TAYLOR, Jeremy, a distinguished theologian, was born at Cambridge, and was baptised on the 15th of August 1613. His father, a descendant of Dr Rowland Taylor, who suffered martyrdom in the reign of Mary, followed the humble calling of a barber. Jeremy was educated at Perse's free-school; and on the 18th of August 1626, being then thirteen years of age, he was entered at Caius College as a sizar, or poor scholar. He took the degree of A.B. in 1630-1, and that of A.M. in 1633. According to the common account, he was elected fellow of his college, but this account seems to require confirmation. Before he attained the age of twenty-one, he was admitted to holy orders; and having soon afterwards been employed by a friend to supply his place at the lecture in St Paul's, his graceful person and elocution, together with the varied richness of his style and argument, speedily procured him friends and admirers. He was mentioned in such favourable terms to Laud, that he was requested to preach before the archbishop at Lambeth, and was highly commended for his performance. This powerful patron recommended him to a vacant fellowship in All Soul's College, Oxford, and a great majority of the fellows voted for his admission; but as the warden refused his concurrence, no election took place, and the nomination thus devolved to the archbishop as visitor of the college. Taylor was appointed on the 14th of January 1636. It appears from the college records that during the period of his continuing a fellow, he was not a regular resident. He became chaplain to the primate, and afterwards to the king; and, on the presentation of Juxon, bishop of London, he was, in March 1638, instituted to the rectory of Uppingham in Rutlandshire. Here he now fixed his residence; and, on the 27th of March 1639, being then in the twenty-sixth year of his age, he married Phoebe Landisdale, or Langsdale, who bore him several sons and daughters.
The civil commotions speedily ensued; and in August 1642 he was called to Oxford to attend the king in his capacity of chaplain. On the 1st of November he was admitted by mandamus to the degree of D.D. He now exerted himself in sustaining the tottering cause of episcopacy, and published various works on the controversies of those unhappy times. Whatever might be the state of the argument between the contending parties, the enemies of episcopacy were stronger than its friends; and for several years Dr Taylor was exposed to many vicissitudes of fortune. He appears to have retired into Wales; and on the 4th of February 1644 he fell into the hands of the parlia-
mentary troops, when they defeated Colonel Gerard before the castle of Cardigan. How long he was detained a prisoner, it is difficult to ascertain. In conjunction with William Nicholson, afterwards bishop of Gloucester, and William Wyatt, afterwards prebendary of Lincoln, he opened a school at Newton Hall in Carmarthenshire. In 1647 was published a little volume, entitled A New and Easie Institution of Grammar, which contains a Latin epistle by Wyatt, and an English epistle by Taylor.
Of the principles of toleration, the members of the Church of England had a very faint and inadequate conception, till in their turn they had begun to feel the bitterness of persecution. Some of those who had been deprived of their benefices, began to perceive a glimpse of purer light; and if Dr Taylor had not been reduced to the condition of a wanderer, it is highly probable that he never would have prepared A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying; shewing the Unreasonableness of prescribing to other Men's Faith, and the Iniquity of persecuting different Opinions.
Dr Taylor's Liberty of Prophesying, one of the most remarkable works which he produced, was printed in quarto in the year 1647. In 1650 he published The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living, and in the following year The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying. His first wife is supposed to have died before his retirement into Wales; and his second was Joanna Bridges, who possessed a competent estate at Mandinam, in the parish of Llanguedor, and county of Carmarthen. Her mother's family, we are informed, was unknown, but she was generally believed to be a natural daughter of Charles I. She is said to have possessed a very fine person; and, both in countenance and disposition, to have displayed a striking resemblance to her unfortunate father. He must now have relinquished the occupation of a schoolmaster. During his residence in Wales he was much indebted to the kindness of Richard, Earl of Carbery, who resided at Golden Grove in the same county, and who retained him as his chaplain. The next important work which he published was The Great Exemplar; or the Life and Death of the Holy Jesus, Lond. 1653, fol. The work speedily obtained an extensive popularity. His learned leisure was soon afterwards exposed to another interruption; and, for some reason which has not been fully discovered, he was imprisoned in Chepstow Castle. He appears to have been in custody in the month of May 1654; but, from some of his own letters, we ascertain that he was released before the close of the ensuing year. According to the statement of Wood, he soon afterwards settled in London, and officiated in a small and private congregation. The accuracy of his statement has been called in question; but it is at least certain that about this period he occasionally officiated in the metropolis.
