One of the richest of the many blessings that has crowned my long life has been a happy home. It has always seemed to me as a wonderful triumph of divine grace in the Apostle Paul that he should have been so "content in whatsoever state he was" when he was a homeless, and, I fear, also a wifeless man. During my own early ministry in Burlington, N.J., my widowed mother and myself lodged with worthy Quakers, and realized Charles Lamb's truthful description of that quiet, "naught-caballing community." On our removal to Trenton, when I took charge of the newly organized Third Presbyterian Church, we commenced housekeeping in what had once been the residence of a Governor, a chief-justice, and a mayor of the city; but was a very plain and modest domicile after all. My new church building was completed in November, 1850, and opened with a full congregation, and I was soon in the full swing of my pastoral duties. As I have already stated in the opening chapter of this volume, my father and mother first saw each other on a Sabbath day, and in a church. It was my happy lot to follow their example. On a certain Sabbath in January, 1851, a group of young ladies, who were the guests of a prominent family in my congregation, were seated in a pew immediately before the pulpit. As a civility to that family we called on the following evening, upon their guests. One of the number happened to be a young lady from Ohio who had just graduated from the Granville College, in that State, and had come East to visit her relatives in Philadelphia. The young lady just mentioned was Miss Annie E. Mathiot, a daughter of the Hon. Joshua Mathiot, an eminent lawyer, who had represented his district in Congress. That evening has been marked with a very white stone in my calendar ever since. It was but a brief visit of a fortnight that the fair maiden from the West made in Trenton; but when she, soon afterwards returned to Ohio, she took with her what has been her inalienable possession ever since and will be, "Till death us do part." My courtship was rather "at long range;" for Newark, Ohio, was several hundred miles away, and I have always found that a man who would build up a strong church must be constantly at it, trowel in hand. On the 17th of March, 1853, the venerable Dr. Wylie conducted for us a very simple and solemn service of holy wedlock, closing with his fatherly benediction, one of the best acts of his long and useful life. The invalid mother of my bride (for Colonel Mathiot had died four years previously) was present at our nuptials, and for the last time was in her own drawing-room. Mrs. Mathiot was a daughter of Mr. Samuel Culbertson, a leading lawyer of Zanesville, and was a lady of rare refinement and loveliness. She had been a patient sufferer from a painful illness of several months' duration, and peacefully passed away to her rest in September of that year.
Of the qualifications and duties of a minister's wife, enough has been written to stock a small library. My own very positive conviction has always been that her vows were made primarily, not to a parish, but to her own husband; and if she makes his home and heart happy; if she relieves him of needless worldly cares; if she is a constant inspiration to him in his holy work, she will do ten-fold more for the church than if she were the manager and mainspring of a dozen benevolent societies. There is another obligation antecedent to all acts of Presbytery or installing councils—the sweet obligation of motherhood. The woman who neglects her nursery or her housekeeping duties, and her own heart-life for any outside work in the parish does both them and herself serious injury. If a minister's wife has the grace of a kind and tactful courtesy toward all classes, she may contribute mightily to the popular influence of her husband; and if she is a woman of culture and literary taste, she can be of immense service to him in the preparation of his sermons. The best critic that ministers can have is one who has a right to criticize and to "truth it in love." Who has a better right to reprove, exhort and correct with all long suffering than the woman who has given us her heart and herself? There are a hundred matters in the course of a year in which a sensible woman's instincts are wiser than those of the average man. There is many a minister who would have been spared the worst blunders of his life, if he had only consulted and obeyed the instinctive judgment of a loving and sensible wife. If we husbands hold the reins, it is the province of a wise and devoted wife to tell us where to drive.
It is very probable that my readers have suspected that this portraiture of a model wife for a minister was drawn from actual life; and they are right in their conjectures. In the discourse delivered to my flock on the twenty-fifth anniversary of my pastorate was the following passage, to whose truth the added years have only added confirmation, "There is still another sweet mercy which has been vouchsafed to me in the true heart that has never faltered and the gentle footstep that has never wearied in the pathway of life for two and thirty years. From how many mistakes and hasty indiscretions her quick sagacity has kept me, you can never know. If you have any tribute of thanks for any good which I have done you, do not offer it to me; go carry it down to yonder home, of which she has been the light and the joy, and lay it at her unselfish feet." On that occasion (for the only time) I heard a murmur of applause run through my congregation.
About the time of our marriage, I received a call from the Shawmut Congregational Church of Boston, and soon afterwards overtures from a Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, and from the First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. All these attractive offers I declined, but within a few months I accepted a call from the Market Street Dutch Reformed Church of New York—a far more difficult field of labor. My ministry in Trenton was one of unbroken happiness, and the Church were profusely kind; but at the end of nearly four years I felt that my work there was done. The young church had built a beautiful house of worship without a dime of debt, and it was filled by a prosperous congregation. I was ready for a wider field of labor.
