
spendthrift. It was a tragic scene from the drama of life, and its
surprise was avarice. The whole country read about Barbara Allen, and
wondered what new strange disease this was that could scourge a human
soul with a madness for accumulating money without spending it. The
people of the United States suffered from quite a different idea of
money. They were just beginning to feel the great American fever for
spending more of it than they could get. This was a serious phase of
social conditions then, and I remember how keenly I felt the menace of
it at the time. Those who couldn't get enough to spend became envious,
jealous, hateful of those who could and these envious ones were the
American masses.

In the spring of 1878, in May, there was a tiger sprang out of this
jungle of discontent, and, crouching, threatened to spring upon American
Society.

It was--Communism. Its theory was that what could not be obtained
lawfully, under the pressure of circumstances, you could take anyhow.
Communism meant no individual rights in property. If wages were not
adequate to the luxurious appetite, then the wage-earner claimed the
right to knock his employer down and take what he wanted. "Bread or
blood" was the motto. It all came from across the Atlantic, and it
spread rapidly. In Brooklyn, New York, Chicago, St. Louis, it was
evident that Communism was organising, that its executive desperadoes
met in rooms, formed lodges, invented grips and pass-words.

In the eighth ward of New York an organisation was unearthed at this
time, consisting of 800 men, all armed with muskets and revolvers. These
organisations described themselves as working-men's parties, and so
tried to ally themselves with the interests of trade unions.

Twenty American newspapers advocated this shocking creed. Tens of
thousands adopted this theory. I said then, in response to the opinion
that Communism was impossible in this country, that there were just as
many cut-throats along the East River and the Hudson as there were
along the Seine or the Thames. There was only one thing that prevented
revolution in our cities in this memorable spring of 1878, and that was
the police and the military guard.

Through dissatisfaction about wages, or from any cause, men have a right
to stop work, and to stop in bands and bodies until their labour shall
be appreciated; but when by violence, as in the summer of 1877, they
compel others to stop, or hinder substitutes from taking the places,
then the act is Communistic, and ought to be riven of the lightnings of
public condemnation. What was the matter in Pittsburg that summer? What
fired the long line of cars that made night hideous? What lifted the
wild howl in Chicago? Why, coming toward that city, were we obliged to
dismount from the cars and take carriages through the back streets? Why,
when one night the Michigan Central train left Chicago, were there but
three passengers on board a train of eight cars? What forced three rail
trains from the tracks and shot down engineers with their hands on the
valves? Communism. For hundreds of miles along the track leading from
the great West I saw stretched out and coiled up the great reptile
which, after crushing the free locomotive of passengers and trade, would
have twisted itself around our republican institutions, and left them in
strangulation and blood along the pathway of nations. The governors of
States and the President of the United States did well in planting the
loaded cannon at the head of streets blocked up by desperadoes. I felt
the inspiration of giving warning, and I did.

But the summer came, August came, and after a lecture tour through the
far West I was amazed and delighted to find there a tremendous harvest
in the grain fields. I had seen immense crops there about to start on
their way to the Eastern sea-boundary of our continent. I saw then that
our prosperity as a nation would depend upon our agriculture. It didn't
make any difference what the Greenback party, or the Republican and
Democratic parties, or the Communists were croaking about; the immense
harvests of the West indicated that nothing was the matter. What we
needed in the fall of 1878 was some cheerful talk.

During this summer two of the world's celebrities died: Charles Mathews,
the famous comedian, and the great American poet, William Cullen Bryant.
Charles Mathews was an illustrious actor. He was born to make the world
laugh, but he had a sad life of struggle.

While Charles Mathews was performing in London before immense audiences,
one day a worn-out and gloomy man came into a doctor's shop, saying,
"Doctor, what can you do for me?" The doctor examined his case and said,
"My advice is that you go and see Charles Mathews." "Alas! Alas!" said
the man, "I myself am Charles Mathews."

In the loss of William Cullen Bryant I felt it as a personal bereavement
of a close friend. Nowhere have I seen the following incident of his
life recorded, an incident which I still remember as one of the great
events in my life.

In the days of my boyhood I attended a meeting at Tripler Hall, held as
a memorial of Fenimore Cooper, who at that time had just died.
Washington Irving stepped out on the speaker's platform first,
trembling, and in evident misery. After stammering and blushing and
bowing, he completely broke down in his effort to make a speech, and
briefly introduced the presiding officer of the meeting, Daniel
Webster. Rising like a huge mountain from a plain this great orator
introduced another orator--the orator of the day--William Cullen Bryant.
In that memorable oration, lasting an hour and a half, the speaker told
lovingly the story of the life and death of the author of "Leather
Stocking" and "The Last of the Mohicans."

George W. Bethune followed him, thundering out in that marvellous flow
of ideas, with an eloquence that made him the pulpit orator of his
generation in the South. Bryant's hair was then just touched with grey.
The last time I saw him was in my house on Oxford Street, two years ago,
in a company of literary people. I said: "Mr. Bryant, will you read for
us 'Thanatopsis'?" He blushed like a girl, and put his hands over his
face and said: "I would rather read anything than my own production; but
if it will give you pleasure I will do anything you say." Then at 82
years of age, and without spectacles, he stood up and with most pathetic
tenderness read the famous poem of his boyhood days, and from a score of
lips burst forth the exclamation, "What a wonderful old man!" What made
all the land and all the world feel so badly when William Cullen Bryant
was laid down at Roslyn? Because he was a great poet who had died? No;
there have been greater poets. Because he was so able an editor? No;
there have been abler editors. Because he was so very old? No; some have
attained more years. It was because a spotless and noble character
irradiated all he wrote and said and did.

These great men of America, how much they were to me, in their example
of doing and living!

Probably there are many still living who remember what a disorderly
place Brooklyn once was. Gangs of loafers hung around our street
corners, insulting and threatening men and women. Carriages were held up
in the streets, the occupants robbed, and the vehicles stolen.
Kidnapping was known. Behind all this outrage of civil rights was
political outrage. The politicians were afraid to offend the criminals,
because they might need their votes in future elections. They were
immune, because they were useful material in case of a new governor or
President. It was a reign of terror that spread also in other large
cities. The farmers of Ohio and Pennsylvania were threatened if they did
not stop buying labour-saving machinery. They were not the threats of
the working-man, but of the lazy, criminal loafers of the country. It is
worth mentioning, because it was a convulsion of an American period, a
national growing pain, which I then saw and talked about. The nation was
under the cloud of political ambition and office-seeking that unsettled
business conditions. Every one was occupied in President-making,
although we were two years from the Presidential election. There was
plenty of money, but people held on to it.