In 1654 he had published a Treatise against Transubstantiation; and in 1655 appeared Unum Necessarium; or, the Doctrine and Practice of Repentance. Here he found occasion to discuss the doctrine of original sin, and in so Arminian a strain, that he incurred much censure, even from the members of his own church. He endeavoured to defend his own opinions in two different tracts. About this period of his life he produced various other works, including a course of Sermons for the whole year. Several of his smaller tracts were collected in a volume entitled, A Collection of Polemical and Moral Discourses, Lond. 1657, fol. About the beginning of the ensuing year, we find him a prisoner in the Tower, to which he had been committed in consequence of his bookseller having prefixed to his Collection of Offices a print of Christ in the attitude of prayer; for a recent act had declared such representations punishable by fine and imprisonment. His friend Evelyn, to whom he had many obligations, was instrumental in procuring his release, nor
does he seem to have been long detained in custody. On the invitation of the Earl of Conway, he afterwards emigrated to the north of Ireland. He left London in June 1658, and proceeded to the county of Antrim, where he appears to have divided his residence between Lisburne and Portmore, about eight miles distant from that town. At Lisburne he is supposed to have had a small lectureship; and he occupied a house in the immediate neighbourhood of his patron's mansion at Portmore. According to the tradition of his descendants, he frequently preached to a small congregation in the half-ruined church of Kilulta. His tranquillity suffered another interruption in 1659, when he was represented to the Irish council as a person disaffected to the existing government. A warrant was issued for bringing him to Dublin for examination, but it does not appear that he was subjected to any additional annoyance.
In the meantime, he devoted his learned leisure to the completion of a very remarkable work, published immediately after the restoration, under the title of Ductor Dubitantium; or the Rule of Conscience in all her General Measures, Lond. 1660, fol. This is the most extensive and learned book on casuistry in the English language. His great merit had now become too conspicuous to be disregarded; and on the 6th of August he was nominated to the bishopric of Down and Connor. He was soon afterwards elected vice-chancellor of the university of Dublin, and this office he retained till his death. On the 30th of April 1661 he was appointed administrator of the bishopric of Dromore, which he continued to hold with his other bishopric. In 1663 he published A Dissuasive from Popery; and some answers to it having been produced, he prepared a second part, which was not printed till after his death. He died at Lisburne on the 13th of August 1667, having only completed the fifty-fourth year of his age. His remains were interred in the choir of the cathedral of Dromore. His disease was a fever, which proved fatal in ten days. His funeral sermon was preached by Dr Rust, his successor in that diocese. No son, by either marriage, survived him. His eldest son, a captain of horse, was killed in a duel with a brother officer, named Vane, who also died of his wounds. Three of his daughters, Phœbe, Mary, and Joanna, survived their father. The eldest died single; the second was married to Dr Francis Marsh, who became archbishop of Dublin; and the third to Edward Harrison, member of Parliament for the borough of Lisburne. The bishop's widow survived him many years, but neither the time nor the place of her death has been ascertained.
In Hallam's opinion the sermons of Jeremy Taylor are—
"Far above any that had preceded them in the Church of England. An imagination essentially poetical, and sparing none of the decorations which, by critical rules, are deemed almost peculiar to verse; a warm tone of piety, sweetness, and charity; an accumulation of circumstantial accessories whenever he reasons, or persuades, or describes; an erudition pouring itself forth in quotation till his sermons become in some places almost a garland of flowers from all other writers, and especially from those of classical antiquity, never before so redundantly scattered from the pulpit, distinguish Taylor from his contemporaries by their degree, as they do from most of his successors by their kind. His sermons on the 'Marriage Ring,' on the 'House of Feasting,' on the 'Apples of Sodom,' may be named without disparagement to others, which, perhaps, ought to stand in equal place. But they are not without considerable faults, some of which have just been hinted. The eloquence of Taylor is great, but it is not eloquence of the highest class; it is far too Asiatic, too much in the style of Chrysostom, and other declaimers of the fourth century, by the study of whom he had probably vitiated his taste; his learning is ill-placed, and his arguments often much so; not to mention that he has the common defect of alleging nugatory proofs; his vehemence loses its effect by the circuity of his pleonastic language; his sentences are of endless length, and hence not only altogether unmusical, but not always reducible to grammar. But he is still the greatest ornament of the English pulpit up to the middle of the seventeenth century;
and we have no reason to believe, or rather much reason to disbelieve, that he has any competitor in other languages."—Hallam's Introduction to the Literature of Europe, vol. III. c. ii.
An edition of Bishop Taylor's whole works, with a copious life of the author, by Bishop Heber, was published at London in the year 1822, in 15 vols. 8vo. Of some of his practical treatises, the recent editions are very numerous; and this complete collection has been often reprinted.