 CHAPTER VI. In preceding sketches we have traced the rise and development of a spirit of rational inquiry within the Church of England. This spirit is more or less connected with the movement of liberal opinion in Holland, but it is also the result of internal forces working in the Church itself, torn by the conflicting tendencies which it embraced and the invasion of Romanist influences once more assailing it. The religious contentions of the time and the extreme and violent forms towards which they were advancing under the excitement of political interests drove a few thoughtful minds to seek a higher solution of spiritual questions than had hitherto been imagined by any political or religious party. Hales and Chillingworth are the most prominent representatives of this higher religious thoughtfulness, the former owing his theological bias in some degree directly to contact with the liberal theology of Holland, the latter drawing his liberal inspiration more from the struggles of his own bold and independent spirit. Both men are thinkers characteristically. They belong to the same phase of the movement and the remarkable group of writers and distinguished Oxford men who gathered around Falkland at Tew. Their whole intellectual life is summed up in what they did to advance the movement. Their connection with it gives them their position in the history of the Church of England. We have therefore presented full sketches of these two men, of their life and character as well as of their opinions. Their attitude as the leaders of liberal theological opinion in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, when the great currents of theological thought were running past them in opposite directions and the significance of their attitude was but little understood and heeded, gives them a claim to full recognition both in their personal and theological character. After these writers there are two names which stand in a peculiar relation to the history of religious thought in England, the names of Jeremy Taylor and Edward Stillingfleet. They belong to the liberal movement of the seventeenth century insofar as they contributed by distinct and important works to its advancement. Yet neither their special reputation nor the prevailing character of their theological activity has identified them with it. Jeremy Taylor's liberty of prophesying is among the most remarkable works of the century. Stillingfleet's ironicum is of less significance because less distinguished by genius and interest and in our day it is comparatively forgotten. Yet it too claims to be remembered as marking the height to which the wave of liberal churchmanship had risen before the reaction which set in with the restoration. The first of these works appeared in 1647, exactly ten years later than the religion of Protestants, the second in 1659 on the eve of the restoration. Both Taylor and Stillingfleet only belong to our history insofar as these works are concerned. Their best known writings are of a different and in some respects contrasted mode of thought. At the same time their consistency is not rashly to be questioned. Taylor was no longer a youth when he published the liberty of prophesying being in 1647 34 years of age, nor can he be said avowedly to have abandoned the principles which it advocated. He even expresses general adherence to them as late as 1662 in the famous sermon preached before the University of Dublin. Footnote. Published among his other works under the title of via intelligente, Heber's edition 6. Yet the tone of Taylor, if not also his principles, are very different in this sermon. Coleridge, notes, etc., page 208, 209, is unduly severe. Yet Taylor's consistency can hardly be defended. His manliness certainly not. End footnote. Still it is only one side and perhaps not the most characteristic side of his intellectual and Christian activity which is represented in the liberty of prophesying. Taylor is much more, and much besides, in the history of English theological literature than the advocate of a liberal eclectic theology and of a church based upon broad and comprehensive principles. Stealing fleet is possibly more open to the charge of inconsistency. He was comparatively a young man, only twenty-four, when the ironicum was first published, and in his later years he is represented as saying that, quote, there are many things in it which, if he were to write again, he would not say, some which show his youth and want of consideration, others which he yielded too far in the hopes of gaining the dissenting parties to the Church of England. Footnote. He is supposed himself to be speaking in the person of P.D., in one of his controversial writings, conference between a Romish priest, etc. He says something to the same effect in his preface to The Unreasonableness of Separation, 1680. End of footnote. Neither of these writers, in short, comes before us in his complete personality. Although they both helped the movement and came under its influence, they do not, as men characteristically, belong to it. Their spirit is not essentially philosophic, rational, or liberal. Taylor is medieval, ascetic, casuistic in his mature type of thought. He is a scholastic in argument, a pietist in feeling, a poet in fancy and expression. He is not a thinker. He seldom moves in an atmosphere of purely rational light. And even when his instincts are liberal and his reasoning highly rational in its results, he brings but a slight force of thought, of luminous and direct comprehension, to bear upon his work. Stillingfleet, again, is antiquarian, formal, and controversial. His intellect is acute, hard, and ingenious, ready to cope with any subject and any opponent that may cross his path, or may seem to him inimical to the church. He is alert alike against the Romanist, the separatist, and the rationalist, one of a common type of theologians bred by all churches who delight to go forth with weapons of war against all assailants of official orthodoxy and official privilege. They have their own merits this class of writers, and Stillingfleet, as well as Jeremy Taylor, is a name of which the Church of England has reason to be proud. Her great role of illustrious writers would be much poorer if they were gone. There are few names upon the whole which shine with a richer or grander lustre than that of Taylor. But to our list they only belong in part, at one point of their lives, and in virtue of the works which we have mentioned. We shall therefore content ourselves with a comparatively brief sketch of both, of Stillingfleet in particular, and dwell mainly on the works by which they have advanced the cause of liberal church opinion. It is also to be remarked that in dealing with these writers we get so far into a new sphere, and even traverse slightly the line of thought to which our second volume is devoted. Yet it seems better, in the view of the definite crisis which the church question may be said to have reached at the restoration, to follow out so far in this volume the series of rational arguments raised by it. Although Taylor and Stillingfleet are separated from our foregoing group and proceed from another university, it was the special type of liberalism begun by hails which they carried forward. With the later platonic type their connection is less essential than has been sometimes supposed. Taylor, moreover, is brought into the direct vicinity of the Oxford set which surrounded Falkland. In short these two writers, or rather their respective works to which we can find attention, carry out in its purely intellectual form that earlier phase of the rational movement which was ecclesiastical rather than philosophical in its character and tendency. Subsequent controversy added but little to the theory of a comprehensive church. Jeremy Taylor was educated at Cambridge, of which he was a native. His parents are said to have been of good descent, to have traced their lineage to the famous martyr Roland Taylor who suffered in the reign of Mary, but they occupied a humble position and were glad to receive assistance in the education of their son. Their son was entered as a Sizer, or poor scholar, at Keyes College in 1626, a year after Milton entered at Christ's College. There appears to be no record of his career as a student. Footnote The sources of Taylor's biography are Heber's well-known life, prefixed to the addition of his works published in 1822, and a life by Archdeacon Bonnie, an interleaved copy of which, corrected with many valuable notes, was consulted by Heber. A descendant of Taylor, William Todd Jones, had made a large collection of materials for a biography of the bishop, among which there was a family book in his own handwriting giving an account of his parentage and the principal events of his life, but this, with other manuscripts of Taylor, is supposed to have been destroyed in a fire that consumed the London Custom House. Footnote One of his biographers has drawn a picture of the course of study he was likely to pursue, and professed to trace the influence of Bacon in some of the aspects of his mental development. But there is no evidence whatever that the Baconian philosophy had obtained any footing at Cambridge at this time, nor is there, in the characteristics of Taylor's genius, any trace of the higher culture which he would have derived from it. So far as we can trust Milton and other authorities probably less prejudiced, the scholastic system, with its singular subtleties, still held sway in the university, and fertile and unrestrained as Taylor's mental activity was in many directions, there is no influence of which it bears more trace than that of the scholasticism still prevailing in his youth. He is one of several examples in his generation of a singular combination of poetic imaginativeness exuberant in its wantonness with an arid scholasticism tedious in its love of trifles and distinctions. A medieval culture overlaid his native richness of fancy and feeling without molding and educating it. The imaginative fruitfulness survives, but it is not well mixed, it is hardly mixed at all, with the harder intellectual grain developed by the scholastic discipline. And so, like some other writers of the seventeenth century, he seems almost to have two minds, one tender, sweet, and luxuriant to excess, the other hard, subtle, formal, prone to definition and logomical. He is at the same time poet and casuist, orator, and ascetic. The poetic, rhetorical elements lie alongside the dialectic in his genius without blending or fusing and strengthening into a thorough rational faculty. Samuel Rutherford, the well-known Scotch Puritan divine, who replied in an elaborate volume to Taylor and other authors contending for lawless liberty or licentious toleration of sex and heresies, is an instance of the same poetic and scholastic qualities, ill-combined, or rather not combined at all. In Rutherford, indeed, both the poetry and the logic must be admitted to be a very inferior quality. Yet the same contrast of mental character is presented. He is scarcely the same writer in his letters, the only productions of his pen now known, and in his argumentative treatises. The letters are marked by the extravagances of a fancy lawless in its exuberance. The treatises are dull, barren, operose, and unillumined in argument to a frightful degree. Nobody without an effort can read them. And if it may seem too great a disparity to compare Rutherford in any respect with Taylor, although their controversial relation suggests the comparison, we may point to the greatest literary name of the age as illustrative of the same fact. Marvelous as our Milton's prose works, they are, especially the treatise on divorce, lacking in lofty rationality and consistency of argument. The poet is revealed in the splendor of occasional thoughts and in passages of noble eloquence. But the imagination has not blended with the understanding so as to give insight, comprehension, and light to the general train of reasoning. Taylor became Bachelor of Arts in 1631, and is stated by his Panagyrist Rust to have been chosen fellow of keys immediately afterwards. There appear, however, to be some doubts of this circumstance which is distrusted by Heber. It is not till 1633 when he became Master of Arts that Taylor's name occurs in the list of fellows. He had then been admitted into holy orders and appears from the first to have attracted attention as a preacher. It was his powers in this respect that brought him under the knowledge of law and opened up for him a new career. One of his fellow students, of the name of Rizden, had become lecturer in St. Paul's Cathedral and wished Taylor to supply his place for a short time. Here his eloquence and graceful person, aided no doubt by the interest attaching to his youth, made a lively impression and speedily procured him friends and admirers. He appeared, in the language of Rust, as some young angel newly descended from the visions of glory. The fame of the youthful preacher was carried to Lod, just then elevated to the Sea of Canterbury, and, with that remarkable appreciation of genius