“Now, let the humble ones arise,
      The poor in heart be glad,
    And let the mourning ones again
      With robes of praise be clad;
    For He who cooled the furnace,
      And smoothed the stormy wave,
    And turned the Chaldean lions,
      Is mighty still to save.”

The new Tabernacle more than met our expectations.  From the day we opened it, it was a great blessing.  It seated 6,000 persons, and when crowded held 7,000.  There was still some debt on the building, for the entire enterprise had cost us about $400,000.  There were regrets expressed that we did not follow the elaborate custom of some fashionable churches in these days and introduce into our services operatic music.  I preferred the simple form of sacred music—­a cornet and organ.  Everybody should get his call from God, and do his work in his own way.  I never had any sympathy with dogmatics.  There is no church on earth in which there is more freedom of utterance than in the Presbyterian church.

[Illustration:  The third Brooklyn tabernacle.]

We were in the midst of a religious conflict on many sacred questions in 1892.  There came upon us a plague called Higher Criticism.  My idea of it was that Higher Criticism meant lower religion.  The Bible seemed to me entirely satisfactory.  The chief hindrance to the Gospel was this everlasting picking at the Bible by people who pretended to be its friends, but who themselves had never been converted.  The Higher Criticism was only a flurry.  The world started as a garden and it will close as a garden.  That there may be no false impression of the sublime destiny of the world as I see it, let me add that it is not a garden of idleness and pleasure, but a vineyard in which all must labour from early morning till the glory of sundown wraps us in its revival robes of golden splendour.

What a changing, hurrying world of desperate means it is.  What a mirage of towering ambition is the whole of life!  I have so often wondered why men, great men of heart and brain, should ever die out, though they pass on to live forever under brighter skies.

In January, 1892, Congressman William E. Robinson was buried from our church, and in February of the same month Spurgeon died in England.  Though men may live at swords’ points with each other they die in peace.  This last forgetfulness is some of the beautiful moss that grows on the ruins of poor human nature.

Congressman Robinson was among the gifted men of his time.  His friends were giants, his work was constructive, his pen an instrument of literary force.  He landed in America with less than a sovereign in his pocket, and achieved prominence in national and State affairs.  I knew him well and respected him.

There is an affinity of souls on earth and doubtless in heaven.  We seek those who are our kindred souls when we reach there.  In this respect I always feel a sense of gratitude, of cheerfulness for those who have passed on.  My old friend, Charles H. Spurgeon, in February, 1892, made his last journey; and I am sure that the first whom he picked out in heaven were the souls of Jonathan Edwards and John Calvin—­two men of tremendous evangelism.  I first met Spurgeon in London in 1872.