The yellow fever scourge came down upon the South during the late summer
of 1878, and softened the hearts of some. There was some money
contributed from the North, but not as much as there ought to have been.
In the Brooklyn Tabernacle we did the best we could; New York city had
been ravaged by yellow fever in 1832, the year I was born, but the
memory of that horror was not keen enough to influence the collection
plate. What with this suffering of our neighbours in the South, and the
troubles of political jealousies local and national, there were cares
enough for our church to consider. Still, the summer of 1878 was almost
through, and many predictions of disaster had failed. We had been
threatened with general riots. It was predicted that on June 27 all the
cars and railroad stations would be burned, because of a general strike
order. We were threatened with a fruit famine. It was said that the
Maryland and New Jersey peach crop was a failure. I never saw or ate so
many peaches any summer before.

Then there was the Patten investigation committee, determined to send
Mr. Tilden down to Washington to drive the President out of the White
House. None of these things happened, yet it is interesting to recall
this phase of American nerves in 1878.

There was one event that aroused my disgust, however, much more than the
croakers had done--Ben Butler was nominated for Governor of
Massachusetts. That was when politics touched bottom. There was no lower
depths of infamy for them to reach. Ben Butler was the chief demagogue
of the land. The Republican party was to be congratulated that it got
rid of him. His election was a cross put upon the State of Massachusetts
for something it had done we knew not of. Fortunately there were men
like Roscoe Conkling in politics to counterbalance other kinds.

Backed up by unscrupulous politicians, the equally irresponsible
railroad promoter began his invasion of city streets with his noisy
scheme. I opposed him, but the problem of transportation then was not as
it is now. Just as the year 1879 had begun, a gigantic political
promoting scheme for an elevated railroad in Brooklyn was attempted.
From Boston came the promoters with a proposition to build the road,
without paying a cent of indemnity to property holders. I suggested
that an appeal be made to Brooklynites to subscribe to a company for the
agricultural improvements of Boston Common. It was a parallel absurdity.
Mayor Howell, of Brooklyn, courageously opposed an elevated road
franchise, unless property holders were paid according to the damage to
the property. This was one of many inspired grafts of political
Brooklyn, years ago.

A great event in the world was the announcement in November, 1878, that
Professor Thomas Edison had applied for a patent for the discovery of
the incandescent electric light. He harnessed the flame of a thunderbolt
to fit in a candlestick. I hope he made millions of dollars out of it.
In direct contradiction to this progress in daily life there came, at
the same time, from the Philadelphia clergy a protest against printing
their sermons in the secular press. It was an injustice to them, they
declared, because the sermons were not always fully reported. I did not
share these opinions. If a minister's gospel is not fit for fifty
thousand people, then it is not fit for the few hundred members of his
congregation. My own sermons were being published in the secular press
then, as they had been when I was in Philadelphia.

Almost at the close of the year 1878 the loss of the S.S. "Pomerania,"
in collision in the English Channel, was a disaster of the sea that I
denounced as nothing short of murder. It was shown at the trial that
there was no fog at the time, that the two vessels saw each other for
ten minutes before the collision. If such gross negligence as this was
possible, I advised those people who bought a ticket for Europe on the
White Star, the Cunard, the Hamburg, or other steamship lines, to secure
at the same time a ticket for Heaven. What a difference in the ocean
ferry-boat of to-day!

Scarcely had the submarine telegraph closed this chapter of sea horror
than it clicked the information that the beautiful Princess Alice had
died in Germany. Only a few days later, in America, we were in mood of
mourning for Bayard Taylor, our Minister Plenipotentiary to Germany. In
the death of Princess Alice we felt chiefly a sympathy for Queen
Victoria, who had not then, and never did, overcome her grief at the
loss of Prince Albert. In the decease of Bayard Taylor we remembered
with pride that he was a self-made gentleman of a school for which there
is no known system of education. Regarded as a dreamy, unpractical boy,
nothing much was ever expected of him. When he was seventeen he set type
in a printing office in Westchester. It was Bayard Taylor who exploded
the idea that only the rich could afford to go to Europe, when on less
than a thousand dollars he spent two years amid the palaces and temples,
telling of his adventures in a way that contributed classic literature
to our book-shelves. He worked hard--wrote thirty-five books. There is
genius in hard work alone. I have often thought that women pursue more
of it than men. They work night and day, year in and year out, from
kitchen to parlour, from parlour to kitchen.

There was some strong legislative effort made in our country about this
time to exclude the Chinese. I opposed this legislation with all the
voice and ability I had, because I felt not merely the injustice of such
contradiction of all our national institutions, but I saw its political
folly. I saw that the nation that would be the most friendly to China,
and could get on the inside track of her commerce, would be the first
nation of the world. The legislature seemed particularly angry with the
Chinese immigrants in this country because they would not allow
themselves to be buried here. They were angry with the Chinese then
because they would not intermarry. They were angry with the Chinese
because they invested their money in China. They did not think they were
handsome enough for this country. We even wanted a monopoly of good
looks in those days.

I was particularly friendly to the Chinese. My brother, John Van Nest
Talmage, devoted his life to them. I believed, as my brother did, that
they were a great nation.

When he went, my last brother went. Stunned was I until I staggered
through the corridors of the hotel in London, England, when the news
came that John was dead. If I should say all that I felt I would declare
that since Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles a more faithful or
consecrated man has not lifted his voice in the dark places of
heathenism. I said it while he was alive, and might as well say it now
that he is dead. He was the hero of our family. He did not go to China
to spend his days because no one in America wanted to hear him preach.
At the time of his first going to China he had a call to succeed in
Brooklyn, N.Y., the Rev. Dr. Broadhead, the Chrysostom of the American
pulpit, a call at a large salary; and there would have been nothing
impossible to my brother in the way of religious work or Christian
achievement had he tarried in his native land. But nothing could detain
him from the work to which God called him long before he became a
Christian.

