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.
[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.
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.
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.