In the church at Somerville, New Jersey, where I was afterwards pastor, John Vredenburgh preached for a great many years.  He felt that his ministry was a failure, and others felt so, although he was a faithful minister preaching the Gospel all the time.  He died, and died amid some discouragements, and went home to God; for no one ever doubted that John Vredenburgh was a good Christian minister.  A little while after his death there came a great awakening in Somerville, and one Sabbath two hundred souls stood up at the Christian altar espousing the cause of Christ, among them my own father and mother.  And what was peculiar in regard to nearly all of those two hundred souls was that they dated their religious impressions from the ministry of John Vredenburgh.

I had no more confidence in my own powers when I was studying for the ministry than John Vredenburgh.  I was often very discouraged.  “DeWitt,” said a man to me as we were walking the fields at the time I was in the theological school, “DeWitt, if you don’t change your style of thought and expression, you will never get a call to any church in Christendom as long as you live.”  “Well,” I replied, “if I cannot preach the Gospel in America, then I will go to heathen lands and preach it.”  I thought I might be useful on heathen ground, if I could ever learn the language of the Chinese, about which I had many forebodings.  The foreign tongue became to me more and more an obstacle and a horror, until I resolved if I could get an invitation to preach in the English language, I would accept it.  So one day, finding Rev. Dr. Van Vranken, one of our theological professors (blessed be his memory), sauntering in the campus of Rutgers College, I asked him, with much trepidation, if he would by letter introduce me to some officer of the Reformed Church at Belleville, N.J., the pulpit of which was then vacant.  With an outburst of heartiness he replied:  “Come right into my house, and I will give you the letter now.”  It was a most generous introduction of me to Dr. Samuel Ward, a venerable elder of the Belleville church.  I sent the letter to the elder, and within a week received an invitation to occupy the vacant pulpit.

I had been skirmishing here and there as a preacher, now in the basement of churches at week-night religious meetings, and now in school-houses on Sunday afternoons, and here and there in pulpits with brave pastors who dared risk having an inexperienced theological student preach to their people.

But the first sermon with any considerable responsibility resting upon it was the sermon preached as a candidate for a pastoral call in the Reformed Church at Belleville, N.J.  I was about to graduate from the New Brunswick Theological Seminary, and wanted a Gospel field in which to work.  I had already written to my brother John, a missionary at Amoy, China, telling him that I expected to come out there.

I was met by Dr. Ward at Newark, New Jersey, and taken to his house.  Sabbath morning came.  With one of my two sermons, which made up my entire stock of pulpit resources, I tremblingly entered the pulpit of that brown stone village church, which stands in my memory as one of the most sacred places of all the earth, where I formed associations which I expect to resume in Heaven.