In the spring of 1888 I received the honour of being made chaplain of the "Old Thirteenth" Regiment of the National Guard, with a commission as captain, to succeed my old friend and fellow-worker, Henry Ward Beecher, who had died. Although I was a very busy man I accepted it, because I had always felt it my duty to be a part of any public-spirited enterprise. On March 7th, 1888, before a vast assembly, the oath was administered by Colonel Austen, and I received my commission. Memories of my actual, though brief, sight of war, at Sharpsburg and Hagerstown, where the hospitals were filled with wounded soldiers, mingled faintly with the actual scene of peace and plenty around me at that moment. We needed no epaulet then but the shoulder that is muscular, and we needed no commanding officer but the steadiness of our own nerves. The Thirteenth Regiment was at the height of its prosperity then; our band, under the leadership of Fred Inness, was the best in the city. I remembered it well because, in the parade on Decoration Day, I was on horseback riding a somewhat unmusical horse. It was comforting, if not strictly true, to read in the newspaper the following day that "Doctor Talmage rides his horse with dash and skill."
The association of ideas in American life is a wonderful mixture of the appropriate and the inappropriate. Because my church was crowded, because I lived in a comfortable house, because I could become, on occasions, a preacher on horseback, I was rated as a millionaire clergyman. It was amusing to read about, but difficult to live up to. There were many calculations in the newspapers as to my income. Some of the more moderate figures were correct. My salary was $12,000 as pastor of the Tabernacle, I have made over $20,000 a year from my lectures. From the publication of my sermons my income was equal to my salary. I received $5,000 a year as editor of a popular monthly; I sometimes wrote an article that paid me $150 or more, and a single marriage fee was often as high as $250. There were some royalties on my books.
We lived well, dressed comfortably; but there were many demands on me then, as on all public men, and I needed all I could earn. I carried a life insurance of $75,000. All this was a long way from being a Croesus of the clergy, however. I mention these figures and facts because they stimulate to me, as I hope they will to others, the possibilities of temporal welfare in a minister's life, provided he works hard and is faithful to the tremendous trusts of his calling.
A man's industry is the whole of that man, just as his laziness is the end of him. I always believed heartily, profoundly, in the equality of a man's salvation with a man's self-respect in temporal affairs. I am sure that whoever keeps the books in Heaven credits the account of a new arrival with the exact amount of salvation he or she has achieved, making a due allowance for the amounts earned and paid over to the causes of charity, kindliness, and mercy.
I always believed in the business and the religious method of the Salvation Army, because it was an effort to discipline salvation on a working basis. When the Salvation Army first began its meetings in Brooklyn its members were hooted and insulted in the streets to an extent that rendered their meetings almost impossible. I was requested to present a petition to Mayor Whitney asking protection for them in the streets of the city. People residing near the Salvation headquarters were in constant danger of annoyance from the mobs that gathered about them. It was the fault of the Brooklyn ruffianism. I demanded that the Salvation Army be permitted to hold meetings and march in processions unmolested. No one was ever killed by a street hosannah, no one was ever hurt by hearing a hallelujah. The more inspiring the music the more virile the optimism we can show, the more good we can do each other in the climb to Paradise. A minister's duty in his own community, and in all other communities in which he may find himself, is to make the great men of his time understand him and like him.
A minister who could adapt himself to the lights and shadows of human character in men of prominence enjoyed many opportunities that were enlightening. One met them, these men of many talents, at their best at dinners and banquets. It was then they were in their splendour.
Those dinners at the Press Club in 1888, what treat they were! In the days of John A. Cockerill, the handsome, dashing "Colonel," as he was called, of Mayor Grant the suave, Chauncey M. Depew the wit, of Charles Emory Smith the conservative journalist, of Henry George the Socialist, Moses P. Handy the "Major," of Roswell P. Flower, of Judge Henry Hilton, of General Felix Agnus—and of Hermann, the original, the great, the magic wonder-maker of the times. They were the leading spirits of an army of bright men who pushed the world upside down, or rolled it over and over, or made it stand still, according to how they felt. Mingling with these arbiters of our fate were all sorts and conditions of men. At one of these dinners I remember seeing Inspector Byrnes, the Sherlock Holmes of American crime, Colonel Ochiltree, the red savage, Steven Fiske, Samuel Carpenter, Judge David McAdam, John W. Keller, Judge Gedney, "Pat" Gilmore, Rufus Hatch, General Horatio C. King, Frank B. Thurber, J. Amory Knox, E.B. Harper, W.J. Arkell, Dr. Nagle, the poet Geogheghan, Doc White, and Joseph Howard, jun. They were the old guard of the land of Bohemia, where a minister's voice sounded good to them if it was a voice without cant or religious hypocrisy. I remember a letter sent by President Harrison to one of these dinners, in which, after acknowledging the receipt of an invitation to attend, he regretted being unable to be present at "so attractive an event."
Among the men whom I first met at this time, and who made an impression of lasting respect upon me, was Henry Cabot Lodge. He was the guest of General Stewart L. Woodford, at a breakfast given in his honour in the spring of 1888 at the Hamilton Club. General Woodford invited me, among others, to meet him. We all came—Mr. Benjamin A. Stillman, Mr. J.S.T. Stranahan, Mr. Theodore Roosevelt, Judge C.R. Pratt, ex-Mayor Schroeder, Mr. John Winslow, president of the New England Society, Mr. George M. Olcott, Mr. William Copeland Wallace, Colonel Albert P. Lamb, Mr. Charles A. Moore, Mr. William B. Williams, Mr. Ethan Allen Doty, Mr. James S. Case, Mr. T.L. Woodruff. It was a social innovation then to arrange a gathering of this sort at 11 a.m. and call it a breakfast. It came from England. Mr. Lodge was only in town on a visit for a few days, chiefly, I think, to attend the annual dinner of the "Sunrise Sons," as the members of the New England society were called. As I read these names again, how big some of them look now, in the world's note-book of celebrities. Some of them were just beginning to learn the pleasant taste of ambitious careers. Most of them had discovered that ambition was the gift of hard work. There is more health in work than in any medicine I ever heard of.
Work is the only thing that keeps people alive. Whatever posterity may proclaim for me, I always had the reputation of being a worker. Perhaps for this reason I became the object of a microscopic investigation before the people in 1888. It was the first time in my life that any notable attention had been taken of me in my own country, that was not a personal notoriety over some conflict of the hour. Whenever the American newspaper begins to describe your home life with an air of analysis that is not libellous you are among the famous. It took me a little while to understand this. A man's private life is of such indifferent character to himself, unless he be an official representative of the people, that I never quite appreciated the importance given to mine, at this time, in Brooklyn. Chiefly because I had made money as a writer, my fellow-citizens were curious to know how, in the clerical profession, it could be made. Articles appeared constantly in the newspapers with headlines like these—"Dr. Talmage at Home," "In a Clergyman's Study," "Dr. Talmage's Wealth," "Talmage Interviewed." Nearly all of them began with the American view point uppermost, in this fashion:
"The American preacher lives in a luxurious home."