niversaries as the Broadway Tabernacle. It
was large and social and central. When that place was torn down, the
anniversaries began their travels. Going some morning out of the warm
sunshine into some cathedral-looking place, they got the chills, and under
the dark stained glass everything looked blue. In the afternoon they would
enter some great square hall where everything was formal.

It is almost impossible to have a genial and successful meeting in a square
hall. When in former days the country pastor said to his congregation,
"Meet me at the New York anniversaries," they all knew where to go; but
after the old Broadway Tabernacle went down, the aforesaid congregation
might have looked in five or six places and not found their minister. The
New York anniversaries died on the street between the old Tabernacle and
St. Paul's Methodist Cathedral.

Prolix reports also helped to kill the patient. Nothing which was not in
its nature immortal could have survived these. The secretary would read
till he got out of wind, and would then say that the remainder of the
report would be found in the printed copies in the pews. The speakers
following had the burden of galvanizing an exhausted meeting, and the
Christian man who attended the anniversary on retiring that evening had the
nightmare in the shape of a portly secretary sitting astride his chest
reading from a huge scroll of documents.

Diluted Christian oratory also helped to kill the anniversaries. The men
whom we heard in our boyhood on the Broadway platform believed in a whole
Bible, and felt that if the gospel did not save the world nothing ever
would; consequently, they spoke in blood-red earnestness and made the place
quake with their enthusiasm. There came afterward a weak-kneed stock of
ministers who thought that part of the Bible was true, if they were not
very much mistaken, and that, on the whole, religion was a good thing for
most people, certainly if they had weak constitutions, and that man could
be easily saved if we could get the phrenologist to fix up his head, and
the gymnasium to develop his muscle, and the minister to coax him out of
his indiscretions. Well, the anniversaries could not live on pap and
confectionery, and so they died for lack of strong meat.

But the day of resurrection will come. Mark that! The tide of Bible
evangelism will come up again. We may be dead, but our children will see
it. New York will be thronged with men and women who wi