My reason for writing that anomalous statement is that, when a small boy
in Sabbath-school, he read a library book, "The Life of Henry Martin."
He said to my mother, "I am going to be a missionary." The remark at the
time made no special impression. Years after that passed on before his
conversion; but when the grace of God appeared to him, and he had
entered his studies for the Gospel ministry, he said one day, "Mother,
do you remember that years ago I said, 'I am going to be a missionary'?"
She replied, "Yes, I remember it." "Well," said he, "I am going to keep
my promise." How well he kept it millions of souls on earth and in
Heaven have long since heard. When the roll of martyrs is called before
the throne, the name of John Van Nest Talmage will be called. He worked
himself to death in the cause of the world's evangelisation. His heart,
his brain, his hand, his voice, his muscles, his nerves could do no
more. He sleeps in the cemetery of Somerville, N.J., so near his father
and mother that he will face them when he arises in the resurrection of
the just, and, amid a crowd of his kindred now sleeping on the right of
them and on the left of them, will feel the thrill of the trumpet that
wakes the dead.

You could get nothing from my brother at all. Ask him a question to
evoke what he had done for God and the Church, and his lips were as
tightly shut as though they had never been opened. Indeed, his reticence
was at times something remarkable. I took him to see President Grant at
Long Branch, and though they had both been great warriors, the one
fighting the battles of the Lord and the other the battles of his
country, they had little to say, and there was, I thought, at the time,
more silence crowded together than I ever noticed in the same amount of
space before.

But the story of my brother's work has already been told in the Heavens
by those who, through his instrumentality, have already reached the City
of Raptures. However, his chief work is yet to come. We get our
chronology so twisted that we come to believe that the white marble of
the tomb is the milestone at which the good man stops, when it is only a
milestone on a journey, the most of the miles of which are yet to be
travelled. The Chinese Dictionary which my brother prepared during more
than two decades of study; the religious literature he transferred from
English into Chinese; the hymns he wrote for others to sing, although he
himself could not sing at all (he and I monopolising the musical
incapacity of a family in which all the rest could sing well); the
missionary stations he planted; the life he lived, will widen out and
deepen and intensify through all time and all eternity.

Never in the character of a Chinaman was there the trait of commercial
fraud that assailed our American cities in 1879. It got into our food
finally--the very bread we ate was proven to be an adulteration of
impure stuff. What an extravagance of imagination had crept into our
daily life! We pretended even to eat what we knew we were not eating.
Except for the reminder which old books written in byegone simpler days
gave us, we should have insisted that the world should believe us if we
said black was white. Still, among us there were some who were genuine,
but they seemed to be passing away. It was in this year that the oldest
author in America died, Richard Henry Dana. He was born in 1788, when
literature in this country was just beginning. His death stirred the
tenderest emotions. Authorship was a new thing in America when Mr. Dana
began to write, and it required endurance and persistence. The
atmosphere was chilling to literature then, there was little applause
for poetic or literary skill. There were no encouragements when
Washington Irving wrote as "Knickerbocker," when Richard Henry Dana
wrote "The Buccaneer," "The Idle Man," and "The Dying Raven." There was
something cracking in his wit, exalted in his culture. He was so gentle
in his conversation, so pure in his life, it was hard to spare him. He
seemed like a man who had never been forced into the battle of the
world, he was so unscarred and hallowed.

It was just about this time that our Tabernacle in Brooklyn became the
storm centre of a law-suit which threatened to undermine us. It was
based upon a theory, a technicality of law, which declared that the
subscriptions of married women were not legal subscriptions. Our
attorneys were Mr. Freeman and Judge Tenney. Theirs was a battle for God
and the Church. There were only two sides to the case. Those against the
Church and those with the Church. In the preceding eight years, whether
against fire or against foe, the Tabernacle had risen to a higher plane
of useful Christian work. I was not alarmed. During the two weeks of
persecution, the days were to me days of the most complete peace I had
felt since I entered the Christian life. Again and again I remember
remarking in my home, to my family, what a supernatural peace was upon
me. My faith was in God, who managed my life and the affairs of the
Church. My work was still before me, there was too much to be done in
the Tabernacle yet. The disapproval of our methods before the Brooklyn
Presbytery was formulated in a series of charges against the pastor. I
was told my enthusiasm was sinful, that it was unorthodox for me to be
so. My utterances were described as inaccurate. My editorial work was
offensively criticised. The Presbytery listened patiently, and after a
careful consideration dismissed the charges. Once more the unjust
oppression of enemies had seemed to extend the strength and scope of the
Gospel. A few days later my congregation presented me with a token of
confidence in their pastor. I was so happy at the time that I was ready
to shake hands even with the reporters who had abused me. How kind they
were, how well they understood me, how magnificently they took care of
me, my people of the Brooklyn Tabernacle!




THE SIXTH MILESTONE

1879-1881


In the spring of 1879 I made a Gospel tour of England, Ireland, and
Scotland. On a previous visit I had given a series of private lectures,
under the management of Major Pond, and I had been more or less
criticised for the amount of money charged the people to hear me. As I
had nothing whatever to do with the prices of tickets to my lectures,
which went to the managers who arranged the tour, this was something
beyond my control. My personal arrangement with Major Pond was for a
certain fixed sum. They said in Europe that I charged too much to be
heard, that as a preacher of the Gospel I should have been more
moderate. If the management had been my own I should not have been so
greedy.

Because of this recollection and the regret it gave me, I decided to
make another tour at my own expense, and preach without price in all the
places I had previously visited as a lecturer. It was the most
exhausting, exciting, remarkable demonstration of religious enthusiasm I
have ever witnessed. It was an evangelistic yearning that could not be
repeated in another life-time.

The entire summer was a round of Gospel meetings, overflow meetings,
open-air meetings, a succession of scenes of blessing. From the time I
arrived in Liverpool, where that same night I addressed two large
assemblages, till I got through after a monster gathering at Edinburgh,
I missed but three Gospel appointments, and those because I was too
tired to stand up. I preached ninety-eight times in ninety-three days.

With nothing but Gospel themes I confronted multitudes. A collection was
always taken up at these gatherings for the benefit of local charities,
feeble churches, orphan asylums and other institutions. My services were
gratuitous.

