“I had made up my mind to settle in the vicinity of Philadelphia, and there I soon found work at the anvil. It was lucky I did, for, when we reached our destination, my whole capital amounted to only about twenty dollars. We made ourselves a little home, and I worked at my trade for the next nine years, except during the panic of 1857, when I carried the hod and broke stone on the turnpike for a dollar a day. Meanwhile, I was preaching o’ Sundays, again at nothing a Sunday. In 1859, I was asked to devote myself altogether to preaching,—to go to Chicago as a minister to the poor. Well, I went. I said good-by forever to the anvil, in whose ringing voice I had heard so many years the old sermon on the nobility of work.” GENIUS IS DEVOTION AND APPLICATION. “Before I had been in Chicago a great while, some people got together and built a church, and appointed me pastor of it, hardly so much as saying to me ‘by your leave.’ It was named the Unity Church, and I remained in charge of it till 1879, when I came to New York to preach in the Church of the Messiah. “Here I have since remained. My life, you see, is divided into two sections,—forty years in the pulpit, twenty-one years at the anvil. I have worked on long lines, and I will say to young men that, when your homes and your schools have done all they can for you, and you begin the work of life, you must take hold with a will and be content to work hard on long lines. People say that such and such a person has genius for what he or she takes in hand, and that is the secret of the success attained. But I say that genius means strong devotion and steadfast application. You may imagine that you can go from the bottom to the top of the ladder at one jump, but it is not true. Going up the ladder at one jump is like the toy monkey that goes up at a jump and comes down head first. The men and women who achieve true success are all hard climbers. They work in one direction. Our course must not be like a cow-path, all over the pasture and into the woods, for that may mean through the woods into the wilderness. “I want to say, too, that, if we expect to do well in this life, we must keep well, by all the means in our power;—eat well, and sleep well eight hours out of the twenty-four. Young men should choose, as early as they can, a good and true woman for a wife, and look forward to a noble family of children. My ambition was to have seven, and the all-wise Father gave me nine. If a young man has good mental and physical health and works hard, his life will be sweet and clean. He will do his day’s work well and his life’s work well, and at the end he will be able to say, with Adam in the play:— “‘Though I look old, yet am I strong and lusty, For in my youth I never did apply hot and rebellious liquors to my blood, And did not with unbashful forehead woo The means of weakness and debility. Therefore my age is lusty winter, frosty, but kindly.’” XLVII