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 an English bishop, now considered the most eloquent of the Caroline Divines. His devotional masterpieces Holy Living and Holy Dying have never been out of print since he penned them. Turned out of his church in the English Civil War, he took shelter in a Welsh country house. There he wrote, in grief and chosen silence, the books that taught many in the English-speaking world how to order a life and meet death. In the same exile he wrote one of the age's bravest pleas for religious toleration as well.
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 into a more public eye. Consequently, while still a young man he became a chaplain to King Charles the First himself. He had every reason to expect a smooth and advancing life in the church and the court of England. Then the king's government collapsed in civil war, and Taylor lost everything along with him as the Roundheads seized control of England.
When the armies of Parliament won and pulled down the Church of England along with the crown, the royalist clergy were ousted from their positions, Taylor among 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, exiled by the government of that day, with no pulpit and no prospects wrote the books that have immortalized him. 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 death with dignity as followers of Jesus. He wrote 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 more famous sentences in English devotion. A man is a bubble, he began, quoting an old Greek proverb. He expands the metaphor like Ecclesiastes' vapor, watching the whole of a human life in the rising and breaking of a bubble on water, fragile, brief, but held the whole time in the hand of God. The book does not leave the reader fearful. It teaches him, both gently and unflinchingly, 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 still braver thing. In an age when every party that gained power persecuted the others, Taylor wrote a plea for toleration, The Liberty of Prophesying, argued that Christians who differed on the hard questions of politics should bear with one another rather than persecute one another if they are following their Lord. He also lifted a banner for humble uncertainty about secondary things; he argued that choosing to be humble stood nearer to true faith than a cruel demand for certainty and dogma that admits no contenders. He was generations ahead of his time in arguing for irenic toleration.
When the king came back in 1660, Taylor was rewarded with a bishopric, but a hard one. Down and Connor was in the north of Ireland, among a people who wanted no bishop at all. In his last years the gentle writer spent in conflict and disappointment working a difficult field. He died there in 1667, only fifty-five. But the books he had written in his Welsh exile became his legacy. 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.
Jeremy Taylor's life is broadly documented, not the least by his own large body of published work. Combined with the records of the Caroline church, contemporary notices, and a long tradition of scholarship; his collected Works run to many volumes of primary sources. He was born at Cambridge in 1613, educated at Gonville and Caius College. Through Archbishop Laud's patronage he was made a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and a chaplain to Charles I at very young ages. A Royalist through the English 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 for which we remember him: The Liberty of Prophesying (1647), an argument for religious toleration even amidst the political disputes; 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, two days before the day of his baptism, in the calendars of the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, and other Anglican churches; his liturgical color is white as a teacher of the faith. He never gathered a following to venerate him nor is there significant hagiography. He 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, while Liberty of Prophesying is still a masterwork as a proposal for functional religious toleration amidst political upheaval. They have been printed in countless editions and translated widely, read and appreciated greatly by John Wesley and particular encouragements facing their own death for over 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