USA > New York > New York City > The history of the Broadway tabernacle church, from its organization in 1840 to the close of 1900, including factors influencing its formation > Part 13
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These and many other pleasant impressions had rendered Mr. Taylor kindly disposed to such overtures as Dr. Thomp- son made in behalf of the Tabernacle Church, and his experi- ences in Liverpool had fitted him for responsibilities such as life in New York was sure to bring. He said in relation to the call :
" When the invitation came to me and I laid it before my officers they said: 'There is no place in England for which we should give you up, but we dare not hinder you from taking such work as that in New York.' Men who said this said it with tears standing in their eyes at the thought of parting with me." *
The call of the Tabernacle Church Mr. Taylor accepted De- cember 29th. In his letter of that date he says:
" As far as I myself am concerned, I cannot but feel slightly anxious when I remember that the people have never heard me, and when I think that they may, perhaps, be expecting from me that which I can- not give. Nevertheless I will come among you to preach Christ cruci- fied, and I am sure that I shall find that the attraction of the cross is as strong in New York as it is anywhere else. It will be my constant aim to hide myself behind my Master, and my hope is that you may in all my ministrations forget the minister in the importance of his mes- sage, 'hearing, indeed, the voice, but seeing no man.'"
Mr. Taylor made no delay in taking up his new duties. He arrived in New York on March Ist, and by the second Sabbath of that month began his pastorate. But when, with wife and children, he found himself in the dreary month of February in mid-ocean, with his heart turning toward the church and the dismantled home he had left behind, and with absolutely no acquaintance with the people to whom he was going, and no knowledge of the home to which he was tak- * The Quiver, p. 100, December, 1888.
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THE THIRD PASTOR, WILLIAM MACKERGO TAYLOR
ing his household, nine souls in all, it is no wonder that this heart misgave him and that he passed some gloomy hours. But his faith was too robust to leave him long in doubt. He says, again : *
" My coming ultimately was to me almost like Abraham's obedience to the call of God when he went out 'not knowing whither he went.' I did not know the way by which He was leading me; but I knew Him, and the result was that I knew Him better than ever."
At this time Mr. Taylor was in the prime of life. He was the son of Peter and Isobel (Mackergo) Taylor, of Kilmar- nock, in Ayrshire, Scotland. He was born in one of the side streets off King Street, Kilmarnock, on October 23, 1829. His father was a merchant or shopkeeper, and a member of the Secession Church. Both father and mother were pious people, possessed of remarkable intelligence, and well versed in the theological questions of the times. The family traced relationship with the Howies of Lockgoin, the lonely home of the Covenanters and shelter of the persecuted. Like Dr. Thompson, he took satisfaction in his Covenanter ancestry, and in later years visited the spot, and had special pleasure in tak- ing the various members of his family to catch inspiration from it. Mr. Taylor studied at the academy in his native town. The boy was distinguished for his love of learning and the rapid progress he made in almost every department. He car- ried off many literary honors and was very early called to be an assistant teacher. He graduated at the University of Glas- gow when he was but twenty years of age. An attic above his father's house was his study, and not infrequently, when some procession was passing or important event taking place in the main street, he could be seen pushing up the skylight window and peering over the slates, satisfied with this brief interruption to his work without desiring to mingle with the crowd. He entered the Divinity Hall of the United Presby- terian Church, the year after the Union, when Drs. Brown, Eadie, M'Michael, Harper, and Lindsay were professors. He
* At the End of Twenty Years. Sermon preached March 13, 1892, p. 6.
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had great respect and veneration for these teachers, and in his work on the Scottish Pulpit, which has been called his most charming volume, he made sketches of prominent divines who were in their prime when he was a student; among them the character and work of Drs. Brown and Eadie are lov- ingly depicted. In the Divinity Hall he gained distinguished honors and was held in high esteem by his professors and fel- low-students. The sessions of the Divinity Hall at that time were restricted to the months of August and September in each year, and during the intervals he was engaged in teach- ing and on the staff of the Kilmarnock Journal as reporter, and, later, as sub-editor. During his theological course he was under the supervision of the United Presbytery of Ayrshire.
