regret his late and troubled years. The turmoil of the Civil War now agitated the country, and Jeremy Taylor was inevitably committed by principle and profession to the royal cause. By virtue of the king's mandate, he was made a doctor of divinity; and at the command of Charles he wrote a defence of Episcopacy. In 1645, apparently while accompanying the royal army as chaplain, or as chaplain to the king, Jeremy Taylor was taken prisoner by the Parliamentary forces, in the battle fought before Cardigan Castle. He was soon released; but the tide of war had turned against the royalists, and in the wreck of the

Church, Taylor resolved to continue in Wales, and, in conjunction with two learned friends, to establish a school at Newton-hall in Caermarthenshire. He appears to have been twice imprisoned by the dominant party, but treated with no marked severity.

'In the great storm,' he says, 'which dashed the vessel of the church all in pieces, I had been cast on the coast of Wales, and in a little boat thought to have enjoyed that rest and quietness which in England in a far greater I could not hope for. Here I cast anchor, and thinking to ride safely, the storm followed me with so impetuous violence that it broke a cable, and I lost my anchor, and here again I was exposed to the mercy of the sea, and the gentleness of an element that could neither

distinguish things nor persons: and but that He that stilleth the raging of the sea, and the noise of his waves, and the madness of his people, had provided a plank for me, I had been lost to all the opportunities of content or study; but I know not whether I have been more preserved by the courtesies of my friends, or the gentleness and mercies of a noble enemy.'

This fine passage is in the dedication to Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying, shewing the Unreasonableness of prescribing to other Men's Faith, and the Iniquity of persecuting Differing Opinions (1646) -'prophesying' meaning simply preaching or expounding. The work has been justly described as 'perhaps, of all Taylor's writings, that which shows him furthest in advance of the age in which he lived, and of the ecclesiastical system in which he had been reared-as the first distinct and avowed defence of toleration which had been ventured on in England, perhaps in Christendom.' He builds the right of private judgment upon the difficulty of expounding Scripture, the insufficiency and uncertainty of tradition, the fallibility of councils, the pope, ecclesiastical writers, and the Church as a body, as arbiters of controverted points, and the consequent necessity of letting every man choose his own guide or judge of the meaning of Scripture for himself; since, says he, 'any man may be better trusted for himself, than any man can be for another; for in this case his own interest is most concerned, and ability is not so necessary as honesty, which certainly every man will best preserve in his own case, and to himself-and if he does not, it's he that must smart for it; and it is not required of us not to be in error, but that we endeavour to avoid it.' Milton, in his scheme of toleration from the opposite camp, excluded Roman Catholics; and Jeremy Taylor, to establish some standard of truth and prevent anarchy, as he alleges, proposed the confession of the Apostles' Creed as the test of orthodoxy and the condition of union among Christians. The principles he advocates that governments should not interfere with any opinions save such as directly tend to subvert them go to destroy this limitation, and are applicable to universal toleration, which perhaps he dared hardly then avow, even if he had entertained such an aspiration. The style of his masterly Discourse' is more argumentative and less ornate than that of his sermons and devotional treatises; but his enlightened zeal often breaks forth in striking condemnation of those who are 'curiously busy about trifles and impertinences, while they reject those glorious precepts of Christianity and holy life which are the glories of our religion, and would enable us to gain a happy eternity.' He closes the work in the second edition (1659) with the following interesting and instructive apologue :

I end with a story which I find in the Jews' books: When Abraham sat at his tent-door according to his custom, waiting to entertain strangers, he espied an old

man stopping and leaning on his staff, weary with age and travel, coming towards him, who was an hundred years of age. He received him kindly, washed his feet, provided supper, caused him to sit down; but observing that the old man eat and prayed not, nor begged for a blessing on his meat, asked him why he did not worship the God of heaven. The old man told him that he worshipped the fire only, and acknowledged no other God; at which answer Abraham grew so zealously angry, that he thrust the old man out of his tent, and exposed him to all the evils of the night and an unguarded condition. When the old man was gone, God called to Abraham, and asked him where the stranger was. He replied: I thrust him away because he did not worship thee.' God answered him: I have suffered him these hundred years, although he dishonoured me; and couldst thou not endure him one night, when he gave thee no trouble?' Upon this, saith the story, Abraham fetched him back again, and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruction. Go thou and do likewise, and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abraham.

