in the net result had its value, as well as the more radical testimony of the Separatist.

The English Church, during all the first part of this century, had a difficult task. Through its close connection with the State it was compelled to bear the odium of the weakness, folly and tyranny of the Sovereign. It had to defend itself against the intrigues and unscrupulous efforts of the Papacy to return to ecclesiastical and political power. It had to resist the general debasement of morals, the bold wickedness in high places and the scandalous degradation of ecclesiastical functions which followed the Reformation; and the very measures which it was obliged to take to accomplish these things, roused the suspicions and antagonism of the dissenting parties. It is only within comparatively recent years that the obstacles that beset the broad minded and conscientious Anglican divines of the reigns of James I. and Charles I. have begun to be appreciated, their services on behalf of toleration understood and justice done them.

Among these true promoters of religious liberty in the English Church none occupies a more shining place than Jeremy Taylor "the Shakespeare of divines" of the Seventeenth Century. His life and writings are so wrapped up with the movement of the times that they can best be considered together.

The son of a barber, he was born in August, 1613, in a house known as the "Black Bull" opposite Trinity Church, Cambridge. Harry Vane and Bishop Pearson were born the same year; Richard Baxter two years, and Ralph Cudworth four years later. Milton and Fuller were each five; Roger Williams and Oliver Cromwell were each thirteen; and George Herbert and Isaac Walton were each twenty years old. Three years later Shakespeare, and thirteen years later Bacon died. Taylor thus appeared almost in the centre of a notable group.

A precocious lad, he was trained at Perse School,

Cambridge, entered as a sizar at Caius College at the age of thirteen, took his first degree at eighteen, was admitted to holy orders at twenty, and at twenty-one became M.A. and prælector in rhetoric. During his residence at the University, there were also there, Milton, Herbert, Fuller, Crashaw, Henry More, Benjamin Whichcote and John Harvard, and he might have known any, or all of them. Accident gave him the opportunity to preach at St. Paul's, the pulpit of which had been glorified by the eloquence of the poet-preacher Donne, then three years dead, and where we are told that Taylor's "florid and youthful beauty and sweet and pleasant air and sublime and raised discourses" were "the astonishment and admiration" of his auditors. He was evidently the pulpit sensation of the hour. He thus attracted the attention of Laud, then as powerful Archbishop of Charles I., beginning to turn the relentless screws of "Thorough" church discipline upon all laxity and non-conformity. Laud perceived his talent, and after some delay secured his admission as Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and later made him his chaplain. At Oxford he remained two years, falling under the influence of Chillingworth and incurring suspicion of a tendency to popery through his intimacy with the Franciscan Sancta Clara. In 1638 he was given by Juxon the comfortable living of Uppingham in Rutlandshire, still however keeping his fellowship at Oxford, where he had gained sufficient distinction to preach at St. Mary's, November 5, his first published sermon on the Gunpowder Plot, a labored, dry, scholastic dissertation with a fulsome dedication to Laud.

He remained as parish priest at Uppingham for about four years, marrying there Phoebe Langdale; when having been made Chaplain in ordinary to the King, the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 led him to join Charles, probably at Oxford. Here by royal mandate he received the degree of D.D. and wrote his second work, "Episcopacy Asserted, published late in 1642. Here too he began to receive

the favor of Christopher, afterwards Lord, Hatton, who, Laud having been impeached and imprisoned, continued for several years to be his patron and to whom many of his books are dedicated.

