could not join in the merriment of the holidays. To
those I recommend Whittier's poem, in which he celebrates the rescue of
two Quakers who had been fined L10 for attending church instead of going
to a Quaker Meeting House, and not being able to pay the fine were first
imprisoned and then sold as slaves, but no ship master consenting to
carry them into slavery they were liberated. The closing stanza of this
poem is worth remembering:--

"Now, let the humble ones arise,
The poor in heart be glad,
And let the mourning ones again
With robes of praise be clad;
For He who cooled the furnace,
And smoothed the stormy wave,
And turned the Chaldean lions,
Is mighty still to save."

The new Tabernacle more than met our expectations. From the day we
opened it, it was a great blessing. It seated 6,000 persons, and when
crowded held 7,000. There was still some debt on the building, for the
entire enterprise had cost us about $400,000. There were regrets
expressed that we did not follow the elaborate custom of some
fashionable churches in these days and introduce into our services
operatic music. I preferred the simple form of sacred music--a cornet
and organ. Everybody should get his call from God, and do his work in
his own way. I never had any sympathy with dogmatics. There is no church
on earth in which there is more freedom of utterance than in the
Presbyterian church.

[Illustration: THE THIRD BROOKLYN TABERNACLE.]

We were in the midst of a religious conflict on many sacred questions in
1892. There came upon us a plague called Higher Criticism. My idea of it
was that Higher Criticism meant lower religion. The Bible seemed to me
entirely satisfactory. The chief hindrance to the Gospel was this
everlasting picking at the Bible by people who pretended to be its
friends, but who themselves had never been converted. The Higher
Criticism was only a flurry. The world started as a garden and it will
close as a garden. That there may be no false impression of the sublime
destiny of the world as I see it, let me add that it is not a garden of
idleness and pleasure, but a vineyard in which all must labour from
early morning till the glory of sundown wraps us in its revival robes of
golden splendour.

What a changing, hurrying world of desperate means it is. What a mirage
of towering ambition is the whole of life! I have so often wondered why
men, great men of heart and brain, should ever