CHAPTER XV.

AT THE SUMMIT OF HIS POWERS AND PRODUCTIVITY.

(1875-1888.)

A WONDERFUL PREACHER.-SOME CHARACTERIZATIONS OF HIM IN THE PULPIT-A FAITHFUL PASTOR.-A PARTIAL SUMMARY OF HIS ACHIEVEMENTS IN NEW ORLEANS DURING THE FIRST TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. CALL TO THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH IN COLUMBIA, S. C., AND TO THE CHAIR OF PASTORAL THEOLOGY IN THE COLUMBIA SEMINARY.-HISTORY OF HIS NEW ORLEANS CHARGE IN THIS PERIOD.— THE SESSION.-SERVICE IN OTHER COURTS.-AN ADVOCATE OF THE CO-OPERATIVE ALLIANCE WITH THE DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH.AGITATOR IN BEHALF OF SABBATH OBSERVANCE.-REACHING FORTH THE HAND TO THE OLD CATHOLICS.-CONTINUES HIS OPPOSITION TO "FRATERNAL RELATIONS."-Opposes "ORGANIC UNION."-OPPOSITION TO OUR CHURCH'S GOING INTO THE PAN-PRESBYTERIAN ALLIANCE.— LETTER TO DR. STUART ROBINSON.

D

R. PALMER was now at the very zenith of his powers as a preacher. He had exercised his great faculties actively and according to well-considered laws ever since he had consecrated himself to God's service in the ministry of the Gospel of His Son. He had crossed the threshold of his forty-first year growing. He crosses, not far along in the period now before us, his sixtieth year line, without the slightest indication of decadence; he crosses it growing. He was better fitted for preaching during these fourteen years than he had ever been before. In addition to the maturity of mind he had all the interpreting force that comes of schooling in sorrows. He was competent now in very deed to be a master of assemblies.

His self-possession in the pulpit was phenomenal. His people had signal illustrations of it from time to time. On one Sunday night not far from the beginning of this period,1 "Dr. Palmer was preaching in his pulpit in his usual style, a colored woman, in the gallery, following his discourse with great apparent interest. Suddenly, during the earnest and solemn appeal, this woman threw up her hands above her head, and shouted, 'Glory, glory, glory, hallelujah!' It was an un'This incident may have occurred in the preceding period.

looked for interruption, and some of the members of the church made toward her, with the intention of removing her from the building; but Dr. Palmer, looking up toward her, said, very firmly: 'Be quiet; don't do that again;' and directing the gentlemen not to trouble her, quietly proceeded with his sermon."

Far toward the end of our present period, one Sunday night in the winter of 1886, as he was preaching to a large audience, the congregation was suddenly startled by the sound of a voice, loud and musical, breaking in upon the preacher's words. It proceeded from a lady who had risen in one of the pews; she sang in a high key, with power and accuracy, the first strain of the Aria from Handel's Messiah, "I know that my Redeemer liveth." Everyone turned to find out the source of the interruption. Dr. Palmer looked at her and said to her in a peremptory way: "That will do; sit down now." She sat down, and the Doctor went on as though nothing had occurred." With his intellectual, moral and spiritual furnishing were united a great variety of other gifts and acquirements, including a magnificent voice, easily managed, seeming never to grow old, capable of expressing every kind, and every degree, of sentiment; genius in action and bearing; and a superb diction.

The matter of his preaching was rich, full, and as varied as he saw the needs of his people. He aimed at the inculcation of the word of God in the whole length and breadth of its Calvinistic interpretation. Beginning in August, 1875, some of his sermons, one sermon each Sabbath, were taken by a phonographer, written and submitted to him for revision and then published. They were sold at twenty cents a number. This series was kept up for fifty-two weeks. The same enterprising phonographer continued the publication through a second year; and lowered his price to ten cents a number, so liberally did his people and others buy them. In the year 1883, a similar attempt was made and conducted for a good many weeks. Besides, many sermons found their way into the newspapers.