which we have already noticed both in the case of Hales and Chillingworth, he sent for Taylor to preach before him at Lambeth. He was highly satisfied with his sermon and immediately interested himself in his advancement. The story is that he wished to rescue so promising a preacher from the snares of a premature popularity in London. He thought him too young for such a sphere as St. Paul's and that it was, quote, for the advantage of the world that such mighty parts should be afforded better opportunities of study and improvement than a course of constant preaching would allow of, close, quote. Taylor, of course, begged his grace as pardon for the fault of his youth and promised, if he lived, he would amend it. Such is the manner in which Bishop Rust represents this turning point in Taylor's career, and there is no reason to doubt his substantial accuracy, however much his admiring fancy may have embellished the event. Lord was greatly attracted by Taylor and used his influence in establishing him at Oxford. After some difficulty he was able to secure him a fellowship at all souls. Sheldon, who was warden of the college, interposed to prevent his immediate appointment, notwithstanding the choice of the fellows at Lord's instance, but the nomination devolving in due course to the Archbishop as visitor, he carried out his intentions by his own authority. Taylor became a fellow of all souls on the 14th of January, 1636. This is a curious and significant step in Taylor's career. It is singular, first of all, to find him, no less than Hales and Schillingworth, in immediate connection with Lod. At this early period Taylor's mind had probably not opened to the deeper questions of his time. There was nothing about him except his undoubted ability to attract the Archbishop. This credit must be given to Lod whatever we may think of his ecclesiastical policy. He had an eye for theological genius. The active patron of Hales and Schillingworth and Taylor cannot be accused of intellectual meanness or of entire misapprehension of the spiritual forces of his time. Probably, as is often found to be the case with extreme ecclesiastics, Lod had no objection to an active and even liberal spirit of theological inquiry where there was no tendency to practical insubordination or political restlessness. He may have guessed instinctively that none of these men would be likely to prove keen opponents of his ritualistic policy. Their spirit of conciliatory doctrineism made them indifferent, if not in some degree disposed, to ceremonies which must have appeared to them mere matters of expediency while to the Puritan they savored of idolatry. Their broad sense acknowledged no reason for repudiating a certain richness and elaboration of worship. And in Taylor's case, while his speculative liberality can hardly have appeared as yet, there may have been already some trace of those casuistic tendencies which afterwards matured and gave complexion to his theological culture. There is no difficulty in understanding the sympathy between Lod and the author of the Ductodubitantium and the Holy Living and Holy Dying, however imperceptible may seem the links of association between him and the author of the Liberty of Prophecying. But it is further singular to find Taylor, born and brought up as he was in Cambridge, at a distance from the band of active theological spirits that surrounded Falkland at Oxford, suddenly thrown into their very heart, in the college of which Sheldon was Warden, and at the time that Chillingworth was busy with the composition of the religion of Protestants. Chillingworth belonged to Trinity, where Sheldon also had been educated, and we cannot tell whether he and Taylor came into contact. It is possible that they would not have greatly attracted each other if they did. Sheldon's opposition to his appointment, naturally produced a coldness between the Warden and the new fellow, thrust upon him from Cambridge against the statutes of the college. The statutes of all souls distinctly required candidates for fellowships to be of three years standing in the university. Taylor was not admitted to Oxford at Eundum till October 1635, so that he had only been a few months in the university when Lod appointed him to all souls. This coldness is alluded to in a letter many years after, from Taylor to Sheldon, in which he thanks him for forgiving two debts, one of money and the other of unkindness. The latter being contracted when he did not know Sheldon and less understood himself. In such circumstances he probably saw little of Sheldon and hence little of Chillingworth, the two being at this time fast friends as they had been fellow students. Yet we cannot help thinking that such a moving spirit as Chillingworth would make his influence in some degree felt within the college of which his friend was the head, and in any case the publication of the Religion of Protestants in the following year, 1637, could scarcely be without effect on a mind so open and impressionable as Taylor's. After his appointment at all souls he continued his intimacy with Lod, who made him one of his chaplains. He himself tells us that he was a most observant and obliged chaplain, and his duties in this capacity frequently carried him away from Oxford. In the spring of 1638 he was presented to the rectory of Uppingham in Rutlandshire, the patron of which was Juxon, Bishop of London, who was probably glad to promote the young friend of the Archbishop. In November of the following year Taylor was selected to preach at St. Mary's the sermon on the anniversary of the gunpowder plot, and there is a story in connection with this event of his having made advances to the Church of Rome which were brought to an end by the hard things which he was forced to say in the sermon against the Roman Catholics. There appears to have been no foundation for the story beyond his intimacy with a Franciscan of the name of Christopher Davenport, who was better known by the pseudonym of Francis Assuncte Clara, a chaplain to Queen Henrietta, and one of the numerous Popish missionaries whom we have so often traced as then laboring secretly in England for the overthrow of the Protestant faith. Davenport was a man of a higher stamp than was usual with this class of missionaries and had imperiled his own orthodoxy by his liberality. Taylor's friendship with him was no evidence whatever of a tendency to Rome, but it was enough to excite suspicion and jealousy in such a time, especially in combination with his relation to laud and his own ritual and ascetic tastes. He continued through life, as Heber says, to be haunted by a suspicion of a concealed attachment to the Roman Communion. About a year after his settlement at Uppingham he married. Little is known of his wife or her relatives beyond the fact that she appears to have resided with her mother in the parish and that her brother was a physician in Gainsborough and subsequently in Leeds where he died in 1683. There is an affectionate letter from Taylor to him in the year 1643 congratulating him on his recovery from illness and bespeaking very affectionate and cordial relations between the families at Uppingham and Gainsborough. He had three sons by this wife, one of whom died in 1642, and the mother does not seem to have long survived her infant. Taylor's life had hitherto been a prosperous and happy one. The times were troubled, but he had secured powerful friends, his genius was acknowledged, and his success had been considerable. Up to this point we have little insight into his opinions. His connection with laud, no doubt, is sufficiently significant as to his general leanings in church and state. His sermon before the University of Oxford on the 5th of November 1638 had vindicated his Protestantism. But of the deep and broader thoughts passing in his mind regarding the conflicts around him we learn nothing. A mind like his, however, must have been greatly moved by the aspect of the times, and he was now about to break silence. His patron had been committed to the tower at the close of 1640, and there he lay awaiting his trial at the time that Taylor was feeling the first bitterness of domestic sorrow in his parsonage at Uppingham. It may have been partly to relieve his mind under the pressure of this sorrow, but no doubt mainly to vindicate a cause dear to him that Taylor took up his pen in defense of Episcopacy, and sent forth the first of his many works Episcopacy asserted against the Asephali and Aryans, new and old. This treatise was published at Oxford by His Majesty's Command in 1642. Before this time Taylor appears to have quitted his parsonage and joined the king. His connection with laud had been too conspicuous and his partisanship was too vehement to enable him to hope that he would remain unmolested at Uppingham. There is no evidence, however, that at this time he was subjected to any active persecution. Probably he fled before the decree of the Parliament in the autumn of 1642 to sequester the livings of the loyal clergy. During the two years following the opening of the long Parliament the air was filled with ecclesiastical pamphlets. The long pent up rage against the abuses of the Anglican hierarchy had burst forth with irrepressible energy, Milton leading the van in his bulky argument on Reformation in England and the causes that hitherto have hindered it. The bishops were specially attacked as an order inimical to the scriptural simplicity of the church and the main cause of its corruptions and tyrannies in England. Many sincere and devout churchmen were honestly astonished at the vehemence of the assaults made upon the Episcopal order. Both Hall and Usher entered the lists in its defence. They bore the heat and burden of the fray in conflict with the Smectimnuans and their great champion whose genius was happily destined to much higher work. FUT NOTE. Five Puritan ministers, the initials of whose names formed the words Smectimnuans, who published a reply to Hall's humble remonstrance in favour of Episcopacy and whose work Milton defended against the moderate yet powerful criticism of Usher. And FUT NOTE. Taylor's treatise may be allowed to rank him along with these illustrious defenders of their order, but he scarcely emerges into public notice as a combatant, nor is there anything in his treatise itself that gives it special claims to recognition. It can hardly be said to be quite worthy of the subject or to meet its real difficulties. It gives no indication of the liberal and comprehensive spirit which was by and by to expand into the liberty of prophesying. Instead of resting the defence of Episcopacy on the rational grounds of Hooker, which still interests and impress all true thinkers, Taylor is content with nothing less than taking up the narrow principle of the Puritans and arguing that the plan of church government must be necessarily platformed in scripture. The result is very unsatisfactory. Neither the statements nor the arguments of the treatise will bear examination. They are marked by uncritical assumptions and a mass of traditional pedantries which look imposing but which weaken and obscure rather than strengthen or throw light upon his conclusions. Its chief excellence consists in the concise and rapid divisions into which he throws his reasoning so as to bring all his points successively in good order before the reader. We have no evidence of how it was received, but no doubt it contributed, along with his active partisanship, to expose him to the severity of persecution which awaited him after the downfall of the royal cause. It was dedicated, like the liberty of prophesying, to one who was hence forth one of his most active and liberal patrons, Christopher Lord Hatton of Kirby, who had been his neighbor at Uppingham, and who, after the king's retirement to Oxford, acted as Comptroller of his household, in which capacity he possessed, says Clarendon, a great reputation which in a few years he found a way to diminish. Taylor had spent five years in pleasant rural retirement. During the next few years he led a wandering and unsettled life, now with the king at Oxford, now following the royal army in the capacity of Chaplin, and now, apparently, for a brief space, as his letters—November 24, 1643—show, with his mother-in-law, the place of whose residence, at this time, is uncertain. Like Chillingworth, he appears to have been involved in the actual disasters of the war, and to have suffered for a time imprisonment. The foundation for this is a passage in Whitelock, in which he states that the royal forces under Colonel Gerard, having been routed before the castle of Cardigan, which they were besieging, there were one hundred and fifty prisoners taken, and among them Dr. Taylor. It is presumed that there was no other Dr. Taylor among the royalists who was likely to be mentioned in this conspicuous manner. This occurred in February 1644, and during the same year there appeared at Oxford a Defense of the Liturgy, which he afterwards published in an enlarged form. There also appeared, under his friend Hatton's name, an edition of the Salter, with Collects affixed, which he subsequently incorporated in his works. The substitution of Hatton's name appears to Heber evidence of Taylor being a prisoner at the time, and, except for some purpose of concealment, it is difficult to account for such a substitution. Nothing, however, is clearly known as to his movements at this period during which he married his second wife. Heber's idea is that he was already married in the end of 1643, or the beginning of 1644, and settled for a brief space of happiness in Wales when the evils of the war extending again involved him in its vortex. To this temporary period of repose he is supposed to elude in the well-known dedication of the liberty of prophesying. In the great storm, he says, quote, which dashed the vessel of the church in pieces, I was cast on the coast of Wales, and in a little boat thought to have enjoyed that rest and quietness which in England I could not hope for. Here I cast anchor, and thinking to ride safely, the storm followed me with so impetuous of violence that it broke a cable and I lost my anchor. 