soul-saving church. Pardon for all sin! Comfort for all trouble! Eternal
life for all the dead!

Moral conditions in the cities of New York and Brooklyn were deplorably
bad during the first few years I went there to preach. There was an
onslaught of bad literature and stage immorality. For instance, there
was a lady who came forth as an authoress under the assumed name of
George Sand. She smoked cigars. She dressed like a man. She wrote in
style ardent and eloquent, mighty in its gloom, terrible in its
unchastity, vivid in its portraiture, damnable in its influence, putting
forth an evil which has never relaxed, but has hundreds of copyists. Yet
so much worse were many French books that came to America than anything
George Sand ever wrote, that if she were alive now she might be thought
almost a reformer. What an importation of unclean theatrical stuff was
brought to our shores at that time! And yet professors of religion
patronised such things. I remember particularly the arrival of a foreign
actress of base morals. She came intending to make a tour of the States,
but the remaining decency of our cities rose up and cancelled her
contracts, and drove her back from the American stage, a woman fit for
neither continent. I hope I was instrumental to some degree in her
banishment. We were crude in our morals then. I hope we are not merely
civilised in them to-day. I hope we understand how to live better than
we did then.

Scarcely a year after the final dedication of our Tabernacle in 1871 it
was completely burned, just before a morning Sabbath service in
December, 1872.

I remember that Sabbath morning. I was coming to the church, when I saw
the smoke against the sky. I was living in an outlying section of the