Commontide
Proper 14
Liturgical Color: White/Gold
The 9th Sunday after Trinity
Almighty God, give us the increase of faith, hope, and love; and, that we may obtain what you have promised, make us love what you command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Most liturgical texts are from the Book of Common Prayer (2019) of the Anglican Church in North America.
The New Coverdale Psalter, © 2019 by the Anglican Church in North America. Used by permission.
Bishop of Down and Connor, Teacher of the Faith
Anglican Commemoration
Jeremy Taylor (1613-1667) was an English bishop, now considered the most eloquent of the Caroline Divines. His devotional masterpieces Holy Living and Holy Dying have never been out of print since he penned them. Turned out of his church in the English Civil War, he took shelter in a Welsh country house. There he wrote, in grief and chosen silence, the books that taught many in the English-speaking world how to order a life and meet death. In the same exile he wrote one of the age's bravest pleas for religious toleration as well.
Jeremy Taylor was born in 1613 in Cambridge, son of a barber-surgeon. He received his education at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he proved a gifted classicist and theologian. Ordained priest, he came to prominence as a preacher in London during the 1640s, where his sermons were celebrated for rhetorical beauty and theological sophistication.
Taylor's early career was marked by his loyalty to the Church of England's episcopal order and the monarchy. During the Civil War, he served as a chaplain to various royalist forces and later to the royal court. When Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth dissolved the established church, Taylor—like other royalist clergy—faced ejection from his benefices. During this period of enforced leisure (1651–1660), he composed his most influential works: Holy Living (1650), a treatise on Christian conduct and virtue ethics; Holy Dying (1651), a meditation on mortality and preparation for death; and The Liberty of Prophesying (1646), a treatise on religious toleration and the limits of ecclesiastical authority.
After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Taylor was rewarded for his loyalty with appointment as Bishop of Down and Connor in the Church of Ireland (1661). He spent his final years in Ireland as bishop and pastoral theologian, producing additional theological works and guiding his diocese through the volatile post-Restoration religious settlement. He died in 1667, having established himself as the preeminent theological voice of the Restoration Church.
Taylor's theological method emphasized reason in conjunction with tradition and Scripture, steering between rigid scholasticism and radical sectarianism. His moral theology drew heavily from classical virtue ethics integrated with Christian grace. His works on prayer, charity, and spiritual discipline remain widely read and have influenced Protestant and Catholic spirituality alike.
Jeremy Taylor never developed a formal cult or hagiographic tradition. His veneration is entirely literary and theological—he is remembered through the influence of his writings on subsequent generations of Anglican, Methodist, and even Catholic spiritual direction. Holy Living and Holy Dying became spiritual classics, published in countless editions and translated into multiple languages. His emphasis on reason, charity, and moral virtue as expressions of faith influenced the development of later Anglican moral theology, particularly through the Caroline Divines and Tractarian traditions. His tolerationist arguments in The Liberty of Prophesying prefigured later Enlightenment religious thought. He has been celebrated in modern Anglican commemoration primarily for the enduring value of his spiritual writings rather than for any miraculous or hagiographic tradition.