XV.

IN REFORMS.

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His Double Nature in Conflict.. Love of Reform and Fear of Reformer.Partly due to his Virginia Birth. - Orange Scott and Dr. Bangs.-"Going to Hell Stern foremost."-A good Squeeze. Abolitionists spying their Mother's Faults with a Microscope. - Scaring the Big Fish from swallowing the Moon. Praises Uncle Tom's Cabin, and shouts Hallelujah over the Perdition of the Slave-Catcher. - Still despises the Abolitionists. Stephen 8. Foster an Angel in the House and a Devil on the Platform.- Gets Thomas Whittemore on the Hip. - A Black Skunk. A Black Cloud. - Dr. Jewett's Portrait of him as a Temperance Lecturer.-At Bunker Hill.-"Boston can make a Cup of Tea of a Cargo, but cannot cork up a Gin-Jug."— At New York. - Hanging the Effect, and letting the Cause go Free.- Kicking the Rumseller into the Pacific. - At Easton. Always in a Hurry. - Crossploughs Fine Paths. A Gill of Rum and Molasses changes Men to Murderers. Over Whitefield's Bones. -The Drunkard the Worst Man on Earth except. The Drunkard-Maker adding to the Punishment of Satan if sent to Hell.—"Might as well copy Chain-Lightning as report One of my Speeches." The Grave of Intemperance, and its Gravestone as big as Jupiter. — Angels hurling the Golden Pavements on the Heads of Rumsellers.- How the Dutchman got in his Grass. - Dislike of "Raisin-Water" as a Substitute for Sacramental Wine, or Dye-Stuff and Glue-Pot. His Testimony before the

Legislative Committee of 1867.- His Dying Hate of the Rumseller.

THE

HE peculiarities of Father Taylor were strikingly revealed when brought into relation to reforms. His moral sense, quick as the light, saw the iniquity in all its huge and horrid proportions. No anathemas were too severe for his lips. He did well, he thoroughly believed, to be angry. the social, ecclesiastical, and other relations

But as

of the

embedded evil rose before him, and he heard the inconsiderate assaults of the axeman, not only on the tree of Upas, but also on the tree of Life, he felt for the truth. He feared that the uprooting of the tares would pull up the wheat also. He was alarmed for the State, the Church, and society. He waxed wroth against the very pruners and purgers of the vine, lest they should cut it up, root and branch.

There was some reason for this dread; for, in some of these movements, the stronger passion of the writer and speaker seemed directed against the truth itself more than against the error which had taken shelter under its roof. He could justly let loose his winds at such reformers, who would cast both right and wrong into the same burning. Yet he ought to have discerned between these assailants and others working beside them, who tenderly guarded the plant which they sought to relieve of its noxious and non-natural connections. He ought to have seen that no truth can suffer by the wrong assaults of earnest opponents of popular error; that the Church and society will come out the more resplendent from the very flagellations to which they are thus subjected. He should have hailed the storm that broke up the sickening and progressionless calm. He should have cried to these chastisements as to private struggles with tempta. tion,

"Then welcome each rebuff

That turns earth's smoothness rough,

Each sting that bids nor sit, nor stand, but go!"

But, while the stuff was not in him that makes the cool, steadfast, unrelenting martyr, he possessed the impulses that spring to the front, the varying passion of the cavalry raider. He was not altogether a Breitmann, on all sides of the fight, though many of his friends fancied that was his favorite character. It was rather that Hamlet indecision which sees so many sides to every duty, that it loses nerve for any advance. Had he been of Hamlet's melancholy vein, he would have had his

"Native hue of resolution

All sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

But, being of the opposite temperament, he shot with Hamletian rapidity from side to side of the opposing battalions. Now he hugged Garrison to his heart as his best beloved, and now he crowned Webster with his gems of wit and compliment more dazzling than a monarch's diadem.

In the church controversies he was equally impartial. The slow-going bishop and the fast-speeding radical were alike held in his all-embracing arms. He would attack slavery and defend Virginia in the same breath. He clung to two pilots in this storm, -Church and State: whoever struck these struck him. They could have large liberty with the outworks, if they spared the citadel.

Hence whatever of his words are remembered in connection with the two chief reforms of his age are strangely mixed. Wrath at each side at reformer

and conservative, at the reform and the evil - burns in his epithets. He came where two seas met, and ran his ship aground. He could not help it. There was no passage narrow enough for his keel. His moral instincts were at variance: he could not reconcile the work to be done and the doing of it. Yet he shot the lightnings of his indignation against the wrong which his quick conscience discerned; and it was quite safe to trust him on the platform against these sins, since he would assuredly grow in heat of feeling in the progress of his speech, and burn up the dross of vain fears, as to harm following the application of the truth to the hostile iniquity. When once out to sea, he would run magnificently before the wind. The audience delighted in his effort; and the shrewd managers, who felt that they had caught a Tartar in his opening words, rejoiced that the Tartar had soon become a tractable rider of their own steed, and had borne their standard all the farther on to victory from his preliminary conuetting with the enemy.

He had been brought up among slaves: the first children he ever played with, all he ever played with, were slaves. He was not instinctively driven to reform, as is the Yankee-born. A Virginian's indifference to social evils slumbered in his veins. He was proud of his native soil. It was sacred to him. So, when he heard the system and State alike condemned, he refused to discriminate. He was indignant at the assailant of Virginia, and cloaked her faults against such a north wind.

The Church reeled on the gulf of Secession. He loved it as the apple of his eye. He saw its ministers abasing it, and he shouted, "Away with these fellows that strike their holy mother! they are not fit to live." His wrath burned at the men, who, he feared, were wrecking the ship, more than at the cargo she was criminally carrying.

Yet he shot back and forward between the contending hosts and ideas, faithful alike to his two central forces, love of ideal truth, love of organic form. Truth must not shatter form: organism must not stifle truth.

He met this conflict first in his church. Rev. Orange Scott, by far the most distinguished of the Methodist leaders in the antislavery war, took early position on the Garrisonian platform, -immediate and unconditional emancipation. In 1835, he circulated "The Liberator" gratuitously among all the members of the Conference, being pastors of the Methodist churches in most of Massachusetts, all of Rhode Island, and half of Connecticut, and, in the following year, had a Conference Antislavery Society organized on this basis. George Thompson delivered one of his thrilling sermons before them (he was then a local preacher of the British Wesleyan Church); and they elected delegates to the General Conference of 1836, who, with a few others from New Hampshire and Maine, constituted the famous fourteen that stood against the multitude in affirming that two of the body were not worthy of censure for attending an antislavery prayer-meeting.