“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.

On the 16th of March, 1862, our church edifice was dedicated to the worship of Almighty God, Dr. Asa D. Smith, of Dartmouth College, delivering the dedication sermon, and in the evening, my brilliant and beloved brother, Professor Roswell D. Hitchcock, gave us one of his incisive and inspiring discourses.  The building accommodates eighteen hundred worshippers, and in emergencies, twenty-five hundred.  It is a model of cheerfulness and convenience, and is so felicitous in its acoustics that an ordinary conversational tone can be heard at the opposite end of the auditorium.  The picture of the Church in this volume gives no adequate idea of the size of the edifice; for the Sunday School Hall and lecture-room and social parlors are situated in the rear, and could not be presented in the photographic view.  I fear that too many costly church edifices are erected that are quite unfit for our Protestant modes of religious service.  It is said that when Bishop Potter was called upon to consecrate one of the “dim religious” specimens of mediaeval architecture, and was asked his opinion of the new structure, he replied:  “It is a beautiful building, with only three faults:  you cannot see in it—­you cannot hear in it—­you cannot breathe in it.”

I need not detail the story of my happy Brooklyn pastorate; for that is succinctly given in the closing chapter of this volume.  Our home-life here for the past forty-two years has been a record of perpetual providential mercies and unfailing kindness on the part of my parishioners and fellow townsmen.  Brooklyn, although removed from New York (for I cannot yet twist my tongue into calling it “Manhattan”) by a five minutes’ journey on the East River Bridge, is a very different town in its political and social aspects.  New York is penned in on a narrow island, and ground is worth more than gold.  It is therefore piled up with very fine apartment houses for the rich, or tenement houses for the poor to more stories than the ancient buildings on the Canongate of Edinburgh.  Here