'the adoption of a sensitive nature, like vowels pronunciable by ⚫ the intertexture of a consonant,' his eloquence flows on in a full tide of mingled quaintness, pedantry, and beauty.

But now God's mercy was at full sea, now was the time when God made no reserves to the effusion of his mercy. For to the Patriarchs and persons of eminent Sanctity and imployment in the Elder ages of the World, God according to the degrees of his manifestation or present purpose would give them one letter of this ineffable name. For the reward that Abraham had in the change of his name, was that he had the honour done him to have one of the letters of Jehovah put into it; And so had Joshua when he was a type of Christ, the Prince of the Israelitish armies; And when God took away one of these letters, it was a curse. But now he communicated all the whole name to this holy Childe, and put a letter more to it, to signifie that he was the glory of God, the expresse image of his Father's person, God Eternall; and then manifested to the World in his humanity, that all the intelligent world who expected Beatitude and had treasured all their hopes in the ineffable name of God, might finde them all with ample returns in this name of Jesus, which God hath exalted above every name, even above that by which God in the old Testament did represent the greatest awfulnesse of his Majesty. This miraculous name is above all the powers of Magicall inchantments, the nightly rites of sorcerers, the secrets of Memphis, the drugs of Thessaly, the silent and mysterious murmurs of the wise Chaldees, and the spels of Zoroastres; This is the name at which the Devills did tremble, and pay their inforced and involuntary adorations, by confessing the Divinity, and quitting their possessions and usurped habitations. If our prayers be made in this name God opens the windows of heaven and rains down benediction: at the mention of this name the blessed Apostles, and Hermione the daughter of S. Philip, and Philotheus the son of Theophila, and S. Hilarion and S. Paul the Hermite, and innumerable lights who followed hard after the Sun of righteousnesse, wrought great and prodigious miracles: Signes and wonders and healings were done by the name of the holy child Jesus. This is the name which we should engrave in our hearts, and write upon our foreheads, and pronounce with our most harmonious accents, and rest our faith upon, and place our hopes in, and love with the overflowings of charity, and joy, and adoration. And as the revelation of this name satisfied the hopes of all the world, so it must determine our worshippings, and the addresses of our exteriour and interiour religion: it being that name whereby God and God's mercies are made presentiall to us and proportionate objects of our religion and affections.'

The work entitled "Christian Consolations" is quite new to us; we were not aware that such a work had ever been published under the name of Taylor; nor should we, from internal evidence, have been disposed to refer it to him as its author. It has not, to our ear, his rhythm and cadence; the language

seems of a different structure; nor does the solitary passage cited by the present Editor, appear decisive of the question. At the same time, we are not disposed to be tenacious of the negative hypothesis. The tract was written for a specific and private purpose, and one that was not likely to stimulate the writer to extraordinary exertion. It contains much that is useful, and a few extracts might be given, not destitue of the more attractive ornaments of style and fancy.

Mr. Heber's criticism on the Sermons of Jeremy Taylor, is not quite so minute as we should have anticipated; and we are not inclined to admit, as a sufficient excuse, that no sermons ' of that age, perhaps of any other age, are more frequently on 'the tables and in the hands of general readers.' We doubt this exceedingly. We could name collections of sermons that can boast fifty readers for one who has taste and vigour of mind enough fairly to estimate the author of the Enaus. There are hundreds of affected gentlemen who will talk by the hour of the old school of English authorship, who would be exceedingly puzzled by a very slight cross-examination on the specific subject of their eloquence. Such works as those of Jeremy Taylor will never be popular in the common acceptation of the term; but, by those whose minds are disciplined to the comprehension of their lofty character and their boundless range, they will be held in the highest value. Few kinds of reading have a more decided tendency than this to strengthen the mental faculties; it is among the most efficient of intellectual tonics; and as a counteractive to the morbid action of an imagination over stimulated by unwholesome diet, we can conceive of nothing more salutary, than the brilliant combination of learning, fancy, picturesque imagery, and richness of expression, which exists in the sermons and theological treatises of this eminent His very faults of composition are the results of exuberant genius; they are allied to beauty, and leave us sometimes at a loss whether to condemn them as violations of correct principles. or to admit them as glowing fancies. In fact, if we were required to point out that particular section of his works which should exhibit the most characteristic sample of his powerful and brilliant mind, we should unhesitatingly refer to his sermons. Mr. Heber avails himself of the opportunity afforded him at this point of his critical analysis, to introduce a series of lively and amusing observations on the styles of preaching that prevailed at and before the time of Taylor, and he gives some rather curious specimens of eccentric sermonizing.

