T. De Witt Talmage as I Knew Him

by T. De Witt Talmage; Eleanor McCutcheon Collier Talmage

In the autumn of 1900, an anniversary of East Hampton, N.Y., was held, and the Doctor entered energetically and happily into the celebration, preaching in the little village church which had echoed to his voice in the early days of his ministry. It was a far call backward over nearly five decades of his teeming life. And he, whose magic style, whether of word or pen, had enchanted millions over the broad world—how well he remembered the fears and misgivings that had accompanied those first efforts, with the warning of his late professors ringing in his ears: "You must change your style, otherwise no pulpit will ever be open to you."

Now he could look back over more than a quarter of a century during which his sermons had been published weekly; through syndicates they had been given to the world in 3,600 different papers, and reached, it was estimated, 30,000,000 people in the United States and other countries. They were translated into most European and even into Asiatic languages. His collected discourses were already printed in twenty volumes, while material remained for almost as many more. His style, too, in spite of his "original eccentricities," had attracted hundreds of thousands of readers to his books on miscellaneous subjects—all written with a moral purpose. Among a score of them I might mention: From Manger to Throne; The Pathway of Life; Crumbs Swept Up; Every-day Religion; The Marriage Ring; Woman: her Powers and Privileges.

Dr. Talmage edited several papers beginning with The Christian at Work; afterwards he took charge, successively, of the Advance, Frank Leslie's Sunday Magazine, and finally The Christian Herald, of which he continued to be chief editor till the end of his life. He spoke and wrote earnestly of the civilising and educational power of the press, and felt that in availing himself of it and thereby furnishing lessons of righteousness and good cheer to millions, he was multiplying beyond measure his short span of life and putting years into hours. He said: "My lecture tours seem but hand-shaking with the vast throngs whom I have been enabled to preach to through the press."

His editorials were often wrought out in the highest style of literary art. I am pleased to give the following estimate from an author who knew him well: "As an editorial writer, Dr. Talmage was versatile and prolific, and his weekly contributions on an immense variety of topics would fill many volumes. His writing was as entertaining and pungent as his preaching, and full of brilliant eccentricities—'Talmagisms,' as they were called. He coined new words and invented new phrases. If the topic was to his liking, the pen raced to keep time with the thought.... Still, with all this haste, nothing could exceed the scrupulous care he took with his finished manuscript. He once wired from Cincinnati to his publisher in New York instructions to change a comma in his current sermon to a semicolon. He had detected the error while reading proof on the train."

Dr. Talmage's personal mail was thought to be the largest of any man in the country, outside of some of the public officers. Thousands, men and women, appealed to him for advice in spiritual things, revealing to him intimate family affairs, laying their hearts bare before him as before a trusted physician of the soul. I have seen him moved to the depths of his nature by some of these white missives bearing news of conversion to faith in Christ wrought by his sermons; of families rent asunder united through his words of love and broadmindedness; of mothers whose broken hearts he had healed by leading back the prodigal son; of prisoners whose hope in life and trust in a loving Father had been awakened by a casual reading of some of his comforting paragraphs.

The life of Dr. Talmage was by no means the luxurious one of the man of wealth and ease it was sometimes represented to be. He could not endure that men should have this aspect of him. He was a plain man in his tastes and his habits; the impression that he was ambitious for wealth, I know, was a false one. I do not believe he ever knew the value of money. The possession of it gave him little gratification except for its use in helping to carry on the great work he had in hand; and, indeed, he never knew how little or how much he had. He never would own horses lest he should give people reason to accuse him of being arrogantly rich. We drove a great deal, but he always insisted on hiring his carriages. If he accepted remuneration for his brain and heart labour, Scripture tells us, "The labourer is worthy of his hire." He was foremost in helping in any time of public calamity, not only in our own country but more than once in foreign lands. And when volumes of his sermons were pirated over the country, and he was urged to take legal steps to stop the injustice, he said: "Let them alone; the sermons will go farther and do more good."

Dr. Talmage's opinions were sought eagerly, and upon all subjects of social, political, or international interest. He was a student of men, and kept ever in close touch with the progress of events. A voluminous and rapid reader, he was quick to grasp the aim and significance of what he read and apply it to his purpose. His library in Washington contained a large and valuable collection of classics, ancient and modern; and his East Hampton library was almost a duplicate of this. He never travelled very far without a trunkful of books. I remember, in the first year of our marriage, his interest in some books I had brought from my home that were new to him. Many of them he had not had time to read, so, in the evenings, I used to read them aloud to him. Tolstoi's works were his first choice; together we read a life of the great Russian, which the Doctor enjoyed immensely.

The Bible was ever held by Dr. Talmage in extreme reverence, which grew with his continual study and meditation of the sacred pages. He repudiated the "higher criticism" with a vehemence that caused him to be sharply assailed by modern critics—pronounced infidels or of infidel proclivities—who called him a "bibliolater." He asserted and reasserted his belief in its divine inspiration: "The Bible is right in its authenticity, right in its style, right in its doctrine, and right in its effects. There is less evidence that Shakespeare wrote 'Hamlet,' that Milton wrote 'Paradise Lost,' or that Tennyson wrote 'The Charge of the Light Brigade,' than that the Bible is God's Word, written under inspiration by evangelists and prophets. It has stood the bombardment of ages, but with the result of more and more proof of its being a book divinely written and protected." "Science and Revelation are the bass and soprano of the same tune," he said. He defied the attempts of the loud-mouthed orators to destroy belief in the Bible. "I compare such men as Ingersoll, in their attacks on the Bible, to a grasshopper upon a railway-line with the express coming thundering along."

His living portraits of Jesus, the Saviour of men, his studies of that divine life, of the words, the actions of the Son of God, especially of His sufferings and death, merging into the glory of His resurrection and ascension, are all well known to those who were of his wide audience. The sweetness, gentleness, and sympathy of the Saviour were favourite themes with him. In a sermon on tears, he says: "Jesus had enough trials to make him sympathetic with all sorrowful souls. The shortest verse in the Bible tells the story: 'Jesus wept.' The scar on the back of either hand, the scar in the arch of either foot, the row of scars along the line of the hair, will keep all Heaven thinking. Oh, that Great Weeper is the One to silence all earthly trouble, to wipe all the stains of earthly grief. Gentle! Why, His step is softer than the step of the dew. It will not be a tyrant bidding you hush your crying. It will be a Father who will take you on His left arm, His face beaming into yours, while with the soft tips of the fingers of the right hand He shall wipe away all tears from your eyes." And here is a word of appeal to those gone astray: "The great heart of Christ aches to have you come in; and Jesus this moment looks into your eyes and says: 'Other sheep I have that are not of this fold.'"

Dr. Talmage was at times acutely sensitive to the thrusts of sharp criticism dealt to him through envy or misunderstanding of his motives. A great writer has said somewhere: "Accusations make wounds and leave scars"; but even the scars were soon worn off his outraged feelings by the remembrance of his divine Master's gentleness and forgiveness. How often have I seen the mandate, "Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you," verified in Dr. Talmage. He could not bear detraction or uncharitableness. His heart was so broad and loving that he seemed to have room in it for the whole world; and his greeting of strangers on an Australian platform, amid the heathers of Scotland, or in the Golden Gate of California, was so free and cordial that each one might have thought himself a dear friend of the Doctor, and he would have been right in thinking so. Again, his sense of humour was so great that he could laugh and "poke fun" at his critics with such ease and good humour that their arrows passed harmlessly over his head. "Men have a right to their opinions," he would genially say. "There are twenty tall pippin trees in the orchard to one crab apple tree. There are a million clover blooms to one thistle in the meadow."