In Wales, Jeremy Taylor was married to Mrs Joanna Bridges, absurdly said to have been a natural daughter of Charles I., but mistress of an estate in the county of Caermarthen. He was thus relieved from the irksome duties of a schoolmaster; but the fines and sequestrations imposed by the Parliamentary party on the property of the royalists are supposed to have dilapidated his wife's fortune. It is known that he received a pension from the patriotic and excellent John Evelyn, and the literary labours of Taylor were never relaxed. In his Welsh retreat he further wrote an Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgy (1649), and The Life of Christ, or the Great Exemplar (1649). These were followed by Holy Living and Holy Dying, Twenty-seven Sermons for the Summer Half-year, and other minor works. The excellent little manual of devotion, the Golden Grove (1655), was so called after the mansion of his neighbour and patron, the Earl of Carbery, in whose family he had spent many of his happiest hours. In the preface to this work Taylor had reflected on the ruling powers in Church and State, for which he was, for a short time, committed to prison in Chepstow Castle. He next completed his Course of Sermons for the Year, and published some controversial (and rather latitudinarian) tracts on the doctrine of Original Sin. He was attacked both by High Churchmen and Calvinists, but defended himself with warmth and spirit - the only instance in which his bland and benevolent disposition was betrayed into anything approaching to personal asperity. He went to London in 1657, and officiated in a private congregation of Episcopalians, till an offer was made him by the Earl of Conway to accompany him to Ireland, and act as lecturer in a church at Lisburn. Thither he accordingly repaired in 1658, fixing his residence at Portmore, on the banks of Lough Neagh, about eight miles from Lisburn. Two years appear to have been spent in this happy retirement, when, in

1660, Taylor made a visit to London, to publish his Ductor Dubitantium, or the Kule of Conscience in all her General Measures, the most elaborate, but the least successful, of all his works. It was meant as a compound of Christian ethics and casuistry, basing morality on the will of God as revealed in and through conscience; and though eloquent and learned, is super-subtle and even at times casuistical. His journey to London was made at an auspicious period. The Commonwealth was on the eve of dissolution in the weak hands of Richard Cromwell, and the hopes of the Cavaliers were fanned by the artifice and ingenuity of Monk. Jeremy Taylor signed the declaration of the loyalists of London on the 24th of April; on the 29th of May he saw Charles II. enter London in triumph, and in August following was appointed Bishop of Down and Connor. The Restoration exalted many a worthless parasite, and disappointed many a deserving loyalist; it brought a mitre to at least one pure and pious Churchman. Taylor was afterwards made chancellor of the University of Dublin, and a member of the Irish Privy Council. The administration of the see of Dromore was also annexed to his other bishopric, 'on account of his virtue, wisdom, and industry.' These well-bestowed honours he enjoyed only about six years. The duties of his episcopal function were discharged with zeal, mingled with charity; at his first visitation he saw it his duty to eject thirty-six ministers as not episcopally ordained, and thenceforward he was kept in perpetual controversy and trouble by irreconcilable Presbyterians, and he would fain have withdrawn to a small parochial cure where he could have had peace. The few sermons which we possess delivered by him in Ireland are truly apostolic, both in spirit and language. He died at Lisburn, of a fever caught at a stricken parishioner's bedside, on the 13th of August 1667, and was buried in the cathedral of Dromore.