There were certain young friends whom he made during these years of ministerial training to whom he remained warmly attached all his days, visiting them summers, while taking his vacation abroad, and insuring the companionship of his friend the Rev. Mr. Kirkwood, of Troon, in whose pul- pit he appeared season after season, by the promise, " Play with me this week, and I will preach for you Sunday." Large audiences were attracted when he preached in Ayrshire on these annual visits, for, to the old friends, no matter what honors he achieved, he was to the last, always Willie Taylor.
Mr. Taylor was licensed as preacher on September 14, 1852, by the United Presbytery of Ayrshire, but as early as Sep- tember, 1850, he had been allowed, according to the custom of the United Presbyterians, to preach in behalf of missions. That first missionary sermon, repeated many times afterward, and the forerunner of many other missionary pleas, was the means of bringing in a rich harvest for the treasury of missions. The amount of the collection on its first delivery delighted him, and he wrote gleefully to his betrothed wife that " it spake well for the preacher, but better for his hearers."
As a preacher of the United Presbyterian Church Mr. Tay- lor at once came to the front, and after a few months re- ceived a call from Sanquhar and another from Kilmaurs. Though a much larger salary was offered by the former, he
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THE THIRD PASTOR, WILLIAM MACKERGO TAYLOR
refused it and was settled in Kilmaurs-an historical congre- gation in connection with the denomination. He was ordained at Kilmaurs, where his grandfather had been an elder and his father baptized, on June 28, 1853. Being only two miles from his native city, he did not shrink from the severe ordeal to which a prophet in such circumstances is exposed. While here he married, October 4th, Miss Jessie Steedman, like him- self a native of Kilmarnock, one of whose brothers had been a fellow-student at the College and the Divinity Hall, and it was to the beautiful manse of Kilmaurs which he describes * as " one of the sweetest nooks to be seen in Scotland or any other country," that he led home his bride.
It was impossible, however, that Kilmaurs could long retain his services. He had labored there with such zeal and success that the Rev. Mr. Robertson, of Irvine, called the attention of the newly formed United Presbyterian Church of Derby Road, Bootle, to his prominent abilities, and they afterward invited him to become their pastor. He accepted the call on October 23, 1854: +
" This was the scene of his labors for sixteen years. The field seemed decidedly unpromising. A suburb of Liverpool and the terminus of the Cunard Line of steamships, the families of seamen, engineers, and me- chanics formed the bulk of the population. No attempt at social or religious improvement had been made within its limits previous to Dr. Taylor's call to the charge of the church and he found it literally a field for missionary labor. The first services were held in a stable loft and the number of members the society could muster was only thirty, but under his charge the society rapidly increased, and in 1869 it wor- shipped in a fine stone church large enough to hold twelve hundred people."
The death of the Prince Consort occurred in December, 1861. Dr. Taylor's sermon the following Sunday was a not- able one. Although the text had not been chosen nor pen put to paper until seven o'clock on Saturday evening, it was
* Church Building Quarterly, April, 1875, p. 67.
+ This account of Dr. Taylor's early years is taken mainly from the Kilmar- nock Standard and from another Ayrshire journal.
# Harper's Weekly, July 18, 1874.
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written and delivered memoriter on Sunday, and was the only sermon on that event, preached in Liverpool, that was pub- lished in full by the daily press. Copies of the sermon were in such demand that, after a few days, it was reprinted sepa- rately. That sermon brought the preacher more prominently before the public.
From that time Mr. Taylor showed great aptitude in seiz- ing upon topics that stirred the public mind. He was more and more sought after for special occasions by churches of all denominations, and his aid was eagerly claimed for re- ligious and philanthropic enterprises of every sort in and about Liverpool. The Liverpool Seaman's Friend Society, in which he would be naturally interested, the Town Mission, the Auxiliary Bible Society, and like institutions did not ask his help in vain.
Possibly some of the best though least conspicuous services of Mr. Taylor, during his life in Liverpool, were rendered at the social meetings of neighbor churches. At such meetings the congregation would be fully represented and in its happi- est mood. The presence of Mr. Taylor never failed to in- crease the good-humor of the assembly. His speech, looked forward to with eagerness, always surpassed the anticipations of his hearers. The children would even become boisterous in their applause of the homely illustrations with which he en- forced the lessons he wished to teach.
