It happened this way:  Truman Osborne, one of the evangelists who went through this country some years ago, had a wonderful art in the right direction.  He came to my father’s house one day, and while we were all seated in the room, he said:  “Mr. Talmage, are all your children Christians?” Father said:  “Yes, all but De Witt.”  Then Truman Osborne looked down into the fireplace, and began to tell a story of a storm that came on the mountains, and all the sheep were in the fold; but there was one lamb outside that perished in the storm.  Had he looked me in the eye, I should have been angered when he told me that story; but he looked into the fireplace, and it was so pathetically and beautifully done that I never found any peace until I was inside the fold, where the other sheep are.

When I was a lad a book came out entitled “Dow Junior’s Patent Sermons”; it made a great stir, a very wide laugh all over the country, that book did.  It was a caricature of the Christian ministry and of the Word of God and of the Day of Judgment.  Oh, we had a great laugh!  The commentary on the whole thing is that the author of that book died in poverty, shame, debauchery, kicked out of society.

I have no doubt that derision kept many people out of the ark.  The world laughed to see a man go in, and said, “Here is a man starting for the ark.  Why, there will be no deluge.  If there is one, that miserable ship will not weather it.  Aha! going into the ark!  Well, that is too good to keep.  Here, fellows, have you heard the news?  This man is going into the ark.”  Under this artillery of scorn the man’s good resolution perished.

I was the youngest of a large family of children.  My parents were neither rich nor poor; four of the sons wanted collegiate education, and four obtained it, but not without great home-struggle.  The day I left our country home to look after myself we rode across the country, and my father was driving.  He began to tell how good the Lord had been to him, in sickness and in health, and when times of hardship came how Providence had always provided the means of livelihood for the large household; and he wound up by saying, “De Witt, I have always found it safe to trust the Lord.”  I have felt the mighty impetus of that lesson in the farm waggon.  It has been fulfilled in my own life and in the lives of many consecrated men and women I have known.

In the minister’s house where I prepared for college there worked a man by the name of Peter Croy.  He could neither read nor write, but he was a man of God.  Often theologians would stop in the house—­grave theologians—­and at family prayer Peter Croy would be called upon to lead; and all those wise men sat around, wonder-struck at his religious efficiency.