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 the waves, and the madness of the people, had provided a plank for me, I had been lost to all the opportunities of content or study. But I know not whether I have been more preserved by the courtesies of my friends, or the gentleness and mercies of a noble enemy." There is difficulty in carrying back the space of temporary quietness to which Taylor here eludes so far as 1643 or even 1644. But there can be no doubt that the description gives us, upon the whole, the best general idea of his mode of life during this interval. He was caught in the great storm in which so many fortunes were ruined, and after remaining for some time in active service with the royal forces he returned into Wales, there married a second time, and settled on his wife's property. The story is that his wife was a natural daughter of King Charles I, and that she bore a strong resemblance to his well-known countenance as presented by Van Dyke. Either because of the evils of the war again overtook him in his Welsh retreat, or because whatever property his wife may have had proved insufficient for his increasing wants, or for both reasons, he has found, about 1646 and 1647, keeping a school in the parish of Lanbyhungle-Aberbethic. Associated with him in this task were two scholars, also suffering from the disasters of the time, William Nicholson and William Wyatt. The former afterwards became Bishop of Gloucester and the other a preventary of Lincoln. From this scholastic retreat appeared in 1647 a new and easy institution of grammar, which is reckoned among Taylor's works for the chief authorship of which has been ascribed to Wyatt. It has two epistles dedicatory, the one by Wyatt, in Latin, addressed to Lord Hatton, and the other in English by Taylor addressed to Hatton's son than in his 15th year. In the same year appeared his great work, the subject of our special criticism. Of the remaining events in Taylor's life we can only give a brief summary. His successive publications, in fact, constitute its chief interest. Nothing could damp the ardor and productivity of his genius, and during the whole period from 1647 to 1660 he continued to send forth from his prolific pen practical, devotional, and argumentative treatises. In the year 1648 he published, in an enlarged form, his defense of the liturgy, then in the same year his life of Christ the great exemplar, one of the most solid and interesting of his works. The three following years gave to the light his well-known twenty-seven sermons and the devotional manuals, perhaps the best known and still the most widely read of all his works, Holy Living and Holy Dying. In 1654 he put forth a controversial treatise against the Roman Catholics on the subject of the Eucharist, and in the same year the beautiful manual of daily prayers and litanies, etc., which he entitled Golden Grove, in honor of the hospitable seat of his friend and patron, Lord Carberry. More sermons followed in the succeeding year and at the same time his famous work on the Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, which presents him in a new theological aspect as an original speculator on the great subjects of Christian dogma. Footnote. Unum necessarium, or the Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, describing the necessity and measure of a strict, a holy, and a Christian life and rescued from popular errors. And footnote. The views as to original sin which he propounded in this treatise drew wide attention and called down hostile criticism not only from the Calvinistic and Puritan theologians of the day, upon which he no doubt reckoned, but from his own theological friends. The venerable Sanderson, in particular, was greatly distressed by his novel speculations. He deplored it is said, quote, with much warmth and even with tears, Taylor's departure from the cautious and scriptural decision of the Church of England and bewailed the misery of the times which did not admit of suppressing by authority so perilous and unseasonable novelties, close, quote. The times had brought personal honor and credit to Sanderson, whose conscientiousness was conspicuous in the resignation of his divinity professorship at Oxford, but they had not taught him toleration or wisdom. He had not read, or at least as Heber suggests, had not profited by Taylor's argument in his liberty of prophesying. His mind, indeed, was of a narrow, if subtle cast, and Taylor's originality, both as a thinker and writer, could have been very little appreciated by him. In recent years Taylor's views on original sin have attracted renewed attention in the criticism of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The weakness and inconsequence of his theory, as well as of the extreme Calvinistic theory which he designed to supersede, have been set forth in the aids to reflection with acuteness and force, although with something also of the wordy and pretentious amplitude of the writer on such subjects. It is not difficult, indeed, to hit the weakness in Taylor's theory. In addition to the intrinsic difficulties of theorizing on such a topic, Taylor's tendency to illustration and exuberance of statement on this as on other topics leads him constantly into extravagance. His imagination is but rarely under the severe control necessary to fortify an argument at all points and to exhibit it at once with due discrimination and force. In the year 1659 he republished several of his former works in folio and among them the liberty of prophesying, under the title Sumbalon Ethicopolemicon, with a dedication to Lord Hatton in which he defends the consistency of his views regarding the Fathers, whose authority he had appeared to some to pull down with one hand and to build with the other. Finally in 1660 was published his great work which he had been long preparing and which he himself was disposed to esteem the chief pillar of his fame, his Ductor Dubotantium, or Extended Treatise on Casuistic Divinity. With this work his career as an author does not, indeed, terminate, but his significance as a theological writer reaches its highest point. His Disuasives from Popery, the second part of which was only completed in the year of his death, 1667, and an important sermon under the title of Via Intelligente, which he preached before the University of Dublin in 1662, are the only writings of his later years that demand special notice. The sermon in question is intimately related to the views expounded in the liberty of prophesying and generally reasserts the liberal principles of this work, with modifications which were not new, but which received from him a new and special prominence in the different circumstances in which he was placed. CHAPTER VI To this brief sketch of Taylor's literary and theological activity during the twenty years which elapsed from the publication of his liberty of prophesying, till his death, little remains to be added as to his external life and circumstances. He remained in Wales, making occasional visits to London and its neighborhood, especially to see his friend Evelyn, until the year 1658. Notwithstanding his misfortunes and losses in the commotions of the time, Taylor seems to have had a great faculty of acquiring friends of rank and wealth who were able to assist him, and to whom he, in return, acted as a spiritual counselor, both privately by personal advice or letter, and publicly, so far as his ministrations could be conducted with any safety under the restrictions of the time. We have already alluded to his friend Lord Carberry, whose seat of golden grove, in the same parish in Wales where Taylor's lot was cast, gave the name to one of his most attractive devotional works. Richard Vaughn, Earl of Carberry, had distinguished himself as a military commander on the king's side and survived to be rewarded for his loyal service at the Restoration. He and his wife were both warm friends of Taylor, and he repaid their friendship by an enthusiastic devotion. When the first lady Carberry died he preached her funeral sermon and drew a portrait of her which, as Heber says, belongs rather to an angelic than a human character. The second lady Carberry, who was a daughter of the Earl of Bridgewater, was no less friendly to Taylor and had the singular fortune of not only being eulogised by him but of forming the original of the Lady in Milton's Comus. In the happy mansion of this family Taylor not only spent many pleasant hours but was able to carry on his ministry when the neighboring churches were shut against him. He preached here his yearly course of sermons. Footnote, Haney Autos, the title by which he himself designated the first series of his published sermons, although, as Heber remarks, with one or two exceptions they have no reference to the yearly festivals of the church. And footnote. His friendship with Evelyn, which was ultimately of material assistance to him, began about 1654, apparently in one of his visits to London. About this time Taylor was in difficulties and appears to have been, within a year, twice imprisoned in connection with some of his publications. His imprisonment, however, was of short duration on both occasions. It is possible that Evelyn was of service in procuring his liberation, for Evelyn's position, character, and moderate opinions, although a sincere royalist, like his friend, gave him influence with the parties in power. Footnote. John Evelyn is a conspicuous figure in the literary and philosophical society of the 17th century. He is now chiefly remembered by his works on gardening and forestry, especially his great work, Silva or A Discourse of Forest Trees. He had returned from a prolonged residence abroad in the beginning of 1652 and settled on his wife's property at Says Court near Detford. And footnote. Certainly from this time Taylor and Evelyn continued warm friends. During four years, from 1655 to 1658, their correspondence, which had previously begun, continues frequent and gives us the best insight we have into Taylor's personal life. The picture has not much color, but we can see with sufficient distinctness, on the one hand, the earnest, hardworking theologian and spiritual counselor, depressed by the race Angus Tadome, of which he often complains, and on the other hand, the kind-hearted, amiable scholar and Christian philosopher always urging his hospitality at Says Court near Detford upon his friend and wishing him to settle in London. Taylor expresses, in July 1656, great anxiety to comply with his friend's wish, that he may, quote, receive advantage of society and books to enable him better to serve God and the interest of souls. Close, quote. But says that he is hindered by the straightness of his means. It seems to be doubtful whether he ever removed to London with his family, but he is represented as officiating to private congregations of Episcopalians there, and as officiating at the baptism of Evelyn's fourth son at Says Court in the spring of 1657. In the same year, Evelyn seems to have granted him a yearly pension, an acknowledgment of which Taylor's thanks are affluent. In 1658, another powerful friend of Taylor's comes upon the scene, Edward Earl of Conway, and he, in conjunction with Evelyn, induced the neglected divine, for whom England at this time could furnish no post, to accept a lectureship at Lisburn in the north of Ireland. At first Taylor did not like the offer which presented few attractions. The stipend is so considerable, he says, that it will not pay the charge and trouble of removing himself and his family, and the duty is to be shared by a Presbyterian. I like not, he writes to Evelyn in May 1658, quote, the condition of being a lecturer under the dispose of another, nor to serve in any semicircle where a Presbyterian and myself shall be, like Caster and Pollux, the one up and the other down. Close, quote. His scruples, however, were overcome, and in the summer of the same year we find him settled at Portmore, about eight miles distant from Lisburn. Portmore was the seat of Lord Conway, his friend and patron, and