000.2. Introduction
Introduction By Clarence E. Macartney When I was a senior at the University of Wisconsin, I heard Talmage lecture at the Monona Lake Chautauqua. How clearly I can see him now after the lapse of all these years! He stood well back from the edge of the platform, above the medium height, well-proportioned, a large powerful frame, frock coat with black string tie tucked under a lie-down collar, his hair gray and his face broad, human, and kindly. He commenced speaking with his eyes closed. The voice, although not melodious like Bryan’s, was powerful, arresting, and stirring. He began with a description of a man riding in a buckboard over the Illinois prairies in the springtime when the flowers were blooming. It was a vivid picture of the flowers of the field sweeping the bellies of the horses as the buckboard was driven across the plains. This went on for a minute or two. Then, opening his eyes, he leaped forward to the front of the platform, and with a mighty voice pronounced a sentence which I have not forgotten. There was something about the man that at once appealed to you. He had the air of friendliness, and also of complete command of the situation, as if there were no doubt at all that he would carry his audience with him, which, of course, he did. Many of those who formed their conceptions of Dr. Talmage from the unfriendly caricatures and criticisms in the newspapers had conceived an intense dislike for him; but that dislike generally disappeared when they saw the man and heard him speak. It was so with the renowned actor Joseph Jefferson. Jefferson and Talmage became intimate one winter during a stay in Florida. Jefferson recalled the famous sermon of Talmage against the theater, preached in the tabernacle at Brooklyn, and how he and other actors had gone to hear the sermon. “When I entered that church to hear your sermon, Doctor,” said Jefferson, “I hated you. When I left the church I loved you.”
Talmage was a unique and remarkable man. As his son expressed it in his memorial sermon for his father, no matter what it was that he did, he was sure to do it differently from anyone else. Talmage himself said: “Each life is different from every other life. God never repeats himself and he never intended two men to be alike.” Certainly there was never another Talmage.
T. DeWitt Talmage was born January 7, 1832, at Middlebrook, New Jersey, where his father kept a tollgate. He was the youngest of eleven children. Four of the sons became honored ministers of the gospel, one of them, John Van Nest, a distinguished missionary in China. His father and mother, like the parents of John the Baptist, were “both righteous before God” and came of a godly line. His grandparents on the Talmage side had been converted at one of Finney’s evangelistic meetings. Talmage said of his mother that when she led the family prayers she would often pray, “O Lord God, I ask not for my children wealth or honor; but I do ask that they all may be subjects of thy converting grace.” When Talmage was still a very young child his parents removed to a farm near Somerville, New Jersey. This farm, with the farmhouse, and the barn and the brook, and the watering trough, and the horses and the carriages, frequently appears in Talmage’s sermons. At nineteen years of age Talmage entered the University of the City of New York, where he studied law. He then went to the New Brunswick Seminary of the Dutch Reformed Church. At the seminary he evinced the same extraordinary, original, and somewhat sensational style of expression in preaching as characterized him in after life. One of his instructors said to him, after he had preached his first class sermon, “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.”
I once talked with a classmate of Dr. Talmage and asked him about his early impressions of the great preacher when he was a student in the seminary. His reply was, “Exactly the same in personality and style as he was in the days of his fame. His first sermon,” he said, “was on the text, Proverbs 18:24, ‘There is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.’ In the sermon he described the scene in heaven when Christ set out on the mission of redemption. The astonished angels said to him, ‘Shall ten thousand of us weave our wings together to make a fit chariot for thee to ride upon in thy descent to that fallen world?’ This offer Christ rejected with a wave of his hand. The angels then exclaimed, ‘Shall we bring together all the clouds of heaven and make a fit throne for thee to sit upon?’ But this offer, too, Christ refused, saying, ‘No, I cannot go in such a way.’ And then he commanded them, ‘Take off these royal robes,’ and the angels reluctantly obeyed. And then he started away from them on his descent to earth without any of his royal insignia, alone, without a single attendant, and the angelic hosts, amazed, crowded out on heaven’s vast balcony to see him descend, and they gazed after him, they talked so loud together about his wonderful condescension and love for men that the shepherds of Bethlehem heard them.” Anyone who is familiar with the sermons of Talmage will at once recognize him in this first sermon. On July 26, 1856, Talmage was ordained and installed as pastor of the Dutch Reformed Church at Belleville, New Jersey, near Newark. He gave an amusing account of how on the first Sabbath he had his sermon at his side as he sat on one of the great horsehair sofas which were the pulpit style in that day. To his consternation the sermon slipped down