laughed at the quaint conceits of the sailor-preacher expected to have a good time, and to go home with an undisturbed conscience. He little knew his man. These oddities and witticisms were but the skirmishers that masked the main attack, and broke the adversary's line before the heavy columns of the old general should he hurled upon it. The preacher had never read that laughter is the best preparation for tears, but genius had taught him the lesson; and his rarest wit was but the ambush for his most powerful assaults. Some of this great orator's sayings seems irreverent, as repeated out of their connection, and without any knowledge of their effect. They did not seem so to one, who, after hearing the whole discourse, went home trembling, or cast himself at the altar with prayers for salvation. "I am always afraid when I am laughing at Father Taylor's wit," said a man of wit. "I know he will make me cry before he has done with me." To judge Father Taylor's oratory by single, detached, ludicrous expressions, is like judging the awful tragedies of Shakespeare by a sentence from the mouth of one of his clowns.

Whether he laughed or wept, whether he used sarcasm or pathos, he had that quality in oratory which is above all art, he forgot himself in his determination to enforce upon his hearers the truth which he loved. And all his powers of eloquence, wit, humour, pathos, were consecrated by their entire devotion to the service of his Lord.

CHAPTER V.

IN THE BETHEL PRAYER-MEETING.

F the Bethel pulpit was a free place, the Bethel prayer-meeting was far more free. Here liberty

had free course to run and be glorified. The word "prayer-meeting" does not express the fact. That suggests a gathering exclusively for prayer. Such it is in his church. out of New England. Such it was in most churches except the Methodist. But when the Methodists entered New England, to gain a foothold, they had to yield something to the prejudices of the people. Here, as everywhere, were set ways. One of these ways was two sermons together to the same congregation; another was pews owned by the occupants. To gain the people to them, they had to surrender these two points to them,-allow them the ownership of their pews, and two sermons a day. The last prevented the flourishing of the circuit system on her soil. It also prevented the development of the local preacher system; for the people demanded a settled minister, or as near that as they could get under an itinerancy. To accommodate them, the

sabbath-evening prayer-meeting was invented, -a meeting for a long time peculiar to New-England Methodists, and which drew, and yet draws, larger audiences steadily to its ministrations than the Sunday-evening preaching of other sections, or than any other form of Sabbath-evening assemblage.

These meetings consisted of two or four short prayers and a dozen or twenty short exhortations or "testimonies," interspersed frequently with a verse of animated song, and concluding usually with an invitation to penitents to come forward to the front seats, or the rail enclosing the broad platform, and called an altar, that they may be prayed with, and led into the kingdom of Christ and peace. In the olden times, this platform, always spacious, was filled with the leading laymen of the church. They to-day, generally leave it to the minister.

The preacher and his lay associates gather in the railed enclosure. The house was crowded with saints, seekers, and sinners. The service begins with a cheerful hymn, sung "lustily " to a cheerful tune. The minister prays, or calls on one of his brethren. Two earnest prayers, and another short hymn is sung. Again two pray, and again an animated and animating song. Then a rapid succession of warm addresses, followed by warmer invitations put into sacred song, and the hour flies swift round to nine o'clock, and the end.

The freedom of such a meeting, its warmth, its rapidity, its consummation in invitations to seekers, their acceptance in prayer, and praise, combined to give it pre-eminence over any other regular religious meeting. The stiff formalism

of the papal service, like ice to the frozen spectator, making him chillier by its superabounding chilliness; the long and largely intellectual services of the Puritan worship, rational to the verge of irrationalism; even the warmer pleadings of warmer pulpits, all fade into unattractiveness before the "hearty," social freedom and joy of a Methodist prayermeeting. If it can be held to the old pitch of liberty and life, it will bring the world to its holy feasts. It makes every participant exclaim, -

"Blest Jesus, what delicious fare!

How sweet thine entertainments are!"

In such meetings Father Taylor would naturally revel. He had preached his two sermons, wringing himself dry with a change of linen; he was nervous, rejoicing to run a race, and, though tired, ready for a change in his work, and glad to throw off even the limited restraints of his pulpit for the broad liberty of the prayer-meeting. It was his professional easy-chair, and from it went forth ceaseless pleading, wit, and power. The room is crowded. It is low, but large. Sailors are there; lost girls from its own neighbourhood, come, as he tells them, "to steal away his sons of Zebulon; lost men, up-town grandees, many yet unfallen youth; and his own "ring" of men and women, full of heart and hope.

He walks his broader deck with glad heart and free. He interjects his word of criticism or commendation with every speech of his brethren and sisters as his spirits dictate. He warms into exhortation and entreaty, and brings many a strange Caliban from the back seats to "the altar," by his skilful fishing for men. Here he builds up his church, and gains most of his trophies of ministerial honour and reward.

A prayer-meeting in the Bethel vestry, or, as it was called, "the old workshop," was unlike, therefore, any other prayer-meeting even; for there were gathered men from all parts of the world, drawn, some by curiosity, some by associations, some by grateful recollections of the past. Many would speak at these meetings whose broken English and uncouth phrases showed their foreign birth and rough training. No one who heard will ever forget the native of Portugal who exclaimed, "If any man say I no love the Lord Jesus, I hit him 'tween the eyes." But But more frequently the broken speech of these wayfaring men was used to tell a story of sorrow and suffering, ending with a chance visit to the Bethel, where the wanderer found a hope, a faith, and a Friend, that had never left him on sea or land. Father Taylor would glow with pride over these trophies, weep with joy, and break out in exclamations of delight: "See," he would say, "see the amber that is thrown on the shore; look at the pearls that come from the ocean,jewels fit to adorn the Saviour's diadem when he shall ride over the sea to judge the earth."

There were gathered around him a body of men and women almost as remarkable as himself. First among them

was his wife, whose stately form and beautiful features, with her sweet voice, added grace to her powerful exhortations. Many a sailor boasts that he owes his renewed life to "Mother Taylor's" influence.

Then came what he called his Three Hebrews, --three brethren of sturdy make, of foreign blood, of strong faith, simple character, clear utterance, who knew the sailor as a boatswain knows his whistle, and whose exhortations always