CHAPTER VIII

JEREMY TAYLOR, BAXTER, AND FOX

THE war between Charles I. and his Parliament was essentially a war of religion, and its progress encouraged and stimulated religious thinkers on both sides. And when the war itself was over, men continued to give their minds to the study of the burning theological questions for which many of their kindred had given their lives.

Among such men in the Church of England none was more earnest than Jeremy Taylor, and no man has left more noble work behind him in his books of devotions, which are still used in the households of most English Churchmen. Baxter was prominent as the leader of the Independents, and Fox as the founder of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, as they were generally called.

Jeremy Taylor came from Cromwell's country. He was born in 1613 in Cambridge, where his father, Nathaniel Taylor, was a barber, and where it was easy to give the boy a good education.

He

was sent to the Perse School when he was six years old, and thence, as a sizar, he went to Gonville and Caius College at the age of thirteen. This age was young to enter a college, but Jeremy Taylor showed a great aptitude for learning, and an unusual docility and sweetness of disposition from his earliest days, so that it was said, “Had he lived among the ancient pagans, he had been ushered into the world with a miracle, and swans must have danced and sung at his birth." So precocious was he that he was ordained before the canonical age of twenty-three; and in 1634, the year after his ordination, he preached for a friend several times in St. Paul's Cathedral. Men flocked to hear the young scholar from Cambridge, who, "by his florid and youthful beauty, and sweet and pleasant air, and sublime and raised discourses, made his hearers take him for some young angel newly descended from the visions of glory."

It was this "sweet and pleasant air" which was Taylor's characteristic throughout his life-the charm of a beautiful and innocent soul, filled with love to God and man, which breathed in his words and illuminated his face as he spoke.

His was not a nature framed for warfare; the religious controversy of the day did not appeal to him he was reserved, and almost timid. He

would have been happiest in a peaceful monastic or collegiate life, where he would have had leisure for more outpourings of a spiritual nature, such as have kept his memory green in the "Holy Living and Dying." It seems a strange irony of Fate that set him, after a patient endurance of the stormy years of Civil War, to end his days and break his heart in that constant hotbed of religious controversy, the province of Ulster.

His early promotion came through the notice of Laud, who saw in him just such a devout son of the Church as she most needed. Laud procured for the young divine, though a Cambridge man, a fellowship at All Souls' College, Oxford, where the Archbishop was Visitor. Jeremy Taylor therefore imbibed the ecclesiastical training of Oxford, such as Laud and his party had made it, and here he must have spent some happy years, discussing questions of theology with kindred spirits in college quadrangle and garden, meditating on his future writings by the banks of the Cherwell, where so many in different ages have pondered the same questions.

His universal popularity continued. At All Souls "love and admiration still waited upon him," and he was known to all by his "extraordinary worth and sweetness."

Laud watched his young disciple with interest; he made him his private chaplain, and in 1638 he gave him the important living of Uppingham.

The change from the constant "disputations," which made up a great part of the academical life of Oxford, to the quiet country routine in Rutlandshire must have been pleasant enough to Taylor's peace-loving nature.

Here on May 27th, 1639, a little more than a year after leaving Oxford, he married Phoebe Langsdale, the sister of an old Cambridge friend, and by her he had several children.

He must have made an ideal country parson, giving his flock wise counsel and loving guidance, and keeping out of his sermons and his instructions just that bitter note of controversy which spoiled so much of the religious teaching of that time. But these peaceful days were of short duration. 1641 came the downfall of Laud; he was impeached and imprisoned, and much of his work undone, and the incumbent of Uppingham wrote in dismay, "I am robbed of that which once did bless me."

In

Taylor had been a saintly, loyal follower of those heads of the Church in which he believed. He had not foreseen the terrible strain to which they were putting that Church's authority, and

when the crash came he seems to have been utterly unprepared. But he did not waver as to his conduct. He was Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the King at the beginning of the war, he was probably with him when the standard was raised at Nottingham, and as a Royalist he lived and died.

In February 1645 he was taken prisoner at Cardigan Castle, where he was with the Royal army which was trying to relieve the place, and hence he evidently escaped to the safe shelter which was to be his happiest home-Golden Grove, the Welsh seat of the second Earl of Carbery. His own words describe his feelings at the shattering of all those things in which he had trusted.

"In this great storm which hath dashed the vessel of the Church all in pieces I have been cast upon the coast of Wales, and in a little boat thought to have enjoyed that rest and quietness which in England in a greater I could not hope for. ... 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 who 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