Taylor, JEREMY, the glory of the English pulpit, was the third son of a Cambridge barber of Gloucestershire family, a descendant of Dr Rowland Taylor, the Marian martyr, and was born in that town, and baptised on August 15, 1613. At thirteen he entered Caius College as a sizar, graduated B.A. in 1630-31, and, according to his friend and successor Bishop Rust, was thereafter chosen fellow of his college. At any rate he became M.A. in 1633, about the same time being admitted to holy orders, and soon after he attracted the notice of Laud, who had a regard for learning, if none for liberty, and was preferred through his influence to a fellowship at All Souls in Oxford (1636). He became also chaplain to the archbishop, and in 1638 was presented by Bishop Juxon to the rectory of Uppingham. About this time Wood tells us he was suspected by watchful zealots of a concealed attachment to the Romish communion, whether from his ascetic notions of piety, his veneration for antiquity and love for the picturesque aspects of religion, the favour of Laud, or his friendship with the learned and pious Franciscan friar, Francis a Sancta Clara [Christopher Davenport]. Taylor married Phebe Landisdale, or Langsdale, in 1639; his second wife, Joanna Bridges, was believed by Bishop Heber, chiefly on the authority of the MS. of Mr Jones, a descendant of Taylor's, to have been an illegitimate daughter of Charles I. when Prince of Wales. His Episcopacy asserted against the Acephali and Aërians New and Old (1642) scarcely gave promise of his future powers, but gained him the empty honour of a D.D. degree. During the struggle Taylor is supposed to have accompanied the royal army as a chaplain, but about the close of 1643 we find him living with his mother-in-law and children, and embarrassed by poverty. Heber thinks his first wife was already dead, and that soon after this time he married his second, and retired to her property at Mandinam in Caermarthenshire. At any rate, after the downfall of the cause he found a shelter in Wales, and for some time he joined in keeping a school at Newton Hall in the parish of Llanfihangel. Here he found a kind patron in Richard Vaughan, Earl of Carbery, then living at the family seat of Golden Grove, immortalised in the title of Taylor's still popular manual of devotion (1655). His second countess was Alice, daughter of John Egerton, first Earl of Bridgewater, and the original of the 'lady' in Milton's Comus. During the last thirteen years (1647-60) of Taylor's enforced seclusion appeared all his great works, some of these the most enduring monuments of sacred eloquence in the English language. The first was The Liberty of Prophesying (1647), a noble and comprehensive plea for toleration and freedom of opinion, far above the ideas of its age, and even of its author in his turn of triumph. Here he takes the Apostles' Creed as the minimum standard of Christian communion, the only necessary terms of such being those dogmas that are capable of being propounded infallibly; that is, from Scripture, in the due exercise of Reason, all such errors as may arise being necessarily venial, when not wilful. 'Heresy is not an error of the understanding, but an error of the will,' to which proposition Coleridge aptly adds its converse, 'faith is not an accuracy of logic, but a rectitude of heart.' 'Those creeds are best which keep the very words of Scripture; and that faith is best which hath greatest simplicity; and it is better in all cases humbly to submit, than curiously to inquire and pry into the mystery under the cloud, and to hazard our faith by improving our knowledge.' He next passes in review the alleged special sources of authority in religious opinion: Scripture, Tradition, Ecclesiastical Councils, the Pope, and the Fathers, finding all save Scripture, interpreted by an enlightened reason, insufficient and contradictory. With regard to civil government he lays down broadly the principle that it is not concerned with opinions, however false or absurd, unless these tend directly to the prejudice of government as such, thus demanding the widest toleration for honest opinion ranging from Anabaptism to Popery. The second edition (1659) closes with the celebrated story of Abraham and the idolatrous traveller.
In 1650 followed the Life of Christ, or the Great Exemplar—an arrangement of the facts in historical order, interspersed with prayers and discourses on topics suggested by the narrative. That same year appeared The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, followed in 1651 by its counterpart, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying, together forming to generation after generation the choicest classic of English devotion. The twenty-seven Sermons for the summer half-year were published in 1651; the twenty-five for the winter half-year in 1653. These, with the discourses in the Life of Christ and many passages in the Holy Living and Dying, contain the richest examples of their author's characteristically gorgeous eloquence. The polemical and practical treatises are more subdued in style, though still figurative and allusive far beyond the measure even of his contemporaries; but here he gave full reins to an imaginativeness unmatched alike in range of illustration and in opulence of language. The solemn music of his words, the rich beauty of the imagery in his incidental metaphors, the tenderness, passion, colour, and force, if not precision, of phrase combine to place these writings by themselves on a level scarce attained by all the Asiatic eloquence of Chrysostom.