Dr. Taylor valued very highly the fellowship of his min- isterial brethren in Liverpool. In his published " Remi- niscences of Professor William Graham, D.D.," a devoted friend, he writes :
" A remarkable body of men the non-conforming ministers at that time were." He particularizes and describes some of them and says of the association: "It was a rare treat to be a member of such a band, and I never knew how much it was to me until the Atlantic rolled between us." The sim- ple objects of the "Club," as it was called, Dr. Taylor set forth as follows: "There were no papers read and no dis- cussions carried on, but, though now and then we talked of
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By permission of Harper Bros.
REV. WILLIAM M. TAYLOR, D.D., LL.D. Pastor 1872 to 1892
THE THIRD PASTOR, WILLIAM MACKERGO TAYLOR
how we were to act on some great public question, the ob- ject we set before us was simply the enjoyment of two or three hours of social fellowship, and these occasions were greatly relished by us all."
Dr. Taylor must have missed the social element in the more formal ministers' clubs this side of the ocean, where papers are read and discussed, and men meet to study problems rather than to promote friendliness.
Many proposals came to Mr. Taylor while in Bootle, from one quarter and another, to change the scene of his pastoral labors; of course his people were likewise disturbed. So the invitation to the Church of the Pilgrims seemed to come as a relief, giving change of scene, and foreign travel without interference with his own church relations. No thought of its possible results, or that he might, within a year, be set- tled in the new world, seems to have crossed his mind .* As has been said, the new pastor reached New York March Ist. The usual March communion service had been put off, thus enabling Mr. Taylor and his people to sit together at the Lord's table on the first Sabbath that he was with them. His installation took place a month later, April 9th. The council was composed of representatives from the Congregational churches of the vicinity, and ministers belonging to the New York and Brooklyn Conference; also to the Central Church of Boston, the First of Pittsfield, the Central of Philadelphia, the Second of Bridgeport, and Rev. Leonard Bacon, D.D., of New Haven, and Rev. Roswell D. Hitchcock, D.D., of New York City. Other sister churches were represented; the Bap- tist, by Rev. Thomas D. Anderson, D.D .; the Episcopal, by Rev. Stephen H. Tyng, Jr .; the Presbyterian, by Rev. John Hall, D.D., and Rev. Rollins A. Sawyer; the Reformed, by Rev. William Ormiston, D.D .; and the United Presbyterian, by Rev. George D. Mathews. The sermon was preached by the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, whose text was Mark 16 : 19,
* In this summary of Dr. Taylor's life before coming to America I have drawn from a paper by Rev. Mr. Hassan and from material and information furnished by Dr. Taylor's daughter, Miss Isobel M. Taylor .- S. H. W.
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20: "So then, after the Lord had spoken unto them, he was received up to heaven, and sat on the right hand of God.
" And they went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs fol- lowing."
Others who joined in the service were Rev. Leonard Bacon, D.D., who offered the installing prayer; Rev. Henry M. Storrs, D.D., who gave the charge to the pastor; Rev. Will- iam Ives Budington, D.D., the right hand of fellowship, and Rev. George B. Bacon, of Orange, N. J., who gave the charge to the people.
The society had voted, the previous November, to pay Mr. Taylor a salary of $9,000, the same amount voted to Dr. Thompson in 1869, and to meet the expense of moving his household to New York; but the trustees having been recently brought to realize the necessity of providing for their pastor when disabled by illness, determined to make provision be- forehand. Therefore, in the first year of Dr. Taylor's pas- torate, the society not only paid his rent and raised his salary to $10,000, but they secured a twenty-year endowment policy upon his life for $25,000; agreeing to pay the annual pre- mium of $1,238.II so long as he continued their pastor.
Both Yale and Amherst gave to Mr. Taylor, in June, 1872, the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and the same year the Ameri- can Home Missionary Society elected him to membership in their Executive Committee.
It had long seemed necessary to make certain important changes in the Tabernacle building, and it was thought best to put the work through at once, so that the church should be in the best of order when parish activities were renewed after the summer vacation. In May the society voted to remove from the body of the house the six large stone pillars that ob- structed more than two hundred sittings, and the low roof over the aisles; to construct a new roof; also to decorate and refurnish the house and make sundry improvements in light- ing, heating, and ventilating.
