My giving of organs to churches came very early in my career, I having presented to less than a hundred members of the Swedenborgian Church in Allegheny which my father favored, an organ, after declining to contribute to the building of a new church for so few.  Applications from other churches soon began to pour in, from the grand Catholic Cathedral of Pittsburgh down to the small church in the country village, and I was kept busy.  Every church seemed to need a better organ than it had, and as the full price for the new instrument was paid, what the old one brought was clear profit.  Some ordered organs for very small churches which would almost split the rafters, as was the case with the first organ given the Swedenborgians; others had bought organs before applying but our check to cover the amount was welcome.  Finally, however, a rigid system of giving was developed.  A printed schedule requiring answers to many questions has now to be filled and returned before action is taken.  The department is now perfectly systematized and works admirably because we graduate the gift according to the size of the church.

Charges were made in the rigid Scottish Highlands that I was demoralizing Christian worship by giving organs to churches.  The very strict Presbyterians there still denounce as wicked an attempt “to worship God with a kist fu’ o’ whistles,” instead of using the human God-given voice.  After that I decided that I should require a partner in my sin, and therefore asked each congregation to pay one half of the desired new organ.  Upon this basis the organ department still operates and continues to do a thriving business, the demand for improved organs still being great.  Besides, many new churches are required for increasing populations and for these organs are essential.

I see no end to it.  In requiring the congregation to pay one half the cost of better instruments, there is assurance of needed and reasonable expenditure.  Believing from my own experience that it is salutary for the congregation to hear sacred music at intervals in the service and then slowly to disperse to the strains of the reverence-compelling organ after such sermons as often show us little of a Heavenly Father, I feel the money spent for organs is well spent.  So we continue the organ department.[53]

[Footnote 53:  The “organ department” up to 1919 had given 7689 organs to as many different churches at a cost of over six million dollars.]

Of all my work of a philanthropic character, my private pension fund gives me the highest and noblest return.  No satisfaction equals that of feeling you have been permitted to place in comfortable circumstances, in their old age, people whom you have long known to be kind and good and in every way deserving, but who from no fault of their own, have not sufficient means to live respectably, free from solicitude as to their mere maintenance.  Modest sums insure this freedom.  It surprised me to find how numerous were those who