hill on which the parsonage was situated I should
probably have accepted. I was delighted with the congregation, and with
the grand scenery of that region.

I was ordained to the Gospel Ministry and installed as pastor July 29th,
1856, my brother Goyn preaching the sermon from the text, First
Corinthians iii. 12, 13. Reverend Dr. Benjamin C. Taylor, the oldest
minister present, offered the ordaining prayer, and about twenty hands
were laid upon my head. All these facts are obtained from a memorandum
made by a hand that long since forgot its cunning and kindness. The
three years passed in Belleville were years of hard work. The hardest
work in a clergyman's lifetime is during the first three years. No other
occupation or profession puts such strain upon one's nerves and brain.
Two sermons and a lecture per week are an appalling demand to make upon
a young man. Most of the ministers never get over that first three
years. They leave upon one's digestion or nervous system a mark that
nothing but death can remove. It is not only the amount of mental
product required of a young minister, but the draft upon his sympathies
and the novelty of all that he undertakes; his first sermon; his first
baptism; his first communion season; his first pastoral visitation; his
first wedding; his first funeral.

My first baptism was of Lily Webster, a black-eyed baby, who grew up to
be as beautiful a woman as she was a child.

I baptised her. Rev. Dr. John Dowling, of the Baptist Church, New York,
preached for me and my church his great sermon on, "I saw a great
multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and
people, and tongues, clothed in white robes." In my verdancy I feared
that the Doctor, who did not believe in the baptism of infants, might
take it for a personal affront that I had chosen that evening for this
my first baptism.

[Illustration: DR. TALMAGE IN HIS FIRST CHURCH, BELLEVILLE, NEW JERSEY.]

Sometimes at the baptism of children, while I have held up one hand in
prayer, I have held up the other in amazement that the parents should
have weighted the babe with such a dissonant and repulsive nomenclature.
I have not so much wondered that some children should cry out at the
Christening font, as that others with such smiling faces should take a
title that will be the burden of their lifetime. It is no excuse
because they are Scriptural names to call a child Jehoiakim, or Tiglath
Pileser. I baptised one b