In the early part of November, 1877, President Hayes offered to Colonel Robert Ingersoll the appointment of Minister to Germany.  The President was a Methodist, and perhaps he thought that was a grand solution of Ingersollism.  It was a mirthful event of the hour—­the joke of the administration.  Germany was the birthplace of what was then modern infidelity, Colonel Ingersoll had been filling the land with belated infidelism.

On the stage of the Academy of Music in Brooklyn he had attacked the memory of Tom Paine, assaulted the character of Rev. Dr. Prime, one of my neighbours, the Nestor of religious journalism, and on that same stage expressed his opinion that God was a great Ghost.  This action of President Hayes kept me smiling for a week—­I appreciated the joke among others.

During this month the American Stage suffered the loss of three celebrities:  Edwin Adams, George L. Fox, and E.L.  Davenport.  While the Theatre never interested me, and I never entered one, I cannot criticise the dead.  Four years before in the Tabernacle I preached a sermon against the Theatre.  I saw there these men, sitting in pews in front of me, and that was the only time.  They were taking notes of my discourse, to which they made public replies on the stage of the Chestnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, and on other stages at the close of their performances.  Whatever they may have said of me, I stood uncovered in the presence of the dead, while the curtain of the great future went up on them.  My sympathy was with the destitute households left behind.  Public benefits relieved this.  I would to God clergymen were as liberal to the families of deceased clergymen as play-actors to the families of dead play-actors.  What a toilsome life, the play-actor’s!  On the 25th of March, 1833, Edmund Kean, sick and exhausted, trembled on to the English stage for the last time, when he acted in the character of Othello.  The audience rose and cheered, and the waving of hats and handkerchiefs was bewildering, and when he came to the expression, “Farewell!  Othello’s occupation’s gone!” his chin fell on his breast, and he turned to his son and said:  “O God, I am dying! speak to them Charles,” and the audience in sympathy cried, “Take him off! take him off!” and he was carried away to die.  Poor Edmund Kean!  When Schiller, the famous comedian, was tormented with toothache, some one offered to draw the tooth.  “No,” said he, “but on the 10th of June, when the house closes, you may draw the tooth, for then I shall have nothing to eat with it.”  The impersonation of character is often the means of destroying health.  Moliere, the comedian, acted the sick man until it proved fatal to him.  Madame Clarion accounts for her premature old age by the fact that she had been obliged so often on the stage to enact the griefs and distresses of others.  Mr. Bond threw so much earnestness into the tragedy of “Zarah,” that he fainted and died.  The life of the actor and actress is wearing and full of privation and annoyance, as is any life that depends upon the whims of the public for success.