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.