He dedicated the rest of his life to this end and founded a voluntary organisation called Save-a-Life League, believed to be the first in the country.
However, in 1868 she remarried to a local 75 year old widowed farmer called, Philip Sargent Hart, who died within 5 months.
While in theological school he assisted in the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, New York, where he was instrumental in starting bible classes, work later continued by John D. Rockefeller Jr.
In 1893 he married Adelaide Everett Butler (1870-1956), the daughter of a hardware merchant, who was a member of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church.
In addition to holding services he became involved with the spiritual welfare of his transient flock, visiting them in hospitals, asylums, court rooms, prisons and made himself available for weddings and funerals.
They were continually refused and they were led to believe that this antipathy was based on racial grounds, due to Koyama’s oriental ethnicity.
Warren was approached by the couple and he had no problems with marrying them, although the ceremony was performed in the chapel of a funeral parlour at a few minutes to midnight.
At this time in New York, licenses were not required before a couple could wed, and Warren married people, day or night, often at his home with his wife acting as witness.
He contacted police, hospitals, churches and the medical examiner’s office to follow up suicide attempts in order to offer support and provide practical assistance.
The secretary of the New York’s chief medical examiner, George P LeBrun, explained that suicides were sometimes misreported as accidents, or they were concealed in such a way as to avoid publicity.
The organisation became known as the Save-a-Life League, with a committee of prominent people (including George P LeBrun) plus an office in New York, staffed with volunteer helpers.
Later this organisation was extended to other parts of the United States and renamed the National Save-a-Life League, with representatives in thirty-five cities.