Chapter I: AM afraid that a lightsome disposition and a relish for humor are not (2)

First, as to overcrowding. This is a question that distinctly affects the state, and with regard to which we have to “live in the whole,” and to see that the welfare of the community is at stake, and that the state must have an authoritative voice in it. Virtue, sobriety, decency, are physically impossible in the conditions under which a vast number of its citizens are living. The national health and morals are in danger. All the arguments that justified the interference of the state with the rights of the Irish landlord, apply equally to the London landlords, and the artificial forcing up of rents, which has resulted from the necessity many workmen are under of living near their work. Yet this question has been the subject of permissive legislation! The Artisans’ Dwellings Improvement Act, an honest attempt on the part of Sir Richard Cross to deal with the problem, was rendered applicable to all towns of 28,000 inhabitants or upward—that is to say, about eighty towns—but it was entrusted to the municipalities to carry it out, the town councils which we have left to be composed chiefly of men of narrow education, largely swayed by self-interest, and probably extensive owners of the very property to be demolished! It is exactly as if the Irish Land Bill had been permissive, and entrusted to the Irish landlords to put it into execution! Can we wonder that in about sixty out of the eighty towns, it remains a dead letter? In eleven it has led to discussion; in two or three it has led to the demolition of buildings, but not to their erection. Is there not a want of ordinary _seeing_ in our moral life? Could we hope to solve a single scientific problem on the methods on which we are content to live?

“The commercial success,” as Mr. Peek observes, “that has been achieved by several of the Artisans’ Dwellings Companies which, while providing good houses, yet pay fair dividends, shows that the poorest pay rents which give a fair interest on capital, so that the municipality will not be compelled to embark in a ruinous undertaking, or one that will not pay in the long run, to say nothing of the gain to the health and morals of the nation.”

Secondly, let us take pauperism. First of all let us clearly recognize that no system of paid officials, no mechanical workhouse will take the place of human thought and human care. Nothing will do instead of love. Indeed, there are already signs that we are working out a _reductio ad absurdum_ with these portentous and ever-increasing warehouses of the destitute and the vicious that are springing up, throwing the winter support of whole dissolute families on hard-working rate-payers, and systematically discouraging thrift. But the problem has been solved satisfactorily on a small scale, and can be on a larger. The Elberfield experiment, which in twelve years reduced the number of paupers from 4,800 to 1,800, notwithstanding that the population had increased from 50,000 to 64,000, and that great commercial depression existed, has been too often described not to be familiar to all. But a remarkable parallel movement among the Jews is scarcely so well known as it deserves to be. When “Oliver Twist” was published, the leading Jews were so mortally ashamed of the picture drawn by the popular novelist of Fagan and the low Jewish quarters in London, that they formed themselves at once into an organization to remedy so disgraceful a state of things. The numbers to be dealt with amounted to those of a populous town, with the additional difficulty afforded by immigrant Jews arriving in large numbers from the Continent in a state of the greatest destitution. The investigation of every case requiring relief was undertaken by volunteer workers, assisted by skilled officers, and was not in the steam pig-killing style, but patient and exhaustive with true human brotherhood; in deserving cases the relief given was sufficient to make a guardian’s hair stand on end, but was given with the view to helping the man to a means of livelihood. Especially this wise liberality was shown in the treatment of their widows. Whilst Mr. Peek has no better suggestion to offer than that the widows’ children should be removed to the pauper barrack-schools to herd with the lowest children of casuals, a system which Mr. Peek himself strongly condemns, the Jews recognized that the mother, if well conducted, was the proper person to have the care of them, and that her place was at home. They therefore either provided their widows with indoor work, or, when that was impossible, relieved them on a sufficient scale to enable them to look after their children at home; the consequence being that instead of feeding the outcast class, as the neglected children of our widows too often do, they grew up productive and well-conducted members of the community. If, however, a family was found overcrowding, all relief was steadily refused till they consented to live a human life, assistance being given to move into a larger tenement. By these wise and thoughtful methods in the course of a single generation the Jews have worked up the people from a considerably lower level to one decidedly above our own. To be sure the Jew does not drink. Give the most destitute Jew five pounds down, and at the end of the year you will find him a small capitalist, having considerably despoiled the Egyptians meanwhile. But the intemperance of our people is largely caused by overcrowding, and by their amusements and recreation-rooms being in the hands of those who make their profit not by the entertainment but by the drink traffic, and indefinite improvement may be brought about by wiser regulations that have the good of the people, and not the fattening of publicans and brewers at heart. Surely the success of the Jewish and Elberfeld efforts prove that the problem of the reduction of pauperism and the inducing of healthy habits of thrift and self-helping in the people is soluble, and with that army of devoted Christian workers in our midst, to whose untiring efforts we owe it that social disaster has not already overtaken us, it must be possible for us to carry on the same movement, if Birmingham or one of our public-spirited towns would lead the way.