through an opening in the back of the sofa, and while the congregation were singing the hymn before the sermon he had to get down on his hands and knees and recover the manuscript. On another occasion, when gas was being introduced for the first time into the church, he planned to read an introductory part of his sermon and then launch out upon the great sea of extemporaneousness. But as he drew near the end of the written part, he became terrified and prayed that the lights would fail. His prayer was answered and the gas lamps went out, leaving the room in darkness. He then said to the congregation, “It is impossible to proceed.” But when he got home he felt it to be humiliating that a man with a message from the Lord God Almighty should be dependent upon paper mills and gas meters. This made him resolve to strike out on a new line of preaching without notes. As an extemporary preacher he had few peers. In 1859, Talmage was called to a Dutch Reformed Church in Syracuse, New York. There he attracted some little attention, and at Hudson, New York, delivered his first lecture, for a fee of $50. In 1862 he became the pastor of the Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia. In this same year Phillips Brooks began his notable ministry in Holy Trinity Church, Philadelphia. Nothing could have been more striking and, in a way, sensational to the Philadelphians than the pulpit style of Talmage. His preaching at once attracted great throngs. The period of the Civil War was a great age for the preacher. The times were stirring, the atmosphere was charged with electricity. A great period like that is stimulating to the intellect and imagination of the preacher. It is not strange, then, that when one calls the roll of America’s famous preachers, he discovers that so many of them, Theodore Parker, Henry Ward Beecher, Matthew Simpson, Benjamin Morgan Palmer, Phillips Brooks, and DeWitt Talmage, belong to that age.
During this Philadelphia pastorate, the wife of Talmage was drowned when they were boating on the Schuylkill River. By 1869 the fame of Talmage had gone abroad. In that year he was called to churches in Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco, and the Central Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn. He accepted the call to the depleted and faction-torn church in Brooklyn, and was installed as pastor by the Presbytery of Brooklyn, March 22, 1869. In a short time the congregations were so large that the church was not able to accommodate them. A new church, which was called the Tabernacle, was hastily built. This was destroyed by fire December 22, 1872, the first of three tabernacles to suffer such a fate. Talmage, like Beecher, held that the conventional church architecture and the pulpit arrangement were a hindrance to the preacher. Like Beecher, he had no pulpit, but a long platform. He made full use of his long platform and roamed to and fro over it, preaching with every inch of his body. The people were all seated near him, in front, around him, and above him. There is no doubt that for a direct appeal to an audience this is the best arrangement. The second Tabernacle was destroyed by fire in 1889, and the third in 1894. At this time Talmage had the largest congregation of any preacher in the world. His unconventional manner and his sometimes extravagant statements made him the object of much ridicule and hostile attack. In 1879 he was accused before the Brooklyn Presbytery of falsehood and deceit, and of using improper methods of preaching which tended to bring religion into contempt. On all these charges he was aquitted. Talmage attributed much of his world-fame to the attacks that other preachers, and later, the newspapers, made upon him.
Talmage created an early sensation in Brooklyn by his explorations into the night life of New York, accompanied by elders of his church and police officers. This gave him material for some of his most graphic descriptions. They remind one of another great pictorial preacher, Thomas Guthrie, of Edinburgh, and his moving descriptions of the submerged populace of Edinburgh.
Like most great preachers, he preached to the heart. He made it the aim in his preaching always to help somebody. He said: “A preacher should start out with the idea of helping somebody. Everybody wants help except a fool.”
One of the secrets of his success, undoubtedly, lay in the fact that he had a warm heart. There was a deep vein of sentiment in him. He would never allow the spot on the barn door at East Hampton, Long Island, where his deceased son, DeWitt, had carved his initials to be painted over or changed. He had unshaken faith in the Bible. “Science and revelation,” he said, “are the bass and soprano of the same tune.” Colonel Ingersoll, with his attacks on the Bible, Talmage likened to a grasshopper on a railway line when the express comes thundering along. The preacher kept himself in physical condition by walking every day of his life; every day except Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, regardless of the weather, he covered five miles. His physical energy was inexhaustible. He said Gladstone was the only man he ever met who walked fast enough for him.
After the destruction of his third Tabernacle, Dr. Talmage became the Associate Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Washington. For his installation sermon he preached one of his most picturesque discourses, “All Heaven Is Looking On,” from Hebrews 12:1, “Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.”