man.

When Jerome allegorizes, in his epistle to Fabiola, the different ornaments of the Jewish high-priest into the different virtues and

graces of a Christian; when Athanasius finds out the penitent thief on his cross in the second verse of the second chapter of Habakkuk † when Gregory the Great makes Jericho at once a symbol of the moon and of our mortal nature; and above all, when Bernard derives the word diabolus from "two pockets," it is difficult to believe that they can have intended these fancies as argumentative, or to prove to their hearers any thing but the talents and acuteness of their teachers. Such, however, were the favourite ornaments of Christian orators for a long lapse of ages; and this taste, which of course, by degrees, degenerated into mere quibbling, was not yet extinct, as we learn from Echard's "Contempt of the Clergy," in England, during the life of Taylor, and prevailed, if we may believe the author of " Fray Gerundio," in Spain at a much later period.'

We differ again from Mr. Heber, in part at least, when he affirms of the sermons, that few compositions can be named, where so much luxuriance of imagination, and so much 'mellowness of style, are made the vehicles of divinity so sound, and holiness so practical.' It would extend too far an article in which our main difficulty is to confine ourselves within reasonable limits, were we to enter on the distinct examination of the position, the gist of which we have marked in italics; we refer to it here simply for the purpose of connecting with it the observation, that while Taylor's moral exhortations and dissuasives are urged with all the terrific force and all the attractive beauty which so peculiarly distinguish his best writings, he does not, according to our views of sound divinity, attach to them those clear views of evangelical doctrine which alone can give them their due motives and their most powerful sanction. The sermon on the Return of Prayers might furnish us with illustrations of this; but we shall rather refer to it for an example of the singular way in which, quitting the just limits of oratory for the very region of poetry, the Bishop of Down was accustomed not unfrequently to mix the wild, excursive, and unruly effusions of his ever-ready fancy with the most energetic remonstrances of the Christian moralist.

• Uncleanness is a direct enemy to the praying man, and an obstruction to his prayers, for this is not only a profanation, but a direct sacrilege; it defiles a temple to the ground; it takes from a man all affection to spiritual things, and mingles his very soul with the things of the world, it makes his understanding low, and his reasonings cheap and foolish, and it destroys his confidence and all his manly hopes; it makes his spirit light, effeminate, and fantastic; and dissolves his attention, and makes his mind so to disaffect all the objects of his desires, that when he prays he is as uneasy as an impaled person, or a condemned criminal upon the hook or wheel.....God cannot love the man; for God is the prince of purities, and the Son

of God is the king of virgins, and the Holy Spirit is all love, and that is all purity and all spirituality. And therefore the prayer of an unclean person is like the sacrifices to Moloch, or the rites of Flora, ubi Cato spectator esse non potuit, a good man will not endure them, much less will God entertain such reekings of the Dead Sea and clouds of Sodom. For so an impure vapour begotten of the slime of the earth, by the fevers and adulterous heats of an intemperate summer sun, striving by the ladder of a mountain to climb up to heaven, and rolling into various figures by an uneasy unfixed revolution, and stopped at the middle region of the air, being thrown from his pride and attempt of passing towards the seat of the stars, turns into an unwholesome flame, and like the breath of hell is confined into a prison of darkness and a cloud, till it breaks into diseases, plagues, and mildews, stink and blastings: so is the prayer of an unchaste person, it strives to climb the battlements of heaven, but because it is a flame of sulphur, salt, and bitumen, and was kindled in the dishonourable regions below, derived from hell, and contrary to God, it cannot pass forth to the element of love, but ends in barrenness and murmur, fantastic expectations, and trifling imaginative confidences, and they at last end in sorrows and despair. Every state of sin is against the possibility of a man being accepted, but these have a proper venom against the graciousness of the person and the power of the prayer. God can never accept an unholy prayer, and a wicked man can never send forth any other; the waters pass through impure aqueducts and channels of brimstone, and therefore may end in brimstone and fire, but never in forgiveness and the blessings of an eternal charity.'

