was a railroad king, and they were not popular with the masses in
1885-6. And yet, the Grand Central Depot in New York and the Union Depot
in Philadelphia, were the palaces where railroad enterprise admitted the
public to the crowning luxury of the age. Men of ordinary means, of
ordinary ability, could not have achieved these things. And yet it was
necessary to keep armed men in the cemetery to protect Mr. Vanderbilt's
remains. This sort of thing had happened before. Winter quarters were
built near his tomb, for the shelter of a special constabulary. Since
A.T. Stewart's death, there had been no certainty as to where his
remains were. Abraham Lincoln's sepulchre was violated. Only a week
before Mr. Vanderbilt's death, the Phelps family vault at Binghamton,
New York, was broken into. Pinkerton detectives surrounded Mr.
Vanderbilt's body on Staten Island. Wickedness was abroad in all
directions, and there were but fifteen years of the nineteenth century
left in which to redeem the past.

In the summer of 1886, Doctor Pasteur's inoculations against
hydrophobia, and Doctor Ferron's experiments with cholera, following
many years after Doctor Jenner's inoculations against small-pox, were
only segments of the circle which promised an ultimate cure for all the
diseases flesh is heir to. Miracles were amongst us again. I had much
more interest in these medical discoveries than I had in inventions,
locomotive or bellicose. We required no inventions to take us faster
than the limited express trains. We needed no brighter light than
Edison's. A new realm was opening for the doctors. Simultaneously, with
the gleam of hope for a longer life, there appeared in Brooklyn an
impudent demand, made by a combination of men known as the Brewers'
Association. They wanted more room for their beer. The mayor was asked
to appoint a certain excise commissioner who was in favour of more beer
gardens than we already had. They wanted to rule the city from their
beer kegs. In my opinion, a beer garden is worse than a liquor saloon,
because there were thousands of men and women who would enter a beer
garden who would not enter a saloon. The beer gardens merely prepare new
victims for the eventual sacrifice of alcoholism. Brooklyn was in danger
of becoming a city of beer gardens, rather than a city of churches.

On January 24, 1886, the seventeenth year of my pastorate of the
Brooklyn Tabernacle was celebrated. It was an hour for practical proof
to m