After four years as pastor in Washington, he resigned his charge in 1899 and until his death in 1902 gave himself to lecturing, preaching, and editorial work. He was taken ill on a trip to Mexico and returned to his home in Washington, where he died April 12, 1902.
Talmage was a great traveler. He found it easy to meet distinguished men, and even the crowned heads of Europe. Through the Christian Herald, he loaded a ship with food supplies for the victims of a famine in Russia. A remarkable thing about the career of Talmage is that from the time he began to draw great crowds in Philadelphia until his death in 1902, almost forty years, his popularity never waned. One of the secrets of his appeal undoubtedly was his invincible optimism. This radiated not only in his written and spoken sermons, but in his personal appearance, his expressive and mobile and ever smiling mouth. When he commenced his ministry he was not strong. Now and then he would overhear people say, “Ah, he is not long for this world.” This made him resolve that never in meeting other people or in conversation with them would he say anything that was depressing. He was a great optimist. He believed that there was as great a number of people out of the Church as in it who followed the teachings of Christianity. It was in keeping with this invincible optimism that the last sermon that he wrote was a sermon on thanksgiving, Psalms 33:2 : “Sing unto him with the psaltery.”
Although not a doctrinal preacher at all, Talmage was true to the great evangelical doctrines of Christianity, and all his sermons, while they do not set forth or analyze those doctrines, are radiant with their light. He was brought to a decision for Christ by an evangelist, Truman Osborne, who was visiting the Talmage home. Osborne asked Talmage’s father if all the children were Christians. His father told him that all were Christians but DeWitt. Then Osborne, looking into the fireplace, told the story of the Lost Sheep. It was this that brought Talmage into the fold.
One of the most far-reaching features of Talmage’s ministry was his printed sermons. Looking one day at a pile of sermons that he had written and preached, he said to his wife, “God must have some other use for these sermons, and intend them for others than just those who heard me preach them.” This conviction led him to make the arrangements for the weekly publication of his sermons. A contributory cause also was the visit to Talmage of a young man, who afterward became eminent as a lawyer. He told Talmage that he was studying law in a distant city and that he must give up his studies unless he could be permitted to take down the sermons through his skill as a stenographer and arrange for their sale. At the time Talmage declined. But after some months had passed he began to reflect that it would be too bad if this brilliant young man was not able to get a legal education. He then allowed the young man to take down the sermons. Within three weeks from all over the United States requests began to come in for the sermons. They were published weekly by as many as three thousand, five hundred newspapers, and by this means Talmage spoke to a greater multitude than had any preacher of Christianity up to that time. Thousands of persons living today will remember the weekly sermons of Dr. Talmage as they appeared in the newspapers on Monday morning and in the Christian Herald, the weekly magazine of which he became the editor. His style was pictorial and, like most of the great preachers, his homiletic method was topical rather than textual or expository. Illustrations came naturally to him. He said: “It has always been the question with me how to get rid of illustrations. I naturally think in metaphor.” Dr. David Gregg, a contemporary in Brooklyn, thus describes his style: “He thinks in pictures and he who thinks in pictures thinks vividly. He paints with a large brush, with colors that burn and glow, and nations gather round his pictures and feel an uplift and an holy thrill.” Perhaps his sermon, “All Heaven Looking On” is as good an example as might be quoted of his vivid imaginative style. The thread of the atonement ran all through his preaching. Christ to him was central and the cross was central and cardinal. The future life and heaven were very real to him. Bidding good-by to an old friend who was on his deathbed, Talmage said, as if the man were going to leave for another city, “Give my love to my boy” (referring to his son DeWitt who had died years before). His emphasis on the grand particularities of the Christian faith was one of the secrets of his popularity with the masses of the people. Senator Beveridge, who heard him frequently, said: “The American people are tired of hearing learned and entertaining lectures delivered under the guise of sermons. They hunger and thirst for the preaching of the faith, unweakened by doubts, criticisms, or explanations, uncompromisingly delivered as Dr. Talmage gave it.” The desire to help and to save sounded in all his sermons. One of his famous themes on the text, “The people that do know their God shall be strong, and do exploits,” Daniel 11:32, was “The Three Greatest Things to Do—Save a Man, Save a Woman, Save a Child.” The contagious optimism and hopefulness of Dr. Talmage comes out in all his sermons. His last sermon, on “David’s Harp,” strikes this characteristic note of hope: “The greatest victories are yet to be gained; the grandest churches are yet to be built; the mightiest anthems are yet to be hoisted; the most beautiful Madonnas are yet to be painted; the most triumphant processions are yet to march. Oh, what a world this will be, when it rotates in its orbit a redeemed planet, girdled with spontaneous harvests, and enriched by orchards whose fruits are speckless and redundant; and the last pain will have vanished, and the last tear wept, and the last groan uttered, and there shall be nothing to hurt or destroy in all God’s holy mountain!”