The more formal treatises were An Apology for Authorised and Set Forms of Liturgy against the Pretence of the Holy Spirit (1646); Clerus Domini, or a Discourse of the Divine Institution, Necessity, Sacredness, and Separation of the Office Ministerial (1651); The Real Presence and Spiritual of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament proved against the Doctrine of Transubstantiation (1654); The Unum Necessarium, or the Doctrine and Practice of Repentance (1655), a treatise with a decided taint of Pelagianism, where the theologian had ventured beyond his depth, and which involved him in a cloud of controversy; The Worthy Communicant (1660); Defence and Introduction to the Rite of Confirmation (1663); The Dissuasive from Popery (1664); and the famous Doctor Dubitantium, or the Rule of Conscience in all her General Measures (1660), the most learned and subtle of all his works, which he himself counted on as the foundation of his fame. Intended as a complete handbook of Christian casuistry and ethics, it labours first to establish a system of morality on the basis of the will of God revealed to us through Conscience, distinguishing with greater subtlety than security the right or sure conscience, the conscience confident in error, the probable or thinking, the doubtful, and the scrupulous conscience. Under the 'probable' head he gives a magnificent sketch of the different probabilities on which a faith in Christianity is founded. The second book discusses the obligations of conscience in relation to the law of nature and the law of Christ, closing with a splendid peroration on the measures and motives of a Christian's duty. In the third book he passes to human positive law alike of church and state, and in the fourth—the best part of the whole—he closes with a discussion of the nature and causes of good and evil, and the efficient and final causes of human actions. But Taylor is much more a rhetorician than a thinker or even a theologian, and his imagination too often carries him at a leap from an illustration to an argument, from an analogy to a conclusion. Distinctions without a difference, inconsistencies, sophistries, and prolixity are foibles that too easily beset his argument, and go far to mar the effect of vast erudition, subtlety of thought, and dazzling eloquence. Besides the real bases of the controversy have shifted far from the 17th-century landmarks, and much of his subtlest argument is to modern men a mere beating of the air. Nor is he altogether free from the special sin of casuistry in its narrowest sense—he maintains that private evil may be done for the public good, that in controversy it is allowable to employ arguments and authorities we know to be invalid, and he is able to justify on moral grounds the fraudulent Israelitish borrowing from the Egyptians. He is besides much too slavish in his respect for authority and tradition, but, as Coleridge says well, Jeremy Taylor 'would have been too great for man had he not occasionally fallen below himself.'
During the troubles Taylor was thrice imprisoned, once for the preface to the Golden Grove; the last time in the Tower for an 'idolatrous' print of Christ in the attitude of prayer in his Collection of Offices (1658). He occasionally visited London, where he numbered among his friends John Evelyn, to whom he wrote many admirable letters still extant, as well as Boyle, George Berkeley, afterwards first Earl of Berkeley, and Wilkins. In 1658 he was given by the Earl of Conway a lectureship at Lisburn in Ireland, and at the Restoration he was made bishop of Down and Connor, to which was added next year the small adjacent see of Dromore. By Ormonde's recommendation he was elected vice-chancellor of the university of Dublin, and in February 1661 he was admitted a member of the Irish privy-council. There were many stubborn Presbyterians in his diocese who mocked at his authority, and tormented his gentle spirit, but we need not believe that the plot to take his life existed anywhere else than in his active imagination. In his first visitation he ejected thirty-six ministers from their churches, but neither severity nor gentleness could prevail to force a form of religion upon an unwilling people. His last years were clouded also by domestic sorrows. His eldest son, an officer in the army, was killed in a duel; the second passed from Trinity College to become the favourite companion and secretary to Buckingham, and died a few days before his father. The three daughters of his second wife alone survived him. He died at Lisburn after a ten days' fever, 13th August 1667, and was buried in the choir of the cathedral at Dromore, largely rebuilt by his own munificence.
Jeremy Taylor's beauty of person corresponded to the beauty of his character and the large charity of his temper. Good portraits are abundant, several he himself gave as frontispieces to his writings; one of the best hangs in All Souls College, Oxford. Bishop Heber endorses Parr's description of Hooker as the object of our reverence, Barrow of our admiration, but Jeremy Taylor of our love. He was above all things a preacher, and that especially of personal holiness. The thread of ideas is ever clear and simple underneath all his exuberant fullness and the stately march of his sentences, and though it is difficult to conceive of a congregation capable of following his argument and illustration in their full detail, all the haste and indistinctness of argument, the quaint, pedantic, and even grotesque irrelevances of illustration are fused together into harmony in the orator's glowing earnestness and fire. No poet ever excelled Jeremy Taylor in exquisite feeling for the sights and sounds of nature; he has no rival in lofty and impassioned prose save Milton alone—'Most eloquent of divines,' says Coleridge, 'had I said of men, Cicero would forgive me, and Demosthenes nod assent.'
The first collected edition of his works was that of Bishop Heber, with an excellent Life (15 vols. 1820-22); a revised edition by the Rev. C. P. Eden (10 vols. 1847-54). See Coleridge's Literary Remains, vol. iii. (1838); Tulloch's Rational Theology in England in the Seventeenth Century, vol. i. (1872); Archdeacon Farrar in Masters in Eng. Theology (1877); and Bishop Barry in Classic Preachers of the Eng. Church, series ii. (1878); also an admirable article in the Quarterly Review for July 1871.