T. De Witt Talmage (Great pulpit masters)

Excerpt: ...Charles A. Moore, Mr. William B. Williams, Mr. Ethan Allen Doty, Mr. James S. Case, Mr. T.L. Woodruff. It was a social innovation then to arrange a gathering of this sort at 11 a.m. and call it a breakfast. It came from England. Mr. Lodge was only in town on a visit for a few days, chiefly, I think, to attend the annual dinner of the "Sunrise Sons," as the members of the New England society were called. As I read these names again, how big some of them look now, in the world's notbook of celebrities. Some of them were just beginning to learn the pleasant taste of ambitious careers. Most of them had discovered that ambition was the gift of hard work. There is more health in work than in any medicine I ever heard of. Work is the only thing that keeps people alive. Whatever posterity may proclaim for me, I always had the reputation of being a worker. Perhaps for this reason I became the object of a microscopic investigation before the people in 1888. It was the first time in my life that any notable attention had been taken of me in my own country, that was not a personal notoriety over some conflict of the hour. Whenever the American newspaper begins to describe your home life with an air of analysis that is not libellous you are among the famous. It took me a little while to understand this. A man's private life is of such indifferent character to himself, unless he be an official representative of the people, that I never quite appreciated the importance given to mine, at this time, in Brooklyn. Chiefly because I had made money as a writer, my fellow-citizens were curious to know how, in the clerical profession, it could be made. Articles appeared constantly in the newspapers with headlines like these