It was the most wonderful summer of evangelical work I was ever
privileged to enjoy. There must have been much praying for me and my
welfare, or no mortal could have got through with the work. In every
city I went to, messages were passed into my ears for families in
America. The collection taken for the benefit of the Y.M.C.A. at Leeds
was about $6,000. During this visit I preached in Scenery Chapel,
London, in the pulpit where such consecrated souls as Rowland Hill and
Newman Hall and James Sherman had preached. I visited the "Red Horse
Hotel," of Stratford-on-Avon, where the chair and table used by
Washington Irving were as interesting to me as anything in Shakespeare's
cottage. The church where the poet is buried is over seven hundred years
old.

The most interesting place around London to me is in Chelsea, where, on
a narrow street, I entered the house of Thomas Carlyle. This great
author was away from London at the time. Entering a narrow hall, on the
left is the literary workshop, where some of the strongest thunderbolts
of the world's literature have been forged. In the room, which has two
front windows shaded from the prying street by two little red calico
curtains, is a lounge that looks as though it had been made by an author
unaccustomed to saw or hammer. On the wall were a few woodcuts in plain
frames or pinned on the wall. Here was a photograph of Carlyle, taken
one day, as a member of his family told me, when he had a violent
toothache and could attend to nothing else, and yet posterity regards it
as a favourite picture. There are only three copies of this photograph
in existence. One was given to Carlyle, the other was kept by the
photographer, and the third belongs to me. In long rough shelves was the
library of the renowned thinker. The books were well worn with reading.
Many of them were books I never heard of. American literature was almost
ignored; they were chiefly books written by Germans. There was an
absence of theological books, excepting those of Thomas Chalmers, whose
genius he worshipped. The carpets were old and worn and faded. He wished
them to be so, as a perpetual protest against the world's sham. It did
not appeal to me as a place of inspiration for a writer.

I returned to America impressed with the over-crowding of the British
Isles, and the unsettled regions of our own country.

"Tell the United States we want to send her five million population this
year, and five million population next year," said a prominent
Englishman to me. I urged a mutual arrangement between the two
governments, to people the West with these populations. Great Britain
was the workshop of the world; we needed workers. The trouble in the
United States at this time was that when there was one garment needed
there were three people anxious to manufacture it, and five people
anxious to sell it. We needed to evoke more harvests and fruits to feed
the populations of the world, and more flax and wool for the clothing.
The cities in England are so close together that there is a cloud from
smokestacks the length and width of the island. The Canon of York
Minster showed me how the stone of that great cathedral was crumbling
under the chemical corrosion of the atmosphere, wafted from neighbouring
factories.

America was not yet discovered then. Those who had gone West twenty
years back, in 1859, were, in 1879, the leading men of Chicago, and
Omaha, and Denver, and Minneapolis, and Dubuque. When I left, England
was still suffering from the effects of the long-continued panic in
America.

Brooklyn had improved; still, we were threatened with a tremendous
influx of people. The new bridge at Fulton Ferry across the East River
would soon be opened. It looked as though there was to be another bridge
at South Ferry, and another at Peck Slip Ferry. Montauk Point was to be
purchased by some enterprising Americans, and a railroad was to connect
it with Brooklyn. Steamers from Europe were to find wharfage in some of
the bays of Long Island, and the passage across the Atlantic reduced to
six days! Passengers six days out of Queenstown would pass into
Brooklyn. This was the Brooklyn to be, as was seen in its prospectus,
its evolution in 1879-80.

Our local elections had resulted in a better local government. With the
exception of an unsuccessful attempt by the Board of Canvassers to
deprive Frederick A. Schroeder of his seat in the Senate, because some
of the voters had left out the middle initial in his name in their
ballots, all was better with us politically than it had been. To the
credit of our local press, the two political rivals, the _Brooklyn
Eagle_ and the _Times_, united in their efforts to support Senator
Schroeder's claim.

There was one man in Brooklyn at this time who was much abused and
caricatured for doing a great work--Professor Bergh, the deliverer of
dumb animals. He was constantly in the courts in defence of a lame horse
or a stray cat. I supported and encouraged him. I always hoped that he
would induce legislation that would give the poor car-horses of Brooklyn
more oats, and fewer passengers to haul in one car. He was one of the
first men to fight earnestly against vivisection--which was a great
work.

Just after we had settled down to a more comfortable and hopeful state
of mind Mr. Thomas Kinsella, one of our prominent citizens, startled us
by showing us, in a published interview, how little we had any right to
feel that way. He told us that our Brooklyn debt was $17,000,000, with a
tax area of only three million and a half acres. It was disturbing. But
we had prospects, energies. We had to depend in this predicament upon
the quickened prosperity of our property holders, upon future examiners
to be scrupulous at the ballot box, on the increase of our population,
which would help to carry our burdens, and on the revenue from our great
bridge. These were local affairs of interest to us all, but in December,
1879, we had a more serious problem of our own to consider. This
concerned the future of the new Tabernacle.

In consequence of perpetual and long-continued outrages committed by
neighbouring clergymen against the peace of our church, the Board of
Trustees of the Tabernacle addressed a letter to the congregation
suggesting our withdrawal from the denomination. I regretted this,
because I felt that the time would soon come when all denominations
should be helpful to each other. There would be enough people in
Brooklyn, I was sure, when all the churches could be crowded. I
positively refused to believe the things that my fellow ministers said
about me, or to notice them. I was perfectly satisfied with the
Christian outlook of our church. I urged the same spirit of calm upon my
church neighbours, by example and precept. It was a long while before
they realised the value of this advice. In the spring of 1879 my friend
Dr. Crosby, pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church at the corner of
Clinton and Fulton Streets, was undergoing an ecclesiastical trial, and
an enterprising newsboy invaded the steps of the church, as the most
interested market for the sale of the last news about the trial. He was
ignominiously pushed off the church steps by the church officers. I was
indignant about it. (I saw it from a distance, as I was coming down the
street.) I thought it was a row between Brooklyn ministers, however, and
turned the corner to avoid such a shocking sight. My suspicions were not
groundless, because there was even then anything but brotherly love
between some of the churches there.

A synodical trial by the Synod of Long Island was finally held at
Jamaica, L.I., to ascertain if there was not some way of inducing church
harmony in Brooklyn. After several days at Jamaica, in which the
ministers of Long Island took us ministers of Brooklyn across their
knees and applied the ecclesiastical slipper, we were sent home with a
benediction. A lot of us went down there looking hungry, and they sent
us back all fed up. Even some of the church elders were hungry and came
back to Brooklyn strengthened.

