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T. De Witt Talmage by T. De Witt Talmage

T >> T. De Witt Talmage >> T. De Witt Talmage




In vain I seek for rest
In all created good;
It leaves me still unblest
And makes me cry for God.
And safe at rest I cannot be
Until my heart finds rest in Thee.

There never was anyone who could equal Jenny Lind in the warble. Some
said it was like a lark, but she surpassed the lark. Oh, what a warble!
I hear it yet. All who heard it thirty-five years ago are hearing it
yet.

I should probably have been a lawyer, except for the prayers of my
mother and father that I should preach the Gospel. Later, I entered the
New Brunswick Theological Seminary. Why I ever thought of any other work
in the world than that which I have done, is another mystery of my
youth. Everything in my heredity and in my heart indicated my career as
a preacher. And yet, in the days of my infancy I was carried by
Christian parents to the house of God, and consecrated in baptism to the
Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; but that did not save me. In
after time I was taught to kneel at the Christian family altar with
father and mother and brothers and sisters. In after time I read
Doddridge's "Rise and Progress," and Baxter's "Call to the Unconverted,"
and all the religious books around my father's household; but that did
not save me. But one day the voice of Christ came into my heart saying,
"Repent, repent; believe, 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 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.

[A] _While at Belleville Dr. Talmage married Miss Mary
Avery, of Brooklyn, N.Y., by whom he had two children--a
son, Thomas De Witt, and a daughter, Jessie. Mrs. Talmage
was accidentally drowned in the Schuylkill River while Dr.
Talmage was pastor of the Second Reformed Church of
Philadelphia._

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.

[Illustration: 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
title 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
circumambient 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 multitudes of
friends, but I have found in my own experience that God 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 assault 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 circumstances, 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 Passaic 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 circumstances. You cannot console
others unless you preserve your own equipoise."

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