I became acquainted with it through my brother-in-law, Rev. S.L.  Mershon.  His first pastorate was at the Presbyterian Church in East Hampton, where, as a young man, I preached some of my first sermons.  East Hampton is always home to me.  When a boy in grammar-school and college I used to visit my brother-in-law and his wife, my sister Mary.  Later in life I established a summer home there myself.  I particularly recall one incident of this month’s vacation that has affected my whole life.  One day while resting at Sharon Springs, New York, walking in the Park of that place, I found myself asking the question:  “I wonder if there is any special mission for me to execute in this world?  If there is, may God show it to me!”

There soon came upon me a great desire to preach the Gospel through the secular printing-press.  I realised that the vast majority of people, even in Christian lands, never enter a church, and that it would be an opportunity of usefulness infinite if that door of publication were opened.  And so I recorded that prayer in a blank book, and offered the prayer day in and day out until the answer came, though in a way different from that which I had expected, for it came through the misrepresentation and persecution of enemies; and I have to record it for the encouragement of all ministers of the Gospel who are misrepresented, that if the misrepresentation be virulent enough and bitter enough and continuous enough, there is nothing that so widens one’s field of usefulness as hostile attack, if you are really doing the Lord’s work.  The bigger the lie told about me the bigger the demand to see and hear what I really was doing.  From one stage of sermonic publication to another the work has gone on, until week by week, and for about twenty-three years, I have had the world for my audience as no man ever had.  The syndicates inform me that my sermons go now to about twenty-five millions of people in all lands.  I mention this not in vain boast, but as a testimony to the fact that God answers prayer.  Would God I had better occupied the field and been more consecrated to the work!

The following summer, or rather early spring, I requested an extension of my vacation time, in order to carry out a plan to visit the “Old World.”  As the trustees of the church considered that the trip might be of value to the church as well as to myself, I was given “leave of absence from pastoral duties” for three months’ duty from June 18, 1870.  All that I could do had been done in the plans in constructing the new Tabernacle.  I could do nothing by staying at home.

I have crossed the Atlantic so often that the recollections of this first trip to Europe are, at this writing, merely general.  I think the most terrific impression I received was my first sight of the ocean the morning after we sailed, the most instructive were the ruins of church and abbey and palaces.  I walked up and down the stairs of Holyrood Palace, once upon a time considered one of the wonders of the world, and I marvelled that so little was left of such a wonderful place.  Ruins should be rebuilt.