A Following Holy Life. Kenneth Stevenson

London trips seem to have been on the increase at this stage. John Evelyn, one of the few to stand by him in the furore over original sin, used him as what we would nowadays call a spiritual director. Indeed, Evelyn’s diary refers to services conducted by Taylor, including a Eucharist on 7 February 1658. At some stage, Taylor was imprisoned in the Tower of London, either in 1657 or, more likely, 1658. He had just published his ‘Collection of Offices’, the first Anglican to write his own liturgy. It is a rich series of services for all the occasions (and more as well) which are covered by the officially outlawed Book of Common Prayer, the only exception being the marriage service, which would have been excluded for legal reasons; Taylor defended the view that marriage was a sacrament. In these liturgies, Taylor’s prose can at times be lavish, the prayers frequently more Trinitarian in scope than Cranmer’s, and the sources often from the Greek liturgies of St Basil and St James. Consistent with his stress in ‘Great Exemplar’ on Christ’s baptism as the prototype of ours, he has Jesus at the River Jordan as one of the lections in his baptismal office, unique in his time, but more familiar now in our day. Although Taylor could – just! – defend his book as within the flexible, anti-specific bounds of the Westminster Directory (1644), it may not have done him many favours with the authorities, and, on a wider front, may well have been the cause of his time in the Tower.

      It probably became clear to his supporters that Taylor needed to be got out of the way, and a solution came through another aristocratic friendship, this time with Edward Conway, a strong Royalist who owned estates in Ulster. It took the form of a parish lectureship, to be shared with a Presbyterian. Taylor at first turned it down, but was persuaded to accept. He thus came to Lisnagarvey (from 1662 referred to as Lisburn) south-west of Belfast, a small town built around the castle where the Conways resided. He soon settled at Portmore, nor far away, and his main work was looking after the Conway household. It provided him with some respite, but hardly total seclusion from religious troubles, as the local population was divided between Scots Presbyterians colonized there and the Irish community who were Roman Catholics, and who had no desire to embrace Anglicanism.

      In these last days, months, and years of the Commonwealth, Taylor completed his largest book of all. He had been working on it for some time. He used to refer to as his ‘cases of conscience’, and it appeared in 1660 as ‘Ductor Dubitantium or the Rule of Conscience’. Twice as long as ‘Great Exemplar’, it represents a considerable amount of learning, and Taylor would have been justified in hoping that it would establish his reputation as a really major writer in his time. Casuistry as a field of what we would nowadays call social and pastoral theology was at its apogee in the Roman Catholic Church, partly as an aid to priests in the confessional, but it also figured among some Protestant theologians as well. It is long, thorough, and at times repetitive, but it shows Taylor as the pastoral theologian that he always was, responding to dilemmas that people might have over their faith, how they were to live the Christian life, and how society should be ordered in the best possible way for all this to happen.

      With Oliver Cromwell dead in 1658, the hopes for a new régime had arisen. Taylor travelled to London in 1660 for the return of Charles II, to whom he wrote the dedication of his ‘magnum opus’. Although others before him like Lancelot Andrewes had written on casuistry, it was the sheer length, scrupulous detail, and exhaustive breadth that marked it out but also limited its readership (a fourth edition appeared in 1698). It comes in four books, which deal with conscience and its definitions, divine laws, human laws, and the nature of good and evil. Book III has some observations about Church and State that are now dated, but what he has to say about free will in Book IV can be seen as a necessary corrective to popular piety at the time. A key throughout this complex work is the relationship between the givenness of revelation and the working of human rationality; for Taylor, faith and reason have to go hand in hand, not just in making sense of belief, but in applying it to everyday life.

In the same year he brought out ‘Worthy Communicant’, which was the last of his devotional works and which he dedicated to Princess Mary of Orange. Set in a wider context, it forms part of the Restoration drive towards proper teaching about the Eucharist and more frequent celebrations of the sacrament, of which the ‘Mensa Mystica’ of Simon Patrick (1625–1707) is another example, published in the same year.[6] There is a directness and a solemnity about the work, which sums up Taylor’s theology in a readable and deep manner, and one of my treasured possessions is a first edition.

      All this might well have given Taylor the hope of an English bishopric in the newly restored Established Church, with Prayer Book and episcopacy re-established alongside the monarchy. But perhaps Taylor’s reputation among those in power in the Church was still tarnished by his plea for toleration in ‘Liberty of Prophesying’, the disputes over original sin in the aftermath of ‘Unum Necessarium’, and one might hazard a guess over other matters as well, including his liturgical project, the ‘Collection of Offices’. Sheldon was now Bishop of London, a key player soon to move to Canterbury as the successor of the ailing William Juxon (1582–1663).

      So it was back to Ulster that he went, but this time as Bishop of Down and Connor, the diocese in which he had lived as chaplain to the Conways, and to which Dromore was subsequently added as a responsibility. His consecration was a great occasion, the re-establishment of Anglicanism in Ireland. He was consecrated alongside two archbishops and nine other bishops in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, on 27 January 1661, and he himself was chosen as the preacher, a mark of the confidence placed in him by the Restoration Church in Ireland. The sermon, subsequently published along with some others – including that preached at Lady Carbery’s funeral – in 1663 as a supplement to the ‘Eniautos’ collection ten years earlier, is predictably a strong defence of episcopacy. Taylor was enough of a realist to know that he himself was not going to have an easy time in a diocese where the majority of the clergy were Presbyterians. It was already a country where the religious ethos was more Calvinist in leanings than England, doubtless partly due to the need to define itself more clearly over against the preponderantly Roman Catholic population.

      Denied preferment in England, Taylor became the main theological driving force of the new Irish Bench, along with William Bramhall (1594–1663), Archbishop of Dublin, at whose funeral he preached in 1663. His largely Presbyterian clergy did not take kindly to the ways of their new bishop, perhaps hoping for a policy inspired by ‘Liberty of Prophesying’ that had been shaped by the needs of a different era. He was appointed Vice-Chancellor of the University of Dublin in 1661. This entailed a certain amount of time in residence there and it was a task that involved him in a great deal of financial and administrative work, at which he was well-skilled. A small university, it was nevertheless an important post, where he said he ‘found all things in a perfect disorder’. But Taylor had a strange knack of seeing things whole, and it is interesting to observe that the sermon he preached before the University in 1661 (published as ‘Via Intelligentiae’) was based largely on a Visitation Charge to his diocese, two somewhat different contexts!

      In the same year, he produced his ‘Rules and Advices to Clergy’, which went into its fourth edition in 1678. Short and simple, it speaks of the importance of prayer, self-knowledge, and decorum in worship. The demands of his new twin responsibilities and the pressures he was under to fulfil them led to a diminishing in the flow of his pen. But in 1663 he was able to produce his ‘Discourse on Confirmation’, which, though short by his own standards, is nonetheless probably the first and the most comprehensive treatment by an Anglican of the subject. The Restoration had brought to a head the need to defend Confirmation by the Bishop to its Reformed critics, because so many people had not been confirmed at all. Taylor entered the fray with a blend of biblical exegesis, patristic learning, and argument from tradition. Not all these grounds would pass muster today, for example his treatment of the New Testament evidence, but it was a valiant attempt, and a milestone in the long sequence of works on the subject written since then.

      But Taylor still yearned for a job in England, and (perhaps unwisely) wrote to Sheldon in 1663 pleading his case, though indicating he was aware that he himself might be the main barrier to such a move. This might refer solely to the controversies of his writings, but it doubtless also echoed something along the lines of that personality trait noted years earlier by Chillingworth, a lack of courtesy with his interlocutors.