The Market Street Dutch Reformed Church, to which I was called, was down town, within ten minutes' walk of the City Hall, and was beginning to feel the inroads of the up-town migration, when my excellent predecessor, Dr. Isaac Ferris, left it to become the Chancellor of the New York University. Although most of the well-to-do families were moving away, yet East Broadway was full of boarding houses packed with young men and these in turn packed our church on Sabbath evenings. Of the happy spiritual harvest-seasons in that old church, especially during the great awakening in 1858, I have written in the chapter on Revivals. I was as eager for work as Simon Peter was for a good haul in fishing, and every week there, I met on the platform the representatives of temperance societies: The Five Points House of Industry, Young Men's Christian Associations, Sunday schools or some other religious or reformatory enterprise. These outside activities were no hindrances to either pulpit or pastoral work; and, like that famous English preacher who felt that he could not have too many irons in the fire, I thrust in tongs, shovel, poker and all. The contact with busy life and benevolent labors among the poor supplied material for sermons; for the pastor of a city church must touch life at a great many points. Our domestic experiences in early housekeeping were very agreeable. The social conditions of New York were less artificial than now. Pastoral calls in the evening usually found the people in their homes, and I do not believe there were a dozen theatre-goers in my congregation. After a very busy and heaven-blest ministry of half a dozen years, I discovered that the rapid migration up town would soon leave our congregation too feeble for self-support. I accordingly started a movement to erect a new edifice up on Murray Hill, and to retain the old building in Market Street as an auxiliary mission chapel. A handsome subscription for the erection of the up-town edifice was secured, and the "Consistory" (which is the good Dutch designation of a board of church officers), convened to vote the first payment for the land. The new site was not wisely chosen, and many of my people were still opposed to any change; but the casting vote of one good old man (whom I shall thank if I ever encounter him in the Celestial World) negatived the whole enterprise, and it was immediately abandoned.
A few weeks before that decision, I had received a call to take charge of a brave little struggling Presbyterian Church in the newer part of Brooklyn. I sent for the officers, and informed them that if they would purchase the ground on the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Oxford Street, and pay for it in a fortnight, and promise to build for me a church with good acoustics and capable of seating from eighteen hundred to two thousand auditors, I would be their pastor. Instead of turning purple in the lips at such a bold proposal, they "staggered not at the promise through unbelief" and in ten days they brought me the deed of the land paid for to the uttermost dollar! I resigned Market Street Church immediately, and on the next Sabbath morning, while the Easter bells were ringing under a dark stormy sky, I came over and faced, for the first time, the courageous founders of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church. The dear old Market Street Church lingered on for a few years more, bleeding at every pore, from the fatal up-town migration, and then peacefully disbanded. The solid stone edifice was purchased by some generous Presbyterians in the upper part of the city, who organized there the "Church of the Sea and Land," which is standing to-day, as a well-manned light-house amid a dense tenement-house foreign population. The successful work that is now prosecuted there is another confirmation of my favorite theory that the only way to reach a neighborhood crowded with the poorer classes, is for the wealthy churches to spend money for just such an auxiliary mission church as is now thriving in the structure in which I spent seven happy years of my ministry.
This portion of Brooklyn to which we removed in 1860, was very sparsely settled, and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher said to me: "I do not see how you can find a congregation there." He lived to say to me: "You are now in the center, and I am out on the circumference," Brooklyn was then pre-eminently a "city of churches," and, though we had not a dozen millionaires, it was not infested with any slums. In a population of over three hundred thousand there was then only a single theatre, and when one of our people was asked: "What do you do for recreation over there?" he replied, "We go to church."
Certainly no one was ever attracted to our own modest little temporary sanctuary by its beauty; for it was unsightly without, though very cheerful within. Soon after we commenced the building of our present stately edifice the startling report of cannon shook the land from sea to sea.
"And then we saw from Sumter's wall
The star-flag of the Union fall,
And armed hosts were pressing on
The broken lines of Washington."
Every other public edifice in this city then in process of erection was brought to a standstill; but we pushed forward the work, like Nehemiah's builders, with a trowel in one hand and a weapon in the other. To raise funds for the structure, required faith and self-denial, and in this labor of love, woman's five fingers were busy and helpful. One brave orphan girl in New York gave, from her hard earnings as a public school teacher, a sum so large that the announcement of it from my pulpit aroused great enthusiasm, and turned the scale at the critical moment, and insured the completion of the structure. Justly may our pulpit vindicate woman's place, and woman's province in the cause of Christ and humanity, for without woman's help that pulpit might never have been erected.