A finer pattern of a Christian divine never perhaps existed. His learning dignified the high station he at last attained; his gentleness and courtesy shed a grace over his whole conduct and demeanour. Dr Parr said, and Heber agreed with him, that Englishmen revere Barrow, admire Hooker, but love Jeremy Taylor. 'Most eloquent of divines,' Coleridge called him; he has no rival but Milton in impassioned prose. Of his controversial writings Parr said: 'Fraught as they are with guileless ardour, with peerless eloquence, and with the richest stores of knowledge-historical, classical, scholastic, and theological-they may be considered as irrefragable proofs of his pure, affectionate, and dutiful attachment to the reformed church of England.' His uncontroversial writings, however, form the noblest monument to his memory. He was perhaps too prone to speculations in matters of doctrine, and he was certainly no blinded adherent of the Church; he was an early example of a Liberal High Churchman. His mind loved to expatiate

on the higher things of time, death, and eternity, which concern men of all parties, and to draw from the divine revelation its hopes, terrors, and injunctions-in his hands, irresistible as the flaming sword—as a means of purifying the human mind, and fitting it for a more exalted destiny. "Theology is rather a divine life than a divine knowledge. In heaven indeed we shall first see and then love; but here on earth we must first love, and love will open our eyes as well as our hearts; and we shall then see, and perceive, and understand.' 'The English Chrysostom,' as he has been called, was a preacher of righteousness and of personal holiness rather than an expositor of doctrine or an accurate theologian. He is hardly self-consistent in all his utterances, and seems to come dangerously near heresy at times. His style is unequalled for wealth of illustration, exuberant fullness of thought, and a certain grandeur of diction; his forte was not in trenchant argument, terseness, or even perfect lucidity. At times the illustrations almost overlay the argument; and the quotations from classical and patristic sources and the learned allusions to ancient literature and story must have been beyond the apprehension of the bulk of his audiences. His devotional works are much less rhetorical than his sermons. He has sometimes been called the Spenser of the pulpit. He certainly resembled Spenser in his prolific fancy, in a certain musical arrangement and sweetness of expression, in prolonged description, and in delicious musings and reveries, suggested by some favourite image or metaphor, on which he dwells with the fondness and enthusiasm of a young poet. In these passages he is also apt to run into excess; epithet is heaped upon epithet, and figure upon figure; all the quaint conceits of his fancy and the curious stores of his learning are dragged in, till precision and proportion are lost. He writes like an orator, and produces his effect by reiterated strokes and multiplied impressions. Some of his sermons are the noblest prose-poetry; but by preference he' dwells on the gentle and familiar; and his allusions to natural objects-as trees, birds, and flowers, the rising or setting sun, the charms of youthful innocence and beauty, and the helplessness of infancy and childhood-possess an almost angelic purity of feeling and delicacy of fancy. When presenting rules for morning meditation and prayer, he stops to indulge his love of nature. 'Sometimes,' he says, 'be curious to see the preparation which the sun makes when he is coming forth from his chambers of the east.' He compares a young man to a dancing bubble, 'empty and gay, and shining like a dove's neck, or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are fantastical.' The fulfilment of our duties he calls 'presenting a rosary or chaplet of good works to our Maker;' and he dresses even the grave with the flowers of fancy. This freshness of feeling and imagination remained with him to the last, amidst all the strife and violence of the

Civil War, and the still more deadening effects of polemical controversy and systems of casuistry and metaphysics. The stormy vicissitudes of his life seem only to have taught him greater gentleness, resignation, toleration for human failings, and a more ardent love of humankind. The earlier of the extracts given below are from Of Holy Dying, the others from sermons.

The Age of Reason and Discretion.