It looked for awhile after this as though all clerical antagonisms in
Brooklyn would expire. I even foresaw a time coming when Brothers
Speare, Van Dyke, Crosby and Talmage would sing Moody and Sankey hymns
together out of the same hymn-book.

The year 1880 began with an outbreak in Maine, a sort of miniature
revolution, caused by a political appointment of my friend Governor
Garcelon contrary to the opinions of the people of his State. Garcelon I
knew personally, and regarded him as a man of honour and pure political
motives, whether he did his duty or not; whatever he did he believed was
the right and conscientious thing to do. The election had gone against
the Democrats. In a neat address Mr. Lincoln Robinson, Democrat, handed
over the keys of New York State to Mr. Carroll, the Republican Governor.
Antagonists though they had been at the ballot-box, the surrender was
conducted with a dignity that I trust will always surround the
gubernatorial chair of the State of New York, once graced by such men as
DeWitt Clinton, Silas Wright, William H. Seward, and John A. Dix.

In January, 1880, Frank Leslie, the pioneer of pictorial journalism in
America, died. I met him only once, when he took me through his immense
establishment. I was impressed with him then, as a man of much elegance
of manner and suavity of feeling. He was very much beloved by his
employees, which, in those days of discord between capital and labour,
was a distinction.

The arrival of Mr. Parnell in New York was an event of the period. We
knew he was an orator, and we were anxious to hear him. There was some
uncertainty as to whether he came to America to obtain bayonets to stick
the English with, or whether he came for bread for the starving in
Ireland. We did not understand the political problem between England and
Ireland so well--but we did understand the meaning of a loaf of bread.
Mr. Parnell was welcome.

The failure of the harvest crops in Europe made the question of the hour
at the beginning of 1880--bread. The grain speculator appeared, with his
greedy web spun around the world. Europe was short 200,000,000 bushels
of wheat. The American speculator cornered the market, stacked the
warehouses, and demanded fifty cents a bushel. Europe was compelled to
retaliate, by purchasing grain in Russia, British India, New Zealand,
South America, and Australia. In one week the markets of the American
North-west purchased over 15,000,000 bushels, of which only 4,000,000
bushels were exported. Meanwhile the cry of the world's hunger grew
louder, and the bolts on the grain cribs were locked tighter than ever.
American finances could have been straightened out on this one product,
except for the American speculator, who demanded more for it than it was
worth. The United States had a surplus of 18,000,000 bushels of grain
for export, in 1880. But the kings of the wheat market said to Europe,
"Bow down before us, and starve."

Suddenly we in America were surprised to learn that flour in London was
two dollars cheaper a barrel than it was in New York. Our grain blockade
of the world was reacting upon us. Lying idle at the wharves of New York
and Brooklyn were 102 ships, 439 barques, 87 brigs, 178 schooners, and
47 steamers. Six or seven hundred of these vessels were waiting for
cargoes. The gates of our harbour were closed in the grip of the grain
gambler. The thrift of the speculator was the menace of our national
prosperity. The octopus of speculative ugliness was growing to its full
size, and threatened to smother us utterly. There was a "corner" on
everything.

We were busy trying to pick out our next President. There was great
agitation over the Republican candidates: Grant, Blaine, Cameron,
Conkling, Sherman. Greatness in a man is sometimes a hindrance to the
Presidency. Such was the case with Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, Thomas H.
Benton, and William C. Preston. We were only on the edge of the
whirlpool of a presidential election. In England the election storm was
just beginning. The first thunderbolt was the sudden dissolution of
Parliament by Lord Beaconsfield. The two mightiest men in England then
were antagonists, Disraeli and Gladstone.

What a magnificent body of men are those Members of Parliament. They
meet and go about without the ostentation of some of our men in
Congress. Men of great position in England are born to it; they are not
so afraid of losing it as our celebrated Republicans and Democrats. Even
the man who comes up into political power from the masses in England is
more likely to hold his position than if he had triumphed in American
politics.

In the spring and summer of 1880 I took a long and exhaustive trip
across our continent, and completely lost the common dread of emigration
that was then being talked about. There was room enough for fifty new
nations between Omaha and Cheyenne, room for more still between Cheyenne
and Ogden, from Salt Lake City to Sacramento.

An unpretentious youth, Carey by name, whom I had known in Philadelphia,
went West in '67. I found him in Cheyenne a leading citizen. He had
been District Attorney, then judge of one of the courts, owned a city
block, a cattle ranch, and was worth about $500,000. There wasn't room
enough for him in Philadelphia. Senator Hill of Colorado told me, while
in Denver, about a man who came out there from the East to be a miner.
He began digging under a tree because it was shady. People passed by and
laughed at him. He kept on digging. After a while he sent a waggon load
of the dust to be assayed, and there was $9,000 worth of metal in it. He
retired with a fortune.

A man with $3,000 and good health could have gone West in 1880, invested
it in cattle, and made a fortune. San Francisco was only forty-five
years old then, Denver thirty-five, Leadville sixteen, Kansas City
thirty-five. They looked a hundred at least. Leadville was then a place
of palatial hotels, elegant churches, boulevards and streets. The West
was just aching to show how fast it could build cities. Leadville was
the most lied about. It was reported that I explored Leadville till long
after midnight, looking at its wickedness. I didn't. All the exploring I
did in Leadville was in about six minutes, from the wide open doors of
the gambling houses on two of the main streets; but the next day it was
telegraphed all over the United States. There were more telephones in
Leadville in 1880 than in any other city in the United States, to its
population. Some of the best people of Brooklyn and New York lived
there. The newspaper correspondents lost money in the gambling houses
there, and so they didn't like Leadville, and told the world it was a
bad place, which was a misrepresentation. It is a well known law of
human nature that a man usually hates a place where he did not behave
well. I found perfect order there, to my surprise. There was a vigilance
committee in Leadville composed of bankers and merchants. It was their
business to give a too cumbrous law a boost. The week before I got to
Leadville this committee hanged two men. The next day eighty scoundrels
took the hint and left Leadville. A great institution was the vigilance
committee of those early Western days. They saved San Francisco, and
Cheyenne, and Leadville. I wish they had been in Brooklyn when I was
there. The West was not slow to assimilate the elegancies of life
either. There were beautiful picture galleries in Omaha, and Denver, and
Sacramento, and San Francisco. There was more elaboration and
advancement of dress in the West than there was in the East in 1880. The
cravats of the young men in Cheyenne were quite as surprising, and the
young ladies of Cheyenne went down the street with the elbow wabble,
then fashionable in New York. San Francisco was Chicago intensified, and
yet then it was a mere boy of a city, living in a garden of Eden, called
California. On my return came Mr. Garfield's election. It was quietly
and peaceably effected, but there followed that exposure of political
outrages concerning his election, the Morey forgeries. I hoped then that
this villainy would split the Republican and Democratic parties into new
fields, that it would spilt the North and the South into a different
sectional feeling. I hoped that there would be a complete upheaval, a
renewed and cleaner political system as a consequence. But the reform
movement is always slower than any other.

