T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D. D.,

Thomas De Witt Talmage was born in 1832, in Bound Brook, Somerset County, N. J. His father was a farmer of much vigor and consistency of character; his mother a woman of noted energy, hopefulness and equanimity. Both parents were in marked respects characteristic. Differences of disposition and methods blended in them into a harmonious, consecrated, benignant and cheery life. The father won all the confidence and the best of the honors a hard-sensed truly American community had to yield. The mother was that counseling and quietly providen. force which made her a helpmeet indeed and her home the center and sanctuary of the sweetest influences that have fallen on the path of a large number of children, of whom four sons are all ministers of the Word. From a period ante-dating the Revolution, the ancestors of our subject were members of the Reformed Dutch Church, in which Dr Talmage's father was the leading lay office bearer through a life extended beyond fourscore years. The youngest of the children, it seemed doubtful at first whether DeWitt would follow his brothers into the ministry. His earliest preference was the law, the studies of which he pursued for a year after his

graduation with honors from the University of the City of New York. The faculties which would have made him the greatest jury advocate of the age were, however, preserved for and directed toward the pulpit by an unrest which took the very sound of a cry within him for months, "Woe is me if I preach not the gospel." When he submitted to it the always ardent but never urged hopes of his honored parents were realized. He entered the ministry from the New Brunswick Seminary of Theology. As his destiny and powers came to manifestation in Brooklyn, his pastoral life prior to that was but a preparation for it. It can, therefore, be indicated as an incidental stage in his career rather than treated at length as a principal part of it. His first settlement was at Belleville, on the beautiful Passaic, in New Jersey. For three years there he underwent an excellent practical education in the conventional ministry. Ilis congregation was about the most cultivated and rural regions of the sterling little state. was known to be about the oldest society of Protestantism in New Jersey. Its records, as preserved, run back over 200 years, but it is known to have had a strong life the better part of a century more. Its structure is regarded as one of the finest of any country congregation in the United States. No wonder: it stands within rifleshot of the quarry from which Old Trinity in New York was hewn. The value (and the limits) of stereotyped preaching and what he did not know came as an instructive and disillusionizing force to the theological

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tyro at Belleville. There also came and remained strong friendships, inspiring revivals, and sacred counsels.

By natural promotion three years at Syracuse succeeded three at Belleville. That cultivated, critical city furnished Mr. Talmage the value of an audience in which professional men were predominant in influence. His preaching there grew tonic and free. As Mr. Pitt advised a young friend, he "risked himself." The church grew from few to many-from a state of coma to athletic life. The preacher learned to go to school to humanity and his own heart. The lessons they taught him agreed with what was boldest and most compelling in the spirit of the revealed Word. Those whose claims were sacred to him found the saline climate of Syracuse a cause of unhealth. Otherwise it is likely that that most delightful region in the United States-Central New York-for men of letters who equally love nature and culture, would have been the home of Mr. Talmage for life.

The next seven years of Mr. Talmage's life were spent in Philadelphia. There his powers got "set." He learned what it was he could best do. He had the courage of his consciousness and he did it. Previously he might have felt it incumbent on him to give to pulpit traditions the homage of compliance-though at Syracuse "the more excellent way," any man's own way, so that he have the divining gift of genius and the nature a-tune to all high sympathies and purposes-had in glimpses come to him. He realized that it was his duty and mis

sion in the world to make it hear the gospel. The church was not to him in numbers a select few, in organization a monopoly. It was meant to be the conqueror and transformer of the world. For seven years he wrought with much success on this theory, all the time realizing that his plans could come to fullness only under conditions that enabled him to build from the bottom up an organization which could get nearer to the masses and which would have no precedents to be afraid of as ghosts in its path. Hence he ceased from being the leading preacher in Philadelphia to become in Brooklyn the leading preacher in the world.

His work for nine years here, know all our readers. It began in a cramped brick rectangle, capable of holding 1,200, and he came to it on "the call" of nineteen. In less than two years that was exchanged for an iron structure, with raised seats, the interior curved like a horse-shoe, the pulpit a platform bridging the ends. That held 3,000 persons. It lasted just long enough to revolutionize church architecture in cities into harmony with common sense. Smaller duplicates of it started in every quarter, three in Brooklyn, two in New York, one in Montreal, one in Louisville, any number in Chicago, two in San Francisco, like numbers abroad. Then it burnt up, that from its ashes the present stately and most sensible structure might rise. Gothic, of brick and stone, cathedral-like above, amphitheatre-like below, it holds 5,000 as easily as one person, and all can hear and see equally well. In a large sense the people built these edifices.