Neither must we think that the life of a man begins when he can feed himself or walk alone, when he can fight or beget his like, for so he is contemporary with a camel or a cow; but he is first a man when he comes to a certain steady use of reason, according to his proportion; and when that is, all the world of men cannot tell precisely. Some are called 'at age' at fourteen, some at one-and-twenty, some never; but all men late enough; for the life of a man comes upon him slowly and insensibly. But as, when the sun approaches towards the gates of the morning, he first opens a little eye of heaven, and sends away the spirits of darkness, and gives light to a cock, and calls up the lark to matins, and by and by gilds the fringes of a cloud, and peeps over the eastern hills, thrusting out his golden horns like those which decked the brows of Moses, when he was forced to wear a veil, because himself had seen the face of God; and still, while a man tells the story, the sun gets up higher, till he shews a fair face and a full light, and then he shines one whole day, under a cloud often, and sometimes weeping great and little showers, and sets quickly: so is a man's reason and his life. He first begins to perceive himself to see or taste, making little reflections upon his actions of sense, and can discourse of flies and dogs, shells and play, horses and liberty: but when he is strong enough to enter into arts and little institutions, he is at first entertained with trifles and impertinent things, not because he needs them, but because his understanding is no bigger, and little images of things are laid before him, like a cock-boat to a whale, only to play withal: but before a man comes to be wise, he is half dead with gouts and consumptions, with catarrhs and aches, with sore eyes and a worn-out body. So that if we must not reckon the life of a man but by the accounts of his reason, he is long before his soul be dressed; and he is not to be called a man without a wise and an adorned soul, a soul at least furnished with what is necessary towards his well-being: but by that time his soul is thus furnished, his body is decayed; and then you can hardly reckon him to be alive, when his body is possessed by so many degrees of death.

And

But there is yet another arrest. At first he wants strength of body, and then he wants the use of reason: and when that is come, it is ten to one but he stops by the impediments of vice, and wants the strength of the spirit; and we know that body and soul and spirit are the constituent parts of every Christian man. now let us consider what that thing is which we call years of discretion. The young man is passed his tutors, and arrived at the bondage of a caitiff spirit; he has run from discipline, and is let loose to passion. The man by this time hath wit enough to choose his vice, to act his lust, to court his mistress, to talk confidently, and ignorantly, and perpetually; to despise his betters, to

deny nothing to his appetite, to do things that, when he is indeed a man, he must for ever be ashamed of: for this is all the discretion that most men shew in the first stage of their manhood; they can discern good from evil; and they prove their skill by leaving all that is good, and wallowing in the evils of folly and an unbridled appetite. And by this time the young man hath contracted vicious habits, and is a beast in manners, and therefore it will not be fitting to reckon the beginning of his life; he is a fool in his understanding, and that is a sad death; and he is dead in trespasses and sins, and that is a sadder: so that he hath no life but a natural, the life of a beast or a tree; in all other capacities he is dead; he neither hath the intellectual nor the spiritual life, neither the life of a man nor of a Christian; and this sad truth lasts too long.

The Pomp of Death.

Take away but the pomps of death, the disguises, and solemn bugbears, and the actings by candlelight, and proper and fantastic ceremonies, the minstrels and the noise-makers, the women and the weepers, the swoonings and the shriekings, the nurses and the physicians, the dark room and the ministers, the kindred and the watches, and then to die is easy, ready, and quitted from its troublesome circumstances. It is the same harmless thing that a poor shepherd suffered yesterday, or a maid-servant to-day; and at the same time in which you die, in that very night a thousand creatures die with you, some wise men and many fools; and the wisdom of the first will not quit him, and the folly of the latter does not make him unable to die.

Miseries of Man's Life.

How few men in the world are prosperous! What an infinite number of slaves and beggars, of persecuted and oppressed people, fill all corners of the earth with groans, and heaven itself with weeping, prayers, and sad remembrances! How many provinces and kingdoms are afflicted by a violent war, or made desolate by popular diseases! Some whole countries are remarked with fatal evils or periodical sicknesses. Grand Cairo in Egypt feels the plague every three years returning like a quartan ague, and destroying many thousands of persons. All the inhabitants of Arabia the desert are in continual fear of being buried in huge heaps of sand, and therefore dwell in tents and ambulatory houses, or retire to unfruitful mountains, to prolong an uneasy and wilder life. And all the countries round about the Adriatic Sea feel such violent convulsions, by tempests and intolerable earthquakes, that sometimes whole cities find a tomb, and every man sinks with his own house made ready to become his monument, and his bed is crushed into the disorders of a grave. It were too sad if I should

tell how many persons are afflicted with evil spirits, with spectres and illusions of the night.