I remember the harsh things that were said in our denomination of
Lucretia Mott, the quakeress, the reformer, the world-renowned woman
preacher of the day. She was well nigh as old as the nation,
eighty-eight years old, when she died. Her voice has never died in the
plain meeting-houses of this country and England. I don't know that she
was always right, but she always meant to be right. In Philadelphia,
where she preached, I lived among people for years who could not mention
her name without tears of gratitude for what she had done for them.
There was great opposition to her because she was the first woman
preacher, but all who heard her speak knew she had a divine right of
utterance.

In November, 1880, Disraeli's great novel, "Endymion" was published by
an American firm, Appleton & Co., a London publisher paying the author
the largest cash price ever paid for a manuscript up to that
time--$50,000. Noah Webster made that much in royalties on his spelling
book, but less on one of the greatest works given to the human race, his
dictionary. There was a great literary impulse in American life,
inspired by such American publishing houses as Appleton's, the Harper
Bros., the Dodds, the Randolphs, and the Scribners. It was the brightest
moment in American literature; far brighter than the day Victor Hugo, in
youth, long anxious to enter the French Academy, applied to Callard for
his vote. He pretended never to have heard of him. "Will you accept a
copy of my books?" asked Victor Hugo. "No thank you," replied the other;
"I never read new books." Riley offered to sell his "Universal
Philosophy" for $500. The offer was refused. Great and wise authors have
often been without food and shelter. Sometimes governments helped them,
as when President Pierce appointed Nathaniel Hawthorne to office, and
Locke was made Commissioner of Appeals, and Steele State Commissioner of
Stamps by the British Government. Oliver Goldsmith said: "I have been
years struggling with a wretched being, with all that contempt which
indigence brings with it, with all those strong passions which make
contempt insupportable." Mr. Payne, the author of "Home, Sweet Home,"
had no home, and was inspired to the writing of his immortal song by a
walk through the streets one slushy night, and hearing music and
laughter inside a comfortable dwelling. The world-renowned Sheridan
said: "Mrs. Sheridan and I were often obliged to keep writing for our
daily shoulder of mutton; otherwise we should have had no dinner."
Mitford, while he was writing his most celebrated book, lived in the
fields, making his bed of grass and nettles, while two-pennyworth of
bread and cheese with an onion was his daily food. I know of no more
refreshing reading than the books of William Hazlitt. I take down from
my shelf one of his many volumes, and I know not when to stop reading.
So fresh and yet so old! But through all the volumes there comes a
melancholy, accounted for by the fact that he had an awful struggle for
bread. On his dying couch he had a friend write for him the following
letter to Francis Jeffrey:--

    "Dear Sir,--I am at the last gasp. Please send me a hundred
    pounds.--Yours truly,

    "WILLIAM HAZLITT."

The money arrived the day after his death. Poor fellow! I wish he had
during his lifetime some of the tens of thousands of dollars that have
since been paid in purchase of his books. He said on one occasion to a
friend: "I have carried a volcano in my bosom up and down Paternoster
Row for a good two hours and a half. Can you lend me a shilling? I have
been without food these two days." My readers, to-day the struggle of a
good many literary people goes on. To be editor of a newspaper as I have
been, and see the number of unavailable manuscripts that come in, crying
out for five dollars, or anything to appease hunger and pay rent and get
fuel! Oh, it is heartbreaking! After you have given all the money you
can spare you will come out of your editorial rooms crying.

Disraeli was seventy-five when "Endymion" was published. Disraeli's
"Endymion" came at a time when books in America were greater than they
ever were before or have been since. A flood of magazines came
afterwards, and swamped them. Before this time new books were rarely
made. Rich men began to endow them. It was a glorious way of spending
money. Men sometimes give their money away because they have to give it
up anyhow. Such men rarely give it to book-building.

In January, 1881, Mr. George L. Seavey, a prominent Brooklyn man at that
time, gave $50,000 to the library of the Historical Society of New York.
Attending a reception one night in Brooklyn, I was shown his check, made
out for that purpose. It was a great gift, one of the first given for
the intellectual food of future bookworms.

Most of the rich men of this time were devoting their means to making
Senators. The legislatures were manufacturing a new brand, and turning
them out made to order. Many of us were surprised at how little timber,
and what poor quality, was needed to make a Senator in 1881. The nation
used to make them out of stout, tall oaks. Many of those new ones were
made of willow, and others out of crooked sticks. In most cases the
strong men defeated each other, and weak substitutes were put in. The
forthcoming Congress was to be one of commonplace men. The strong men
had to stay at home, and the accidents took their places in the
government. Still there were leaders, North and South.

My old friend Senator Brown of Georgia was one of the leaders of the
South. He spoke vehemently in Congress in the cause of education. Only a
few months before he had given, out of his private purse, forty thousand
dollars to a Baptist college. He was a man who talked and urged a hearty
union of feeling between the North and the South. He always hoped to
abolish sectional feeling by one grand movement for the financial,
educational, and moral welfare of the Nation. It was my urgent wish that
President Garfield should invite Senator Brown to a place in his
Cabinet, although the Senator would probably have refused the honour,
for there was no better place to serve the American people than in the
American Senate.

During the first week in February, 1881, the world hovered over the
death-bed of Thomas Carlyle. He was the great enemy of all sorts of
cant, philosophical or religious. He was for half a century the great
literary iconoclast. Daily bulletins of the sick-bed were published
world-wide. There was no easy chair in his study, no soft divans. It was
just a place to work, and to stay at work. I once saw a private letter,
written by Carlyle to Thomas Chalmers. The first part of it was devoted
to a eulogy of Chalmers, the latter part descriptive of his own
religious doubts. He never wrote anything finer. It was beautiful,
grand, glorious, melancholy.

