DISCOURSE FORTY-FIRST

JEREMY TAYLOR, D.D.

THIS celebrated prelate was born, the son of a barber, at Cambridge, in 1613, and was educated in the grammar-school of his native place and at Caius College. When he had taken orders he removed to London, where he was introduced to Laud, who procured for him a fellowship at All-souls' College, Oxford, in 1636. He was subsequently made chaplain to Laud, and afterward to Charles I., and obtained the Rectory of Uppingham. During the civil war he sustained himself by teaching, until he was interdicted from this employment. Lord Carberry then appointed him his chaplain; and in this position he wrote some of his celebrated pieces. He was twice imprisoned by the Republican government. At the restoration he was made Bishop of Down and Conner, along with which see he held that of Dromore, and the vice-chancellorship of Trinity College, Dublin. He died in 1667.

The writings of Jeremy Taylor are well known; the most cele brated being his "Liberty of Prophesying;" "Holy Living and Holy Dying;" together with his sermons. His style is distinguished by the charms of imagination. No writer ever knew better than he, how to captivate and ravish with the gayety and richness of a luxuriant fancy. No writer excelled him in poetic splendor of imagery, in exuberance of learning and wit, and in the graceful manner in which illustration glides into argument, and comes forward to attract and to please. Some of his compositions are like "a wilderness of sweets." The thoughts hardly have opportunity to breathe, amid so much of dazzling beauty and rich fragrance. In this direction his style is considered by many to be open to criticism. There is a profusion of ornament-so much of glitter and show, as to call off attention from the body of thought to its gay adornings. The eulogy of Dr. Rust, the friend and chaplain of Taylor, is worth appending: "He had the good humor of a gentleman, the eloquence of an orator, the fancy of a poet, the acuteness of a schoolman, the profoundness of a philosopher, the wisdom of a counselor, the sacacity of a prophet, the reason of an angel, and the piety of a saint." The discourse which we give is one of the most cele

brated. There are two upon the same text-it being a double sermon. The second is taken, as presenting most of the author's peculiarities of style, and as being in itself more complete than the first.

THE FOOLISH EXCHANGE.

"For what shall a man be profited, if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"-MATTHEW, xvi. 26.

When the soul is at stake, not for its temporal, but for its eternal interest, it is not good to be hasty in determining, without taking just measures of the exchange. Solomon had the good things of the world actually in possession; and he tried them at the touchstone of prudence and natural value, and found them alloyed with vanity and imperfection; and we that see them "weighed in the balance of the sanctuary," and tried by the touchstone of the Spirit, find them not only light and unprofitable, but pungent and dolorous. But now we are to consider what it is that men part with and lose, when, with passion and impotency, they get the world; and that will present the bargain to be an huge infelicity. And this I observe to be intimated in the word lose. For he that gives gold for cloth, or precious stones for bread, serves his needs of nature, and loses nothing by it; and the merchant that found a pearl of great price, and sold all that he had to make the purchase of it, made a good venture; he was no loser: but here the case is otherwise; when a man gains the whole world, and his soul goes in the exchange, he hath not done like a merchant, but like a child or prodigal; he hath given himself away, he hath lost all that can distinguish him from a slave or a miserable person, he loses his soul in the exchange. For the soul of a man all the world can not be a just price; a man may lose it, or throw it away, but he can never make a good exchange when he parts with this jewel; and therefore our blessed Saviour rarely well expresses it by quor, "loss," which is fully opposed to xéodos, "gain;" it is such an ill market a man makes, as if he should proclaim his riches and goods vendible for a garland of thistles, decked and trimmed up with the stinking poppy.

But we shall better understand the nature of this bargain if we consider the soul that is exchanged; what it is in itself, in order, not of nature, but to felicity and the capacities of joy; secondly, what price the Son of God paid for it; and, thirdly, what it is to

lose it; that is, what miseries and tortures are signified by losing a soul.

I. First, if we consider what the soul is in its own capacity to happiness, we shall find it to be an excellency greater than the sun, of an angelical substance, sister to the cherubim, an image of the Divinity, and the great argument of that mercy whereby God did distinguish us from the lower form of beasts, and trees, and minerals.

For, so it was, the Scripture affirms that "God made man after his own image," that is, "secundum illam imaginem et ideam quam concepit ipse;" not according to the likeness of any of those creatures which were pre-existent to man's production, nor according to any of those images or ideas whereby God created the heavens and the earth, but by a new form, to distinguish him from all other substances; "He made him by a new idea of His own," by an uncreated exemplar. And besides, that this was a donation of intelligent faculties, such as we understond to be perfect and essential, or rather the essence of God, it is also a designation of Him to a glorious immortality, and communication of the rays and reflections of His own essential felicities.