Most of the texts of Talmage’s sermons were taken from the Old Testament. Three hundred and five of his texts are Old Testament texts and one hundred and eighty-five New Testament texts. Very often the sermons deal with some Old Testament scene or history, and this gives the preacher an opportunity to introduce his sermon with a piece of description or historical narrative. A good example of this is his well-known sermon, “The King’s Wagons,” on the text from Genesis 45:27, “And when he saw the wagons.” The sermon commences with a description of the capital of the Pharaohs: “There were temples aflame with red sandstone, entered by gateways that were guarded by pillars bewildering with hieroglyphics, and wound with brazen serpents, and adorned with winged creatures, their eyes and beaks and pinions glittering with precious stones. There were marble columns blooming into white flower buds. There were stone pillars, the tops bursting into the shape of the lotus when in full bloom along the avenues lined with sphinx and fane and obelisk. There were princes who came in gorgeously upholstered palanquins, carried by servants in scarlet, or else drawn in vehicles with snow-white horses, golden-bitted, six abreast, dashing at full run. There were fountains from stone-wreathed vases climbing the ladder of the sun.”
Thus the great word painter made the palace of Pharaoh, with all its splendor, live before his hearers. “Overdone! Too ornate!” the critic would say. But the fact is that the people enjoyed it. Talmage knew that there is a poet hidden away in the common man, and to that man he made his appeal. In these sermons on Old Testament themes, Talmage always is able to draw simple, straightforward, and helpful lessons. For instance, in this sermon on “when he saw the wagons,” his two chief points are: First, that the king’s wagons bring us corn and meat and many changes of garment. By this he means God’s provisions for our needs in this world. Secondly, the king’s wagons bring us good news. Here he strikes the high note of immortality and union with Christ and with our departed friends. Our faith brings us word that our Joseph, Jesus, is yet alive, and that he sends messages of pardon, of peace, of life, from heaven—corn for our hunger, raiment for our nakedness. “Glorious religion!” A religion made not out of death’s-heads and cross-bones and an undertaker’s screw driver, but one abounding with life and sympathy and gladness! “The king’s wagons will take us to see our lost friends.” Here the great preacher has a beautiful description of a stormy Sabbath at the New Jersey farmhouse where he was brought up. On those Sabbaths the children were left at home. He tells how at twelve o’clock they would go to the window to see if their father and mother were coming, and then at half past twelve, and then at one o’clock. “After a while Mary or Daniel or DeWitt would shout, ‘The wagon’s coming.’ And then we would see it winding out of the woods and over the brook, and through the lane and up in front of the old farmhouse, and then we would rush out, leaving the doors wide open, with many things to tell them, asking them many questions.” The clearness of Talmage’s homiletic style is brought out in his sermon, “The Laughter of the Bible.” The sermon has five divisions: First, Sarah’s laugh, or the laugh of skepticism. Secondly, David’s laugh, or that of spiritual exultation: “Then was our mouth filled with laughter.” Thirdly, the fool’s laugh, or that of sinful merriment, or “the crackling of thorns under a pot.” Fourthly, God’s laugh, or that of infinite condemnation: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh.” And fifthly, heaven’s laugh, or the laugh of eternal triumph: “Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.”
Another interesting example of Talmage’s use of Old Testament incidents is his sermon on the queen of Sheba, “Behold, the half was not told,” 1 Kings 10:7. The sermon opened with a description of Solomon’s palace. Here, as we have seen, Talmage was at his best when describing the glory and splendor of some Oriental capitol or palace. At the end of this description he says, “Why, my friends, in that place they trimmed their candles with snuffers of gold, and they cut their fruits with knives of gold, and they washed their faces in basins of gold, and they scooped out the ashes with shovels of gold, and they stirred the altar fires with tongs of gold. Gold reflected in the water! Gold flashing from the apparel! Gold blazing in the crown! Gold! Gold! Gold!” The lessons that he draws from the visit of the queen of Sheba, are, first, that it is a beautiful thing when social position and wealth surrender themselves to God; secondly, earnestness in the search of truth, how the queen of Sheba crossed mountains and deserts to get to Jerusalem; and, thirdly, that religion is a surprise to anyone that gets it. The more we have of it, the more surprised we are, and the greatest surprise of all will be heaven. Talmage always delighted to close his sermons in heaven. There is a true homiletic in that, for most of the great hymns close there, and there the Christian enters upon the final chapter of his life. On occasions, Talmage took one of the great doctrines and made a serious effort to expound it. An example of this is his sermon on “Vicarious Suffering”: “Without shedding of blood is no remission,” Hebrews 9:22. The sermon opens with an account of how John G. Whittier once asked Talmage after he had given out the hymn, “There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood,” at morning devotions at a hotel in the White Mountains, “Do you really believe there is a literal application of the blood of Christ to the soul?” Talmage answered, “No,” and in the sermon’s introduction he properly explains how the blood stands for the life. It was Christ’s life which was given for our salvation.
