Father Taylor, Boston's Sailor Preacher

Book excerpt: One of the most celebrated nineteenth-century American preachers was Edward T. Taylor, always known as Father Taylor. Taylor was an uneducated former sailor who became a Methodist minister and served a church for sailors in Boston's North End for forty years. Despite his lack of education, his natural talents attracted not only large crowds of sailors but also people such as Walt Whitman, who said Taylor was "the one essentially perfect orator" he had ever heard. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "the Poet of the church" and "the Shakspear of the sailor and the poor." Horace Mann said that in Taylor's preaching "soul speaks to soul." The book contains a biographical essay on Taylor by the author, scores of accounts of his life and preaching written by people who knew him, and nineteen illustrations.