Thomas Carlyle started with the idea that the intellect was all, the
body nothing but an adjunct, an appendage. He would spur the intellect
to costly energies, and send the body supperless to bed. After years of
doubts and fears I learned that towards the end he returned to the
simplicities of the Gospel.

While this great thinker of the whole of life was sinking into his last
earthly sleep, the men in the parliament of his nation were squabbling
about future ambitions. Thirty-five Irish members were forcibly ejected.
Neither Beaconsfield nor Gladstone could solve the Irish question. Nor
do I believe it will ever be solved to the satisfaction of Ireland. But
a greater calamity than those came upon us; in the summer of this year
President Garfield was assassinated in Washington.




THE SEVENTH MILESTONE

1881-1884


On July 2, 1881, an attempt was made to assassinate President Garfield,
at the Pennsylvania Station, Washington, where he was about to board a
train. I heard the news first on the railroad train at Williamstown,
Mass., where the President was expected in three or four days.

"Absurd, impossible," I said. Why should anyone want to kill him? He had
nothing but that which he had earned with his own brain and hand. He had
fought his own way up from country home to college hall, and from
college hall to the House of Representatives, and from House of
Representatives to the Senate Chamber, and from the Senate Chamber to
the Presidential chair. Why should anyone want to kill him? He was not a
despot who had been treading on the rights of the people. There was
nothing of the Nero or the Robespierre in him. He had wronged no man. He
was free and happy himself, and wanted all the world free and happy. Why
should anyone want to kill him? He had a family to shepherd and educate,
a noble wife and a group of little children leaning on his arm and
holding his hand, and who needed him for many years to come.

Only a few days before, I had paid him a visit. He was a bitter
antagonist of Mormonism, and I was in deep sympathy with his Christian
endeavours in this respect. I never saw a more anxious or perturbed
countenance than James A. Garfield's, the last time I met him. It seemed
a great relief to him to turn to talk to my child, who was with me. He
had suffered enough abuse in his political campaign to suffice for one
lifetime. He was then facing three or four years of insult and contumely
greater than any that had been heaped upon his predecessors. He had
proposed greater reforms, and by so much he was threatened to endure
worse outrages. His term of office was just six months, but he
accomplished what forty years of his predecessors had failed to do--the
complete and eternal pacification of the North and the South. There were
more public meetings of sympathy for him, at this time, in the South
than there were in the North. His death-bed in eight weeks did more for
the sisterhood of States than if he had lived eight years--two terms of
the Presidency. His cabinet followed the reform spirit of his
leadership. Postmaster General James made his department illustrious by
spreading consternation among the scoundrels of the Star Route, saving
the country millions of dollars. Secretary Windom wrought what the
bankers and merchants called a financial miracle. Robert Lincoln, the
son of another martyred President, was Secretary of War.

Guiteau was no more crazy than thousands of other place-hunters. He had
been refused an office, and he was full of unmingled and burning
revenge. There was nothing else the matter with him. It was just this:
"You haven't given me what I want; now I'll kill you." For months after
each presidential inauguration the hotels of Washington are roosts for
these buzzards. They are the crawling vermin of this nation. Guiteau
was no rarity. There were hundreds of Guiteaus in Washington after the
inauguration, except that they had not the courage to shoot. I saw them
some two months or six weeks after. They were mad enough to do it. I saw
it in their eyes.

They killed two other Presidents, William Henry Harrison and Zachary
Taylor. I know the physicians called the disease congestion of the lungs
or liver, but the plain truth was that they were worried to death; they
were trampled out of life by place-hunters. Three Presidents sacrificed
to this one demon are enough. I urged Congress at the next session to
start a work of presidential emancipation. Four Presidents have
recommended civil service reform, and it has amounted to little or
nothing. But this assassination I hoped would compel speedy and decisive
action.

James A. Garfield was prepared for eternity. He often preached the
Gospel. "I heard him preach, he preached for me in my pulpit," a
minister told me. He preached once in Wall Street to an excited throng,
after Lincoln was shot. He preached to the wounded soldiers at
Chickamauga. He preached in the United States Senate, in speeches of
great nobility. When a college boy, camped on the mountains, he read the
Scriptures aloud to his companions. After he was shot, he declared that
he trusted all in the Lord's hand--was ready to live or die.

"If the President die, what of his successor?" was the great question of
the hour. I did not know Mr. Arthur at that time, but I prophesied that
Mr. Garfield's policies would be carried out by his successor.

I consider President Garfield was a man with the most brilliant mind
who ever occupied the White House. He had strong health, a splendid
physique, a fine intellect. If Guiteau's bullet had killed the President
instantly, there would have been a revolution in this country.

He lingered amid the prayers of the nation, surrounded by seven of the
greatest surgeons and physicians of the hour. Then he passed on. His son
was preparing a scrap-book of all the kind things that had been said
about his father, to show him when he recovered. That was a tender
forethought of one who knew how unjustly he had suffered the slanders of
his enemies. There was much talk about presidential inability, and in
the midst of this public bickering Chester A. Arthur became president.
He took office, amid severe criticism. I urged the appointment of
Frederick T. Frelinghuysen to the President's Cabinet, feeling that. Mr.
Arthur would have in this distinguished son of New Jersey, a devout,
evangelical, Christian adviser. In October I paid a visit, to Mr.
Garfield's home in Mentor, Ohio. On the hat-rack in the hall was his
hat, where he had left it, when the previous March he left for his
inauguration in Washington. I left that bereaved household with a
feeling that a full explanation of this event must be adjourned to the
next state of my existence.

The new President was gradually becoming, on all sides, the bright hope
of our national future. In after years I learned to know him and admire
him.

In the period of transition that followed the President's assassination
we lost other good men.

We lost Senator Burnside of Rhode Island, at one time commander of the
Army of the Potomac, and three times Governor of his State. I met him at
a reception given in the home of my friend Judge Hilton, in Woodlawn,
at Saratoga Springs. He had an imperial presence, coupled with the
utterance of a child. The Senator stood for purity in politics. No one
ever bought him, or tried to buy him. He held no stock in the Credit
Mobilier. He shook hands with none of the schemes that appealed to
Congress to fleece the people. He died towards the close of 1881.

