I have delivered about two written sermons in twenty-five years.  That farewell message was one of them.  I wanted to be careful, fair, just.  I could not escape the belief that at least seven of my predecessors who had been pushed out by unfair means had left with a lie on their lips.  Pastor and people, in dissolving relationship, had always assumed and often explicitly stated on the records that the departing minister “had been called of God” elsewhere.  If God was the author of their methods of dismissal, He ought to be ashamed of Himself.

There was no interregnum.  The Sunday following that farewell sermon I preached my first sermon as pastor of the newly organized People’s Church of New Haven.  About thirty people left the old church and joined the new.  Among them was a saintly woman, who had been a member for half a century of Pilgrim Church.  We had one man of means—­Philo Sherman Bennett, the friend of Mr. Bryan.  The opening meeting was in the Hyperion Theatre.  The creed was simple, and brevity itself:  “This church is a self-governing community for the worship of God and the service of man.”  A Jewish Rabbi read the Scriptures, a Universalist minister made an address, and a judge of the city led in prayer.  Part of my address was a series of serious questions:  “Will this movement raise the tone of society?  Will it increase mutual confidence?  Will it diminish intemperance?  Will it find the people uneducated and leave them educated?  Will the voice of its leader be lifted in the cause of justice and humanity?  Will it tend after all to elevate or lower the moral sentiments of mankind?  Will it increase the love of truth or the power of superstition or self-deception?  Will it divide or unite the world?  Will it leave the minds of men clearer and more enlightened, or will it add another element of confusion to the chaos?  These are the tests we put to this new church and to our personal lives.”

We had an old hall in the outskirts of the city, on a railroad bank.  There we opened our Sunday School and began our church activities.  I got a band of Yale men to go to work at the hall.  The son of Senator Crane, of Massachusetts, became head of the movement, but that plan was spoiled by a man of the English Lutheran persuasion, who was an instructor in Yale.  It appeared that the church of which this man was a member had been trying to rent this old hall and, not succeeding in that, they claimed the community.  This instructor complained to the Yale authorities, and without a word to me the Yale band was withdrawn.  A few weeks after the Lutherans claimed another community, and went to work in it.