In February, 1893, I lost an evangelical neighbour of many years—­Bishop Brooks.  He was a giant, but he died.  My mind goes back to the time when Bishop Brooks and myself were neighbours in Philadelphia.  He had already achieved a great reputation as a pulpit orator in 1870.  The first time I saw him was on a stormy night as he walked majestically up the aisle of the church to which I administered.  He had come to hear his neighbour, as afterward I often went to hear him.  What a great and genial soul he was!  He was a man that people in the streets stopped to look at, and strangers would say as he passed, “I wonder who that man is?” Of unusual height and stature, with a face beaming in kindness, once seeing him he was always remembered, but the pulpit was his throne.  With a velocity of utterance that was the despair of the swiftest stenographers, he poured forth his impassioned soul, making every theme he touched luminous and radiant.

Putting no emphasis on the mere technicalities of religion, he made his pulpit flame with its power.  He was the special inspiration of young men, and the disheartened took courage under the touch of his words and rose up healed.  It will take all time and all eternity to tell the results of his Christian utterances.  There were some who thought that there was here and there an unsafe spot in his theology.  As for ourselves we never found anything in the man or in his utterances that we did not like.

Although fully realising that I was approaching a crisis of some sort in my own career, it was with definite thankfulness for the mercies that had upheld me so long that I forged ahead.  My state of mind at this time was peaceful and contented.  I find in a note-book of this period of my life the following entry, which betrays the trend of my heart and mind during the last milestone of my ministry in Brooklyn: 

“Here I am in Madison, Wisconsin, July 23, 1893.  I have been attending Monona Lake Chautauqua, lecturing yesterday, preaching this morning.  This Sabbath afternoon I have been thinking of the goodness of God to me.  It began many years before I was born; for as far back as I can find anything concerning my ancestry, both on my father’s and mother’s sides, they were virtuous and Christian people.  Who shall estimate the value of such a pedigree?  The old cradle, as I remember it, was made out of plain boards, but it was a Christian cradle.  God has been good in letting us be born in a fair climate, neither in the rigours of frigidity nor in the scorching air of tropical regions.  Fortunate was I in being started in a home neither rich nor poor, so that I had the temptations of neither luxury nor poverty.  Fortunate in good health—­sixty years of it.  I say sixty rather than sixty-one, for I believe the first year or two of my life compassed all styles of infantile ailments, from mumps to scarlet fever.