Churches in the vicinity proved kindly neighbors, and from
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THE THIRD PASTOR, WILLIAM MACKERGO TAYLOR
the time the work began, early in June, until the middle of July, on Sunday evenings, the Tabernacle services were held in the Brick Church, Thirty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue; and the morning service in Association Hall. After the sum- mer vacation, morning service was held in the Tabernacle chapel, and, Sunday evenings, the church worshipped in the Fourth Presbyterian Church on Thirty-fourth Street until the work was completed. The Tabernacle was reopened Sabbath morning, November 24th. The changes enlarged the seat- ing capacity of the house and rendered it much more cheerful, airy, and attractive.
On November 24, 1869, the church had adopted a plan for aggressive work outside the limits of its own congregation, in order to utilize the energy and ability of many active Chris- tian men upon whom no special church responsibility rested. This plan was followed in a general way until 1886. By this arrangement a manager was elected annually for the following departments : Mission Schools ; Visitation of the Poor and Sick in mission districts; Charitable Contributions for work in these departments; Strangers, with special regard to the reception of strangers at the church services. These managers were authorized each to organize a corps of assistants from such members of the society as would willingly co-operate in his department, and at the annual meeting of the church they were to report progress. The managers with the pastor and the treasurer of the church constituted a Board of Consulta- tion for the work of each department, and for disbursing funds raised for such work. The board was not authorized to enter upon any new mission field without the consent of the church. The first managers appointed were Messrs. Ranney, Bates, Abernethy, and Winterburn. In a short time a "Department of Education " was added to these " Departments of Missions and Charities," the special object of which was to educate young men for the ministry. Gradually the city-mission ener- gies of the church centred in the Bethany enterprise, and in the new Chinese Sunday-school begun in 1885. At the an- nual meeting of the church, held February 3, 1886, a Board
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of Missions, consisting of a committee of three, was substituted for the Board of Managers, and for the Board of Missions that had been appointed on the organization of the Bethany Church; the Department of Strangers was replaced by a Re- ception Committee of one, with power to appoint his assistant ushers, and the Chinese work was put in charge of a committee of three.
The attraction which the Broadway Tabernacle held for young men, and Dr. Taylor's interest in the many who thronged there, soon led him to organize for them a literary union which, besides its social service, afforded them an opportunity for practice in debate, essay writing, and parliamentary usage. In its first year Dr. Taylor gave before the society a lecture on " Books and Reading." This literary union was reported at the annual meeting of the church for half a dozen years. In 1878, when the last record of it is given, its officers were: President, Mr. Austin Abbott; Vice-President, Mr. William Ives Washburn; Recording Secretary, Mr. G. W. Somerin- dyke; Corresponding Secretary, Mr. John Allyn; Treasurer, Mr. Irving R. Fisher; its directors were Dr. Taylor, Mr. John H. Washburn, Mr. Clark Bell, and Mr. George W. Hale. The pastor also organized a Bible class and teachers' prepara- tory meeting for Friday evenings.
But Dr. Taylor was not especially an organizer of church activities. He was a preacher of the Word, mighty in the Scriptures, and he fed the flock. He made regular pas- toral calls, announcing week by week from the pulpit what streets he should traverse on his visiting days; and in times of sorrow he was tenderness itself. He had known bereave- ment in his own household. By a scourge of scarlet fever, in 1867, he had lost little children, two daughters and a son, and through this experience of grief he was skilled in com- forting those who were in any trouble. He brought them into the very presence of the God of all comfort, and left them where they should be partakers of the consolation as well as suffering. But over all and above all he was a preacher. His published writings were for the most part first delivered in
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THE THIRD PASTOR, WILLIAM MACKERGO TAYLOR
the pulpit and were meant not for theological experts, but for the people .* Not a few of them have been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Marathi, and other languages. As late as 1900, "Peter the Apostle " was translated and published in Ahmednagar, India, where it was at once put into active use, and has since been followed by a translation of "Elijah, the Prophet."
