Weekly expositor. (Brockway Centre, Mich.) 1882-1894, 1893-04-28

New York in its better mood! Strang-
ers have not seen New York until they
have seen Brooklyn. The East river
is the chasm in which our merchants
drop their cares and their anXieties
and their business troubles, and by the
time they have greeted their families
in the home circle, they have forgot
ten all about Wall Street and Broad
way and the shambles. If they com
nit business sins in New York during
the day, they come over to brooklyn
TO repent of them!
Everybody comes here. Stand at
the bridge entrance or at the ferry
gates on Sabbath morning at 10
o'clock, or Sabbath evening at z
o'clock, and you see North, South
East, West-Europe, Asia, Africa, New
Zealand, notwithstanding to Brook
Ign to spend the Sabbath, or part of
it in the persons OF their representa-
tives. Some of them fresh from the
sea. They have just landed, and they
want to seek the house of God publicly
to thank the Lord for their deliverance
from cyclone and fog-banks off New
foundland. Every song sung, every
prayer offered, every sermon preached
in New York and Brooklyn and all
along this sea-coast, IN some shape
goes all round the world. A Brooklyn
passionate is at the Gr,a test altitude of
conspi.uity.
Again L remark that a Brooklyn
pastorate is characterized by brevity.
| bethinE myself of but three ministers
of the gospel now preaching here who
were preaching when | came to Brook
Ign. Most of the pulpits around me
have changed seven or eight times
since my arrival.
Sometimes the pastorate has been
brief for one reason, and sometimes
for another reason. Sometimes the
ministers of the Gospel have been too
goot for this wo Id, and Heaven has
transplanted them. Sometimes they
changed places by the decree of Their
denomination. Sometimes they came
with great blare of trumpets, propos-
ing TO carry everything before them,
and got eXtingu shed before they were
distinguished! Some got preached out
in two or three years, and told the
people all they knew! Some with
holy speed did in short time work
which it takes a great many years
to do.
Whether for good or bad reasons, a
Brooklyn pastorate is characterized by
brevity; not much of the old plan by
which Il minister of the Gospel bap-
TIED an infant, then received him into
the church, after he had become an
adult married him, baptized his chill
dren, married them, and lived on long
enough to bury almost everybody but
himself. Glorious old pastorates they
were. Some of us remember them
DIR. Spring, Peter Labaugh, Dominic
Zabriskie, Daniel Waldo, Abram
Halsey. When the snow melted
from their foreheads it revealed
the flowers of an unfading coronal.
Pastorates of thirty, forty, fifty, fifty
five years continuance. Some of them
had to be helped into the pulpit or
into the carriage, they were SO old and
decrepit; but when the Lord S chariot S
halted one day in front of the old par
sonage, they stepped in vigorous as an
athlete, and as we saw the wheels of
fire whirling through the gates o the
sunset we all cried out, My father,
my father. the chariots of Israel and
the horsemen thereof.
remark again: n Brooklyn pastor
ate is characterized by its happiness.
No city under the sun where people
take such good care of their ministers,
in proportion as the world outside
may curse, "a congregation stands close
up by the man whom they believe in,
Brooklyn society has for its foundation
two elements-the Puritanic which
always means quiet Sabbath; and
the Hollandish, which means a wor-
shipful people. On the top OF this an
admixture of all nationalities-the
brawny Scot, the solid English, the
vivacious Irish, the polite French, the
philosophic German; and, in all this
intermingling of population, the uni
versal dominant theory that n man
can do as he pleases, providing he
doesn't disturb anybody else.
A delightful climate. While 1t is
hard on weak threats, for the most of
us it is bracing. Not an atmosphere
made up of the discharged gases of
chemical factories, or the miasms of
swamps, but coming painting right off
three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean
before anybody else has had a chance
TO breathe it! All through the city a
society of kind, genial, generous, sym
pathetic people. How they fly to you
when you are in trouble. How they
watch over you when you are sick.
How tender they are with you when
you have buried your dead. Brooklyn
is good place to live in, good place
to die in, a good place TO be buried in,
a good place to rise in the beautiful
resurrection.
In such a city l have been permitted
TO have twenty-four years of pastorate.
During these years how many heart
breaks, how many losses, how many
bereavements! Hardly a family of the
church that has not been struck with
sorrow. But God has sustained you
in the past, and he will sustain you
in the future. | exhort you to be of
good cheer, o thou of the broken
heart Weeping may endure for a
night, but Joy cometh in the morn
ing" / wish over every door of this
church we might have written the
word sympathy" sympathy for all
the young.
We must crowd them in here by
thousands, and propose radiant gos-
pei that they will take on the spot
We must make this place so attractive
for the young that a young man will
come here on Sabbath morning, put
down his hat, brush his hair back from
his forehead, unbutton his overcoat
and look around wondering If he has
not by mistake got into heaven. He
will see in the faces of the old people,