Then follow examples of vicarious suffering: the father toiling at his business to maintain the home; a mother watching for the sixth night with her sick child; another mother giving her life in prayer and thought and loving deeds for a prodigal son; then the soldiers of the Civil War giving life for the nation; then the doctors who gave their lives caring for the sick during a plague in the South; then William H. Seward, in 1846, sacrificing his popularity to defend an idiotic Negro who had slain a whole family.
Thus he traces through all life the scarlet thread of vicarious substitution until he comes to the substitution of Christ on the cross. “Christ gathered up all the sins of those to be redeemed under his one arm and all their sorrows under his other arm and said: ‘I will atone for these under my right arm. Strike me with all thy glittering shafts, O eternal Justice! Roll over me with all thy scourges, ye ocean of sorrow!’ And the thunderbolt struck him from above, and the seas of trouble rolled up from beneath, hurricane after hurricane, and cyclone after cyclone, and then and there, in the presence of earth and heaven and hell, yea, all worlds witnessing, the price, the bitter price, the transcendent price, the awful price, the glorious price, the infinite price, the eternal price, was paid that sets us free.” The sermon comes to a conclusion with an account of the preacher’s visit to the battlefield of Waterloo, and Marshal Ney addressing his troops as he led them on the last charge. “But our great Waterloo was in Palestine. There came a day when all hell rode up, led by Apollyon, and the Captain of our salvation confronted them alone, the Rider on the White Horse of the Apocalypse going out against the Black Horse Cavalry of Death and the Battalions of the demoniacs and myrmidons of darkness. From twelve o’clock noon to three o’clock in the afternoon, the greatest battle of the universe went on. Eternal destinies were being decided. All the arrows of hell pierced our Chieftain, and the battle-axes struck him, until brow and cheek and shoulder and hand and foot were incarnadined with oozing life; but he fought on until he gave a final stroke with a sword from Jehovah’s buckler, and the Commander in Chief of hell and all his forces fell back in everlasting ruin, and the victory is ours! And on the mound that celebrates the triumph we plant this day two figures, not in bronze or ivory, or sculptured marble, but two figures of living light, the Lion of Judah’s tribe and the Lamb that was slain.”
Talmage’s striking ability to make a Biblical scene real to his congregation is found in the introduction to his sermon, “The Wings of the Almighty”: “The Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust,” Ruth 2:12.
Scene: An Oriental harvest field, grain standing, grain in swath, grain in sheaf; at the side of the field a white tent in which to take the nooning; jars of vinegar or sour wine to quench the thirst of the hot working people; the swarthy men striking their sickles into the rustling barley, others twisting the bands for the sheaves, putting one end of the band under the arm, and with the free arm and foot collecting the sheaf; sunburned women picking up the stray straws and bringing them to the binders; Boaz, a fine-looking Oriental, gray-bearded and bright-faced, the owner of the field, looking on and estimating the value of the grain, and calculating in so many ephahs to the acre. Happy is the preacher who can make a scene as real as that to his congregation!
One of Talmage’s most characteristic sermons was the first sermon he preached as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Washington, D. C. The subject of this sermon was “All Heaven Is Looking On,” from the text Hebrews 12:1, “Seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses.” The theme and the text gave full scope for the play of Talmage’s imagination. He first describes a Roman amphitheater, with the cheering thousands, and the gladiators fighting with the beasts. The Christian fights in such an arena, surrounded by a throng of witnesses. The tigers and lions of sin come out of their dens and across the sand to attack him. One man’s lion is the passion for strong drink. Every man and every woman has his or her lion or tiger. But they do not fight alone. A cloud of witnesses look down upon them.