was charmingly situated on Loch Ney. Here, under the shadow of a princely mansion, built after a plan by Inigo Jones, and amidst scenes where a painter, a poet, or a devout contemplatist might alike delight to linger, Taylor appears to have fixed his final residence. His subsequent elevation to the bishopric of the province made no change, or at least no permanent change, in his place of abode. He clung to the sequestered charm of the place, with its cluster of romantic islets lying near, to some of which, according to tradition, it was his practice to retire for purposes of study or devotion. It was a fitting retreat for his closing years. When Episcopacy was restored in 1660, it might have been supposed that so distinguished a champion of it as Taylor would have been called to some post of honor and activity in England, but from whatever cause he received no such call. He was elevated to Episcopal dignity, however, within the district where he was. On the 6th of August, after the king's return, he was appointed Bishop of Down and Conner, and shortly afterwards he was elected Vice Chancellor of the University of Dublin. Of Taylor's Episcopate there is not much to say. The difficulties which surrounded him were extreme. On one side the Roman Catholics, on the other side the Puritans regarded him with disfavor. The latter had obtained great ascendancy, particularly in his diocese, during the Commonwealth. They were generally of the most extreme Calvinistic and Covenanting type, and Taylor's liberalism and theology, no less than his devotion to the ritual and government of the Church of England, were deeply distasteful to them. It is impossible to read his sermon before the two Houses of Parliament in May 1661, or his still more famous sermon before the University of Dublin, published in the following year, without perceiving traces of his disappointment at the conduct of this ecclesiastical faction. His principles were strained to the utmost in speaking of them, and some of his expressions regarding the duty of obedience to ecclesiastical superiors, and the overdoing of respect for weak consciences, when it is evidently not their consciences but their profits that are in question, are barely within those laws of toleration and charity of which he had written so earnestly and so beautifully. As for the Roman Catholics, he found himself in face of them as a faction and a state party, whose design was, according to his own statement, to recover their old laws and a barbarous manner of living, and so to be populous unius labii, a people of one language and unmingled with others. Unhappily, neither the political nor ecclesiastical authorities of the time fully appreciated the nature of the people whom they sought to govern and instruct. Neither penalties nor dissuasives from potpourri were the means to reach an ignorant, enthusiastic, naturally patriotic race. Teachers and preachers in their own language, the systematic and patient carrying out of the policy pursued by Usher and Bedell at an earlier period, might have been crowned with some measure of success. But nothing of this sort was attempted. The Irish language was in every way discountenanced. Neither scripture nor the liturgy was translated, while the people were yet bound to give attendance at the parish churches. The fatal results of such a policy have only reached their climax in our own day. Not even a bishop like Taylor could stem the evil influences that flowed from it. The most enlightened toleration and the purest and most benevolent character might relieve the darkness of the general system of civil and ecclesiastical governments set up in Ireland, no less than in Scotland, at the Restoration, but they could do no more. The name of Taylor, like that of Layton, serves to show how the noblest and most Christian aspirations may be bound up with a base and unjust cause. They are spots of beauty in an ugly picture, on which men look back with shame and sorrow, but in no respect do they redeem the cause with which they were identified. They do not even cast respectability around it. On the contrary, it requires the impartial charity of the historian to lift the name of either clear from the bad system of ecclesiastical and political tyranny to which they respectively belonged, and which derived in its time some credit from their connection. Taylor survived his elevation to the Episcopate only seven years, years of severe personal trial as well as of painful public responsibility. Of his two surviving sons one fell in a duel, and the other, who was intended for the church, came under the profligate influence of the Duke of Buckingham, lost his health as the result of his excesses, and died in August 1667. In the same month the father, who had felt bitterly the conduct of his sons, and been broken in spirit by the sad fate of the eldest, it is doubtful whether he survived to hear of the death of the second, was seized with fever and died at Lisburn after ten days' illness in the fifty-fifth year of his age. Those who have looked at Taylor's portraits will have been struck by the beauty and grace of his personal appearance. There is a ripe and somewhat soft freshness of health in his face, with his hair long and gracefully curling on his cheeks, large dark eyes full of sweetness and aquiline nose, and an open earnest expression. He has said not to have been without consciousness of his personal beauty, and to have frequently introduced his portraits in different attitudes in his various writings. II. The discourse on the liberty of prophesying was published in 1647, and it is important to fix attention upon this particular date in the great crisis of events through which the country was passing. In the ten years which had elapsed since the publication of the Religion of Protestants, momentous changes had occurred. The Government of the King had been subverted, the Church overthrown, lawed beheaded. Puritanism was everywhere triumphant. The fear of popery, which had goaded the nation into frenzy, and the intolerant claims of which had provoked Chillingworth's great work, had entirely passed away. The question was no longer as to the validity of Protestantism. The reforming passions of the nation, long held in check by arbitrary power, had burst forth and carried all before them, and, as always happens in such crises, it was the extreme force of the reaction which had gradually acquired ascendancy. It is singular and somewhat mournful to contemplate the manner in which the national enthusiasm swept away the successive stands or rallying points which the early friends of the movement sought to make. At first, when the long Parliament met, November 1640, all the representatives of the national patriotism may be said to have been arrayed against the King, Clarendon and Falkland, no less than Pym and Hampton. But with the overthrow of the great abuses and agencies of tyranny which had grown up under Charles, a schism occurred in the popular party. Pym and Hampton carried forward the revolutionary movement, but Falkland and his friends drew off and formed that new or middle party of which we have already spoken. Falkland was the soul of this party, and its best, if not its stoutest representative. A constitutionalist in politics, and a moderate in doctrine and church government, he would have arrested the revolution if he could have done so by the pure operation of parliamentary government on the one hand and, on the other hand, by a reasonable reform of the church, so as to give scope at once to freedom of opinion and a fair order of service without popish adjuncts or episcopal intermeddling. In this latter respect his friend Chillingworth would have been found ranked by his side. This is the very ideal of doctrinal moderation and church order and service which he has drawn in his third chapter on points fundamental and not fundamental. There is reason to believe that, so far as reform of the church was concerned, Pym himself was not disposed at first to go further than this. The constitutional moderates in church and state, however, were rapidly swept away. They can scarcely be said even to have made a serious stand betwixt the extreme influences that were hurrying the nation into conflict. Pym, who alone had the strength of brain and the parliamentary influence to have converted them into a party, was himself hurried by the violence of his political resentments and his too well-founded suspicions of the king into an increasing hostility to the royal cause. No Puritan himself he yet laid the foundations of the triumph of Puritanism. He headed the forces which were destined to subvert the church to which he professed attachment. When, with the progress of events, power passed into the hands of the Presbyterians they sought to make a definite and authoritative stand for their principles. They were a compact and closely organized party, fully understanding what they meant both in reference to church and state. Constitutionalists in politics, dogmatists in religion, even more decisively than the Lodians whose excesses had done so much to provoke hostilities, they sought to stem the advancing tide of the revolution as soon as they had secured their religious ends. And if Charles had yielded sooner the demands of Scotland and thrown himself upon the loyalty of the Presbyterian interest in both countries it is probable that he might still have secured his throne and life and the course of the revolution have been stayed. But the fanaticism of Charles played into the hands of the more powerful fanaticism which animated the soldiers of the Commonwealth and left him a prey to their ambitious energy and fierce passion for rule. Presbyterianism in its turn was swept aside and the revolution reached its height in the triumph of the army which its necessities had called into existence. In the years 1646 and 1647, however, it was still uncertain what course things would take. Presbyterianism, as represented by the parliaments in both kingdoms, had begun to lose credit but it was still powerful. Some of the military chiefs, like Essex, still clung to it. The Westminster Assembly, the embodiment of its higher spiritual wisdom, still met and gave forth from time to time their deliverances. Especially the Scottish army in the north of England was unanimously and intensely Presbyterian and would have been quite ready, as future events proved, to turn its arms against the revolution which it had done so much to advance if the King would only have consented to its terms and accepted the Covenant at least for Scotland. Charles, whose own forces had been entirely ruined after the Battle of Naysby, June 1645, sought refuge in the Scottish camp in May 1646. The negotiations respecting the Covenant having failed with him, he was delivered under orders from the Scottish Parliament to the commissioners of the English Parliament on the 30th of January 1647. In the following June he was forcibly taken possession of by the English army which had now turned its forces against the Parliament. The summer of 1647 was therefore, as Heber indicates, a critical turning point in the great struggle. There were at least three parties in the field, the King, the Presbyterians, and the Independents, represented by Cromwell and the Army. Religious confusion embittered civil discord. Sects were rising on all sides, unfamiliar alike to Presbytery and Episcopacy. Out of the very growth of religious differences there had sprung a spirit of religious latitude. The Independents, whilst claiming freedom for themselves against the Presbyterians, could not deny some measure of the same freedom to Episcopalians. And accordingly, when they obtained possession of the King, they at once showed a greater deference to his religious scruples than the Parliament had done. His chaplains were admitted free access to his presence and were allowed to conduct service before him according to the Book of Common Prayer. It seemed for a while as if there were an opening for general pacification through some adjustment of religious differences. It is, at any rate, to the immortal credit of Taylor that such a vision of religious accommodation, based on the most profound principles of religious truth and freedom, took hold on his mind and inspired his great work. Even such a voice as his was too feeble to quell the rage of contending factions and to breathe toleration and charity into sternly agitated minds. But it remains, nevertheless, a living voice of wisdom long after the intolerant cries on one side and another have died away. It is only the natural fate of such a voice to be unheard in its first utterance, but the cause of truth, freedom, and charity for which it pleads is not destroyed although resisted. No truth, spoken by God's spirit, as Taylor himself says, returns unperformed and ineffectual, and therefore he adds, quote, I thought it might not misbecome my duty and endeavours to plead for peace and charity and forgiveness and permission's mutual. Although I had reason to believe that, such as the iniquity of men, and they so indisposed to receive such impresses, that