A man of greater celebrity, of an entirely different quality, who had
passed on, was about this time to be honoured with an effigy in
Westminster Abbey--Dean Stanley. I still remember keenly the afternoon I
met him in the Deanery adjoining the abbey. There was not much of the
physical in his appearance. His mind and soul seemed to have more than a
fair share of his physical territory. He had only just enough body to
detain the soul awhile on earth.

And then we lost Samuel B. Stewart. The most of Brooklyn knew him--the
best part of Brooklyn knew him. I knew him long before I ever came to
Brooklyn. He taught me to read in the village school. His parents and
mine were buried in the same place. A few weeks later, the Rev. Dr.
Bellows of New York went. I do not believe that the great work done by
this good man was ever written. It was during that long agony when the
war hospitals were crowded with the sick, the wounded, and the dying. He
enlisted his voice and his pen and his fortune to alleviate their
suffering. I was on the field as a chaplain for a very little while, and
a little while looking after the sick in Philadelphia, and I noticed
that the Sanitary Commission, of which Dr. Bellows was the presiding
spirit, was constantly busy with ambulances, cordials, nurses,
necessaries and supplies. Many a dying soldier was helped by the mercy
of this good man's energies, and many a farewell message was forwarded
home. The civilians who served the humanitarian causes of the war, like
Dr. Bellows, have not received the recognition they should. Only the
military men have been honoured with public office.

The chief menace of the first year of President Arthur's administration
was the danger of a policy to interfere in foreign affairs, and the
danger of extravagance in Washington, due to innumerable appropriation
bills. There was a war between Chili and Peru, and the United States
Government offered to mediate for Chili. It was a pitiable interference
with private rights, and I regretted this indication of an unnecessary
foreign policy in this country. In addition to this, there were enough
appropriation bills in Washington to swamp the nation financially. I had
stood for so many years in places where I could see clearly the ungodly
affairs of political life in my own country, that the progress of
politics became to me a hopeless thing.

The political nominations of 1882 involved no great principles. In New
York State this was significant, because it brought before the nation
Mr. Grover Cleveland as a candidate for Governor against Mr. Folger. The
general opinion of these two men in the unbiassed public mind was
excellent. They were men of talent and integrity. They were not merely
actors in the political play. I have buried professional politicians,
and the most of them made a very bad funeral for a Christian minister to
speak at. I always wanted, at such a time, an Episcopal prayer book,
which is made for all eases, and may not be taken either as invidious or
too assuring.

There was another contest, non-political, that interested the nation in
1882. It was the Sullivan-Ryan prize-fight. I had no great objection to
find with it, as did so many other ministers. It suggested a far better
symbol of arbitration between two differing opinions than war. If Mr.
Disraeli had gone out and met a distinguished Zulu on the field of
English battle, and fought their national troubles out, as Sullivan and
Ryan did, what a saving of life and money! How many lives could have
been saved if Napoleon and Wellington, or Moltke and McMahon had
emulated the spirit of the Sullivan-Ryan prize fight! I saw no
reasonable cause why the law should interfere between two men who
desired to pound one another in public; I stood alone almost among my
brethren in this conclusion.

The persecution of the Jews in Russia, which came to us at this time
with all its details of cruelty and horror, was the beginning of an
important chapter in American history. Dr. Adler, in London, had
appealed for a million pounds to transport the Jews who were driven out
of Russia to the United States. It seemed more important that
civilisation should unite in an effort to secure protection for them in
their own homes, than compel them to obey the will of Russia. This was
no Christian remedy. We might as well abuse the Jews in America, and
then take up a collection to send them to England or Australia. The Jews
were entitled to their own rights of property and personal liberty and
religion, whether they lived in New York, or Brooklyn, or London, or
Paris, or Warsaw, or Moscow, or St. Petersburg. And yet we were
constantly hearing of the friendly feeling between Russia and the United
States.

In after years I was privileged personally to address the Czar and his
family, in a private audience, and questions of the Russian problem were
discussed; but the Jews flocked to America, and we welcomed them, and
they learned to be Americans very rapidly. Their immigration to this
country was a matter of religious conscience, in which Russia had no
interest.

A man's religious convictions are most important. I remember in October,
1882, what criticism and abuse there was of my friend Henry Ward
Beecher, when he decided to resign from the religious associations of
which he was a member. I was asked by members of the press to give my
opinion, but I was out when they called. Mr. Beecher was right. He was a
man of courage and of heart. I shall never forget the encouragement and
goodwill he extended to me, when I first came to Brooklyn in 1869 and
took charge of a broken-down church. Mr. Beecher did just as I would
have done under the same circumstances. I could not nor would stay in
the denomination to which I belonged any longer than it would take me to
write my resignation, if I disbelieved its doctrines. Mr. Beecher's
theology was very different from mine, but he did not differ from me in
the Christian life, any more than I differed from him. He never
interfered with me, nor I with him. Every little while some of the
ministers of America were attacked by a sort of Beecher-phobia, and they
foamed at the mouth over something that the pastor of Plymouth Church
said. People who have small congregations are apt to dislike a preacher
who has a full church. For thirteen years, or more, Beecher's church and
mine never collided. He had more people than he knew what to do with,
and so had I. I belonged to the company of the orthodox, but if I
thought that orthodoxy demanded that I must go and break other people's
heads I would not remain orthodox five minutes. Brooklyn was called the
city of churches, but it could also be called the city of short
pastorates. Many of the churches, during fifteen years of my pastorate,
had two, three, and four pastors. Dr. Scudder came and went; so did Dr.
Patten, Dr. Frazer, Dr. Buckley, Dr. Mitchell, Dr. Reid, Dr. Steele, Dr.
Gallagher, and a score of others. The Methodist Church was once famous
for keeping a minister only three or four years, but it is no longer
peculiar in this respect. Mr. Beecher had been pastor for thirty-six
years in Brooklyn when, in the summer of 1883, he celebrated the
anniversary of his seventieth birthday.

Every now and then, for many years, there was an investigation of some
sort in Brooklyn. Our bridge was a favourite target of investigation.
"Where has the money for this great enterprise been expended?" was the
common question. I defended the trustees, because people did not realise
the emergencies that arose as the work progressed and entailed greater
expenditures. Originally, when projected, it was to cost $7,000,000, but
there was to 

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