In Boston, “Father Taylor” became famous as an eloquent and colorful preacher, a sailors’ advocate, and a temperance activist.

There, he heard a sermon by Edward D. Griffin at the Park Street Church and exclaimed, "Why can't I preach so?

He was licensed as a lay preacher in 1813 and took a job driving a horse and cart for a Boston store, traveling through the countryside to sell tinware and rags.

[5] In 1817, Amos Binney, Commandant of the Boston Navy Yard and a prominent Methodist layman, recommended that Taylor receive formal training.

Most of Taylor’s assignments were in coastal towns and seaports, and a significant portion of his parishioners were sailors or maritime workers.

At the same time that he was serving the seafaring and mill towns of southeastern New England, Taylor was a popular preacher at summer camp meetings.

They acquired the vacant Methodist Alley Chapel located in the North End, which was the heart of Boston’s shipping industry.

The Port Society renamed the chapel the Seamen’s Bethel, and at the end of the year Taylor was hired as Mariner’s Preacher.

Several Boston merchants, primarily Unitarians, pledged to provide financial assistance, and they arranged to build a new and bigger chapel.

In his absence, the magazine editor Sarah Josepha Hale founded the Seaman’s Aid Society, a women's charitable organization that assisted the Seamen’s Bethel and supported sailors’ wives and families.

He worked with, and was admired by, several Unitarian ministers, notably Henry Ware Jr.; William Ellery Channing; Ralph Waldo Emerson; James Freeman Clarke; Robert C. Waterston; and Cyrus A. Bartol.

[13] A contemporary encyclopedia noted that he “mingled nautical terms and figures in his discourses, and by his wit, pathos, and imagination controlled the moods and wrought upon the feelings of his hearers in a remarkable degree.”[14] The notable Unitarian minister Henry W. Bellows said of Taylor: "There was no pulpit in Boston around which the lovers of genius and eloquence gathered so often, or from such different quarters, as that in the Bethel at the remote North End, where Father Taylor preached.

[18] The European writers Harriet Martineau,[19] Anna Jameson,[20] and James Silk Buckingham[21] also heard Taylor preach and included him in their American travel books.