4. _His humor._ This kept all cheerful, healthy and bright. He was a “laughing Christian.” I do not think he ever used humor merely to make people laugh, but always with an earnest purpose back of it. He was no joker, and rarely thought his own keen thrusts subjects for merriment.
Of his manliness, his good sense, his improvidence, his sweet and beautiful home life, space does not suffice to speak.
If to be an original character among men is to be eccentric, Father Taylor was indeed odd. “He was in all things himself and not any one else; in this generation there has been but one Father Taylor,” said Dr. Waterstone; and Dr. Bartol declared that, “No American citizen—Webster, Clay, Everett, Lincoln, Choate—has a reputation more impressive and unique.” No one understood his singularity better than himself. “I will not wear a straight-jacket or Chinese shoes,” he declared. Having been invited to lecture, he said: “I can’t lecture; I would not lecture if I could. Your lectures are all macadamized; they are entertainments where those go who dare not visit the theater. I must cross-plow your fine paths. I am no man’s model, no man’s copyist, no man’s agent; go on my own hook; say what I please, and you may help yourselves.”
Like all greatly-eccentric souls, I presume, he felt his own isolation and want of comprehension of himself by others. One who sat far into the night in communion of soul with him, said: “You are a strange mortal!” “Well,” said he, pathetically, “I have made up my mind there never was but one E. T. Taylor and, so far as I have anything to do with it, there never shall be another.”
When we think of his birth, training, and surroundings—the child of the plantation and the graduate of the forecastle—and contrast this with his peculiar powers, his strange career, and above all in rarity his wonderful world-wide mission, it is not too much to say that Father Taylor is without a parallel in American history. “An impulsive, untrained, and erratic genius;” there was a fixed purpose and a continuity of effort, such as is seen in few lives. If extravagant in speech and inconsistent in views, his intensity, vividness, and realism, make all sound like plain common-sense. Haughty and tender, imperious and democratic, grand and simple, splendidly uncultured; a strange, terrible power among men always used for leading, driving, persuading to righteousness. He deserves a paraphrase of a higher tribute than Phillips, the Irish barrister, gave to Napoleon. Such a medley of contradictions and at the same time such individual consistency for right were never before united in the same character. In the solitude of his originality, he was always the same mysterious, incomprehensible self—a man without a model and without a shadow.