So he denounced the abolitionists and slavery in the same breath. “Before I would assist one of those Southern devils to catch a nigger,” he shouted, after reading “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” “I would see them all in hell, and I would shout hallelujah on to the end of it!” “You talk like a rabid abolitionist,” said his interlocutor. “No,” he cried, with even more vengeance; “no, I despise them. They have cursed the land!” He called Foster, the abolitionist orator, “a devil on the platform.” His reverence for the church led him to consign summarily to a hotter climate those who came out on the anti-slavery issue; and he was a vehement advocate of church authority, and evangelical orthodoxy, yet the most of his life he preached for Unitarians; and he openly defied the mandate of the conference regarding Masonry, being a member of the fraternity, and he submitted to church discipline for his contumacy, but refused to withdraw from the order, and prayed in public for the anti-Masons, “O, Lord, make their hearts as soft as their heads are.” Plainly, there was no managing such a tempestuous soul, and he was left to go his own way. Honor be to the church that had the magnanimity and broad charity to let him do his own grand work in his own grand way. It was herein as grand and eccentric as an organization as he was among men. His sarcasm, wit, terseness, and vigor of speech were the outcome of an energetic and picturesque mind, struggling with a limited vocabulary for its expression. His sentences were explosive. “This fast age,” he said, “would be glad to put spurs to lightning, and blow a trumpet in the ears of thunder.” Again, “Some people think they are saints. If they could see themselves as the just in glory see them they wouldn’t dare to look a decent devil in the face.” “If I owed the devil a hypocrite, and he wouldn’t take that man for pay, I’d repudiate the debt.” He called another minister, who had preceded him, and infringed on his allotted time, “As selfish as a whale who takes in a ton of herring before breakfast.” Again, “It is a great mistake to think of converting the world without the help of sailors. You might as well think of melting a mountain of ice with a moonbeam, or of heating an oven with snow-balls.” He called morality, without religion, “Starting a man to heaven with an icicle in his pocket.” “I am not two inches off heaven!” he exclaimed, in a moment of religious exaltation. He said to Channing, the Unitarian: “When you die angels will fight for the honor of carrying you to heaven on their shoulders.” “Sailors’ hearts are big as an ox’s; open like a sunflower, and they carry them in their right hands ready to give them away.” One of his converts, gifted in prayer, he always called “Salvation-set-to-music.” A colored brother, speaking with the simple pathos of his race, drew from Father Taylor the ejaculation, “There is rain in that cloud.”