in this country a week he was dragged through the newspapers as one who expected to be called to Plymouth Church, whereas he had his own great congregation eagerly awaiting his return. I don’t wonder that he was disgusted and discouraged and unable to finish his tour. There was a young preacher in England who had made a great impression on Mr. Beecher by his speech of welcome before the Congregational board, at a reception given Mr. Beecher in Liverpool on our last day in England: Rev. Charles Berry, of Wolverhampton. I had published Mr. Beecher’s remarks concerning Mr. Berry in my “Summer in England with Henry Ward Beecher,” and some Plymouth people had seen them, and suggested that Mr. Berry be invited to come over and preach a trial sermon. Meanwhile Dr. Abbott was preaching every Sunday, and the church was always full. Mr. Berry was preaching in Wolverhampton on a salary of £200 a year. He came to Plymouth Church, preached two sermons and received a call, with an offer of $9,000 a year. Of course this first real recognition of Mr. Berry as a preacher of unusual ability, and a call to the most famous pulpit in the world, surprised the religious public of Great Britain, and more than quadrupled his value at home. The people of his own congregation at once strongly protested against his going away, and from then until the time of his death he was the leading minister of his denomination in his own country. During all this time Dr. Abbott was occupying the pulpit and preaching twice every Sunday. It finally dawned upon the Church Committee that they were really having the finest and most acceptable preaching available in all the world. Dr. Abbott was called to be their pastor, and accepted. There was, of course, some protest, for it did not seem possible to a great many that there were not some “great” men somewhere, and Lyman Abbott had been all his life familiar to them. But the church interest and attendance showed no falling off; it rather increased; the sentiment in his favor became and remained unanimous, and for ten years Lyman Abbott held that pulpit, and, as all the world knows, held it to the highest grade among the pulpits of the land. The most unanimous protest came in 1898, when Dr. Abbott surprised his congregation by telling them that he was going to resign, and asked them to look for his successor. They were not going to accept his resignation. He had so completely filled their ideal of a pastor and preacher that to lose him meant a certain calamity to the church. Only a few of the veterans--who had seen Mr. Beecher followed by another, without disaster--could believe that Plymouth Church could be satisfied with a substitute for Dr. Abbott.