I had as good plow the sands or till the air as persuade such doctrines which destroy men's interests and serve no end but the great end of a happy eternity and what is in order to it. But because the events of things are in God's disposition, and I knew them not, and because, if I had known, my good purposes would be totally ineffectual as to others, yet my own designation and purpose would be of advantage to myself, who might, from God's mercy, expect the retribution which he is pleased to promise to all pious intendments. I resolved to encounter with all objections and to do something to which I should be determined by the consideration of the present distemperatures and necessities by my own thoughts, by the questions and scruples, the sects and names, the interests and animosities which, at this day, and for some years past, have exercised and disquieted Christendom, close quote. Such, then, was the origin of the liberty of prophesying. It sprang directly out of the necessities of the time, out of those public concernments which, as Taylor says, in the same dedicatory epistle, so fixed his thoughts that, besides them, he could not go. He could not keep his mind off the religious conflicts on which he looked. He saw nothing but prolonged confusion and an increase of enmities in the prevalent ways of promoting the several opinions which were then in vogue. In the rise of the independence and their more liberal treatment of religious questions he may have seen an opening more favorable to his views than he even confesses. And he gave, if not with hopefulness, yet with a strong confidence in the righteousness and charity of his cause, his views to the public. The substance of the argument of the liberty of prophesying is contained in the first two chapters of the work on the nature of faith and the nature of heresy. The principles which underlie his system of religious latitude or comprehension are fully unfolded in these chapters, and most of the remaining chapters are devoted to show the weakness of any other grounds of religious certitude and agreement than those which he has set forth. One of these chapters, however, on the practice of the primitive church, has a more practical and significant bearing. It treats of the rise of the idea of persecution in the Christian church and shows how greatly at variance it was with the course of Christian thought in the first ages and for long afterwards. In his lengthened dedicatory epistle he recursed to this subject and brings forth more ample evidence bearing upon it. His whole treatment of this important subject is highly interesting and satisfactory. Then his chapter on the case of the Anabaptists deserves special mention. It is an admirable piece of pleading on behalf of a sect generally repudiated and condemned, and indeed with such a firm and even hand did Taylor hold the balance in estimating the arguments regarding baptism on either side that many of his friends seem to have been doubtful to which side he himself inclined, and he was obliged to add an appendix containing the Anabaptist's arguments, as he had himself put them, answered. We shall do most justice to his argument by exhibiting, in the first instance, the principles on which it rests and which appeared to him to form the only rational basis of religious certitude, and then by reviewing briefly, according to his own order and exposition, the several false or uncertain standards of religious truth which had been set up by contending parties. Taylor opens his treatise with a brief statement of his general position, which is plainly identical with that of Chillingworth. Differences in religious opinion are declared to be inevitable. So long as men had such variety of principles, such several constitutions, educations, tempers and distempers, hopes, interests, and weaknesses, degrees of light and degrees of understanding, it was impossible all should be of one mind, and what is impossible to be done is not necessary it should be done. Variety of opinion must subsist in the nature of things, but variety of opinion need not breed and cannot justify the virulent hostilities of religious parties. It is quite possible for men to differ on really important questions, such as the validity or invalidity of a deathbed repentance or the consequences of the doctrine of predetermination and yet not fall into sects or break up communion on this account. The source of mischief is not in the diversity of thought, but in the want of charity and breadth of mind. Men are so in love with their own fancies and opinions as to think faith and all Christendom are concerned in their support, and so a theological dispute grows into a quarrel in religion and God is entitled to it, and the person with whom we differ becomes to us an enemy of God whom we think that it is a good service to God to persecute even to death. It is not the variety of understandings, but the disunion of wills and affections. It is not the several principles, but the several ends that cause our miseries. Our opinions commence and are upheld according as our turns are served and our interests are preserved, and there is no cure for us but piety and charity. The mischiefs which he deplores, proceed not from this that all men are not of one mind, for that is neither necessary nor possible, but that every opinion is made an article of faith, every article aground of quarrel, every quarrel makes a faction, every faction is zealous, and all zeal pretends for God, and whatsoever is for God cannot be too much. We by this time are come to that pass we think we love not God except we hate our brother, and we have not the virtue of religion unless we persecute all religions but our own." The purpose of his discourse is to discover the origin of such errors and mischiefs, and so to indicate their cure and remedy. 1. The first and most important point to be considered is the nature of faith, for it is here that the first and great mistake of religious parties begins. Faith, he says, is not an intellectual habit directed towards certain doctrines or propositions, but simply a personal acceptance of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. We may indifferently doubt or believe many things concerning God when the question is not concerning God's veracity, for every Christian accepts what he knows to be revealed of God, but whether God hath said so or no. That which is of the foundation of faith that only is necessary. The primitive creed was nothing more than belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and our Saviour. He quotes various texts in proof of this from the Annunciation of St. Peter in Matthew 1616, we believe and are sure that Thou art Christ the Son of the Living God, to the admirable creed of St. Paul. This is the word of faith which we preach, that if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved. These and many other instances show that the entire complexion of a Christian faith is contained in such a creed. The act of believing propositions has no excellency in itself. Faith is only valuable as a means to an end. We are bound indeed to believe all which we know our great master hath taught, but salvation specially flows from belief in the great gospel verities, which have in them the endearments of our services or the support of our confidence or the satisfaction of our hopes, such as our Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, forgiveness of sins by his blood, resurrection of the dead, and life eternal. Salvation is promised to the explicit belief of those articles, and therefore those only are necessary and those are sufficient. If any man will urge further that whatsoever is deducible from these articles by necessary consequence, a favorite mode of argument with dogmatists, both Puritan and sacerdonal, is necessary to be believed explicitly, Taylor answers, quote, it is true if one sees the deduction and coherence of the parts, but it is not certain that any man shall be able to deduce whatsoever is immediately or certainly deducible from these premises. And then, since salvation is promised to the explicit belief of these, I see not how any man can justify the making the way to heaven narrower than Jesus Christ hath made it, it being already so narrow that there are few that find it, close quote. He then proceeds to show that the Apostles Creed is the summary of such verities as are alone necessary for Christian salvation. He accepts the traditional view of this Creed as in the main composed by the Apostles, or holy men, their contemporaries and disciples, but candidly admits that the clause as to Christ's descent into hell is not to be found in the original Creed and is omitted in all the confessions of the Eastern churches. If the Apostles Creed contained all that was necessary to be believed in primitive times, he is quite at a loss to understand why it should not be equally adequate now. Quote, If the Apostles admitted all to their communion that believed this Creed, why shall we exclude any that preserve the same entire? Why is not our faith of these articles of as much efficacy for bringing us to heaven as it was in the church's apostolical, who had guides more infallible that might without error have taught them superstructures enough if they had been necessary? And so they did, but that they did not insert them into the Creed when they might have done it with as much certainty as these articles makes it clear to my understanding that other things were not necessary, but these were. Close quote. He recursed to the enlargement of the Creed by deduction and states his opinions more fully on this point. It was lawful for the Apostles to draw out the general article of belief in Christ as the Son of God and Savior of the world into the special clauses of the Apostles Creed because these are only the explicit expressions of what is contained in the general article, and they may be supposed to have had special divine guidance in what they did. But all further deductions, with a view to being made tests of communion or orthodoxy, are illegitimate. A man may, if he likes, extend his own Creed. He may make deductions himself, but he is not bound to follow another man's logic as an article of faith. No such deduction is fit to be pressed on others as an article of faith. The church, in short, quote, has power to intend our faith but not to extend it, to make our belief more evident but not more large and comprehensive. For Christ and his Apostles concealed nothing that was necessary to the integrity of Christian faith or salvation of our souls. Christ declared all the will of the Father and the Apostles were stewards and dispensers of the same mysteries and were faithful in all the house, and therefore concealed nothing but taught the whole doctrine of Christ. So they said themselves. And indeed, if they did not teach all the doctrine of faith, an angel or a man might have taught us other things than what they taught without deserving an anathema, but not without deserving a blessing for making up that faith entire which the Apostles left imperfect. He entirely denies the right of the church to add credenda to the Christian Creed, to declare any article to be necessary, which before was not necessary. By so doing she makes the narrow way to heaven narrower and chalks out one path more to the devil than he had before. The object of the church's faith is in order of nature before the church or before the act and habit of faith and therefore cannot be enlarged by the church any more than the act of the visive faculty can add visibility to the object, close quote. Such is Taylor's clear and decisive outline of the nature of faith and hence of the only essential conditions of a Christian church. All who believe in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and Savior of the world, he was prepared to acknowledge as members of the Christian church. Not only so, but he maintained that those who went beyond this, the ground of Christ himself and of the Apostles, were the real authors of schism and heresy. Bodies of confession and articles, according to him, quote, do much hurt by becoming instruments of separating and dividing communions and making unnecessary or uncertain propositions a certain means of schism and disunion. Men would do well to consider whether or no such proceedings do not derive the guilt of schism upon them who least think it, and whether of the two is the schismatic, he that makes unnecessary and supposing the state of things inconvenient impositions, or he that disobeys them because he cannot without doing violence to his conscience believe them, he that parts communion because without sin he could not entertain it, or they that have made it necessary for him to separate by requiring such conditions which to no man are simply necessary and to his particular case either sinful or impossible, close quote. Profession of faith in the Apostles Creed, therefore, constituted with Taylor the sole essential of Christian communion. He believed indeed Episcopacy to be a divinely sanctioned order. The Episcopal form of church government was to