He that is no fool, but can consider wisely, if he be in love with this world, we need not despair but that a witty man might reconcile him with tortures, and make him think charitably of the rack, and be brought to dwell with vipers and dragons, and entertain his guests with the shrieks of mandrakes, cats, and screech-owls, with the filing of iron and the harshness of rending of silk, or to admire the harmony that is made by a herd of evening wolves, when they miss their draught of blood in their midnight revels. The groans of a man in a fit of

the stone are worse than all these ; and the distractions of a troubled conscience are worse than those groans; and yet a merry careless sinner is worse than all that. But if we could from one of the battlements of heaven espy how many men and women at this time lie fainting and dying for want of bread, how many young men are hewn down by the sword of war, how many poor orphans are now weeping over the graves of their father, by whose life they were enabled to eat; if we could but hear how many mariners and passengers are at this present in a storm, and shriek out because their keel dashes against a rock or bulges under them; how many people there are who weep with want and are mad with oppression, or are desperate by a too quick sense of a constant infelicity; in all reason we should be glad to be out of the noise and the participation of so many evils. This is a place of sorrow and tears, of so great evils and a constant calamity; let us remove from hence at least in affections and preparations of mind.

On Death.

Thus nature calls us to meditate of death by those things which are the instruments of acting it; and God by all the variety of his providence, makes us see death everywhere, in all variety of circumstances, and dressed up for all the fancies and the expectation of every single person. Nature hath given us one harvest every year, but death hath two; and the spring and the autumn send throngs of men and women to charnel-houses; and all the summer long men are recovering from their evils of the spring, till the dog-days come, and then the Sirian star makes the summer deadly; and the fruits of autumn are laid up for all the year's provision, and the man that gathers them eats and surfeits, and dies and needs them not, and himself is laid up for eternity; and he that escapes till winter, only stays for another opportunity, which the distempers of that quarter minister to him with great variety. Thus death reigns in all the portions of our time. The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us, and the winter's cold turns them into sharp diseases, and the spring brings flowers to strew our hearse, and the summer gives green turf and brambles to bind upon our graves. Calentures and surfeit, cold and agues, are the four quarters of the year, and all minister to death; and you can go no whither but you tread on a dead man's bones.

The wild fellow in Petronius that escaped upon a broken table from the furies of a shipwreck, as he was sunning himself upon the rocky shore espied a man rolled upon his floating bed of waves, ballasted with sand in the folds of his garment, and carried by his civil enemy, the sea, towards the shore to find a grave. And it cast him into some sad thoughts: that peradventure this man's wife in some part of the continent, safe and warm, looks next month for the good man's return; or, it may be, his son knows nothing of the tempest; or his father thinks of that affectionate kiss which still is warm upon the good old man's cheek ever since he took a kind farewell, and he weeps with joy to think how blessed he shall be when his beloved boy returns into the circle of his father's arms. These are the thoughts of mortals, this is the end and sum of all their designs: a dark night and an ill guide, a boisterous sea and a broken cable, a hard rock and a rough wind, dashed in pieces the fortune of a whole family; and they that shall weep loudest for the accident are not yet entered

Then

into the storm, and yet have suffered shipwreck. looking upon the carcass, he knew it, and found it to be the master of the ship, who the day before cast up the accounts of his patrimony and his trade, and named the day when he thought to be at home. See how the man swims who was so angry two days since! His passions are becalmed with the storm, his accounts cast up, his cares at an end, his voyage done, and his gains are the strange events of death, which, whether they be good or evil, the men that are alive seldom trouble themselves concerning the interest of the dead. . . .

