Thoughts of the glory of Christ are too high and too hard for us. We cannot delight in them for very long without becoming weary and turning away from them. We are unspiritual, our thoughts and desires being taken up with other things. If we would stir ourselves to believe “the things the angels desire to look into”, our spiritual understanding and strength would increase daily. We would then show more of the glory of Christ by the way we live and death itself would be welcome to us!
John Owen

Thomas Dewitt Talmage

Thomas Dewitt Talmage

Thomas Dewitt Talmage
1832-1902
American Presbyterian minister. Thomas Dewitt Talmage was a lawyer before his conversion. Upon entering the ministry, he served three Reformed churches in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, and also two Presbyterian churches in New York and Washington, D.C. After serving as a chaplain in the Union Army during the Civil War, he built a tabernacle in Brooklyn in 1870. It was burned by vandals in 1872. It was rebuilt but burned again in 1889, and again in 1894.

Talmage served as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., from 1895 until 1899. His sermons were printed in 3,500 newspapers each Sunday across America and Europe. He also edited The Christian Herald and authored more than 500 sermons, which were published as a complete set.

Preaching without the aid of notes, his oratorical powers were compared to those of George Whitefield, and his poetic expression to that of Shakespeare and Milton. Over 30,000 people received the Lord Jesus Christ as personal Saviour during Talmage’s ministry as pastor.