T. De Witt Talmage Part 2

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 mult.i.tude 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: DR. TALMAGE IN HIS FIRST CHURCH, BELLEVILLE, NEW JERSEY.]

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 t.i.tle 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 circ.u.mambient 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 mult.i.tudes of friends, but I have found in my own experience that G.o.d 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 a.s.sault 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 Pa.s.saic 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 G.o.d. 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 G.o.d, 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 circ.u.mstances 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, pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce would fail to tell of the n.o.ble 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 antic.i.p.ation of the world to come.

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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 grat.i.tude, 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 a.s.sembled to hear the pastor of that church preach, and the disappointment I was about to create added to my embarra.s.sment.

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 incert.i.tude, 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. G.o.d 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 circ.u.mstances 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 a.r.s.enals, 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 pa.s.sing 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 dest.i.tute 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.