© Kenneth Stevenson 2011
First published in 2011 by the Canterbury Press Norwich
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Contents
Introduction: Jeremy Taylor – Life, Writings and Theology
Taylor’s Works Listed Chronologically
3 Eucharist, Confirmation, Ordination, Liturgy
4 Sermons, Friendship, Toleration, Popery, Original Sin
Postscript – from the Funeral Sermon by George Rust
Preface
When I was a theological student, a visiting lecturer tried to put us all off Jeremy Taylor. In time, I was able to adjust such a view considerably. His name kept coming up in conversations and in some of the readings in the various anthologies that have appeared since then. But it was when I became a parish priest that I really began to appreciate both the depth and the scope of his writing, not just ‘Holy Living’ – perhaps his best-known work – but other aspects of his theology.
Dated as his florid language and penitential tone appear to a culture that prefers the epigrammatic and suspects certain kinds of self-examination, Taylor’s continues to resound across the centuries. In an age of polarized religious views, he held out for a thoughtful liberality that didn’t avoid difficult questions. It was an age to which he brought his own distinct approach to sacramental theology; an age of both bawdiness and repression that could benefit from what he wrote about sex as something to be enjoyed responsibly; an age that had its fair share of economic exploitation, in which he took pains to warn against profiteering. And he had the courage to challenge what he saw as the overly negative view of original sin prevalent in his time.
In putting this collection together, I want to thank Christine Smith and Natalie Watson of Canterbury Press for their kindness and cooperation. And among the many people who have nurtured my appreciation of Taylor over the years, I must mention Henry McAdoo, who devoted so much of his retirement to the study of Taylor’s many works, and Jessica Martin for her assistance as well.
Kenneth Stevenson
Chichester, December 2010
Introduction
Jeremy Taylor – Life, Writings and Theology
Taylor’s life – a snapshot[1]
Jeremy Taylor was born in Cambridge in 1613 and died in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, in 1667. Into those fifty-four years he managed to pack a great deal, and not just in all his writings, which are contained in no fewer than ten volumes. He was a Cambridge scholar, an Oxford don, a parish priest in Rutland and then in Northamptonshire. Coming into prominence as a young preacher, he became a chaplain to the King and served later as a chaplain in the Royalist army. The victory of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) over King Charles I (1600–49) cost Taylor his career in the Church, and he lived a kind of internal exile from 1655 as a personal chaplain to an aristocrat in Carmarthenshire which was from a literary point of view the most prolific of his life. Imprisoned on three occasions for his views, another chaplaincy was eventually found for him in 1658, this time in Lisburn, not far from Belfast. At the Restoration in 1660, when Charles II came home as King, Taylor probably hoped he would be given an English bishopric, but he was made Bishop of Down and Connor, and Vice-Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin.
His life and writings in context[2]
Cambridge, London, Oxford, rural parish ministry, Civil War, imprisonments, domestic chaplaincy in Wales, parish chaplaincy in Ulster and a rural Irish bishopric: in some ways, this is a story of achievement nipped in the bud, and triumph prevailing over tragedy. But Taylor’s voice and personality keep coming through, and they explain why he emerges from the turbulent mid-seventeenth century as one of the most formative Anglicans of his time. Before we look at the main aspects of his theological works, we need to see his life and writings in a wider context. The published works of any author have an ‘occasional’ quality to them, for the obvious reason that they emerge at a particular time, arising from circumstances as much to do with the development of the author’s thinking as the era in which they live. Taylor’s writings all have something that responds to a particular context while reflecting an overall maturing theology that is practical rather than systematic.
Taylor’s background was neither impoverished nor well-to-do. His father, Nathaniel, was a Cambridge barber, who sent him to the Perse Grammar School, when he was six years old. Stephen Perse was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, and Taylor went there at the age of fifteen in 1628. We do not know the details of his course of studies, but we can be sure that they involved being steeped in the classics, an experience from which Taylor would have emerged fully accomplished in Latin and Greek. In many respects, a mind-frame shaped by the Renaissance in this way suited him well. In 1633 he was appointed to a Fellowship. Such a move required him to be ordained, in his case at the tender and technically uncanonical age of twenty (he should have been twenty-three).
In the following year, Taylor had what would nowadays be called a lucky break, when he had to stand in for a friend who was supposed to preach in