T. De Witt Talmage as I Knew Him. T. De Witt Talmage
THE THIRD MILESTONE
ToC
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