Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Jeremy Taylor

by Marcus Dods

TAYLOR, Jeremy (1613-1667), was a native of Cambridge, and was baptized on the 15th August 1613. His father, Nathaniel, though a barber, was a man of some education, respected by his townsmen, and lineally descended from Dr Rowland Taylor, Cranmer's chaplain, who suffered martyrdom under Mary. Jeremy, after passing through the grammar school, was entered at Caius College as a sizar in 1626, eighteen months after Milton had entered Christ's, and while George Herbert was public orator and Edmund Waller and Thomas Fuller were undergraduates of the university. He was elected a fellow of his college in 1633, but the best evidence of his diligence as a student is the enormous learning of which he showed so easy a command in after years. Accepting the invitation of Risden, a fellow-student, to supply his place for a short time as lecturer in St Paul's, he at once attracted attention by his remarkable eloquence as well as by his handsome face and youthful appearance. Archbishop Laud, ever on the outlook for men of capacity, sent for Taylor to preach before him at Lambeth, and, discerning that his genius was worth fostering, dismissed him from the overpressure of the metropolis to the quiet of a fellowship in All Souls, Oxford, and at the same time, by making him one of his own chaplains, showed his desire to keep him in permanent connexion with himself. At Oxford Chillingworth was then busy with his great work, the Religion of Protestants, and it is possible that by intercourse with him Taylor's mind may have been turned In 1661 he buried, at Lisburn, Edward, the only surviving son of his second marriage. His oldest son, an officer in the army, was killed in a duel; and his second son, Charles, intended for the church, left Trinity College and became companion and secretary to the duke of Buckingham, at whose house he died. The day after his son's funeral Taylor sickened, and, after a ten days' illness, he died at Lisburn on the 13th August 1667, in the fifty-fifth year of his life and the seventh of his episcopate.

Taylor's fame has been maintained by the popularity of his sermons and devotional writings rather than by his influence as a theologian or his importance as an ecclesiastic. His mind was neither scientific nor speculative, and he was attracted rather to questions of casuistry than to the deeper problems of pure theology. His wide reading and capacious memory enabled him to carry in his mind the materials of a sound historical theology, but these materials were unsifted by criticism. His immense learning served him rather as a storehouse of illustrations, or as an armoury out of which he could choose the fittest weapon for discomfiting an opponent, than as a quarry furnishing him with material for building up a completely designed and enduring edifice of systematized truth. Indeed, he had very limited faith in the human mind as an instrument of truth. "Theology," he says, "is rather a divine life than a divine knowledge." His great plea for toleration is based on the impossibility of erecting theology into a demonstrable science. "It is impossible all should be of one mind. And what is impossible to be done is not necessary it should be done." Differences of opinion there must be; but "heresy is not an error of the understanding but an error of the will." His aim in life was practical; his interests were in men rather than in ideas, and his sympathies were evoked rather by the experiences of individuals than by great movements. Of a decidedly poetic temperament, fervid and mobile in feeling, and of a prolific fancy, he had also the sense and wit that come of varied contact with men. All his gifts were made available for influencing other men by his easy command of a style rarely matched in dignity and colour. With all the majesty and stately elaboration and musical rhythm of Milton's finest prose, Taylor's style is relieved and brightened by an astonishing variety of felicitous illustrations, ranging from the most homely and terse to the most dignified and elaborate. His sermons especially abound in quotations and allusions, which have the air of spontaneously suggesting themselves, but which must sometimes have baffled his hearers. This seeming pedantry is, however, atoned for by the clear practical aim of his sermons, the noble ideal he keeps before his hearers, and the skill with which he handles spiritual experience and urges incentives to virtue. But, through all his gorgeous eloquence and genial interest in human nature, there breaks from time to time some dead and laboured irrelevancy, the growth of his training in scholastic dialectics; for "like some other writers of the 17th century he seems almost to have two minds,—one tender, sweet, luxuriant to excess, the other hard, subtle, formal, prone to definition and logomachy."

The first collected edition of his works was published by Bishop Heber (with a life) in 1822, reissued after careful revision by Charles Page Eden, 1852-61. (M. D.)