T. De Witt Talmage as I Knew Him. T. De Witt Talmage
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.
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.
T. DeWitt Talmage in his First Church, Belleville, New Jersey
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