Apart from his active literary and editorial work, he was now to devote himself to sermons and lectures which should have for audience the whole country.  As a consequence, on re-entering his study after his long absence, he found accumulated on his desk an immense number of invitations to preach, applications from all parts of the land.  He smiled, and expressed more than once his conviction that God’s Providence had marked out his way for him, and here was direct proof of His divine call and His fatherly love.

At a monster meeting in New York this year Dr. Talmage revived national interest in his presence and his Gospel.  Ten thousand people crowded to the Academy of Music to hear his words of encouragement and hope.  It was the twentieth anniversary of the Bowery Mission, of which Dr. Talmage was one of the founders.  “This century,” he said in part, “is to witness a great revival of religion.  Cities are to be redeemed.  Official authority can do much, but nothing can take the place of the Gospel of God....  No man goes deliberately into sin; he gets aboard the great accommodation train of Temptation, assured that it will stop at the depot of Prudence, or anywhere else he desires, to let him off.  The conductor cries:  ‘All aboard’ and off he goes.  The train goes faster and faster, and presently he wants to get off.  ‘Stop’! he calls to the conductor; but that official cries back:  ’This is the fast express and does not stop until it reaches the Grand Central Station of Smashupton.’” The sinner can be raised up, he insists.  “The Bible says God will forgive 490 times.  At your first cry He will bend down from his throne to the depths of your degradation.  Put your face to the sunrise.”

Faith in God was his armour; his shield was hope; his amulet was charity.  He harnessed the events of the world to his chariot of inspiration, and sped on his way as in earlier years.  He had become a foremost preacher of the Gospel because he preached under the spell of evangelical impulse, under the control of that remarkable faith which comes with the transformation of all converted men or women.  The stillness of the vast crowds that stood about the church doors when he addressed them briefly in the open air after services was a tribute to the spell he cast over them by the miracle of that converting grace.  He was quite unconscious of the attention he attracted outside the pulpit, on the street, in the trains.  His celebrity was not the consequence of his endeavours to obtain it, nor was it won, as some declared, by studied dramatic effects; it was the result of his moments of inspiration, combined with continual and almost superhuman mental labour—­labour that was a fountain of perennial delight to him, but none the less labour.