We now lose sight of him-pronounced loyalist and churchman-for about two years as he probably followed the disastrous fortunes and wanderings of the King, until we suddenly find him with Colonel Gerard a prisoner of the Parliamentary forces when that officer, in his attempt to relieve Cardigan Castle in Wales, was defeated February 4, 1645. This was a good fortune for him and also for us. Liberated, as he says, "by the courtesies of my friends, or the gentleness and mercies of a noble enemy," he with two other royalist clergymen, for a time carried on a school for boys in Wales, and later was made private Chaplain by the genial and broad-minded Lord Carberry, who received him into his beautiful country estate, "Golden Grove," on the bank of the Towey in South Wales. Here "in a private corner of the world," secure from the terrible storms that were breaking over England, Taylor remained for about ten comparatively happy years, only occasionally disturbed by fears as some spray from the billows of the great civil conflict beat upon his refuge; and here he wrote his most celebrated works. He complains of the lack of books. We are glad of the lack, for it freed him from the excess of citation of authorities and quotations from the classics and gave liberty to his genius which now began to disport itself. His first book was "An Apology for Liturgy," a most lucid and heartfelt argument for the Prayer Book as against the Directory for Worship, set forth by the Parliament. It was dedicated to the King and published in 1646. This was followed in 1647 by "The Liberty of Prophesying," the most famous, though not the most popular of his books. Then came "The Great Exemplar," or "Life of Christ," not in the least a critical work, but really a series of glowing and exquisite

discourses and prayers gathering about the chief events in our Saviour's life-a treatise in which the extraordinary power, imagination and beauty of the author's style begin to fascinate us. The best known of all his works, the "Holy Living," came next, followed by twenty-eight sermons, which were probably a long time in preparation, and in which his wonderful gifts as a master of gorgeous, yet pure English are still further displayed. One wonders where in this corner of Wales he got hearers for the music and throb of these glittering battalions of majestic sentences. The companion to "Holy Living," the "Holy Dying" appeared later, surpassing its predecessor in dignity of thought and brilliancy of expression; and to this succeeded another series of twenty-four sermons which, with the twenty-eight, already published, he called the Eniautos. In these last sermons Taylor attains his maximum of splendor. He moves with the ease, the exultation, the certainty of a sovereign in the treasure house of kings, and his spirit still thrills and rules us from his dusty pages. Hardly anything nobler exists in our noble tongue.

A sermon on the death of Lady Carberry and a small tract entitled "Clerus Domini" came out in connection with these larger works, and in 1654, he published his "Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament," a controversial work, burdened with learning, which stirred up strife and is inferior to his other works of this period. A book that brought him into unpleasant prominence was "Golden Grove," a sort of catechism, or manual of creed, litanies, prayers and offices for the whole life of a Christian, which was published in 1655. His charming "Discourse on Friendship" followed, a pure piece of literary work worthy of Cicero, in which there is no suggestion of theologian or priest. Two treatises dealing with sin and repentance, called "Unum Necessarium" and "Deus Justificatus," in which he seemed to incline towards Pelagianism, and which stirred up further hostility to

him, came next and may possibly have been the cause of his arrest and short imprisonment in Chepstow Castle. If to these controversial books, we add one other, we shall complete the list of Taylor's chief productions. This is the "Ductor Dubitantium," published, after long delay, in 1660, the longest, most ambitious, the most laboriously composed, by him the most highly regarded but perhaps the least valuable of all his works. It is a most prolix and attenuated analysis of cases of conscience, filled with odd learning and hair-splitting distinctions, which had few readers when it was published, and in spite of a separate edition brought out in 1851, has few now, though it is of interest to those curious in such matters.

There is one other book bearing the amusing title, "A Discourse on Auxiliary Beauty, or Artificial Handsomeness," published in 1656, which singularly enough has been persistently attributed to Taylor, but as all his biographers point out, entirely without adequate evidence. He may have had something to do with it, as a friend of the real author.

During all this turbulent period from about 1645 to about 1655, he enjoyed the hospitable shelter of Golden Grove. It is sad that he could not have enjoyed it longer. He ventured occasionally, perhaps secretly, to London; he formed connections with Rushton, the famous publisher by whom his books were brought out; he secured the valuable friendship of John Evelyn, for whom he acted as confessor, with whom he often stayed and who greatly helped him; he found infrequent opportunities for preaching in St. Gregory, a little church near St. Paul's which Cromwell sometimes tacitly allowed to be used for Episcopal services. There is a legend that he had access to Charles during the last summer of the monarch's life when he was a prisoner of the Parliament, and that the King parted from him with affection, giving him his watch, now in the hands of one of Taylor's descendants and a ring set