In the rapid awakening of the people to the fact that in the name of Party they are being stripped of everything that makes for the independence and prosperity and happiness of the average citizen.
Talmage in Russia: Fourteen Years Ago
After the downfall of Beecher, Doctor Talmage became the most conspicuous preacher in the United States. His sermons and his writings had an immense audience. “Talmage’s Sermon” was a standing headline, in American Monday morning newspapers, and they were widely known in Europe also. No visitor to New York thought of returning home until he had attended services at the Brooklyn Tabernacle and qualified himself to boast of the fact that he had “heard Talmage.”
The fact that Doctor Talmage had been engaged to furnish articles to any periodical, was sufficient to boost its circulation into the tens of thousands. No Lyceum, no Chautauqua, no Lecture Course was complete without Talmage. Formal banquets, in quest of oratorical attractions, never failed to urge the attendance of Doctor Talmage.
Somehow the man became the fashion, the rage. He was the Caucasian Booker Washington. Everybody having agreed that he was a wonderful man, the ball kept on rolling by the law of inertia.
Nobody could tell you wherein he was great; nobody could quote anything remarkable from his writings or his sermons; nobody knew of anything phenomenal that he had done, or was supposed to be able to do. His capacity for the benevolent assimilation of an indefinite number of voluntary donations was strikingly like Booker Washington’s power in the same direction; but beyond the fact that Talmage preached to a large congregation, and wrote books which many people read, his greatness was hard to define.
However, Talmage had his day. He was the fashion. At home and abroad he was a man whom it was the correct thing to treat with distinguished consideration. Foreign potentates, princes and powers knew Talmage as a mighty man of the pen; likewise as a man of infinite capacity for talk; also as a man who traveled with a photographic outfit. Consequently a man to be handled with care; “this side up,” as it were.
His progress through a foreign land, was not merely an incident; it was an event. He was greeted with dress-parade formalities. Foreign princes, potentates and powers knew that Talmage would write a book about them when he got home; that the book would be read by hundreds of thousands; that public opinion would be influenced by it; and that the photographs of the princes, etc., would appear in the book. Consequently the smiling faces which were turned toward the Talmage Camera by the helpless potentates etc., were almost distressing in their laborious amiability.