When he went, my last brother went.  Stunned was I until I staggered through the corridors of the hotel in London, England, when the news came that John was dead.  If I should say all that I felt I would declare that since Paul the Apostle to the Gentiles a more faithful or consecrated man has not lifted his voice in the dark places of heathenism.  I said it while he was alive, and might as well say it now that he is dead.  He was the hero of our family.  He did not go to China to spend his days because no one in America wanted to hear him preach.  At the time of his first going to China he had a call to succeed in Brooklyn, N.Y., the Rev. Dr. Broadhead, the Chrysostom of the American pulpit, a call at a large salary; and there would have been nothing impossible to my brother in the way of religious work or Christian achievement had he tarried in his native land.  But nothing could detain him from the work to which God called him long before he became a Christian.

My reason for writing that anomalous statement is that, when a small boy in Sabbath-school, he read a library book, “The Life of Henry Martin.”  He said to my mother, “I am going to be a missionary.”  The remark at the time made no special impression.  Years after that passed on before his conversion; but when the grace of God appeared to him, and he had entered his studies for the Gospel ministry, he said one day, “Mother, do you remember that years ago I said, ’I am going to be a missionary’?” She replied, “Yes, I remember it.”  “Well,” said he, “I am going to keep my promise.”  How well he kept it millions of souls on earth and in Heaven have long since heard.  When the roll of martyrs is called before the throne, the name of John Van Nest Talmage will be called.  He worked himself to death in the cause of the world’s evangelisation.  His heart, his brain, his hand, his voice, his muscles, his nerves could do no more.  He sleeps in the cemetery of Somerville, N.J., so near his father and mother that he will face them when he arises in the resurrection of the just, and, amid a crowd of his kindred now sleeping on the right of them and on the left of them, will feel the thrill of the trumpet that wakes the dead.

You could get nothing from my brother at all.  Ask him a question to evoke what he had done for God and the Church, and his lips were as tightly shut as though they had never been opened.  Indeed, his reticence was at times something remarkable.  I took him to see President Grant at Long Branch, and though they had both been great warriors, the one fighting the battles of the Lord and the other the battles of his country, they had little to say, and there was, I thought, at the time, more silence crowded together than I ever noticed in the same amount of space before.