It is because they do not recognise this body as a temple, built up by God’s intelligence, as a fitting sanctuary for the immortal Spirit, and this life equally with any other form of life as dedicate to Him, that men fall into such opposite extremes of sin:—the spiritual sin which contemns the body, and the sensual sin which misuses it.
VI.
When I was at Boston I made the acquaintance of Father Taylor, the founder of the Sailors’ Home in that city. He was considered as the apostle of the seamen, and I was full of veneration for him as the enthusiastic teacher and philanthropist. But it is not of his virtues or his labours that I wish to speak. He struck me in another way, as a poet; he was a born poet. Until he was five-and-twenty he had never learned to read, and his reading afterwards was confined to such books as aided him in his ministry. He remained an illiterate man to the last, but his mind was teeming with spontaneous imagery, allusion, metaphor. One might almost say of him,
| “He could not ope His mouth, but out there flew a trope!” |
These images and allusions had a freshness, an originality, and sometimes an oddity that was quite startling, and they were generally, but not always, borrowed from his former profession—that of a sailor.
One day we met him in the street. He told us in a melancholy voice that he had been burying a child, and alluded almost with emotion to the great number of infants he had buried lately. Then after a pause, striking his stick on the ground and looking upwards, he added, “There must be something wrong somewhere! there’s a storm brewing, when the doves are all flying aloft!”
One evening in conversation with me, he compared the English and the Americans to Jacob’s vine, which, planted on one side of the wall, grew over it and hung its boughs and clusters on the other side,—“but it is still the same vine, nourished from the same root!”
On one occasion when I attended his chapel, the sermon was preceded by a long prayer in behalf of an afflicted family, one of whose members had died or been lost in a whaling expedition to the South Seas. In the midst of much that was exquisitely pathetic and poetical, refined ears were startled by such a sentence as this,—“Grant, O Lord! that this rod of chastisement be sanctified, every twig of it, to the edification of their souls!”