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.
