The seminary professor had recommended his young student, Thomas De Witt Talmage (1832-1902), as a candidate for the pulpit at the Reformed Church of Belville, New Jersey. When the occasion arrived he felt quite comfortable with his chosen text. The better of his two sermons (all he owned at this point!) was on Judges 7:20-21 and, as it described a battle scene between the Gideonites and the Midianites it would give him good scope for the descriptive powers and excellent vocabulary skills for which he was well-known.

But his discomfort grew as the service progressed and his time to speak drew closer. Then, when his sermon manuscript suddenly disappeared between the upright back and lower seat of the hard-stuffed horsehair pulpit sofa, he was almost ready to raise the white flag of surrender. Talmage later described his dilemma thus:

... But how could I recover it, and in so short a time? I bent over and reached under as far as I could. But the sofa was low, and I could not touch the lost discourse. The congregation was singing the last verse of the hymn and I was reduced to desperate effort. I got down on my hands and knees, and then down flat, and crawled under the sofa and clutched the prize. Fortunately, the pulpit front was wide and hid the sprawling attitude I was compelled to take, When I arose to preach a moment after, the fugitive manuscript before me on the Bible, it is easy to understand why I felt more like the Midianites than I did like Gideon. (Talmage, 1912: 20).

This "near-death" experience (as he described it) resulted in his being cured of preaching from a manuscript forever. He commented:

This and other mishaps with manuscripts helped me after a while to strike for entire emancipation from such bondage, and for about a quarter of a century I have preached without notes -- only a sketch of the sermon pinned to my Bible, and that sketch seldom referred to. (Talmage, 1912:21)

A Carefully-Crafted Style

Talmage favored small and often unusual biblical texts upon which he could develop interesting subjects, often using the biblical material only as a launching pad for his thought rather than as a basis for exegetical discussion. His commitment to sermon preparation focused on form and style as much as it did on content. He walked five miles for his health every day except Friday and Saturday when he paced back and forth in his study dictating his ideas for Sunday in an abandonment of delivery to a secretary.

The secretary's typed productions were then revised, and boiled down several times, and finally reduced to include many epigrammatic statements. Then, without committing the manuscript to actual word-for-word memorization, he would rehearse the sermon again and again, grasping both its thought movement and linguistic expression until he became so saturated with its form that a basic recall of most of its detail was not difficult.

He began most sermons at an emotional level with a vivid description of a biblical scene, historical event, or contemporary incident. He would use something patriotic, revive memories of home and family, or discuss the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln to initiate audience identification and response.