When I was introduced to the good man as an American, he spoke a few kind words and gave me an “apostolic kiss” upon my cheek.  As I was about to make the first public speech of my life, I suppose that I may regard that act of the great Irish apostle as a sort of ordination to the ministry of preaching the Gospel of total abstinence.  The administration of the pledge was followed by a grand meeting of welcome in the city hall.  Father Mathew spoke with modest simplicity and deep emotion, attributing all his wonderful success to the direct blessings of God upon his efforts to persuade his fellow-men to throw off the despotism of the bottle.  After delivering my maiden speech I hastened back to Edinburgh with the deputation from “Auld Reekie,” and I never saw Father Mathew again.  He was, unquestionably, the most remarkable temperance reformer who has yet appeared.  While a Catholic priest in Cork, a Quaker friend, Mr. Martin, who met him in an almshouse, said to him, “Father Theobald, why not give thyself to the work of saving men from the drink?” Father Mathew immediately commenced his enterprise.  It spread over Ireland like wildfire.  It is computed that no less than five millions of people took the pledge of total abstinence from intoxicating poisons by his influence.  The revolution wrought in his day, in his own time and country, was marvellous, and, to this day, his influence is perpetuated in the vast number of Father Mathew Benevolent Temperance Societies.

[Illustration:  DR CUYLER AT 32 (When Pastor of the Market St Church, New York)]

Second only to Father Mathew in the number of converts which he has made to total abstinence was that brilliant and dramatic platform orator, John B. Gough.  When he was a reckless young sot in Worcester, Massachusetts, he had owed his conversion to a touch on his shoulder by a shoemaker, named Joel Stratton, who had invited him to a Washingtonian temperance meeting.  Soon after that time he owed his conversion, under God, to the influence of Miss Mary Whitcomb, the daughter of a Boylston farmer in the neighborhood.  He formed her acquaintance very soon after he signed the temperance pledge in Worcester, and she consented to assume the risk of becoming his wife.  In the summer of 1856 I visited my beloved friend Gough at his beautiful Boylston home to aid him in revival services, which he was conducting in his own church, then without a pastor.  He was Sunday-school superintendent, pastor and leader of inquiry meetings—­all in himself.  One evening he took me to the house of his neighbor, Captain Flagg, and said to me:  “Here, in this house, Mary and I did our brief two or three weeks of courting.  We didn’t talk of love, but only religion and about the welfare of my soul.  We prayed together every time we met; and it was such serious business that I do not think I even kissed her until we were married.  She took me on trust, with three dollars in my pocket, and has been to me the best wife God ever made.”  When they went to Boston, Dr. Edward N. Kirk received Mr. Gough into the Mt.  Vernon Street Church, just as many years afterwards he received Mr. Moody to the same communion table.