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.