Doctor Taylor's appearance in the pulpit was massive, dig- nified, impressive. He was of medium height, but his sturdy frame gave the impression of great strength. He had a noble head, a serious face, sensitive to emotion, with grave eyes that could flash or burn or twinkle under bushy brows, enough Scotch fire to warm his tongue to eloquence, and of accent and homeliness of diction to make his speech picturesque. His voice was clear and strong, his action unstudied, energetic, at times vehement. In the words of Dr. R. S. Storrs :
" Every fibre of his being, physical and moral, came in to contribute to the intensity and power of his utterance. . I used often to think when I was in the pulpit with him or in the congregation before him, that even that mighty physical frame would be shaken to pieces with the earnestness, the momentum, the self-forgetful intensity of his thought and utterance. But so it was that he put himself into other lives,-put his thought into other minds, his feeling and purpose into other spirits and swayed assemblies with his impressive and masterful utterance." t
Of set purpose, Dr. Taylor changed his early argumenta- tive style to exposition aided by illustration, using a wealth of illustration not because it was his natural way of speaking, but because it seemed to him the most effective. He made preaching his business. His one aim was to save men, to build up saints. He was a wide reader, and his illustrations were gathered from a broad range of subjects. His exposi- tions were practical, helpful for every-day life. Biblical scenes and incidents became vivid in the sight of his hearers as he described them, and, thanks to his wonderfully retentive memory and to his continued and constant Biblical study, he had always at command the very scriptural passage that could * Appendix J. t William Mackergo Taylor, p. 30.
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throw the light of revelation upon the truth he was teaching. In his sermon, " At the End of Twenty Years," Dr. Taylor defined the course of study through which he had taken his church. He says :
" One of the most important duties of the pulpit is instruction, and on one part of each Lord's day up till this present winter, when I have been prevented by considerations of health, I have followed steadily out some course of exposition, so that in the years of my ministry here, I have expounded the larger portion of the historical books of the Old and New Testaments. Genesis we took with Abraham, Jacob and Joseph; the other four books of the Pentateuch we studied when our theme was the life of Moses; Joshua we had when we followed the campaigns of that great captain. Many portions of the books of Samuel came into the life of David; and we had large sections of the books of Kings, when we took up the biographies of Elijah and Elisha. We were delighted and animated by the business career of Nehemiah, and we followed with eager interest the history of Esther. We spent some weeks on Jonah; and a winter on the miscalled minor prophets. In the Gospels we took the Miracles and Parables of our Saviour. The book of the Acts of the Apostles came almost entirely under our study in the lives of Peter and of Paul; while we have had discourses on the whole of the Lord's Prayer; on Peter's plan for character building ; and other similar passages from the Epistles. This has been with me a matter of principle and not of convenience. If I had sought my own ease I would not have taken up any such courses, for the preparation of such 'Lectures,' as they are called in my native land, costs far more labor than that of other sorts of sermons. But my desire was to make my hearers familiar with the Word of God. I have not preached about it, but I have preached out of it, and I indulge the hope that they who followed me in these Bible studies will often remember them in after days, and will say regarding me: 'He gave us a new relish for the Bible, for he taught us to read it with intelligence and self-application.'"
He says further :
" On the other parts of the Lord's Day my subjects have been mis- cellaneous, as God might suggest to me, doctrinal or practical, but it has always been my habit to make them first expository, so that in these also, the Word was uppermost."
Dr. Clapp, in one of his letters to the Congregationalist signed " Huntington," says that Dr. Taylor's power in the scriptures did not appear only or chiefly in his pulpit dis-
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courses, but that those flashes of Biblical illumination so char- acteristic of him quite as often startled and surprised his hearers at the mid-week prayer-meeting.
Another testimony as to Dr. Taylor's scriptural insight is given by the ex-president of Union Theological Seminary, Dr. Thomas S. Hastings, for a series of years his parishioner :
" His way of handling the Word of God-reverently, scholarly, prac- tically, and forcefully-was peculiarly delightful to me. I can never forget the keen relish with which he would come to me sometimes, when he thought he had a fresh view of some passage of scripture, and how his heart warmed within him, and how his face glowed as he unfolded to me its meaning.
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