s in a small congregation; he has more time for study, a better
chance to become intimately acquainted with individual characters, and
also a smaller audience to face. The first congregation that I was
called to take charge of, in Burlington, N.J. contained about forty
families. Three or four of these were wealthy and cultivated, the rest
were plain mechanics, with a few gardeners and coachmen. I made my
sermons to suit the comprehension of the gardeners and coachmen at the
end of the house, leaving the cultivated portion to gain what they could
from the sermon on its way. One of the wealthy attendants was Mr.
Charles Chauncey, a distinguished Philadelphia lawyer, who spent the
summer months in Burlington. Once after I had delivered a very simple
and earnest sermon on the "Worth of the Soul," I went home and said to
myself, "Lawyer Chauncey must have thought that was only a camp-meeting
exhortation." He met me during the week and to my astonishment he said
to me: "My young friend, I thank you for that sermon last Sunday; it had
the two best qualities of preaching--simplicity and down-right
earnestness. If I had a student in my law-office who was not more in
earnest to win his first ten dollar suit before a Justice of the Peace
than some men seem to be in trying to save souls I would kick such a
student out of my office." That eminent lawyer's remark did me more
service than any month's study in the Seminary. It taught me that
cultivated audiences relished plain, simple scriptural truths as much as
did the illiterate, and that down-right earnestness to save souls hides
a multitude of sins in raw young preachers.

Another instance that occurred in my early ministry did me a world of
good. I was invited to preach in the Presbyterian Church at Saratoga
Springs about two years after I was licensed. My topics were "Trusting
Jesus Christ" in the morning and "The Day of Judgment" at the evening
service. The next day, when I was buying my ticket at the railway
station to leave the town, a plain man (who was a baker in the village)
said to me: "Are you not the young man who spoke yesterday in our
meeting-house?" I told him that I was. "Well," said he, "I never felt
more sorry for any one in my life." "Why so?" I asked. His answer was:
"I said to myself, there is a youth just out of the Seminary, and he
does not know that a Saratoga audience is made up of highly educated
people from all parts of the land; but I have noticed that if