The Florida Agriculturist

Bits of Autobiography.

"To every man his own work," was the text chosen Sunday morning by the Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage, at the Brooklyn Tabernacle. There are now in the world, he said, 1,377,000,000 of people, and consequently there are so many fields of labor and usefulness. If man neglects his work it is undone forever. This is a double anniversary. Nearly ten years ago I became pastor of this church, and last Wednesday I was forty-seven years old. I started life in an old-fashioned Christian family, where we had prayers morning and evening and blessings were asked at each meal. There was something in the tones of my mother's prayers and something in the tears that flowed before she got through that has had one influence upon my life. I started for the legal profession with an admiration for it not yet cooled, and I cannot pass a court house or hear an attorney speak without having my enthusiasm aroused. God converted my soul and put me in the ministry, and by a variety of circumstances shut me up in that profession. I know personally about 5,000 clergymen, and they are all excellent men. Some are living on starvation salaries, with worn health, trying to bring comfort to the human race. It has been the chief ambition of my ministry to apply a religion 6,000 years old to the present day. I saw in the Garden of Eden a religion that was to bruise the serpent's head-I never see that head now without throwing something at it. Every time I have bruised it he has hissed. I have trod on him thus far with only one foot, but before I get through with him I shall jump on him with both feet. I here declare war against the fraud, corruption and iniquities of cities for the next twenty-five years, if God lets me live. Between here and my rest in Greenwood there shall be no compromise. After I am dead I ask for no marble slab, draped church, or long funeral oration. A plain body in a plain box will be enough, if the elders of my church will stand at the altar and say that I never compromised with sin. Then let Father Pearson pronounce the benediction and the congregation go home.

It has been understood that at installations and dedications that Talmage was to be excoriated (laughter), and now if congregations get dull through lack of ventilation, perhaps, and the pastor wakes up and makes some sharp allusion, people nudge each other and say, "That's Talmage." (Renewed laughter.) The favorite allusions to me are "mountebank," "sensationalism" and "buffoonery" (laughter), and a variety of phrases that show that my dear Christian brethren are not happy. The dear souls, I wish them all the good in the world, with large audiences, $15,000 salaries, a house full of children, and heaven to boot. I am so busily engaged assailing the powers of darkness that I have no time to stop and stab any of my regiments in the back. I let them go. It relieves them and it don't hurt me. I answer them only by good advice that they can never build themselves up by trying to pull anyone else down.

During the ten years of my pastoral duties I have been misrepresented. Spurgeon, Beecher and others have had stories told about them also. They were lies, lies, all lies; every one of them lies.

But a story has been told which invades the sanctity of my home. It has been stated in private circles and newspapers, until ten thousand people have heard the report, that sixteen or seventeen years ago I went sailing on the Delaware river with my wife and my sister-in-law, that the boat capsized and that having an opportunity of saving either my wife or her sister, that I let my wife drown and saved my sister, and that I married the latter within sixty days. I propose to nail that infamous lie on the forehead of every man or woman who shall utter it again, and I shall invoke the law in my behalf. (Applause.) The facts in that casualty were as follows: Sarah Talmage Whiteneck, my own sister, with her daughter, who was an only child, was visiting at my house in Philadelphia. Accompanied by my wife, we started for Fairmount. I was ignorant of the topography of the country. I suggested a sail, and hired a row-boat. We all got in, and not knowing of the dam across the river, and unwarned by the keeper of the boat of the danger, I pulled straight for the brink. I suspected nothing wrong until I saw people on the shore wildly gesticulating, as if there was danger ahead. I looked back and found that we were already on the dam. I turned back the boat in vain, and we went over. The boat capsized with us. My wife disappeared, and she was drawn under the dam, from which her body was not recovered for days. I was able to swim, and I clung to the boat, my niece hanging on me, while my sister was clinging to the other side of the boat. A boat pushed out from the shore and saved us. After trying to resurrect the child, already nine-tenths dead-and I can now see her blackened body as it was rolling on a barrel to resuscitate her -a carriage came. Leaving my wife at the bottom of the Schuylkill, and with the little girl still unconscious, sitting on my lap, my sister and I rode home. Since the world was created a more ghastly catastrophe never happened. This is the scene over which some ministers of the Gospel and one publication have dared to make sport. My present wife was not within a hundred miles of the place where my first wife lay, and they had never heard of each other. It was not until nine months afterward that I met my present wife, being introduced by my brother, the Rev. Going Talmage. My first wife was Mary R. Avery, a member of the Reformed Presbyterian Church in Harrison st., Brooklyn. My present wife was Susan Whittemore, a member of the church at Greenpoint. There are multitudes at both these churches in Brooklyn and Greenpoint, and multitudes of people on the banks of the Schuylkill to tell the same story. What do you think, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, editors and reporters, of a lie like that, manufactured out of whole cloth? I have never spoken of it before, and I shall not refer to it again, but I give fair notice that if any two responsible witnesses will give me the names of two responsible persons repeating this infamous slander, I will pay the informers $100 reward, and I will put on the criminal, vagabond, loathsome and accursed wretch who utters it the full force of the law.