Lastly, we come to the vast, hopeful field, presented by greater care for the young, and better methods of embodying it.

First, let the law protect the young of both sexes up to the legal age of majority from all attempts to lead them into a dissolute life. In most continental countries the corruption of minors is an indictable offense. The English penal code recognizes this principle in property; it is felony to abduct an heiress up to twenty-one, and a young man’s debts, except for bare necessaries, are null and void till he is of age; but, as usual, our English law leaves the infinitely more precious moral personality unprotected. There is no practical protection at any age for an English child from the trade of vice. An unruly child of fifteen or sixteen, or even younger, quarrels with her mother or with her employer, and runs off in a fit of temper. Even if she leaves her parents’ roof, it can not be brought under the law against abduction. No one abducts her; the child abducts herself. Yet the keeper of the lowest den of infamy can harbor that child for an infamous purpose, and he or she commits no indictable offence. It is no wonder, therefore, that the open profligacy of the young forms the very gravest feature of our large towns. Thankful as we are for the honest effort to deal with this monstrous anomaly in English law, shown by Lord Rosebery’s bill, we can not but regret the extreme inadequacy of its provisions, or that the legislature should refuse to extend legal protection from even the trade of vice, to the most dangerous age of a girl’s life, the age of sixteen—the age when, as the medical faculty are agreed, a girl is least morally responsible, and most liable to sexual extravagances, and when we can statistically prove that the greatest number of those who go wrong are led astray. The country will not rest till the legal protection from the trade of vice is extended to twenty-one.

Secondly, let us recognize it as an axiom that parental rights do not exist when wholly severed from parental duties; or, in other words, that the child has its rights as well as the parent, and that its indefeasible right is, in South’s strong words, “to be born and not damned into the world.” Let it be recognized, then, that no child of either sex is to be brought up in a den of infamy, and to attend school from thence to the contamination of the children of the respectable poor, the magistrates being no longer allowed to defeat this beneficent provision of the Industrial Schools Act, and parental responsibility being recognized by the parent being compelled to pay toward the Christian and industrial training of the child; all children living in, or frequenting, thieves’ dens and disorderly houses to be at once removed. Let day industrial schools be formed for the lowest class of children, so as to introduce some classification in our board schools, the want of which is one of their gravest defects. Let us adopt emigration to our colonies for our pauper and destitute children, whenever possible. Any one who has gone into the question can corroborate Mr. Samuel Smith’s statement in his able article in the May number of the _Nineteenth Century_, that “£15 per head covers all expenses, including a few months’ preparatory training, outfit, passage, etc.” The average cost of each child in the metropolitan district schools is nearly £25 per annum. About 11,000 pauper children are brought up in these large establishments at a cost to the ratepayers of London of £250,000 per annum. Probably each child is kept, on the average, five years, costing, say, £120 in all. Truly Mr. Smith may well add, “with a blindness that is incomprehensible, the guardians have preferred herding them together at a vast expense, and refused till quite lately to allow emigration to be tried.” And for those children who through bad health, or any other disability, are unable to emigrate, and can not be boarded out, as well as children whose drunken and dissolute parents are bringing them up to crime, let there be an order of teaching deaconesses instituted, and a state-aided training college, where educated ladies may receive training in the management of an industrial school, and from which the guardians can supply themselves with mothers for cottage homes on the plan of the Village Homes of Ilford, where the cost of a child is £14, instead of £25. By this arrangement the children would come under higher influence than the uneducated workhouse officials. Hundreds of ladies are wanting remunerative employment, and would gladly undertake this, if they could be put in the way of the work by a little preliminary training, and freed from the necessity of “doing the washing” in the cottage home. And, lastly, let it be a recognized theory that every Christian household has one respectable but rough little girl to train under its own upper class servants, to give her a good start in life, that our houses, with all their culture and refinement, may no longer be strongholds of _l’egoisme à plusieurs_, but centers for teaching good work, high character, and fine manners—organs for the public good.

And those social atomists who raise their vehement cry about personal rights and the liberty of the subject over all compulsory measures for saving children, I would remind that the question is not of compulsion or non-compulsion; but whether the natural guardians of a child shall be compelled to pay toward its Christian and industrial training, or whether they and I, as ratepayers, shall be compelled to pay for its degradation in prisons, in infirmary beds, and workhouses. Compulsion there is anyhow: but surely no reasonable mind can doubt which compulsion is most in accordance with the true right and true liberty.

And how can I better close than with the impassioned words of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, apostrophizing our material splendor, as shown in the great Exhibition of 1851, by the side of our moral squalor:

“O Magi of the East and of the West,
Your incense, gold and myrrh are excellent!
What gifts for Christ, then, bring ye with the rest?
Your hands have worked well: is your courage spent
In handiwork only? Have you nothing best
Which generous souls may perfect and present
And He shall thank the givers for? No light
Of teaching, liberal nations, for the poor
Who sit in darkness when it is not night?
No cure for wicked children? Christ—no cure!
No help for women sobbing out of sight
Because men made the laws? No brothel lure
Burnt out by popular lightnings? Hast thou found
No remedy, my England, for such woes?

* * * * *

Alas! great nations have great shames, I say.

* * * * *

O gracious nations, give some ear to me!
You all go to your fair, and I am one
Who at the roadside of humanity
Beseech your alms,—God’s justice to be done!”
—_The Contemporary Review._

AT REST.

By SARAH DOUDNEY.

Ah, silent wheel, the noisy brook is dry,
And quiet hours glide by
In this deep vale, where once the merry stream
Sang on through gloom and gleam;
Only the dove in some leaf-shaded nest
Murmurs of rest.

Ah, weary voyager, the closing day
Shines on that tranquil bay,
Where thy storm-beaten soul has longed to be;
Wild blast and angry sea
Touch not this favored shore, by summer blest,
A home of rest.

Ah, fevered heart, the grass is green and deep
Where thou art laid asleep;
Kissed by soft winds, and washed by gentle showers,
Thou hast thy crown of flowers;
Poor heart, too long in this mad world oppressed,
Take now thy rest.

I, too, perplex’d with strife of good and ill,
Long to be safe and still;
Evil is present with me while I pray
That good may win the day;
Great Giver, grant me thy last gift and best,
The gift of rest!

—_Good Words._

* * * * *

BUSINESS requires earnestness and strength of character, life must be allowed more freedom; business calls for the strictest sequence, whereas in the conduct of life inconsecutiveness is often necessary—nay, is charming and graceful. If thou art strict in the first, thou mayest allow thyself more freedom in the second; while if thou mix them up, thou wilt find the free interfering and breaking in upon the fixed.—_Goethe._

ECCENTRIC AMERICANS.

By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.

I.—THE SAILOR, PEDDLER, FARMER, PREACHER.

In mechanics, an eccentric is a wheel that can start all the rest of the machinery with a jerk and a kick, and keep it going. It was the little eccentrics that enabled ten thousand Chautauquans to scatter to every part of the land in a few hours. The cam-motion in human nature starts its machinery and scatters its thought. We ought to thank God for the minds that wabble. Every originator has been counted eccentric—many of them have been pronounced insane. The little Festuses sitting in judgment are always crying to the inspired apostles of truth, “Thou art beside thyself.”

It is finite mechanism and finite thought that invent geometry and theology. Men hang, cunningly and truly, their long counter-shafts of creed, of behavior, of thought, of dress, of consistency, of loyalty; they bolt and key thereto immovably all human characters which are round, “line them up” all true and uniform, lubricate with lucre, put on the steam and away they all go beautifully and all alike. Woe be to one who wabbles in this machine-shop of society! But God uses no plumb-lines, right-angles, levels or true circles. “Nature’s geometrician,” the bee, never made a true hexagon. The old planets go “spinning through the grooves of change” in eccentrics, and never collide. Erratic comets dash through and among them, and never crash. I suppose the most eccentric character that ever walked this earth was that strange boy from Nazareth who confounded the doctors with his unprecedented outgivings. His teachings were indeed so strange that after the world has been for one thousand nine hundred years trying to work its standard up to them, a perfect Christian would to-day be accounted _non compos mentis_ by the rest of Christendom.

So it is not a bad idea to study eccentric characters, especially if they are strangely good and oddly useful. One such, at least, we have at hand for the first study of this series—Rev. Edward T. Taylor, “Father Taylor,” “The Sailor-Preacher,” of Boston and the world.

Born in Virginia, reared on the sea, and adopted by New England. Born a religionist, he preached “play” sermons when a child; born again a Christian, he preached the gospel in the Methodist Episcopal Church until all humanity claimed him. Born a poet, for ten years he studied nature in her tragic and her melting moods upon the sea; studied man in the forecastle, in the prison, upon the farm, in the market. Nature was his university; humanity his text-book; hard experience his tutor. At the age of twenty he had traveled the world over, had sounded the depths of human fortune, passion, misery, and sin; was profoundly learned in his great text-book, and the most inspired interpreter of its unuttered wants—and did not know the alphabet! He had become celebrated throughout New England as a marvelous prodigy in the despised sect of “shouting Methodists” years before he could read a text or “line” a hymn. And to the day of his death his preaching knew no method, his eloquence no logic, his conduct no consistency, and his power no limit or restraint. To this day no one has succeeded in analyzing his genius. He could not himself account for his power, nor could he control it. He seemed to play upon his audiences at will as a master plays upon the harp; yet some unseen, mysterious force played upon him in turn. His brethren in the ministry, who accounted for his strange power by attributing it to the Holy Spirit, were confounded by the rudeness, jocoseness, and at times almost profanity of his speech at its highest flights; and they who undertook to resolve his efforts into the accepted elements of human power were astounded by the more than human resources of a mind uncultured and a nature as wild, as uncontrollable, as bright and as sad as the sea he loved. Surely, if ever man was inspired, Father Taylor was.

His career, like his methods, answered to all the terms that can define eccentricity. Deeply religious as the child was by nature, he ran away to sea at the age of seven. His conversion was characteristic. Putting into port at Boston, he strolled to a meeting-house where a revival was in progress; instead of going in by the door, he listened outside, and when stricken under conviction, with characteristic impulsiveness he climbed in through the window. To use his own sailor words: “I was dragged in through the ‘lubber hole,’ brought down by a broadside from the seventy-four, Bishop Hedding, and fell into the arms of Thomas W. Tucker.” This was at the age of nineteen. Then off to sea as a privateersman in the war of 1812, he was captured and imprisoned at Halifax, and here his preaching of the gospel strangely began. A fellow-prisoner read texts to him till one flashed upon his conception as the cue to his discourse. “Stop!” the boy would cry; “read that again.” “That will do;” and he was ready to pour forth a fervid hour of pathos, wit, brilliant imagery, all supported by perfect acting.

Out of prison at last, he returns to Boston, leaves his seafaring forever, and takes to the road with a tin peddler’s cart: clad in a sailor’s jacket and tarpaulin, talking “sea lingo,” religion and poetry in equal proportions, he traveled over New England as attractive a sight as Don Quixote would have been. He came across an old lady who taught him to read (age 21), and he paid her by gratefully holding meetings in her big kitchen, and exhorting wondering crowds of rustics and weeping crowds of penitents. Next he undertook to learn shoemaking, and then worked a farm for a living—all the time concentrating his intense nature on his grand passion for playing upon the human heart; earning little bread for himself, and breaking the bread of life abundantly to farmers, shoemakers, fishermen; in farm houses, school houses, barns, camp-meetings; over a circuit of his own organization. “He was a youthful rustic Whitefield,” says Bishop Haven, “thrilling rustic audiences with his winged words and fiery inspiration.” He loved to preach from the text, “How knoweth this man letters, having never learned?” Taylor did not know letters, and his speech was rude and coarse, his blunders innumerable: if words failed him out of his limited vocabulary, he manufactured them. Once, completely at fault in his struggle to express the burning thoughts that crowded his brain he cried, with a perplexed but irradiated face: “I have lost my nominative case, but I am on my way to glory!” A few smiled; all wept. His earnestness atoned for many defects; his imagery was even now beautiful, and his magnetism irresistible.

Thus young Taylor preached, unlicensed, for five years. It was the breaking-up and seed-time of New England Methodism. Between the Puritans and Quakers, with their mutual antagonism, the shouting Methodists were as corn between the millstones, a despised and persecuted sect.

About the age of twenty-five occurred three notable events in his life. He was licensed by the Methodist Conference to preach. He attended school a short time and began his education. He married one of God’s noble-women to complete his education. For ten years he continued the life of a circuit preacher, growing in culture, power, spirit, and fame, under that wise and gentle nurture. No one can say how far short of its fullness Father Taylor’s life might have fallen without Deborah Taylor.

All these seventeen years of his ministry he had, as far as possible, kept near to the coast and the haunts of sailors; praying in the forecastle and preaching on the decks of ships about to sail, wherever he could reach them. The salt air was incense to him, and the music of the surf seemed ever dwelling in the nautilus-chambers of his heart. At last his life-work came in the direction of his longings. At the age of thirty-fire he was called to preach to the sailors of Boston. The meetings were a success from the first, and Mr. Taylor went South and solicited the money ($2,100) to buy a house for their Bethel. (More bread cast on the waters to return after many days to the South.) The work grew, and soon an incorporated society was organized, called the “Boston Port Society;” from the first nondenominational, though a majority of its board were Methodists. The work still grew. Soon the merchants of Boston assumed the burden of the work, and in 1833 “The Seamen’s Bethel” was completed at a cost of $24,000. Soon a Seamen’s Savings Bank and then a Seamen’s Aid Society, a Seamen’s Boarding-house, and then a Mariner’s Home (at a cost of $34,000), an Industrial School for Seamen’s Children, and a Seamen’s Co-operative Store, sprang up around this nucleus. These collateral enterprises were largely the inspiration of Mother Taylor, but the burden of them fell upon the Unitarians of Boston, who soon assumed entire control of the noble charity and mission. Here Father Taylor fulfilled his life-mission. “From 1829 to 1871 he trod this quarter-deck, its master.” The fame of the Bethel and its chaplain, one and the same, went to all quarters of the globe. Edward Everett styled him “The Walking Bethel,” and Richard H. Dana in his “Two Years Before the Mast,” said one of the first inquiries of sailors in foreign ports, from him, was regarding the welfare of Father Taylor, the mariner’s preacher in Boston. A sailor declared he had been in ports where the United States had not been heard of, but never where Father Taylor had not. Once, soliciting aid for Bethel before another audience than his own, he glowingly promised: “Drop your gold into this ocean and it will cast a wave on the shores of Europe which will strike back to the islands of the Southern Sea, rebound on the Northwest coast, and so make the circuit of the world and strike this port again.” The realization of this prediction was more extravagant than the bold imagery of it. At the dedication of the Bethel he cried: “America is the center of the world, the center of America is Boston, and the center of Boston is the Bethel.”

The first place of a returning sailor’s thoughts became the Bethel, instead of the groggery. Two of them, seeking it for the first time, spelled out the name on the flag floating above it: “B-E-T, beat, H-E-L, hell; beat-hell! This is Father Taylor’s place,” and they cast anchor. “There he is, Bill,” said an old tar to another, as they entered the Bethel; “there’s the old man walking the deck. He’s got his guns double-shotted and will give it to us right and left. See how fast he travels—fifteen knots on a taut bowline. When he walks that way he’s ready for action.”

There were strange scenes in that vast audience room. The body of the church was reserved for sailors always, while the side slips and galleries were for the general public. When the seats were all filled, he would order the sailors forward like a sea captain, and crowd the altar rail, the pulpit stairs, the pulpit, and the pulpit sofas with the weather-beaten mariners, while the grandest in the land stood and listened in the aisles. “Now,” he would say, with a beaming face, “we have got the hold full and a deck load, and we’ll up anchor and start.” Many of the best critics and reporters have tried to describe and analyze a service after such a “start”—Dickens, Harriet Martineau, Fredricka Bremer, Horace Mann, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others—but all fail to give us much comprehension of the method of the man; I suspect because they were all so absorbed they forgot to take notes, mental or otherwise. But they recall the _effects_ of the preaching vividly, each in his own way. So much of the power of Father Taylor was in his presence and action, that no report of one of his sermons has been made and preserved. He said himself, “You might as well try to report chain lightning.” Dr. Bellows said, twelve years ago, “Alas! nothing remains of him but his memory and his influence. He will be an incredible myth in another generation.” Why _need_ this be so? He has left a wealth of original sayings behind him unequaled by the utterances of few save Abraham Lincoln; and he may furnish the material for many rare studies in character. We may be forgiven the presumption of attempting to help rescue Father Taylor from vanishing into oblivion. What, then, were the characteristics that lay at the foundations of this remarkable character? I would classify them under four heads:

1. _Intensity._ This gave him concentration of thought, earnestness of belief, courage and aggressiveness in action. He went into everything with an irresistible impulse. His training on the sea and in the circuit gave free growth to this trait. He was never placed where he needed to be politic or conservative; and his combativeness always had free play. He was the champion of his despised sect, but he fought with the polished weapons of a wit, and the impressive presence of a will which the foes of his cause more dreaded than force. And then his spirit was so lovable that there is no instance on record of any one ever having laid hands on him, fierce disputant as he was.

He was a man born to command. His will was imperious. The last conscious act of his life was to shake his fist at his nurse, who refused to let him rise from bed. Peter Cartwright said there were two cataracts in this country—Niagara and Father Taylor. His brethren called him “the breaking-up plow of the Church.” Miss Martineau spoke of “the prodigious force which he carries in his magnificent intellect and earnest heart.” Another English writer said, “He goes on as energetically as any ‘Praise-God Barebones’ of the old Covenanter times.”

I think one thing all his biographers lost sight of was the fact that his belief became a vital part of him, the very breath of his nostrils. There is a mighty difference between truly believing, and simply accepting a belief second-hand, which latter passes for belief with most people. It is the men who genuinely believe who make others accept and adopt their belief. In the pulpit his action is tremendous. He always comes down wet through with perspiration, and a complete change of wardrobe is necessary with every effort.

2. _Imagination._ To this quality is to be referred his profound religious nature, his poetry, dramatic power, eloquence, and (in conjunction with his earnestness) even his faults. One called him a poet; another, a born actor. James Freeman Clarke said he was the only man he ever heard to whom the much-abused word, “eloquence,” could be truly applied. But I think none of these terms so accurately classify his genius as to call him a painter. His earnestness made everything his quick imagination conjured up seem realistic to him; and his dramatic power enabled him to make these images realistic to his hearers. His thoughts were entities to him, and they always took the form of objects real and visible. This differs from the _poetic_ imagination, the essence of which is unsubstantiality. The poet sees visions, the artist creates forms. Taylor was an artist, with words for his colors, action for his pencil. One who heard him said: “While he preached the ocean rolled and sparkled, the ship spread her sails, the tempest lowered, the forked lightnings blazed, the vessel struck, her disjointed timbers floated upon the waves. It was all pictured to the eye as positive reality. You could hardly believe afterward you had not actually witnessed the scene.”

He describes a shipwreck, and at the climax, as the ship is slowly settling in the water, and every face in the audience is livid with fear, he roars, “Man the life boat!” and every sailor in the house springs to his feet. Now sailors, under the influence of drink, have killed their captain. He describes the deed. They start up before the audience, creeping down the stairs and into the cabin; he raises the imaginary knife, and half the men in the house jump forward to arrest the blow, while women shriek in horror. Once, however, a matter-of-fact, though possessed sailor, confused Father Taylor. He had depicted the impenitent sinner, under the figure of a storm-tossed ship, with her sails split, and driven by the gale toward the rock-bound coast of Cape Ann. “Oh, how,” he exclaimed, in tones of despair, “shall this poor sin-tossed sinner be saved?” “Put his helm hard down, and _bear away for Squam_!” bellowed the old salt, springing excitedly to his feet.

So he painted the Mosaic miracles, “till the brethren saw the snakes squirm, heard the frogs croak, felt the lice bite, brushed the flies out of their faces and saw the Israelites march out of Egypt.”

One of his last sermons, when he was old and feeble, ended thus: “My work is almost done. Where are all my old shipmates—they who lay in hammocks beside me and who have fought at the same guns? Gone, gone—all gone! No, blessed be God! not _all_; there’s one left. [Here he made the picture realistic by pointing to an old salt, gray, bent, and knotty-faced.] Yes, there’s old Timberhead. He and I have weathered many a storm together. It is only a little farther we have to sail. Look, look ahead there! It is only to beat just around that point yonder. Now—now! there is the peaceful, blessful haven and home full in view.” By this time the audience was weeping, radiant with hope.

Even his isolated sentences are full of this imaginary realism. “Sailors ignorant!” he cried indignantly when one depreciated them; “sailors know everything; they grasp the world in their hand like an orange!” The boldness of this language is wonderful. Of superannuated ministers he said: “They are like camels bearing precious spices and browsing on bitter herbs. They were moral giants. When God made them he rolled his sleeves up to the arm-pits.”

It was the activity of his brain, the realism of his imagery and the homely naturalness of his language that made some of his transitions abrupt to grotesqueness and some of his speech border startlingly on impropriety. He really thought aloud—which many a matter-of-fact, heavy speaker would find it unsafe to do. Dissociated from their context and from the earnestness and devout spirit of the man, they sound much worse than when uttered.

It was the combination of these two qualities also which made him extravagant in speech, erratic in sentiment, and inconsistent with himself. He _was_ whatever he thought or imagined for the moment; his genius possessed and controlled him. Thus he was a radical temperance reformer, but he denounced prohibitory legislation and hurled ridicule at those who proposed the use of an unfermented wine in the sacrament; he called it “raisin water.” Of rum-sellers he said: “I wonder that the angels in heaven do not tear up the golden pavements and throw them on their heads;” but he conjured those who should succeed him to “Cast out from this church, in my name, any man that comes up to the altar with his glue-pot and dye-stuff.”

Dr. Jewett says: “I have heard him at times when I have been amazed at the utter inconsistency of his views, not only with any standard of doctrine recognized as sound by other men, but with his own public utterances of perhaps the week previous. His imagination, once fairly excited, could furnish in thirty minutes material for half-a-dozen speeches of an hour each; and, unfortunately, it frequently happened that different parts of the same speech could be used on opposite sides of the same question.”

So he denounced the abolitionists and slavery in the same breath. “Before I would assist one of those Southern devils to catch a nigger,” he shouted, after reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “I would see them all in hell, and I would shout hallelujah on to the end of it!” “You talk like a rabid abolitionist,” said his interlocutor. “No,” he cried, with even more vengeance; “no, I despise them. They have cursed the land!” He called Foster, the abolitionist orator, “a devil on the platform.” His reverence for the church led him to consign summarily to a hotter climate those who came out on the anti-slavery issue; and he was a vehement advocate of church authority, and evangelical orthodoxy, yet the most of his life he preached for Unitarians; and he openly defied the mandate of the conference regarding Masonry, being a member of the fraternity, and he submitted to church discipline for his contumacy, but refused to withdraw from the order, and prayed in public for the anti-Masons, “O, Lord, make their hearts as soft as their heads are.” Plainly, there was no managing such a tempestuous soul, and he was left to go his own way. Honor be to the church that had the magnanimity and broad charity to let him do his own grand work in his own grand way. It was herein as grand and eccentric as an organization as he was among men.

His sarcasm, wit, terseness, and vigor of speech were the outcome of an energetic and picturesque mind, struggling with a limited vocabulary for its expression. His sentences were explosive. “This fast age,” he said, “would be glad to put spurs to lightning, and blow a trumpet in the ears of thunder.” Again, “Some people think they are saints. If they could see themselves as the just in glory see them they wouldn’t dare to look a decent devil in the face.” “If I owed the devil a hypocrite, and he wouldn’t take that man for pay, I’d repudiate the debt.” He called another minister, who had preceded him, and infringed on his allotted time, “As selfish as a whale who takes in a ton of herring before breakfast.” Again, “It is a great mistake to think of converting the world without the help of sailors. You might as well think of melting a mountain of ice with a moonbeam, or of heating an oven with snow-balls.” He called morality, without religion, “Starting a man to heaven with an icicle in his pocket.” “I am not two inches off heaven!” he exclaimed, in a moment of religious exaltation. He said to Channing, the Unitarian: “When you die angels will fight for the honor of carrying you to heaven on their shoulders.” “Sailors’ hearts are big as an ox’s; open like a sunflower, and they carry them in their right hands ready to give them away.” One of his converts, gifted in prayer, he always called “Salvation-set-to-music.” A colored brother, speaking with the simple pathos of his race, drew from Father Taylor the ejaculation, “There is rain in that cloud.”

But, whether homely or lofty, whether pathetic or witty, he always talked in dead earnest out of his warm heart, out of his seething brain, and everything was gilded by the magic touch of imagination. “A man,” says Stevens, “who could scarcely speak three sentences, in the pulpit or out of it, without presenting a striking poetic image, a phrase of rare beauty, or a sententious sarcasm, whose discourses presented the strangest, the most brilliant exhibition of sense, epigrammatic thought, pathos, and humor, spangled over by an exhaustless variety of the finest images and pervaded by a spiritual earnestness that subdued all listeners.” “His splendid thoughts come faster than he can speak them,” said Harriet Martineau, “and at times he could be totally overwhelmed by them if a burst of tears, of which he was wholly unconscious, did not aid in his relief.” “I have seen a diamond shining,” said Dr. Bartol, “but he was a diamond on fire.”

3. _Sympathy._ Here was the secret of his power over men. His emotional nature constantly overflowed all else. With a marvelous intuition in reading character, a free-masonry with all phases of human emotions, a magnetism that put him inside of every heart, he became the better self, the ideal longing of each listener. It made no difference how learned or stoical the man was; Father Taylor got hold of him and stirred his heart from the bottom. A man of wit said, “I am always afraid when I am laughing at Father Taylor’s wit, for I know he will make me cry before he has done with me.” People cry and laugh alternately, and sometimes both together. Laughter is the best preparation for tears. “Man, thou pendulum betwixt a smile and tear.” [Are we not all inconsistent, eccentric, at the bottom of our natures, _i. e._, at our very best?] A New York comedian came to study the method of one of whose acting he had heard much report; he was so affected by the unlearned art of this master of the soul that he fairly blubbered behind his handkerchief.

Dr. Wentworth, of another occasion said: “The immense audience swayed in the wealth of his eloquence like a forest of willows. We laughed, we wept, we shouted in turns; and finally, finding myself getting utterly unmanned, and rapidly dissolving into tears and brine, I fled the pulpit and hid myself out of earshot of this extraordinary scene.”

Dr. Wakely, of New York, describes the effects of a prayer by Father Taylor, at the New York Conference: “The ministers wept all over the house like little children. Dr. Capers and Dr. Pitman were in the pulpit with me. Dr. Capers wept and trembled exceedingly; and Dr. Pitman laughed and cried alternately—smiles and tears strangely blended.”

“His pathos is the most awful of his powers,” said Miss Martineau, terrified at his control over her emotions; “I have seen a single clause of a short sentence call up an instantaneous flush on hundreds of hard faces.”

Many would not expose their hearts to hear him a second time; they could not bear the overmastering power.

Dr. Bartol very finely said: “What was the secret but a sympathy, raised to the highest power, so as to exceed all that we conceive under that name, so that _he saw out of people as well as into them_! He put on their eyes for his eyeglasses, looking at the world as they did, and they found and felt him in them at the core and center.” “He was a master of pathos,” said Dr. Bellows; “rough sailors and beautiful and cultivated Boston girls, and men like Webster and Emerson, and shop boys and Cambridge students, and Jenny Lind and Charles Dickens, and Harriet Martineau, and everybody of taste or curiosity who visited Boston were seen weeping together with Father Taylor. Ah, the human heart, down at the bottom, is one.”

He loved all little children with all his Master’s passion. The baptism of infants was always a baptism of joy and tears with him. He would gather one to his breast and kiss and croon over it like a mother. Taking a beautiful little girl in his arms, he raised her before the whole audience, and said, with streaming eyes, “Look at the sweet lamb! Her mother has brought her to Christ’s fold. A baptism of heaven be on thee, my pretty dove.” All children recognized him at sight for one of their guild. A ragged little girl walked into the church at his funeral, laid a buttonhole bouquet on the coffin, and said timidly and sweetly, “He was _my_ friend,” and so departed. Once when he had been called to several children’s funerals in succession, he said to a friend whom he met in the street, “There is something wrong somewhere. There are storms brewing when so many doves are flying aloft.”

At funerals he was a refuge of consolation. He so entered into the hearts bereaved that he felt their hurt. “Father, look upon us,” he once implored, with mighty and tender supplication, “_we are a widow_!” “It is no wonder to me,” said Harriet Martineau, “that the widow and orphan are cherished by those who hear his prayers for them.”

Drunken sailors or abandoned women, none were left out of reach of his infinite sympathy; and it reached the uttermost parts of the earth. A sailor boy has died and been buried in South America, and he prays that the Comforter may be near the bereaved father “when his aged heart goes forth from his bosom to flutter around the far southern grave of his boy!” Is Shakspere more dramatic, Shelly more imaginative, Longfellow more pathetic than this?

Out of this fathomless love he preached his gospel of happiness and purity and love; for it was doubtless true, as he declared, that “he never knew the time when he did not love God.” Out of it came his sweet charity and tolerance. His lovers were of all denominations and of none—Catholics, Universalists, Unitarians—for he was “altogether lovely.” When one at a camp-meeting excluded from salvation all these sects, all men who used tobacco and all women who wore jewelry, Father Taylor broke in indignantly, “If that’s true, Christ’s mission was a failure. It’s a pity he came.” “How far apart are heaven and hell?” he was asked. “I tell you,” said he, “they are so near that myriads of souls to-day don’t know which they are in.” “Blessed Jesus,” he prayed, “give us common sense, and let no man put blinkers on us, that we can only see in a certain direction; for we want to look all around the horizon—yea, to the highest heavens and to the lowest depths of the ocean.” “When _Bigotry_ is buried I hope I shall be at the funeral,” he said. His intimacy with the Unitarians, and his remarkable tribute to Channing have been cited. Of Emerson he said: “He has the sweetest soul God ever put into a man. If the devil gets him he will never know what to do with him.” A theologian asked him what he was going to do with the Unitarians; “I don’t know,” he said, confidentially; “if they go to hell they’ll _change the atmosphere_.” “Is your son-in-law a Christian?” asked a solicitous brother. “Not exactly,” replied Father Taylor, “but he’s a very sweet sinner.”

4. _His humor._ This kept all cheerful, healthy and bright. He was a “laughing Christian.” I do not think he ever used humor merely to make people laugh, but always with an earnest purpose back of it. He was no joker, and rarely thought his own keen thrusts subjects for merriment.

Of his manliness, his good sense, his improvidence, his sweet and beautiful home life, space does not suffice to speak.

If to be an original character among men is to be eccentric, Father Taylor was indeed odd. “He was in all things himself and not any one else; in this generation there has been but one Father Taylor,” said Dr. Waterstone; and Dr. Bartol declared that, “No American citizen—Webster, Clay, Everett, Lincoln, Choate—has a reputation more impressive and unique.” No one understood his singularity better than himself. “I will not wear a straight-jacket or Chinese shoes,” he declared. Having been invited to lecture, he said: “I can’t lecture; I would not lecture if I could. Your lectures are all macadamized; they are entertainments where those go who dare not visit the theater. I must cross-plow your fine paths. I am no man’s model, no man’s copyist, no man’s agent; go on my own hook; say what I please, and you may help yourselves.”

Like all greatly-eccentric souls, I presume, he felt his own isolation and want of comprehension of himself by others. One who sat far into the night in communion of soul with him, said: “You are a strange mortal!” “Well,” said he, pathetically, “I have made up my mind there never was but one E. T. Taylor and, so far as I have anything to do with it, there never shall be another.”

When we think of his birth, training, and surroundings—the child of the plantation and the graduate of the forecastle—and contrast this with his peculiar powers, his strange career, and above all in rarity his wonderful world-wide mission, it is not too much to say that Father Taylor is without a parallel in American history. “An impulsive, untrained, and erratic genius;” there was a fixed purpose and a continuity of effort, such as is seen in few lives. If extravagant in speech and inconsistent in views, his intensity, vividness, and realism, make all sound like plain common-sense. Haughty and tender, imperious and democratic, grand and simple, splendidly uncultured; a strange, terrible power among men always used for leading, driving, persuading to righteousness. He deserves a paraphrase of a higher tribute than Phillips, the Irish barrister, gave to Napoleon. Such a medley of contradictions and at the same time such individual consistency for right were never before united in the same character. In the solitude of his originality, he was always the same mysterious, incomprehensible self—a man without a model and without a shadow.

“When I am dead,” he pleaded, “I do not want to be buried in dirt. But bury me rather in the deep salt sea, where the coral rocks shall be my pillow, and the seaweeds shall be my winding-sheet, and the waves shall sing my requiem forever.”

And it was not done. Conventionality triumphed in death over the old eccentric, who had defied it as long as he lived.

* * * * *

OBSERVE, the fates of men are balanced with wonderfully nice adjustments. The scale of this life, if it sinks, rises there, while if it rises here, it will sink to the ground there. What was here temporary affliction, will be there eternal triumph; what was here temporary triumph, will be there eternal and ever-enduring despair.—_Schiller._