T. De Witt Talmage as I Knew Him. T. De Witt Talmage
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