I always believed in the business and the religious method of the Salvation Army, because it was an effort to discipline salvation on a working basis.  When the Salvation Army first began its meetings in Brooklyn its members were hooted and insulted in the streets to an extent that rendered their meetings almost impossible.  I was requested to present a petition to Mayor Whitney asking protection for them in the streets of the city.  People residing near the Salvation headquarters were in constant danger of annoyance from the mobs that gathered about them.  It was the fault of the Brooklyn ruffianism.  I demanded that the Salvation Army be permitted to hold meetings and march in processions unmolested.  No one was ever killed by a street hosannah, no one was ever hurt by hearing a hallelujah.  The more inspiring the music the more virile the optimism we can show, the more good we can do each other in the climb to Paradise.  A minister’s duty in his own community, and in all other communities in which he may find himself, is to make the great men of his time understand him and like him.

A minister who could adapt himself to the lights and shadows of human character in men of prominence enjoyed many opportunities that were enlightening.  One met them, these men of many talents, at their best at dinners and banquets.  It was then they were in their splendour.

Those dinners at the Press Club in 1888, what treat they were!  In the days of John A. Cockerill, the handsome, dashing “Colonel,” as he was called, of Mayor Grant the suave, Chauncey M. Depew the wit, of Charles Emory Smith the conservative journalist, of Henry George the Socialist, Moses P. Handy the “Major,” of Roswell P. Flower, of Judge Henry Hilton, of General Felix Agnus—­and of Hermann, the original, the great, the magic wonder-maker of the times.  They were the leading spirits of an army of bright men who pushed the world upside down, or rolled it over and over, or made it stand still, according to how they felt.  Mingling with these arbiters of our fate were all sorts and conditions of men.  At one of these dinners I remember seeing Inspector Byrnes, the Sherlock Holmes of American crime, Colonel Ochiltree, the red savage, Steven Fiske, Samuel Carpenter, Judge David McAdam, John W. Keller, Judge Gedney, “Pat” Gilmore, Rufus Hatch, General Horatio C. King, Frank B. Thurber, J. Amory Knox, E.B.  Harper, W.J.  Arkell, Dr. Nagle, the poet Geogheghan, Doc White, and Joseph Howard, jun.  They were the old guard of the land of Bohemia, where a minister’s voice sounded good to them if it was a voice without cant or religious hypocrisy.  I remember a letter sent by President Harrison to one of these dinners, in which, after acknowledging the receipt of an invitation to attend, he regretted being unable to be present at “so attractive an event.”