So my first settlement as pastor was in the village of Belleville, N.J.  My salary was eight hundred dollars and a parsonage.  The amount seemed enormous to me.  I said to myself:  “What! all this for one year?” I was afraid of getting worldly under so much prosperity!  I resolved to invite all the congregation to my house in groups of twenty-five each.  We [A] began, and as they were the best congregation in all the world, and we felt nothing was too good for them, we piled all the luxuries on the table.  I never completed the undertaking.  At the end of six months I was in financial despair.  I found that we not only had not the surplus of luxuries, but we had a struggle to get the necessaries.

[A] While at Belleville Dr. Talmage married Miss Mary
Avery, of Brooklyn, N.Y., by whom he had two children—­a
son, Thomas De Witt, and a daughter, Jessie.  Mrs. Talmage
was accidentally drowned in the Schuylkill River while Dr.
Talmage was pastor of the Second Reformed Church of
Philadelphia.

Although the first call I ever had was to Piermont, N.Y., my first real work began in the Reformed Church of Belleville, N.J.  I preached at Piermont in the morning, and at the Congregational meeting held in the afternoon of the same day it was resolved to invite me to become pastor.  But for the very high hill on which the parsonage was situated I should probably have accepted.  I was delighted with the congregation, and with the grand scenery of that region.

I was ordained to the Gospel Ministry and installed as pastor July 29th, 1856, my brother Goyn preaching the sermon from the text, First Corinthians iii. 12, 13.  Reverend Dr. Benjamin C. Taylor, the oldest minister present, offered the ordaining prayer, and about twenty hands were laid upon my head.  All these facts are obtained from a memorandum made by a hand that long since forgot its cunning and kindness.  The three years passed in Belleville were years of hard work.  The hardest work in a clergyman’s lifetime is during the first three years.  No other occupation or profession puts such strain upon one’s nerves and brain.  Two sermons and a lecture per week are an appalling demand to make upon a young man.  Most of the ministers never get over that first three years.  They leave upon one’s digestion or nervous system a mark that nothing but death can remove.  It is not only the amount of mental product required of a young minister, but the draft upon his sympathies and the novelty of all that he undertakes; his first sermon; his first baptism; his first communion season; his first pastoral visitation; his first wedding; his first funeral.

My first baptism was of Lily Webster, a black-eyed baby, who grew up to be as beautiful a woman as she was a child.

I baptised her.  Rev. Dr. John Dowling, of the Baptist Church, New York, preached for me and my church his great sermon on, “I saw a great multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, clothed in white robes.”  In my verdancy I feared that the Doctor, who did not believe in the baptism of infants, might take it for a personal affront that I had chosen that evening for this my first baptism.