"From first to last we have been a united people, and my fervent thanks are to all the Boards of Trustees and Elders, whether of the present or past, and to all the congregation, and to New York and Brooklyn.
"I have no vocabulary intense enough to express my gratitude to the newspaper press of these cities for the generous manner in which they have treated me and augmented my work for this quarter of a century.
"After such a long pastorate it is a painful thing to break the ties of affection, but I hope our friendship will be renewed in Heaven."
There was a sorrowful silence when I stopped reading, which made me realise that I had tasted another bitter draft of life in the prospect of farewell between pastor and flock. I left the church alone and went quietly to my study where I closed the door to all inquirers.
If my decision had been made upon any other ground than those of spiritual obligation to the purpose of my whole life I should have said so. My decision had been made because I had been thinking of my share in the evangelism of the world, and how mercifully I had been spared and instructed and forwarded in my Gospel mission. I wanted a more neighbourly relation with the human race than the prescribed limitations of a single pulpit.
In February, 1893, I lost an evangelical neighbour of many years—Bishop Brooks. He was a giant, but he died. My mind goes back to the time when Bishop Brooks and myself were neighbours in Philadelphia. He had already achieved a great reputation as a pulpit orator in 1870. The first time I saw him was on a stormy night as he walked majestically up the aisle of the church to which I administered. He had come to hear his neighbour, as afterward I often went to hear him. What a great and genial soul he was! He was a man that people in the streets stopped to look at, and strangers would say as he passed, "I wonder who that man is?" Of unusual height and stature, with a face beaming in kindness, once seeing him he was always remembered, but the pulpit was his throne. With a velocity of utterance that was the despair of the swiftest stenographers, he poured forth his impassioned soul, making every theme he touched luminous and radiant.
Putting no emphasis on the mere technicalities of religion, he made his pulpit flame with its power. He was the special inspiration of young men, and the disheartened took courage under the touch of his words and rose up healed. It will take all time and all eternity to tell the results of his Christian utterances. There were some who thought that there was here and there an unsafe spot in his theology. As for ourselves we never found anything in the man or in his utterances that we did not like.
Although fully realising that I was approaching a crisis of some sort in my own career, it was with definite thankfulness for the mercies that had upheld me so long that I forged ahead. My state of mind at this time was peaceful and contented. I find in a note-book of this period of my life the following entry, which betrays the trend of my heart and mind during the last milestone of my ministry in Brooklyn:
"Here I am in Madison, Wisconsin, July 23, 1893. I have been attending Monona Lake Chautauqua, lecturing yesterday, preaching this morning. This Sabbath afternoon I have been thinking of the goodness of God to me. It began many years before I was born; for as far back as I can find anything concerning my ancestry, both on my father's and mother's sides, they were virtuous and Christian people. Who shall estimate the value of such a pedigree? The old cradle, as I remember it, was made out of plain boards, but it was a Christian cradle. God has been good in letting us be born in a fair climate, neither in the rigours of frigidity nor in the scorching air of tropical regions. Fortunate was I in being started in a home neither rich nor poor, so that I had the temptations of neither luxury nor poverty. Fortunate in good health—sixty years of it. I say sixty rather than sixty-one, for I believe the first year or two of my life compassed all styles of infantile ailments, from mumps to scarlet fever.
"A quarter of a century ago, looking at a pile of manuscript sermons, I said again and again to my wife: 'Those sermons were not made only for the people who have already heard them. They must have a wider field.' The prophecy came true, and every one of those sermons through the press has come to the attention of at least twenty-five million people. I have no reason to be morose or splenetic. 'Goodness and mercy have followed me all the days of my life.' Here I am at 61 years of age without an ache, a pain, or a physical infirmity. Now closing a preaching and lecturing tour from Georgia to Minnesota and Wisconsin, I am to-morrow morning to start for my residence at the seaside where my family are awaiting me, and notwithstanding all the journeying and addressing of great audiences, and shaking hands with thousands of people, after a couple of days' rest will be no more weary than when I left home. 'Bless the Lord, O my soul!'"