When fire destroyed that church he built one having the largest seating capacity in America officially housing 6,000 but where 7,000 often gathered -- packing out the aisles and spilling onto the platform to hear him.

Publicizing a Social Conscience

For years Brooklyn preachers protested the social wickedness of their area but Talmage decided to take some direct action concerning this blight on his city.

Feeling called upon to explore underground New York City life, that I might report the evils to be combatted, I took with me two elders of my church and a New York City Police Commissioner and a policeman, and I explored and reported the horrors that needed removal, and the allurements that endangered our young men. There came upon me an outburst of indignation that fright ened almost everybody but myself. That exploration put into my church thirty or forty newspaper correspondents, from north, south, east, and west; which opened for me new avenues in which to preach the Gospel that otherwise would never have been opened. I preached a series of sermons on amusements, and a false report of what I did say roused a violence that threatened me with poison, dirk, and pistol and other forms of extinguishment, until the chief of the Brooklyn police, without any suggestion from me, took possession of the church with twenty-four policemen, to see that no harm was done. (Banks, 1902: 67-68).

His unconventional methods and alleged falsehoods brought him before the Presbytery on charges of malice and inaccuracy but he was able to prove his critics wrong and gain a complete exoneration. He wrote of unexpected results from criticisms of his ministry saying:

Their accusations were published in every newspaper in the country ... the New York correspondents of the leading papers in the chief cities of the United States came to my church on Sundays expecting I would make counter attacks which would make good news... The correspondents were after news, and failing to get the sensational charges, they took down the sermons and sent them to their papers. Thus my audiences were increased ten-thousand fold and the Gospel was proclaimed to countless numbers who never darkened church doors. The sermons seemed to please the readers, and the weekly press has continued the practice of publishing them until the present, while thousands of others have made them a regular feature, until it is now estimated that they appear weekly in thousands of periodicals through our America, Europe, and Asia, and that the number of weekly readers is about 20,000,000. (Banks, 1902: 70).

At the service which celebrated his 25 years of pastoral service in the Brooklyn congregation he surprised them all by resigning in order to fulfill a wider ministry. He then was himself surprised when fire broke out in the organ loft at the conclusion of the service and, as before, an enormous conflagration burned the mighty Tabernacle to the ground -- the third so to be destroyed. Although no longer pastor his popularity continued. A newspaper report of his return in November 1900 to be a guest preacher for his former congregation says it all: