ARRIVAL IN CANADA—MARRIAGE—LEONORA—A MESSAGE FROM GOD—INVESTIGATION—EMBRACES THE GOSPEL.
Landing in New York, he remained there and in Brooklyn and Albany a few months before going on to Toronto, Upper Canada, where he was to rejoin his parents.
After his arrival in Toronto he connected himself with the Methodists in that city, and began preaching under the auspices of their church organization. It was while he was engaged in this work that he met Leonora Cannon, to whom he was married on the 28th of January, 1833.
Leonora Cannon was a daughter of Captain George Cannon (grandfather of President George Q. Cannon) of Peel, Isle of Man. Captain Cannon died while Leonora was yet in her girlhood; the old homestead in Peel was rented to strangers, and she went to reside in England with a lady named Vail. Later she became an inmate of Governor Smelt's family, residing in Castle Rushen, Castletown, Isle of Man. Here she frequently met with many distinguished people from England. Finally in the capacity of companion to the wife of Mr. Mason, the private secretary of Lord Aylmer, Governor General of Canada, she went to Toronto, and being a devout Methodist, associated with that church and there met Mr. Taylor, who became her class leader.
His first proposal of marriage was rejected; but afterwards, through a dream in which she saw herself associated with him, she was convinced that he would be her husband. Therefore, when he renewed his proposal, he was accepted.
Refined both by nature and education, gentle and lady-like in manner, witty, intelligent, gifted with rare conversational powers, possessed of a deep religious sentiment, and, withal, remarkable for the beauty of her person, she was a fitting companion to John Taylor.
Mrs. Taylor frequently accompanied her husband in filling his appointments to preach on the Sabbath, and he often alluded to the singular revelation he had received in his youth, about his having to preach the gospel in America.
"Are you not now preaching the gospel in America?" Leonora would ask.
"This is not the work; it is something of more importance," he would answer.
As a preacher in the Methodist church, both in England and Canada, he was very successful, and made many converts. "My object," he remarks, "was to teach them what I then considered the leading doctrines of the Christian religion, rather than the peculiar dogmas of Methodism." His theological investigations had made him very much dissatisfied with existing creeds and churches, because of the wide difference between modern and primitive Christianity, in doctrine, in ordinances, in organization and above all, in spirit and power.