unate American city. From Brooklyn I helped to send temporary
relief. With a wooden box in my hand I, with others, collected from the
bounty of that vast meeting in the Academy of Music. The exact amount
paid over by our relief committee in all was $95,905. There was no end
to the demand upon one's energy in all directions.

I was called upon in September, 1888, to lay the corner stone of the
First Presbyterian Church at Far-Rockaway, and amid the imposing
ceremonies I predicted the great future of Long Island. It seemed to me
that Long Island would some day be the London of America, filled with
the most prominent churches of the country.

While in the plans of others I was an impulse at least towards success,
in my own plans, how often I have been scourged and beaten to earth. As
it had been before, so it was in this zenith of my personal progress. To
my amazement, chagrin and despair, on the morning of October 13, 1889,
our beautiful church was again burned to the ground.

THE FOURTEENTH MILESTONE

1889-1891

For fifteen years, to a large part of the public, I had been an
experiment in church affairs. In 1889 I had caught up with the world and
the things I had been doing and thinking and hoping became suitable for
the world. In the retrospect of those things I had left behind what
gratitude I felt for their strife and struggle! A minister of the Gospel
is not only a sentinel of divine orders, he must also have deep
convictions of his authority to resist attack in his own way, by his own
force, with his own strength and faith. When, on June 3, 1873, I laid
the corner-stone of the new tabernacle, I dedicated the sacred building
as a stronghold against rationalism and humanitarianism. I knew then
that this statement was regarded as questionable orthodoxy, and I myself
had become the curious symbol of a new religion. Still I pursued my
course, an independent sentry on the outskirts of the old religious
camping-ground, but inspired with the converting grace I had received in
my boyhood, my duty was clearly not so much a duty of regulations as it
was a conception, a sympathy, a command to the Christian needs of the
human race.

When the first Tabernacle was consumed by fire my utterances were
criticised and my enthusiasm to rebuild it was misconstrued. My
convictions then were the same, they have always been the same. To me it
seemed that God's most vehement utterances had been in flames of fire.
The most tre