awakening in the church, and the meeting was held in the parlor of a private house.  I arose and spoke for ten minutes.  When the meeting was over, more than one came to me and said:  “Your talk did me good.”  On my way home, as I drove along in my sleigh, the thought flashed into my mind, “If ten minutes’ talk to-day helped a few souls, why not preach all the time?” That one thought decided the vexed question on the spot.  Our lives turn on small pivots, and if we let God lead us, the path will open before our footsteps.  I reached home that day, and informed my good mother of my decision.  She had always expected it and quietly remarked, “Then, I have already spoken to Mr. Ford for his room for you in the Princeton Seminary.”  My three years in the Seminary were full of joy and profit.  I made it a rule to go out as often as possible and address little meetings in the neighboring school-houses, and found this a very beneficial method of gaining practice.  A young preacher must get accustomed to the sound of his own voice; if naturally timid, he must learn to face an audience and must first learn to speak; afterwards he may learn to speak well.  It is a wise thing for a young man to begin his labors in a small congregation; he has more time for study, a better chance to become intimately acquainted with individual characters, and also a smaller audience to face.  The first congregation that I was called to take charge of, in Burlington, N.J. contained about forty families.  Three or four of these were wealthy and cultivated, the rest were plain mechanics, with a few gardeners and coachmen.  I made my sermons to suit the comprehension of the gardeners and coachmen at the end of the house, leaving the cultivated portion to gain what they could from the sermon on its way.  One of the wealthy attendants was Mr. Charles Chauncey, a distinguished Philadelphia lawyer, who spent the summer months in Burlington.  Once after I had delivered a very simple and earnest sermon on the “Worth of the Soul,” I went home and said to myself, “Lawyer Chauncey must have thought that was only a camp-meeting exhortation.”  He met me during the week and to my astonishment he said to me:  “My young friend, I thank you for that sermon last Sunday; it had the two best qualities of preaching—­simplicity and down-right earnestness.  If I had a student in my law-office who was not more in earnest to win his first ten dollar suit before a Justice of the Peace than some men seem to be in trying to save souls I would kick such a student out of my office.”  That eminent lawyer’s remark did me more service than any month’s study in the Seminary.  It taught me that cultivated audiences relished plain, simple scriptural truths as much as did the illiterate, and that down-right earnestness to save souls hides a multitude of sins in raw young preachers.