He describes first the gallery of the angels, naming nearly all the great angels of the Bible, from the angel that swung his sword at the gate of Eden to the angel of the incarnation, and all the seraphim and cherubim of heaven. All these angels are the friends of man in his struggle with the beast.
Then comes the gallery of the prophets and the apostles—Hosea, David, Jeremiah, Daniel, Isaiah, Peter, Paul, Moses, and Noah, all cheering the Christian on. Daniel cries out, “Thy God will deliver thee from the mouth of the lions.” David, “He will not suffer thy foot to be moved.” Isaiah, “Fear not: for I am with thee.” Paul, “Victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Then comes the gallery of the martyrs: Latimer, and the Theban Legion, and Felicitas, who encouraged her children while they died for the faith. Then comes the gallery of the great Christians: Martin Luther, Lyman Beecher, John Calvin, George Whitefield, and Charles Wesley, and David Brainerd, and Adoniram Judson, Isaac Watts, who sings from his gallery to the Christian struggling in the arena:
“Must I be carried to the skies On flowery beds of ease, While others fought to win the prize, And sailed through bloody seas?”
Then comes the gallery of our departed friends: father, mother, children, all exhorting us to be “faithful unto death.”
Talmage spoke to the average man and comforted and encouraged the average man. One of his rules for the pulpit was to remember that men need help and to try to help them. The best example of the sermon that helps is his famous, and perhaps favorite, sermon on the text 1 Samuel 30:24 : “As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff.” This was the last sermon preached by Dr. Talmage in an American church. The sermon opens with a graphic description of the drunken carousal of the Amalekites who had made a raid on Ziklag and had carried away the women and children, among them the wives of David. Then comes the account of David’s division of the spoil; how, in spite of the men who had gone down to the battle, those who had guarded the camp received an equal portion of the spoil. The preacher relates how the earl of Kintore once said to him, “When you get back to America I want you to preach a sermon on the discharge of ordinary duty in ordinary places.” It was this request which suggested to Talmage this famous and helpful sermon.
He illustrates his sermon by describing the deference paid to a distinguished merchant at a fashionable watering place. When the confidential clerk gets his week off, no one notices him, whether he comes or goes, yet without such a clerk there could be no successful merchant. Men know the names of the presidents of the great railroads, but not the names of the faithful engineers, switchmen, flagmen, brakemen. When there has been an escape from disaster at sea, the passengers thank the captain; but the captain could have done nothing without the crew, without the engineer. Then comes a moving description of how a country family deny themselves to send a promising son to college. The hired help is discharged, sugar and butter are banished from the table. Then comes Commencement Day. The brother and son receives rounds of applause as he delivers the oration of the valedictorian; but hidden away in the back of the gallery are his old-fashioned father and mother and his sisters in their plain hats and faded shawls. They made his success possible.
Then comes a passage of encouragement for the aged. The Lord will not turn off his old soldiers any more than the French did the soldiers who fought under Napoleon. The old ministers who preached on $400 a year will have their reward in heaven. The dominant note of Dr. Talmage’s preaching was that of hope and good cheer. The conclusion of the sermon strikes that note in an unforgettable way: “Cheer up, men and women of unappreciated services, you will get your reward, if not here, hereafter. When Charles Wesley comes up to Judgment and the thousands of souls which were wafted into glory through his songs shall be enumerated, he will take his throne. Then John Wesley will come up to Judgment, and after his name has been mentioned in connection with the salvation of the millions of souls brought to God through the Methodism which he founded, he will take his throne. But between the two thrones of Charles Wesley and John Wesley there will be a throne higher than either on which shall sit Susannah Wesley, who with maternal consecration, in Epworth Rectory, Lincolnshire, England, started these two souls on their triumphant mission of sermon and song through all ages. Oh, what a day that will be for many who rocked Christian cradles with weary feet, and out of a small income made the children comfortable for the winter! What a day that will be for those to whom the world gave the cold shoulder and called them nobodies and begrudged them the last recognition, and who, weary and worn and sick, fainted by the Brook Besor! Oh, that will be a mighty day, when the Son of David shall distribute the crowns, the thrones, the scepters, the dominions! Then you and I will appreciate as never before the height, the breadth, the columned, the domed magnificence of my text, ‘As his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff’! Hallelujah! Amen!” This chapter is reprinted from: Clarence E. Macartney, Six Kings of the American Pulpit, The Westminster Press, 1942. (Public domain)