A study of these sermons, and the briefs which have never been published, shows that, on rare occasions, he was inaccurate in thought, or wanting in grasp; and that very rarely he betrayed clearly, though not offensively, a consciousness of his great reputation. But they also show that he possessed an

2

These incidents were furnished by Dr. John W. Caldwell.

amazing mastery of Scripture-of the ipsissima verba of Scripture, so that he could quote from almost any part of it at will; that he possessed a masterful grasp of the Christian system as set forth in the Westminster Standards; and that in expounding the truth of any one text he was wont to regard it in its place as a part of that great system; that he was a noble and fearless expounder of the law, a most persuasive preacher of the Gospel, a man of ability to construe Bible teaching in easily intelligible terms of current common life, of infinite breadth and variety of illustration and argument, with a genius for planning discourses, whether in simple or complex fashion so as to exhaust the meaning of his text. He was as fond of series of sermons as ever. For example, April 1, 1877, he preached on "Truth, the Law of the Intellect;" April 8, on "Justice, the Law of the Conscience;" April 15, on "Love, the Law of the Heart;" April 22, on "Obedience, the Law of the Will." Between January 27, and April 28, 1878, he delivered ten lectures on the first twenty-three verses of the Eleventh Chapter of Hebrews. Between October 22, 1882, and January 7, 1883, he gave twelve lectures on the first six chapters of the Book of Acts. He was, as appears from all these sermons, a man of splendid pictorial powers, and an almost absolute master of the pathetic.

He rarely, he almost never, wrote a sermon prior to its first delivery. Thereafter when asked to do so, he would, sometimes, reduce a sermon to written form. His manner of preparation continued to be to form an outline more or less full, usually rather full when time permitted; and then, walking the diagonal in his study to think it through and through. When he came to the pulpit, he came with neither scrap nor line, and gave re-birth to his thought with all spontaneity and freshness.

The impression made, during this period, upon his auditors by Dr. Palmer as a minister of worship may be conveniently set forth by calling some of those who heard him to the witness stand. The Rev. Wm. Frost Bishop wrote, February 11, 1885, from New Orleans, to the St. Louis Presbyterian:

"Sunday morning, upon entering the Church, I found it crowded to the very door. Approaching the sexton or usher, I said: 'Please give me a good seat: I am a stranger here.'

"To this he replied: 'No seats are left, except the chairs in front of the pulpit, and they are for gentlemen accompanied by ladies. You had better go into the gallery.'

"Finding all seats in the gallery occupied, I walked boldly forward and seated myself on the steps in the left gallery and within sixty feet of the speaker.

"Dr. Palmer was reading an account of our Lord's passion, as given in John's Gospel at the eighteenth chapter.

"There was a peculiar tenderness in his voice, and I was early persuaded that the preacher had been in the sick room a great deal during the past week, or else in the house of affliction.

"In the prayer which followed the reading, he prayed very beautifully, and touchingly for one of his flock, 'smitten with a disease from which there was no earthly escape.'

"He offered special petitions that she might be reconciled to the Divine will and made ready for the change. Nor did he forget the little children, who should lose by this providence a mother's care. There was something deeply touching in his allusion to these little

ones.

"While the collection was being taken up, I looked around the audience. There were over one thousand five hundred persons present. “Dr. Palmer announced the following as his text: 'The cup which my Father gave me, shall I not drink it?" John 18: 11. He wore a vest cut very low, exposing a great deal of white linen, and the coat was left unbuttoned. His enunciation was distinct and his delivery deliberate. This calmness of manner continued till the chariot wheels took fire toward the close of the sermon, which lasted an hour and ten minutes.

"The great preacher began his sermon in the simplest manner possible, describing the closing conflict of our Lord's life, with occasional flashes of interpretation which showed that he had studied the context carefully and also that a storm of eloquence was gathering.

"About the close of his introduction, a passing band of music so filled the house with its din and noise that the speaker's voice was scarcely audible. This lasted for a minute or more, but Dr. Palmer did not seem to notice it. The audience, too, behaved remarkably well.

"The subject was treated first in reference to Christ, the motives which lay back of his submission, such as the cup coming from the Father and none else-its being a cup and therefore a limited measure of suffering-its being a token of a covenant relation-the suffering being the vestibule of the glory which should follow. These and like considerations were presented with great power. He also unfolded for us the pregnant comment of Dean Alford, that 'the cup here spoken of had allusion, no doubt, to the cup of the Lord's Supper.' The old economy, with the paschal lamb, died in the act of giving life to the new dispensation of the Christian Sacrament.

"The second application of the subject was to the sufferings of be