It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to us who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood; from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of five-andtwenty, to the hollowness and deadly paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven as a lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness, and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age; it bowed the head, and broke its stalk; and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and out-worn faces. The same is the portion of every man and every woman; the heritage of worms and serpents, rottenness and cold dishonor, and our beauty so changed that our acquaintance quickly knew us not; and that change mingled with so much horror, or else meets so with our fears and weak discoursings, that they who six hours ago tended upon us either with charitable or ambitious services, cannot without some regret stay in the room alone where the body lies stripped of its life and honour. I have read of a fair young German gentleman who, living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends' desire by giving way, that after a few days' burial they might send a painter to his vault, and if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death unto the life. They did so, and found his face half eaten, and his midriff and backbone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors. So does the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad with you and me; and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave? what friends to visit us? what officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon Our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funeral?

Real Happiness.

If we should look under the skirt of the prosperous and prevailing tyrant, we should find, even in the days of his joys, such allays and abatements of his pleasure as may serve to represent him presently miserable, besides his final infelicities. For I have seen a young and healthful person warm and ruddy under a poor and a thin garment, when at the same time an old rich person hath been cold and paralytic under a load of sables and the skins of foxes. It is the body that makes the clothes warm, not the clothes the body; and the spirit of a man makes felicity and content, not any spoils of a rich for

tune, wrapt about a sickly and an uneasy soul. Apollodorus was a traitor and a tyrant, and the world wondered to see a bad man have so good a fortune, but knew not that he nourished scorpions in his breast, and that his liver and his heart were eaten up with spectres and images of death; his thoughts were full of interruptions, his dreams of illusions: his fancy was abused with real troubles and fantastic images, imagining that he saw the Scythians flaying him alive, his daughters like pillars of fire, dancing round about a caldron in which himself was boiling, and that his heart accused itself to be the cause of all these evils.

Does he not drink more sweetly that takes his beverage in an earthen vessel, than he that looks and searches into his golden chalices, for fear of poison, and looks pale at every sudden noise, and sleeps in armour, and trusts nobody, and does not trust God for his safety?

Can a man bind a thought with chains, or carry imaginations in the palm of his hand? can the beauty of the peacock's train, or the ostrich plume, be delicious to the palate and the throat? does the hand intermeddle with the joys of the heart? or darkness, that hides the naked, make him warm? does the body live, as does the spirit? or can the body of Christ be like to common food? Indeed, the sun shines upon the good and bad; and the vines give wine to the drunkard, as well as to the sober man; pirates have fair winds and a calm sea, at the same time when the just and peaceful merchantman hath them. But although the things of this world are common to good and bad, yet sacraments and spiritual joys, the food of the soul and the blessing of Christ, are the peculiar right of saints.

Marriage.

They that enter into the state of marriage cast a die of the greatest contingency, and yet of the greatest interest in the world, next to the last throw for eternity. . . . Life or death, felicity or a lasting sorrow, are in the power of marriage. A woman indeed ventures most, for she hath no sanctuary to retire to from an evil husband; she must dwell upon her sorrow, and hatch the eggs which her own folly or infelicity hath produced; and she is more under it, because her tormentor hath a warrant of prerogative, and the woman may complain to God, as subjects do of tyrant princes; but otherwise she hath no appeal in the causes of unkindness. And though the man can run from many hours of his sadness, yet he must return to it again; and when he sits among his neighbours, he remembers the objection that lies in his bosom, and he sighs deeply. . . . The boys, and the pedlars, and the fruiterers, shall tell of this man when he is carried to his grave, that he lived and died a poor wretched person. The stags in the Greek epigram, whose knees were clogged with frozen snow upon the mountains, came down to the brooks of the valleys . . . hoping to thaw their joints with the waters of the stream;' but there the frost overtook them, and bound them fast in ice, till the young herdsmen took them in their stranger It is the unhappy chance of many men, finding many inconveniences upon the mountains of single life, they descend into the valleys of marriage to refresh their troubles; and there they enter into fetters, and are bound to sorrow by the cords of a man's or woman's peevishAnd the worst of the evil is, they are to thank their own follies; for they fell into the snare by enter

snare.

ness.

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