informed them that if they would
purchase the ground on the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Oxford Street,
and pay for it in a fortnight, and promise to build for me a church with
good acoustics and capable of seating from eighteen hundred to two
thousand auditors, I would be their pastor. Instead of turning purple in
the lips at such a bold proposal, they "staggered not at the promise
through unbelief" and in ten days they brought me the deed of the land
paid for to the uttermost dollar! I resigned Market Street Church
immediately, and on the next Sabbath morning, while the Easter bells
were ringing under a dark stormy sky, I came over and faced, for the
first time, the courageous founders of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian
Church. The dear old Market Street Church lingered on for a few years
more, bleeding at every pore, from the fatal up-town migration, and then
peacefully disbanded. The solid stone edifice was purchased by some
generous Presbyterians in the upper part of the city, who organized
there the "Church of the Sea and Land," which is standing to-day, as a
well-manned light-house amid a dense tenement-house foreign population.
The successful work that is now prosecuted there is another confirmation
of my favorite theory that the only way to reach a neighborhood crowded
with the poorer classes, is for the wealthy churches to spend money for
just such an auxiliary mission church as is now thriving in the
structure in which I spent seven happy years of my ministry.

This portion of Brooklyn to which we removed in 1860, was very sparsely
settled, and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher said to me: "I do not see how you
can find a congregation there." He lived to say to me: "You are now in
the center, and I am out on the circumference," Brooklyn was then
pre-eminently a "city of churches," and, though we had not a dozen
millionaires, it was not infested with any slums. In a population of
over three hundred thousand there was then only a single theatre, and
when one of our people was asked: "What do you do for recreation over
there?" he replied, "We go to church."

Certainly no one was ever attracted to our own modest little temporary
sanctuary by its beauty; for it was unsightly without, though very
cheerful within. Soon after we commenced the building of our present
stately edifice the startling report of cannon shook the land from sea
to sea.

"And then we saw from Sumter's wall
The star-flag of the Union fall,