him something more than it was to Chillingworth. In his view it appeared to have been committed to the Apostles by Christ himself. He had maintained as much in his Episcopacy asserted, but whatever were his own convictions on this subject he did not press them as entering radically into the idea of the church. In its full conception the church implied Episcopacy but not in its essence. It was part of its well-being, its bene essay, but not of its mere-being or essay. All its essential life was to be found in faith in Christ, and looking forth on the wild dogmatic contentions of his time he proclaimed this truth as one fitted to heal its divisions and enmities. If the Episcopalian, the Puritan, Presbyterian or independent, the sectary, whether Anabaptist or any other, could have been induced to recognize what seemed to him so clearly true and proved both in the light of Scripture and of apostolic practice, it might have been possible to have built up the breaches of the National Zion, or at least to have established relations of peace amidst the distracted parties into which the country was divided. It can scarcely be doubted that Taylor, Episcopalian as he was, designed to teach his own party especially a wholesome lesson and to lead them to recognize the validity of differences with which they could not sympathize. It is a hard case, he says, that we should think all Papists and Anabaptists and Sacramentarians, Zwinglians, to be fools and wicked persons. Certainly among all these sects there are very many wise men and good men as well as Urring. It was supercilious indifference to private opinions, or rather a proud impatience and oppression of them, which had produced the revolution. Severe as was the education through which the national mind had to pass, it was by no means a profitless severity which it issued in the recognition of the principle so finely expressed by Taylor, that God alone is, quote, Master of our souls and hath a dominion over human understanding, and he that says this does not say that indifference of religion is persuaded because God alone is judge of Urring persons. End of Chapter 6, Part 2, Section 19 of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy, Volume 1 by John Tulloch. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Chapter 6, Jeremy Taylor, Liberty of Christian Teaching within the Church, Part 3. 2. Taylor follows up his explanation of faith by a very important chapter on the nature of heresy. The two chapters require to be taken together in order fully to understand the eclectic spirit of his theological and ecclesiastical system. As Christ is with him the sole comprehensive object of faith, so it is opposition to Christ, or denial of him as having come in the flesh to save sinners, which alone properly constitutes heresy. It is observable that no heresies are noted signunter in Scripture, but such as are great errors practical in Materia Pietattis, such whose doctrines taught impiety or such who deny the coming of Christ directly or by consequence. Heresy, in short, is a wicked opinion and ungodly doctrine and is never applied to doubtful speculative propositions nor ever to pious persons. He insists greatly upon the latter point as unmistakably evident in every notice of heresy in the New Testament. Heresy is not an error of the understanding but an error of the will, and this is clearly insinuated in Scripture in the style whereof faith and a good life are made one duty, and vice is called opposite to faith and heresy opposed to holiness and sanctity. St. Paul calls faith, or the form of sound words, cut Eusebán de la Scalion, the doctrine that is according to godliness. And to believe in the truth and to have pleasure in unrighteousness are by the same apostle opposed. If we remember that St. Paul reckons heresy amongst the works of the flesh and ranks it with all manner of practical impieties, we shall easily perceive that if a man mingles not a vice with his opinion, if he be innocent in his life, although deceived in his doctrine, his error is his misery, not his crime. As the nature of faith, in short, is, so is the nature of heresy. Faith, if it be taken for an act of the understanding merely, has no value except to improve the understanding, as strength doth the arm or beauty the face. It is only when it mixes charity with it that it becomes moral or religious. And so error which springs from involuntary causes, from ignorance of the truth or mistake regarding it, is no heresy in the New Testament sense, but only such as springs from ambition, willful sectarianism, love of preeminence as in diographies or love of lucre as it was in some that were of the circumcision. Footnote Further on, in the same section, he says, in a passage of sterling truth and force, Quote, Error is not heresy formally, and an erring person may be a Catholic. A wicked person in his error becomes heretic when the good man in the same error shall have all the rewards of faith. For whatever an ill man believes, if he therefore believe it because it serves his own ends, be his belief true or false, the man hath an heretical mind. For to serve his own ends his mind is prepared to believe a lie. But a good man that believes what, according to his light and upon the use of his moral industry, he thinks true, whether he hits upon the right or no, because he hath a mind desirous of truth, and prepared to believe every truth, is therefore acceptable to God, because nothing hindered him from it but what he could not help, his misery and his weakness, which being imperfections merely natural, which God never punishes, he stands fair for a blessing of his morality, which God always accepts. Close Quote and Footnote Quote In all the animate versions against errors made by the Apostles in the New Testament, no pious person was condemned, no man that did invincibly err or bonamente, but something that was amiss in Genere Morum was that which the Apostles did redargue. And it is very considerable that even they of the circumcision, who in so great numbers did heartily believe in Christ, and yet most violently retained circumcision, and without question went to heaven in great numbers. Yet of the number of these very men, when they grew covetous and for filthy lucre's sake taught the same doctrine which others did in the simplicity of their hearts, then they turned heretics, and Titus was commanded to look to them and to silence them. So broadly and leniently does he fix the character of heresy, that he is careful to discriminate between an obstinacy of willful persistence of error, which is highly criminal, and such an obstinacy as may spring from a resolution of understanding which it is not in a man's power honestly to alter. If a man cannot see reason for altering his opinion, he not only may lawfully, but he must honestly maintain it. Only he should do so in the spirit of love and peace as St. Cyprian did, who persisted until death in his opinion of the necessity of re-baptizing heretics, but in such a way as not to have his obstinacy called criminal, or his own error turned into heresy. No man is a heretic against his will. And if it be pretended that every man that is deceived is therefore proud, because he does not submit his understanding to the authority of God, and so his error becomes heresy, to this he answers, just as Chillingworth did in the same case, that there is no Christian man but will submit his understanding to God, always provided he knows that God hath said so. Submission to authority, in short, is a good principle which every Christian man recognizes. But the recognition of the principle is no warrant of any special application made of it. All the force of the principle depends in every case upon the character of the authority. Is it truly divine? Then it claims universal submission. All who acknowledge God will acknowledge God's authority. But then it must be evident that the authority is divine, and nothing short of this or different from this. And so, quote, the whole business of submitting our understanding to human authority comes to nothing, for either it resolves itself into the direct duty of submitting to God, or if it be spoken of abstractedly, it is no duty at all. Having thus defined the nature of heresy, he occupies the rest of the chapter with a somewhat detailed review of the various heresies in the early Christian centuries. Even after the apostolic time, he shows that no men were really esteemed heretics unless they either taught practical impieties or denied an article of the creed. So long as the foundation was preserved entire, great liberty of opinion was permitted, and no man's error was condemned as heresy. But the further men went from the apostles, the more forward were they in numbering heresies. And the state of the church in the second and third centuries appears to tailor to have promoted this growth of heresies. For as yet there was no general court or council of appeal on disputed questions. Bishops were, for the most part, dependent in their respective provinces, and there was no principle or criterion of Christian judgment besides the single dictates or decretals of private bishops. Scripture was professed to be authoritative by all, but the question was as to the meaning of it. This multiplication of Episcopal authority in matters of opinion has led, according to him, to great confusion and misconception in the traditional lists or catalogues of heretics. Some men being condemned for opinions the very reverse of what they held, as Montanus is by Epiphanius and others, as Nicholas the Deacon of Antioch is by Jerome, having their views completely misrepresented by a perversion or exaggeration of their language. The example of Cyprian, however, shows that there was no curtailment of Christian liberty within the church even during the third century. A liberty of prophesying or of interpretation was not forbidden to anyone if he transgressed not the foundation of faith and the creed of the apostles. The first violation of this freedom was when general councils came in and the symbols were enlarged and new articles were made as much of necessity to be believed as the creed of the apostles and damnation threatened to them that did dissent. He expresses this opinion all the more forcibly because he has no quarrel with the enlarging of the creed which the council of Nice made. It appears to him to have been an enlargement in the true sense of the apostles, but to others it appears in a different light. They think that the church would have been more happy, quote, if she had not been in some sense constrained to alter the simplicity of her faith and to make it more curious and articulate so much that he had need to be a subtle man to understand the very words of the new determinations, close, quote. According to them, and evidently also according to his own view, quote, those creeds are best which keep the very words of Scripture, and that faith is best which hath greatest simplicity, and it is better in all cases humbly to submit than curiously to inquire and pry into the mystery under the cloud and to hazard our faith by improving our knowledge, close, quote. The Nicene Fathers are admitted to have done well in their peculiar circumstances in enlarging and defining the creed, yet they would have done still better, Taylor thinks, in leaving it undefined. For an authoritative definition, as in the case of the Homo Uzion, although it may be of good use to determine the judgment of indifferent persons, is apt to be a weapon of affront against the scrupulous in the hands of persons of confident and imperious understandings, while, quote, they against whom the decision is do the more readily betake themselves to the defensive and are engaged upon contestation and public enmities for such articles which either might safely be unknown or with much charity disputed, close, quote. Therefore, he adds, quote, the Nicene Council, although it have the advantage of an acquired and prescribing authority, yet it must not become a precedent to others, lest the inconveniences of multiplying more articles upon as great pretence of reason as then make the act of the Nicene Fathers in straightening prophesying and enlarging the creed become accidentally an inconvenience, close, quote. The power is a dangerous one, although in this case it was well exercised. It is like an arbitrary power which, so long as it takes only six pence from the subject, produces no inconvenience, but which, by the same reason, may take a hundred pounds and then a thousand. And so sensible of this were the early fathers themselves, that, as is well known, they pronounced at the Council of Ephesus anathema on all those who should add anything to the creed. Footnote. Taylor says the creed of Constantinople, following the common tradition which ascribes the enlargement of the third part of the creed to the second ecumenical council which met at Constantinople in 381. But it is now well known that in the records of this Council there is no trace of any additions having been proposed or made to the creed of Nicaea. This creed, on the contrary, is