[Illustration:  Dr. Talmage as chaplain of the thirteenth regiment.]

In the spring of 1888 I received the honour of being made chaplain of the “Old Thirteenth” Regiment of the National Guard, with a commission as captain, to succeed my old friend and fellow-worker, Henry Ward Beecher, who had died.  Although I was a very busy man I accepted it, because I had always felt it my duty to be a part of any public-spirited enterprise.  On March 7th, 1888, before a vast assembly, the oath was administered by Colonel Austen, and I received my commission.  Memories of my actual, though brief, sight of war, at Sharpsburg and Hagerstown, where the hospitals were filled with wounded soldiers, mingled faintly with the actual scene of peace and plenty around me at that moment.  We needed no epaulet then but the shoulder that is muscular, and we needed no commanding officer but the steadiness of our own nerves.  The Thirteenth Regiment was at the height of its prosperity then; our band, under the leadership of Fred Inness, was the best in the city.  I remembered it well because, in the parade on Decoration Day, I was on horseback riding a somewhat unmusical horse.  It was comforting, if not strictly true, to read in the newspaper the following day that “Doctor Talmage rides his horse with dash and skill.”

The association of ideas in American life is a wonderful mixture of the appropriate and the inappropriate.  Because my church was crowded, because I lived in a comfortable house, because I could become, on occasions, a preacher on horseback, I was rated as a millionaire clergyman.  It was amusing to read about, but difficult to live up to.  There were many calculations in the newspapers as to my income.  Some of the more moderate figures were correct.  My salary was $12,000 as pastor of the Tabernacle, I have made over $20,000 a year from my lectures.  From the publication of my sermons my income was equal to my salary.  I received $5,000 a year as editor of a popular monthly; I sometimes wrote an article that paid me $150 or more, and a single marriage fee was often as high as $250.  There were some royalties on my books.

We lived well, dressed comfortably; but there were many demands on me then, as on all public men, and I needed all I could earn.  I carried a life insurance of $75,000.  All this was a long way from being a Croesus of the clergy, however.  I mention these figures and facts because they stimulate to me, as I hope they will to others, the possibilities of temporal welfare in a minister’s life, provided he works hard and is faithful to the tremendous trusts of his calling.

A man’s industry is the whole of that man, just as his laziness is the end of him.  I always believed heartily, profoundly, in the equality of a man’s salvation with a man’s self-respect in temporal affairs.  I am sure that whoever keeps the books in Heaven credits the account of a new arrival with the exact amount of salvation he or she has achieved, making a due allowance for the amounts earned and paid over to the causes of charity, kindliness, and mercy.