But the soul is all that whereby we may be, and without which we can not be, happy. It is not the eye that sees the beauties of the heaven, nor the ear that hears the sweetness of music, or the glad tidings of a prosperous accident, but the soul that perceives all the relishes of sensual and intellectual perfections; and the more noble and excellent the soul is, the greater and more savory are its percep tions. And if a child beholds the rich ermine, or the diamonds of a starry night or the order of the world, or hears the discourses of an apostle; because he makes no reflex acts upon himself, and sees not that he sees, he can have but the pleasure of a fool, or the deliciousness of a mule. But, although the reflection of its own acts be a rare instrument of pleasure or pain respectively, yet the soul's excellency is, upon the same reason, not perceived by us, by which the sapidness of pleasant things of nature are not understood by a child; -even because the soul can not reflect far enough. For as the sun, which is the fountain of light and heat, makes violent and direct emissions of his rays from himself, but reflects them no further than to the bottom of a cloud, or the lowest imaginary circle of the middle region, and, therefore, receives not a duplicate of his own heat so is the soul of man; it reflects upon its own inferior actions of particular sense, or general understanding; but, because it knows little of its own nature, the manners of volition, the immediate instrumenta understanding, the way how it comes to meditate; and can not dis

cern how a sudden thought arrives, or the solution of a doubt not depending upon preceding premises; therefore, about half its pleas ures are abated, and its own worth less understood; and, possibly, it is the better it is so. If the elephant knew his strength, or the horse the vigorousness of his own spirit, they would be as rebellious against their rulers as unreasonable men against government; nay, the angels themselves, because their light reflected home to their orbs, and they understood all the secrets of their own perfection, they grew vertiginous, and fell from the battlements of heaven. But the excellency of a human soul shall then be truly understood, when the reflection will make no distraction of our faculties, nor enkindle any irregular fires; when we may understand ourselves without danger.

In the mean this consideration is gone high enough, when we understand the soul of man to be so excellently perfect, that we can not understand how excellently perfect it is; that being the best way of expressing our conceptions of God Himself. And, therefore, I shall not need by distinct discourses to represent that the will of man is the last resort and sanctuary of true pleasure, which, in its formality, can be nothing else but a conformity of possession or of being to the will; that the understanding, being the channel and conveyance of the noblest perceptions, feeds upon pleasures in all its proportionate acts, and unless it be disturbed by intervening sins and remembrances derived hence, keeps a perpetual festival; that the passions are every one of them fitted with an object, in which they rest as in their center; that they have such delight in these their proper objects, that too often they venture a damnation rather than quit their interest and possession. But yet from these considerations it would follow, that to lose a soul, which is designed to be an immense sea of pleasure, even in its natural capacities, is to lose all that whereby a man can possibly be, or be supposed, happy. And so much the rather is this understood to be an insupportable calamity, because losing a soul in this sense is not a mere privation of those felicities, of which a soul is naturally designed to be a partaker, but it is an investing it with contrary objects, and cross effects, and dolorous perceptions: for the will, if it misses its desires, is afflicted; and the understanding, when it ceases to be ennobled with excellent things, is made ignorant as a swine, dull as the foot of a rock; and the affections are in the destitution of their perfective actions made tumultuous, vexed, and discomposed to the height of rage and violence. But this is but the gz divar, "the beginning of those throes," which end not but in eternal infelicity.

II. Secondly: If we consider the price that the Son of God paid for the redemption of a soul, we shall better estimate it, than from the weak discourses of our imperfect and unlearned philosophy. Not the spoil of rich provinces, not the estimate of kingdoms, not the price of Cleopatra's draught, nor any thing that was corruptible or perishing; for that which could not one minute retard the term of its own natural dissolution, could not be a price for the redemp tion of one perishing soul. And if we list but to remember, and then consider, that a miserable, lost, and accursed soul, does so infinitely undervalue and disrelish all the goods and riches that this world dotes on, that he hath no more gust in them, or pleasure, than the fox hath in eating a turf; that, if he could be imagined to be the lord of ten thousand worlds, he would give them all for any shadow of hope of a possibility of returning to life again; that Dives in hell would have willingly gone on embassy to his father's house that he might have been quit a little from his flames, and on that condition would have given Lazarus the fee simple of all his temporal possessions, though he had once denied to relieve him with the superfluities of his table; we shall soon confess that a moment of time is no good exchange for an eternity of duration; and a light unprofitable possession is not to be put in the balance against a soul, which is the glory of the creation; a soul with whom God has made a contract, and contracted excellent relations, it being one of God's appellatives, that he is, "the Lover of the souls."

When God made a soul, it was only "Let us make man in our image." He spake the word, and it was done. But, when man hath lost this soul which the Spirit of God breathed into him, it was not so soon recovered. It is like the resurrection, which hath troubled the faith of many, who are more apt to believe that God made a man from nothing, than that He can return a man from dust and corrup tion. But for this resurrection of the soul, for the re-implacing the Divine image, for the rescuing it from the devil's power, for the reentitling it to the kingdoms of grace and glory, God did a greater work than the creation; He was fain to contract Divinity to a span, to send a person to die for us, who, of Himself, could not die, and was constrained to use rare and mysterious arts to make him capable of dying; He prepared a person instrumental to His purpose, by sending His Son from His own bosom, a person both God and man, an enigma to all nations and to all sciences; one that ruled over all the angels, that walked upon the pavements of heaven, whose feet were clothed with stars, whose eyes were brighter than the sun. whose voice is louder than thunder, whose understanding is larger

1