appealed to in its primary form as adequate for all theological purposes. It was not till the Fourth General Council in 451 that the creed, now known as that of Constantinople, or sometimes spoken of as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan, crept into use and became generally professed by the Christian Church, with the exception of the Nestorians who had been previously separated from the General Church, had Calcedon in 431. End footnote. And yet for all this he continues, quote, the Church of Rome added the clause Filioque to the article of the procession of the Holy Ghost and what they have done since all the world knows. All men were persuaded that it was most reasonable the limits of faith should be no more enlarged, but yet enlarged it themselves and bound others from doing it, like an intemperate father who, because he knows he does ill himself and joins temperance to his son but continues to be intemperate himself. Close quote. Of the Athanasian creed it may be supposed to Taylor expresses a very modified approval. For the articles themselves he is persuaded of their truth, yet he admits that to many people they are unintelligible, contrary to reason, and in their curiosities of explication unwarranted by Scripture. The damnatory appendix is entirely unjustifiable because Cetra-Hock's Symbolum, the faith of the Apostles, is entire, and he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved. Admitting the creed to be the production of Athanasius there is no evidence that he designed it as a symbol of communion. According to Aquinas it was made nonpermodum simboli, said permodum doctrinae, that it is not with a purpose to impose it upon others but with confidence to declare his own belief. To prescribe it to others as a creed was the act of the bishops of Rome. But it is doubtful, Taylor recognizes, whether it be the creed of Athanasius at all, the original being evidently Latin and not Greek. Footnote. His words are, quote, this creed was written originally in Latin, which in all reason Athanasius did not, it being apparent that the Latin copy is but one but the Greek is various. And footnote. He affirms, at the same time, that even the Athanasian creed makes no pretense of adding any new articles to the Christian faith, but simply of explaining further the article's apostolical. If it be maintained that the explanations are to be received as necessarily of faith as the dogmatical articles of the Apostles' Creed, Taylor abandons their defense. But the saying of Athanasius, this is the Catholic faith, is at least a warrant that, quote, no man can say of any other article that it is a part of the Catholic faith or that the Catholic faith can be enlarged beyond the contents of that symbol. Close quote. In conclusion, he recursed to the Apostles' Creed as the only necessary symbol of Christian communion. It was so in the early Christian age, and dare any man tax that proceeding of remissness and indifference in religion? The Creed is an adequate security of faith. It contains implicitly, if not explicitly, all other articles, and, quote, it is better the implication should continue than that by an explication the Church should be troubled with questions and uncertain determinations and factions and kindled and animosities set on foot and men's souls endangered who before were secure by the explicit belief of all that the Apostles required as necessary. Close quote. The sum of his argument is that whereas the nature of faith is in all cases moral and not merely intellectual, binding us to honor Christ and to obey him, so heresy is to be judged by its proportion and analogy to faith. Heresy is only that which is against faith in the true sense. That is to say, which strikes at the foundation of Christianity embodied in the Apostles' Creed or teaches ill life. All other propositions which are extrinsical to these two considerations, whether they be true or false, are not heretical. 3. In the six following sections of his work, Taylor passes under review the alleged special sources of authority in religious opinion, scripture, tradition, ecclesiastical councils, the Pope, and the Fathers. He adds a brief section on the Church in its diffusive capacity and the pretense of the spirit. But he thinks it unnecessary to consider these at length, for the Church must either speak by tradition or by a representative body in a council, by Popes, or by the Fathers. It is not a chimera or shadow, but a company of men believing in Jesus Christ, whose opinions can only be known by one or other of those channels. 4. Coleridge quarrels with Taylor as to these expressions in his peculiar manner, notes, etc., 1, 225. But here as elsewhere in his elaborate notes on the liberty of prophesying, he mistakes Taylor and makes no allowance for his special point of view and the context of the argument. Taylor had no intention of denying the substantive entity of the Church, but merely wished to make it clear that its voice could only be known through some definite channel. Coleridge is thinking more of himself and of his own transcendentalism than of doing justice to Taylor, and this pretentious egoism runs unpleasantly through all his notes on English divines. End footnote. The pretense of the spirit, again even if admissible, is impertinent to the question, because in its nature it is only of private application. Such infallible assistance, he says, may determine my own assent, but shall not enable me to prescribe to others. The other professed sources of infallibility deserve more particular consideration, and may be viewed together as a distinct division of his work. A. All necessary articles of faith, as well as of practice, are plainly and clearly set down in scripture. The gospel is not hid except to them who refuse to see and acknowledge it. But beyond such a simple knowledge of the truth as makes us wise and to salvation, there is no infallible declaration of theological opinion in scripture, or at least men have no infallible means of determining what this opinion is. Besides those things which are so plainly set down, some for doctrine, as St. Paul says, that is, for articles and foundation of faith, some for instruction, some for reproof, some for comfort, that is, in matters practical and speculative, of several tempers and constitutions, there are innumerable places containing in them great mysteries, but yet either so enwrapped with a cloud, or so darkened with umbridges, or heightened with expressions, or so covered with allegories and garments of rhetoric, so profound in the matter, or so altered or made intricate in the manner, in the clothing and dressing, that God may seem to have left them as trials of our industry, and arguments of our imperfections, and incentives to the longings after heaven, and the clearest revelations of eternity, and as occasions and opportunities of our mutual charity, and toleration to each other, and humility in ourselves, rather than the repositories of faith and furniture of creeds and articles of belief." He dwells at some length on the varieties of copies and readings of holy scripture, on the many senses and designs of expounding it, its figurative and double meanings. What he says on these subjects is not much to the point, and modern criticism would not stumble at some of the difficulties he sets forth. His general argument, however, remains quite untouched by any progress of criticism. Where a question arises as to the meaning of scripture, we have no means of determining it infallibly and certainly. No one is entitled to dictate to another as to what he shall accept as the meaning of scripture, and the necessity hence arises of, quote, allowing a liberty in prophesying without prescribing authoritatively to other men's consciences, and becoming lords and masters of their faith." After explaining various ways of reaching the meaning of scripture by the context and connection of the parts, by the conference of places, by a proportion and analogy of reason, by the analogy of faith, and lastly by consulting the originals, he concludes that all these ways, quote, which of themselves are good helps, are made either by design or by our infirmities, ways of intricating and involving scripture in greater difficulty, because men do not learn their doctrines from scripture but come to the understanding of scripture with preconceptions and ideas of doctrines of their own. And then no wonder that scriptures look like pictures wherein every man in the room believes that they look on him only and that wheresoever he stands or how oftensoever he changes his station. So that now what was intended for a remedy becomes the promoter of our disease, and our meat becomes the matter of sickness, and the mischief is, the wit of man cannot find a remedy for it, for there is no rule, no limit, no certain principle by which all men may be guided to a certain and so infallible an interpretation that he can with any equity prescribe to others to believe his interpretations in places of controversy or ambiguity. And in evidence of this, Taylor proceeds to show that even in the case of what appears to many so clear and determinative prophecy as that of Jacob about the scepter not departing from Judah till Shiloh come, the Jews have no fewer than twenty-six explanations, while in reference to the diversity of St. James and St. Paul regarding justification, a diversity he adds to my understanding very easy to reconcile. Hoseander observes in his confutation of the book which Melanchthon wrote against him that there are twenty several opinions concerning justification all drawn from the scriptures by men only of the Augustan confession. There are, Taylor adds, quote, sixteen several opinions concerning original sin, and as many definitions of the sacraments as there are sects of men that disagree about them. Close, quote. The result of the two chapters which he devotes to the consideration of holy scripture is that, while it contains plainly, in a manner apparent to all, the articles of the apostles creed, which are therefore of simple and prime necessity, there is nothing further which a wise man would wish to have imposed upon himself or which a just man would wish to impose upon others. A liberty of prophesying and interpreting scripture is, therefore, the right of every man, quote, a necessity derived from the consideration of the difficulty of scripture in questions controverted and the uncertainty of any internal medium of interpretation, close, quote. B. Tradition, which he next considers, is affirmed to be as fallible as anything else. The fathers themselves possessed no consistent traditional guide. On the contrary, they were infinitely deceived in their account and enumerations of traditions. And the further we descend from the fountainhead of the Christian revelation, the more varying in contradictory is found to be the course of tradition. Augustan maintained the communicating of infants to be an apostolic tradition, and many other things notoriously of later and corrupt growth were traced back to a primitive sanction. On the other hand, many things of apostolic custom have, quote, expired and gone out in a desvetude, such as abstinence from blood and things strangled, the cenobitic life of secular persons, the College of Widows, to worship standing upon the Lord's Day, to give milk and honey to the newly baptized, and many more of the like nature, close, quote. Moreover, the fathers themselves are found to appeal from tradition and custom to holy scripture. Irenaeus, Basil, Jerome, Augustan, Athanasius, and divers others all unite in the saying of St. Paul, name of Sentiat, super, quote, Scriptum est. All, in effect, maintain that every article of faith is sufficiently recorded in holy scripture and that the judgment of faith and heresy is to be derived from thence alone. C. The judgment of general counsels carries with them no further weight than belongs to their intrinsic reasonableness. They have no promise of supernatural direction beyond what belongs to every individual. Every private man will be assisted sufficiently by the Holy Spirit, quote, in order to that end to which he needs assistance, and therefore much more shall general counsels in order to that end for which they convene and to which they need assistance, that is, in order to the conservation of faith for the doctrinal rules of good life and all that concerns the essential duty of a Christian, but not in deciding questions to satisfy contentious or curious or presumptuous spirits, close, quote. He explains how general counsels have never been pronounced by the church and never been accepted as infallible, how they have contradicted each other and in some cases been notoriously corrupt. The opinion of Gregory Nazianzen is quoted to the effect that he had such a poor opinion of counsels of bishops that he had, quote, never known one of them come to any good and prosperous issue or which did not rather tend to the increase than the diminution of wickedness, close, quote. He refrains at the same time from endorsing this opinion and sets forth in a fair and discriminating