Good-bye, great and good and splendid soul!  Good-bye, till we meet again!  I will look around for you as soon as I come, if through the pardoning grace of Christ I am so happy as to reach the place of your destination.  Meet me at the gate of the city; or under the tree of life on the bank of the river; or just inside of the door of the House of Many Mansions; or in the hall of the Temple which has no need of stellar or lunar or solar illumination, “For the Lamb is the Light thereof.”

After three years of grace and happiness at Belleville I accepted a call to a church in Syracuse.  My pastorate there, in the very midst of its most uplifting crisis, was interrupted, as I believe, by Divine orders.  The ordeal of deciding anything important in my life has always been a desperate period of anxiety.  I never have really decided for myself.  God has told me what to do.  The first great crisis of this sort came to me in Syracuse.  While living there I received a pastoral call from the Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia.  Six weeks of agony followed.

I was about 30 years of age.  The thick shock of hair with which I had been supplied, in those six weeks was thinned out to its present scarcity.  My church in Syracuse was made up of as delightful people as ever came together; but I felt that the climate of Philadelphia would be better adapted to my health, and so I was very anxious to go.  But a recent revival in my Syracuse Church, and a movement at that time on foot for extensive repairs of our building, made the question of my leaving for another pastorate very doubtful.  Six weeks of sleeplessness followed.  Every morning I combed out handfuls of hair as the result of the nervous agitation.  Then I decided to stay, and never expected to leave those kind parishioners of Syracuse.

A year afterward the call from Philadelphia was repeated, and all the circumstances having changed, I went.  But I learned, during those six weeks of uncertainty about going from Syracuse to Philadelphia, a lesson I shall never forget, and a lesson that might be useful to others in like crisis:  namely, that it is one’s duty to stay where you are until God makes it evident that you should move.

In all my life I never had one streak of good luck.  But I have had a good God watching and guiding me.

While I was living in Syracuse I delivered my first lecture.  It was a literary lecture.  My ideas of a literary lecture are very much changed from what they used to be.  I used to think that a lecture ought to be something very profound.  I began with three or four lectures of that kind in stock.  My first lecture audience was in a patient community of the town of Hudson, N.Y.  All my addresses previously had been literary.  I had made speeches on literature and patriotism, and sometimes filled the gaps when in lecture courses speakers announced failed to arrive.

But the first paid lecture was at Hudson.  The fifty dollars which I received for it seemed immense.  Indeed it was the extreme price paid anyone in those days.  It was some years later in life that I got into the lecturing field.  It was always, however, subordinate to my chief work of preaching the Gospel.