Why that noble and gifted daughter, who was the inseparable companion of her fond mother, and who was developing into the sweet graces of young womanhood, was taken from our clinging arms at the early age of twenty-two, God only knows.  Many another aching parental heart has doubtless knocked at the sealed door of such a mystery, and heard the only response, “What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter.”  Upon the monument that bears her name, graven on a cross, amid a cluster of white lilies, is inscribed:  “I thank my God upon every remembrance of thee.”  The lovely twin brother, “Georgie” (whose sweet life story is told in “The Empty Crib"), reposes in our same family plot, and beside him lies a baby brother, Mathiot Cuyler, who lived but twelve days.  As this infant was born on the twenty-fifth of December, 1873, his tiny tomb-stone bears the simple inscription:  “Our Christmas Gift.”

During all our seasons of domestic sorrow the cordial sympathies of our noble-hearted congregation were very cheering; for we had always kept open doors to them all, and regarded them as only an enlargement of our own family.  In our household joys, they too, participated.  When the twenty-fifth anniversary of our marriage occurred, they decorated our church with flags and flowers and suspended a huge marriage-bell on an arch before the pulpit.  After the President of our Board of Trustees, the Hon. William W. Goodrich, had completed his congratulatory address, two of the officers of the church in imitation of the returning spies from Eshcol marched in, “bearing between them on a staff” a capacious bag of silver dollars.  A curiously constructed silver clock is also among the treasured souvenirs of that happy anniversary.

In April, 1885, the close of the first quarter-century of my ministry was celebrated by our church with very delightful festivities.  Addresses were delivered by his Honor Mayor Low, Dr. McCosh, of Princeton, Dr. Richard S. Storrs, and the Hon. John Wanamaker, Post-Master General.  A duodecimo volume giving the history of our church and all its activities was published by order of our people.

From such a loyal flock in the full tide of its prosperity, to cut asunder, required no small exercise of conscience and of courage.  When the patriarchal Dr. Emmons, of Franklin, Massachusetts, resigned his church at the age of eighty, he gave the good reason:  “I mean to stop when I have sense enough to know that I have not begun, to fail.”  In exercising the same grace, on a Sabbath morning in February, 1890, I made before a full congregation the following announcement:  “Nearly thirty years have elapsed since I assumed the pastoral charge of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church; and through the continual blessings of Heaven upon us it has grown into one of the largest and most useful and powerful churches in the Presbyterian denomination.  It has two thousand three hundred and thirty members; and is third in point of numbers in the United States.