manner what he conceives to be the true uses of church counsels. They may be excellent instruments of peace, rare sermons for determining a point in controversy, and possess the greatest probability from human authority, but further he knew nothing they can pretend to be with reason and argument sufficient to satisfy any wise man. There never was any counsel so general that it might not have been more general in respect of the whole church. Even that of Nice itself was but a small assembly. There is no decree so well constituted, but it may be proved by an argument higher than the authority of a counsel. General counsels are therefore in their several degrees, quote, excellent guides for the prophets and directions and instructions for their prophesying, but not of weight and authority to restrain their liberty so wholly but that they may dissent where they see a reason strong enough to persuade them. D. It is unnecessary to dwell upon his special argument respecting the claim of papal infallibility. He first deals with the usual scriptural argument as to the special powers alleged to be vested in the apostle Peter, and then, making the supposition that there is something in these arguments which he does not allow, he points out the absurdity of the pope claiming to represent St. Peter. So far from the popes or their ancestors having any claim to expound the truth infallibly, there have been among them some, quote, notorious heretics and preachers of false doctrines, some that made impious decrees both in faith and manners, some that have determined questions with egregious ignorance and stupidity, some with a parent sophistry, and many to serve their own ends most openly. In short, he comes to the conclusion that, if he were bound to call any man master upon earth, he would, quote, of all men least follow him that pretends he is infallible and cannot prove it, for that he cannot prove it makes me as uncertain as ever, and that he pretends to infallibility makes him careless of using such means which will morally secure those wise persons who, knowing their own aptness to be deceived, use what endeavours they can to secure themselves from error, and so become the better and more probable guides, close, quote. E. The inconsistencies of the fathers and their consequent disability to determine questions with certainty and truth are next insisted upon in a separate section. He points out the various topics on which they have disagreed and the errors, such as chileasm and infant communicating, which have widely prevailed among them. He alludes to Daïe's well-known work D'Euvré Usage des Pères, then lately published, and seems to coincide with its general conclusions. At the same time he abstains from, quote, all disparagement of these worthy personages, who were excellent lights to their several dioceses and cures. It is not to be denied, but that great advantages are to be made by their writings, all of them containing some probable things according to their wisdom. If one wise man, he adds forcibly, says a thing, it is an argument to me to believe in its degree of probation, that is proportionable to such an assent as the authority of a wise man can produce, and when there is nothing against it that is greater. But that which I complain of is, that we look upon wise men that lived long ago with so much veneration and mistake that we reverence them not for having been wise men, but that they lived long since. Close quote. IV Having thus examined and discarded all these several sources of pretended authority in theological opinion, he turns, in a very pregnant and interesting section, to discuss the authority of reason, and that it, proceeding upon best grounds, is the best judge. His conclusions here are substantially the same as those of Chillingworth. Reason and private judgment must be the last authority of every man in the face of Scripture. Both of them would have strongly repudiated what in our days is known as rationalism or the exaltation of the private understanding in the place of divine revelation. It never occurred to them to doubt the reality of revelation and its supremacy over the conscience and reason. The question is not one asked to the ultimate source of religious truth. This was admitted beyond doubt to be the divine revelation in particular. But admitting this, there remained the question as to the interpretation of this revelation. And here it is that both Chillingworth and Taylor assert in the strongest manner the claims of reason. What the truth is, as revealed in Scripture, every man must be trusted to judge for himself. I say, he adds, quote, every man that can judge at all, as for others they are to be saved as it pleases God. He that follows his own reason, not guided only by natural arguments but by divine revelation and all other good means, hath great advantages over him that follows any human guide whatsoever, because he follows all their reason and his own too. In the conscientious exercise of private judgment there is, in short, the best security for right religious opinions. And if, with all our pains and diligence to investigate the truth, we should, after all, fall into error, it is to be borne in mind that it is not required of us not to be an error, but that we may endeavor to avoid it. This last touch is extremely like Chillingworth. It is the very echo of his manly sense and charity, and the whole of the section reminds us of some of the best passages in the religion of Protestants. Intelligent inquiry is enforced as a Christian duty no less than intelligent obedience. We are commanded to search the Scriptures, to, quote, try the spirits whether they be of God or no, to try all things and to retain that which is best. For he that resolves not to consider resolves not to be careful whether he hath truth or no, and therefore hath an affection indifferent to truth or falsehood, which is all one as if he did choose amiss. Close, quote, and not only is inquiry a duty, it is a necessity for every man. All men really follow the guidance of their own judgment in some degree, although they may profess to follow other guides. If they accept the church on tradition or a certain sense of Scripture it is because they have some reason for what they do. Close, quote, although all men are not wise and proceed discreetly, yet all make their choice some way or other. He that chooses to please his fancy takes his choice as much as he that chooses prudently, and no man speaks more unreasonably than he that denies to men the use of their reason in choice of their religion. Close, quote. It will be seen, therefore, that the general position of Taylor in the liberty of prophesying is identical with that of Chillingworth in the religion of Protestants. The conclusions which the latter reaches in a special conflict with the resurgent spirit of Romanism in England in the time of Lod, the former maintains professedly in a treatise written with a view to still the strife of ecclesiastical bigotry and faction in the time of the Civil War. Chillingworth shows a firmer mastery of principles, a more downright and vigorous thoughtfulness in the midst of all the special details of his argument. But Taylor draws out his principles with a more comprehensive range and purpose and sets the problem of his time, the reconstitution of the Church on an evangelical yet tolerant basis, in a more definite light. This problem appears in Chillingworth's pages only indirectly, but this is expressly the question which Taylor set himself to solve in the view of the jarring parties of his time. His solution is that the Church should rest on the Apostles Creed, neither more nor less, and that there should be the widest toleration of opinions ranging from Anabaptism to Popory. He devotes a special section to the discussion of the case of the Anabaptists, and concludes that as there is no direct impiety in their opinion, and so much which may be fairly urged in its defense, they are to be redargued or instructed, but in no respect to be coerced. His liberality towards a sect so hateful to all classes of dogmatists in the seventeenth century, and the extremely impartial manner in which he had set forth what might tend in behalf of their opinions, involved him in special suspicion and he felt himself under the necessity of answering in anapendics his own arguments on behalf of this sect. Nothing is more creditable to Taylor than his frank liberality in this case as nothing can better illustrate the intolerance spirit of the seventeenth-century dogmatism than the obligation under which he felt of showing that his meaning was innocent, and that while maintaining that an ample case could be made out for the toleration of the Anabaptists, he did not mean in any respect to weaken what he believed to be the truth or to discourage the right side. To Taylor there was no error intolerable which was not impious or licentious, opposed to the fundamental principles of the Christian religion or to good morals and government, and the Christian church, instead of seeking to narrow its terms of communion, was bound by every consideration of Christian truth and policy to open its doors as widely as possible for all who would come in. The faith of the apostles entitles all who hold it to the communion of saints. Quote, Take the way to heaven straighter than God made it, or to deny to communicate with those whom God will vouchsafe to be invited, and to refuse our charity to those who have the same faith because they have not all our opinions is impious and schismatical. It infers tyranny on one part, and persuades and tempts to uncharitableness and animosities on both." There is no reason why individual Christians should not communicate with churches of different persuasions. If they require no impiety or anything unlawful as the condition of their communion, communion with them merely implies that we acknowledge them as servants of Christ, as disciples of his doctrine, and subjects to his laws, while their particular distinguishing doctrine has no effect with us. Beyond the primitive facts of the gospel, in short, Taylor does not recognize any valid basis for the Christian church or any valid terms of Christian communion. He was no doubt, as we have seen, himself an earnest defender of Episcopacy. For the perfect order of the church he would certainly have maintained the necessity of Episcopal government and of liturgical worship. His writings leave this beyond question. But that Episcopacy or liturgy has anything to do essentially with a man being a Christian, or with the recognition of Christian brotherhood, is an opinion opposed to the whole spirit of his great treatise, and to many of its expressed statements. A Christian is one who accepts Christ as his Savior and Lord, and orders his life under the inspiration of this simple but mighty faith. A Christian church is a society of men who acknowledge the same faith and walk by the same rule. These are the essentials, all else is accidental. No error is damnable which may be held with an honest mind. It concerns all persons to see that they do their best to find out truth, and if they do it is certain that, let the error be never so damnable, they shall escape the error or the misery of being damned for it. And if God will not be angry with men for being invincibly deceived, why should men be angry at one and another? All opinions in which the public interests of the Commonwealth and the foundation of faith and a good life are not concerned are to be permitted freely. Let every one be persuaded in his own mind was the doctrine of St. Paul, and that is argument and conclusion too. And they were excellent words which St. Ambrose said in attestation of this great truth. Imperial authority has no right to interdict the liberty of speaking or sacerdotal authority to prevent the speaking of what you think. ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ ¶ stooping and leaning on his staff, weary with age unto travail, coming towards him who was an hundred years of age. He received him kindly, washed his feet, provided supper, caused him to sit down. But observing that the old man sat and prayed not, nor begged for a blessing on his meat, he asked him why he did not worship the God of Heaven. The old man told him that he worshipped the fire only and acknowledged no other God. At which answer Abraham grew so zealously angry that he thrust the old man out of his tent and exposed him to all the evils of the night in an unguarded condition. When the old man was gone, God called it to Abraham and asked him where the stranger was. He replied, I thrust him away because he did not worship thee. God answered him, I have suffered him these hundred years, although he dishonored me, and couldst not thou endure him one night when he gave thee no trouble? Upon this, saith the story, Abraham fetched him back again and gave him hospitable entertainment and wise instruction. Go thou and do likewise, he adds, and thy charity will be rewarded by the God of Abraham. The lesson is one, unhappily, which requires constant repetition in the history of the Christian Church.