almage edited several papers beginning with _The Christian at
Work_; afterwards he took charge, successively, of the _Advance, Frank
Leslie's Sunday Magazine_, and finally _The Christian Herald_, of which
he continued to be chief editor till the end of his life. He spoke and
wrote earnestly of the civilising and educational power of the press,
and felt that in availing himself of it and thereby furnishing lessons
of righteousness and good cheer to millions, he was multiplying beyond
measure his short span of life and putting years into hours. He said:
"My lecture tours seem but hand-shaking with the vast throngs whom I
have been enabled to preach to through the press."

His editorials were often wrought out in the highest style of literary
art. I am pleased to give the following estimate from an author who knew
him well: "As an editorial writer, Dr. Talmage was versatile and
prolific, and his weekly contributions on an immense variety of topics
would fill many volumes. His writing was as entertaining and pungent as
his preaching, and full of brilliant eccentricities--'Talmagisms,' as
they were called. He coined new words and invented new phrases. If the
topic was to his liking, the pen raced to keep time with the thought....
Still, with all this haste, nothing could exceed the scrupulous care he
took with his finished manuscript. He once wired from Cincinnati to his
publisher in New York instructions to change a comma in his current
sermon to a semicolon. He had detected the error while reading proof on
the train."

Dr. Talmage's personal mail was thought to be the largest of any man in
the country, outside of some of the public officers. Thousands, men and
women, appealed to him for advice in spiritual things, revealing to him
intimate family affairs, laying their hearts bare before him as before a
trusted physician of the soul. I have seen him moved to the depths of
his nature by some of these white missives bearing news of conversion to
faith in Christ wrought by his sermons; of families rent asunder united
through his words of love and broadmindedness; of mothers whose broken
hearts he had healed by leading back the prodigal son; of prisoners
whose hope in life and trust in a loving Father had been awakened by a
casual reading of some of his comforting paragraphs.

The life of Dr. Talmage was by no means the luxurious one of the man of
wealth and ease it was sometimes represented to be. He could not endure
that me