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