Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Down & Connor, Teacher of the Faith
August 13 · d. 1667
also known as Jeremy Taylor of Down and Connor
Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) was the most eloquent of the Caroline Divines, an English bishop whose devotional masterpieces Holy Living and Holy Dying have never been out of print. Turned out of the church in the Civil War and sheltered in a Welsh country house, he wrote, in grief and forced silence, the books that taught the English-speaking world how to order a life and meet a death. In the same exile he wrote one of the age's bravest pleas for religious toleration.
Jeremy Taylor was born in Cambridge in 1613, the son of a barber, and he rose by sheer brilliance. His preaching was so beautiful that Archbishop Laud noticed him and pushed him forward, and while still a young man he became a chaplain to King Charles the First. He had every reason to expect a smooth and rising life in the church. Then the king's cause collapsed in civil war, and Taylor lost everything that had carried him.
When the armies of Parliament won and pulled down the Church of England, the royalist clergy were turned out of their livings, and Taylor with them; more than once he was imprisoned. He took shelter at a great house called Golden Grove, in the hills of Carmarthenshire in Wales, and there, a clergyman of a forbidden church with no pulpit and no prospects, he wrote the books that made him immortal. Out of defeat and enforced silence came Holy Living and Holy Dying, two small manuals teaching ordinary Christians how to order a life and how to meet a death, written in a prose so rich and so tender that they have never since been out of print.
He wrote Holy Dying in sorrow. His patron's young wife had died, and in those same years Taylor lost his own wife and several of his children. He did not write of death as a theorist; he wrote as a man burying the people he loved. And he opened the book with one of the most famous sentences in English devotion. A man is a bubble, he began, quoting an old Greek proverb, and then watched the whole of a human life in the rising and breaking of a bubble on water, fragile, brief, and held the whole time in the hand of God. The book does not leave the reader in fear. It teaches him, gently and without flinching, to make each day a preparation, so that death, when it comes, will find him ready and unafraid.
In the same years he did a braver thing still. In an age when every party that gained power persecuted the others, Taylor wrote a plea for toleration, The Liberty of Prophesying, arguing that Christians who differed on the hard questions should bear with one another rather than burn one another, and that a humble uncertainty about secondary things stood nearer to true faith than a cruel certainty. It was generations ahead of its time.
When the king came back in 1660, Taylor was rewarded with a bishopric, but a hard one, Down and Connor in the north of Ireland, among a people who wanted no bishop at all, and the last years of the gentle writer were spent in conflict and disappointment. He died there in 1667, only fifty-five. But the books he had written in his Welsh exile outlived all of it. For more than three centuries Holy Living and Holy Dying have been put into the hands of the anxious and the dying, and the barber's son who lost his church in a civil war goes on teaching the English-speaking world how to live well and how to die in peace.
How we know. Jeremy Taylor is fully documented, chiefly by his own large body of published work, together with the records of the Caroline church, contemporary notice, and a long tradition of scholarship; his collected Works run to many volumes. He was born at Cambridge in 1613, educated at Gonville and Caius College, and through Archbishop Laud's patronage was made a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a chaplain to Charles I. A royalist through the Civil War, he was ejected and at times imprisoned after the king's defeat, and found refuge under the Earl of Carbery at Golden Grove in Carmarthenshire. There he produced the works on which his fame rests: The Liberty of Prophesying (1647), an argument for toleration; The Great Exemplar (1649), a life of Christ; and the two manuals of devotion, The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651).
At the Restoration he was made Bishop of Down and Connor in 1660 and vice-chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, and he labored in a difficult Ulster diocese until his death at Lisburn on 13 August 1667. Taylor is reckoned the greatest prose stylist among the Caroline Divines, the seventeenth-century Anglican writers who articulated a churchmanship between Rome and Geneva grounded in Scripture, the ancient church, and reason. His moral theology wove classical virtue into Christian grace; his Liberty of Prophesying is counted a landmark in the history of religious toleration; and his devotional manuals carried the spirituality of that school far beyond it, into Methodist, later Anglican, and even Roman Catholic hands.
Jeremy Taylor is commemorated on 13 August, the day of his death, in the calendars of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, and other Anglican churches; his liturgical color is white. He never gathered a cult or a hagiography, and would have wanted none; his veneration is entirely of the kind he would have approved, the long life of his books in the hands of readers.
That is his monument. Holy Living and Holy Dying became and remained spiritual classics, printed in countless editions and translated widely, read by John Wesley and pressed on the dying for three hundred years. His reputation as a writer earned him the affectionate titles the church has given few of its theologians, the Shakespeare and the Spenser of the divines, for the music of his prose. He is honored, in the end, not for wonders worked but for words written: for having taught a whole tradition how to live and how to die.
The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living and Holy Dying(English, 1650-1651)
Taylor's twin masterpieces of practical devotion, written in his Welsh exile and never since out of print; the Oxford critical edition is the scholarly text, and both books are freely readable in full at CCEL.
Public domain: Holy Living (CCEL), Holy Dying (CCEL)
Further reading. The scholarly edition is the Oxford critical text of Holy Living and Holy Dying edited by P. G. Stanwood (Oxford University Press), the first fully annotated edition since the nineteenth century. For a life, the classic memoir by Reginald Heber, prefixed to the collected Works, remains valuable, and C. J. Stranks's The Life and Writings of Jeremy Taylor (1952) is the standard modern study.
Online resources. Taylor's chief works, including Holy Living, Holy Dying, and The Liberty of Prophesying, are freely readable at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
Almighty God, you gave your servant Jeremy Taylor special gifts of grace to understand and teach the truth revealed in Christ Jesus: Grant that by this teaching we may know you, the one true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Carmarthenshire /kɑːˈmɑːðənʃər/
Readings for a Teacher of the Faith
Proverbs 3:13–26Psalm 119:89–1061 John 1:1–10Matthew 13:47–52