We believe that we were the first to point out, in a Number of the former series of this Journal, a remarkable passage in South's Sermons, marked with the bitter sarcasm peculiar to that highly gifted but irritable and spiteful man, and plainly levelled at the affectations and fantastic illustrations which present themselves rather too frequently in the compositions of Taylor. It is as follows. I speak the words of soberness, said St. Paul, Acts xxvi. 25. And I preach the Gospel not with 'the enticing words of man's wisdom, 1 Cor. ii. 4. This was the way of the Apostles' discoursing of things sacred. Nothing here of the fringes of the North-Star; nothing of nature's becoming unnatural; nothing of the down of angels' wings, or the beautiful looks of Cherubims; no starched similitudes, introduced with a Thus have I seen a cloud rolling in its airy munsion, and the like. No, these were sublimities above the rise of the apostolic spirit. For the Apostles, poor mortals, were 'content to take lower steps, and to tell the world in plain ' terms, that he who believed should be saved, and that he who believed not should be damned. And this was the dialect which 'pierced the conscience, and made the hearers cry out, Men and Brethren, what shall we do? It tickled not the ear, but

sunk into the heart; and when men came from such sermons, they never commended the preacher for his taking voice or gesture; for the fineness of such a simile, or the quaintness of such a sentence; but they spoke like men conquered with the overpowering force and evidence of the most concerning truths; much in the words of the two disciples going to Emmaus; Did not our hearts burn within us, while he opened to us the Scriptures?"

If this criticism be not very courteous, its justice will not be denied; and it will serve to place in full view the different characters of the two writers. South had a mind of far more compactness; he was, beyond comparison, the sounder and deeper theologian; and his fancy, if less exuberant, was, in its happiest efforts, of a more equable and finished kind. He was coarse, indeed, much more so than his great rival; but this offensive quality seems to have had a moral cause, and to have originated in the ferocity and malignity of his temper: his natural taste, if we may judge from such of his sermons as were preached in avoidance of irritating topics, was remarkably pure, and his ear for the true rhythm of rhetorical composition, exquisite. Taylor's occasional coarseness is of a very different description; it is evidently the accidental error of a mind full of images and ideas, and incapable, from the very oppression of its wealth, of exercising a due discernment and discretion. He seldom flatters, excepting in his dedications, and then in a very gentlemanly way; whereas South was the most disgusting and unblushing sycophant that ever made a bold stroke for a mitre. We do not recollect that Taylor has betrayed, under any circumstances, a propensity to the sarcastic and abusive, the constant stumbling-block of South; and the little asperity into which his kindly spirit was stirred on one or two occasions, is to be attributed to accidental causes, rather than to the nature of the man. But we must hasten to give one more exemplification of this section of our analysis, and then pass on to the There are few passages, even in the noble compositions before us, of a higher order of eloquence, both in conception and expression, than the exordium of the sermon on the invalidity of a late or death-bed repentance. The text is from Jeremiah xiii. 16.

God is the eternal fountain of honour, and the spring of glory; in him it dwells essentially, from him it derives originally, and when an action is glorious, or a man is honourable, it is because the action is pleasing to God, in the relation of obedience or imitation, and because the man is honoured by God, or by God's Vicegerent; and therefore God cannot be dishonored, because all honour comes from himself; he cannot but be glorified, because to be himself is to be VOL. XXII. N. S.

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