belonging to the congregation had just died, leaving a widow and many small children without any means of support. Father Taylor now placed himself and the congregation in the position of the widow, and described so forcibly their grief, their mournful countenances, and their desolate condition, that at the close of the sermon the congregation rose as one man, and so considerable was the contribution which was made for the widow, that she was raised at once above want. In fact, our coldly moralising clergy who read their written sermons ought to come hither, and learn how they may touch and win souls."

"After the service I was introduced to Father Taylor and his agreeable wife, who in disposition is as warm-hearted as himself. The old man (he is about sixty) has a remarkably lively and expressive countenance, full of deep furrows. When we thanked him for the pleasure which his sermon had afforded us, he replied, 'Oh, there's an end, an end of me! I am quite broken down. I am obliged to screw myself up to get up a little steam. It's all over with me now!'

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While he was thus speaking, he looked up, and exclaimed, with a beaming countenance, 'What do I see? Oh, my son, my son!' And extending his arms, he went forward to meet a gigantically-tall young man, who, with joy beaming on his fresh, good-tempered countenance, was coming through the church, and now threw himself with great fervour into Father Taylor's arms, and then into those of his wife.

"Is all right here, my son ?' asked Taylor, laying his hand on his breast; 'has all been well kept here? Has the heart not become hardened by the gold? But I see it, I see it! All right, all right!' said he, as he saw large tears in the young man's eyes. Thank God! God bless thee, my son!' And with that there was again a fresh embracing.

"The young man was a sailor, no way related to Father Taylor, except spiritually; who, having been seized by the Californian fever, had set off to get gold, and now had returned after an interval of a year, but whether with or without gold, I know not. But it was evident that the heart had not lost its health. I have heard a great deal about the kindness and liberality of Father Taylor and his wife, in particular to poor sailors of all nations."

Mrs. Jameson's notes, though less extended than any of her predecessors, are the more valuable; for they are confined almost entirely to remarks of his, rather than descriptions of him. This is her bunch of remarks :*.

"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!'

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"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

A Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies. London, 1854.

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!'

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Then immediately afterwards he prayed that the Divine Comforter might be near the bereaved father when his aged heart went forth from his bosom to flutter round the far southern grave of his boy! Praying for others of the same family who were on the wide ocean, he exclaimed, stretching forth his arms, 'Oh, save them! Oh, guard them! thou angel of the deep."

"On another occasion, speaking of the insufficiency of the moral principles without religious feeling, he exclaimed, "Go heat your oven with snowballs! What! shall I send you to Heaven with such an icicle in your pocket? I might as well put a millstone round your neck to teach you to swim.'

"He was preaching against violence and cruelty: 'Don't talk to me,' said he, 'of the savages: a ruffian in the midst of Christendom is the savage of savages. He is as a man freezing in the sun's heat, groping in the sun's light, a straggler in Paradise, an alien in Heaven!'

"In his chapel all the principal seats in front of the pulpit and down the centre aisle were filled by the sailors. We ladies and gentlemen and strangers, whom curiosity had brought to hear him, were ranged on each side: he would on no account allow us to take the best places. On one occasion, as he was denouncing hypocrisy, luxury, and vanity, and other vices of more civilised life, he said emphatically, 'I don't mean you before me here,' looking at the sailors: I believe you are wicked enough, but honest fellows in some sort; for you profess less, not more, than you practise: but I mean to touch starboard and larboard there!' stretching out both hands with the forefinger extended, and looking at us on either side till we quailed.

"He compared the love of God in sending Christ upon earth to that of the father of a seaman who sends his eldest and most beloved son, the hope of the family, to bring back the younger one, lost on his voyage, and missing when his ship returned to port.

"Alluding to the carelessness of Christians, he used the figure of a mariner, steering into port through a narrow, dangerous,

channel, 'false lights here, rocks there, shifting sandbanks on one side, breakers on the other; and who, instead of fixing his attention to keep the head of his vessel right, and to obey the instructions of the pilot as he sings out from the wheel, throws the pilot overboard, lashes down the helm, and walks the deck whistling, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket.' Here, suiting the action to the word, he put on a true sailor-like look of defiant jollity; changed in a moment to an expression of horror as he added, 'See! see! she drifts to destruction!'

"One Sunday he attempted to give to his sailor congregation an idea of Redemption. He began with an elegant description of a terrific storm at sea, rising to fury through all its gradations; then, amid the waves, a vessel is seen labouring in distress, and driving on a lee shore. The masts bend and break, and go overboard; the sails are rent, the helm unshipped; they spring a leak; the vessel begins to fill, the water gains on them; she sinks deeper, deeper deeper, deeper! He bent over the pulpit, repeating the last words again and again; his voice became low and hollow. The faces of the sailors, as they gazed up at him with their mouths wide open, and their eyes fixed, I shall never forget. Suddenly stopping, and looking to the farthest end of the chapel, as into space, he exclaimed, with a piercing cry of exultation, ‘A lifeboat! a life-boat! Then looking down upon his congregation, most of whom had sprung to their feet in an ecstacy of suspense, he said in a deep, impressive tone, and extending his arms, ' Christ is that life-boat!""

6

These descriptions suffice to whet the public curiosity to know more of this remarkable man. And we have many good reasons for a fuller account.

The subject of it was a striking exhibition of the power the renewing grace of God. With all his peculiarities and exceptional features, the central truth stands out like Teneriffe above the ridgy seas that toss about it. He was a converted man. He had been born again. He was changed by the Holy Ghost from a child of wrath to an heir

of heaven. He stands forth in an age that disputes this divine declaration of the Scriptures, both as to its need and its possibility, a living witness of both truths,—the sad and the glad, the depravity and the regeneration. He entered into a community that had largely lost the testimony of redemption, had forgotten whether there be any Holy Ghost, had covered the Cross with a cloud of speculation, and discarded the Blood of Sacrifice and Salvation as an unholy thing, and outshone its brilliancy with a superior brightness, made its wit dull, its eloquence tame, its fervour cold, its polish rude, with his untutored culture of manners, and shinings of genius; and all this without awakening condemnation of his doctrines, or hostility to his experience. It is not too much to say that Father Taylor was, for a generation, almost the only representative of evangelical faith who had the entrée to those of the cultivated classes of his adopted city who had abandoned this fundamental faith of their fathers and of the Church. It would seem as if to these wise men of the East had arisen the strange star, and led them, all unwillingly, to the cradle of their Lord and Redeemer. They rejoiced in the star; they followed its wanderings; they came by its guidance to the place where their Lord lay.

Other great divines, in some respects greater, arose and shone in the same city at the same period; but none of them was allowed to illuminate souls. Dr. Beecher uttered his burning entreaties and weighty arguments to their deaf ear. Dr. Wayland poured forth his full heart and brain in a stream that rarely flooded their social summits. Dr. Griffin made thousands listen to his strong cries and tears, but this was an outcast among the old Puritan families that had built and