ting crisis, was interrupted, as I believe, by Divine orders.
The ordeal of deciding anything important in my life has always been a
desperate period of anxiety. I never have really decided for myself. God
has told me what to do. The first great crisis of this sort came to me
in Syracuse. While living there I received a pastoral call from the
Second Reformed Church of Philadelphia. Six weeks of agony followed.

I was about 30 years of age. The thick shock of hair with which I had
been supplied, in those six weeks was thinned out to its present
scarcity. My church in Syracuse was made up of as delightful people as
ever came together; but I felt that the climate of Philadelphia would be
better adapted to my health, and so I was very anxious to go. But a
recent revival in my Syracuse Church, and a movement at that time on
foot for extensive repairs of our building, made the question of my
leaving for another pastorate very doubtful. Six weeks of sleeplessness
followed. Every morning I combed out handfuls of hair as the result of
the nervous agitation. Then I decided to stay, and never expected to
leave those kind parishioners of Syracuse.

A year afterward the call from Philadelphia was repeated, and all the
circumstances having changed, I went. But I learned, during those six
weeks of uncertainty about going from Syracuse to Philadelphia, a lesson
I shall never forget, and a lesson that might be useful to others in
like crisis: namely, that it is one's duty to stay where you are until
God makes it evident that you should move.

In all my life I never had one streak of good luck. But I have had a
good God watching and guiding me.

While I was living in Syracuse I delivered my first lecture. It was a
literary lecture. My ideas of a literary lecture are very much changed
from what they used to be. I used to think that a lecture ought to be
something very profound. I began with three or four lectures of that
kind in stock. My first lecture audience was in a patient community of
the town of Hudson, N.Y. All my addresses previously had been literary.
I had made speeches on literature and patriotism, and sometimes filled
the gaps when in lecture courses speakers announced failed to arrive.

But the first paid lecture was at Hudson. The fifty dollars which I
received for it seemed immense. Indeed it was the extreme price paid
anyone in those days. It was some years later in life that I got into
the lecturing field. It was alw