500 Selected Sermons

In Twenty Volumes

Volume 1

by

T. De Witt Talmage

Database © 2010 WORD search Corp.

Introduction

by

Clarence E. Macartney

When I was a senior at the University of Wisconsin, I heard Talmage lecture at the Monona Lake Chautauqua. How clearly I can see him now after the lapse of all these years! He stood well back from the edge of the platform, above the medium height, well-proportioned, a large powerful frame, frock coat with black string tie tucked under a lie-down collar, his hair gray and his face broad, human, and kindly. He commenced speaking with his eyes closed. The voice, although not melodious like Bryan’s, was powerful, arresting, and stirring. He began with a description of a man riding in a buckboard over the Illinois prairies in the springtime when the flowers were blooming. It was a vivid picture of the flowers of the field sweeping the bellies of the horses as the buckboard was driven across the plains. This went on for a minute or two. Then, opening his eyes, he leaped forward to the front of the platform, and with a mighty voice pronounced a sentence which I have not forgotten. There was something about the man that at once appealed to you. He had the air of friendliness, and also of complete command of the situation, as if there were no doubt at all that he would carry his audience with him, which, of course, he did. Many of those who formed their conceptions of Dr. Talmage from the unfriendly caricatures and criticisms in the newspapers had conceived an intense dislike for him; but that dislike generally disappeared when they saw the man and heard him speak. It was so with the renowned actor Joseph Jefferson. Jefferson and Talmage became intimate one winter during a stay in Florida. Jefferson recalled the famous sermon of Talmage against the theater, preached in the tabernacle at Brooklyn, and how he and other actors had gone to hear the sermon. “When I entered that church to hear your sermon, Doctor,” said Jefferson, “I hated you. When I left the church I loved you.”

Talmage was a unique and remarkable man. As his son expressed it in his memorial sermon for his father, no matter what it was that he did, he was sure to do it differently from anyone else. Talmage himself said: “Each life is different from every other life. God never repeats himself and he never intended two men to be alike.” Certainly there was never another Talmage.

T. DeWitt Talmage was born January 7, 1832, at Middlebrook, New Jersey, where his father kept a tollgate. He was the youngest of eleven children. Four of the sons became honored ministers of the gospel, one of them, John Van Nest, a distinguished missionary in China. His father and mother, like the parents of John the Baptist, were “both righteous before God” and came of a godly line. His grandparents on the Talmage side had been converted at one of Finney’s evangelistic meetings. Talmage said of his mother that when she led the family prayers she would often pray, “O Lord God, I ask ...