we are informed by the publisher in his preface for the private use of a noble an excellent Lady, probably Anne, daughter of Sir Heneage Finch, and wife of his patron Edward Lord Conway, of whose benevolence and piety we read much in the writings of the excellent Henry More. She appears so from some parts even of his eulogium, and still more, from different slight circumstances mentioned of her in the Rawdon Papers*, to have been a woman of considerable powers of mind, and of a high and seraphical devotion, but credulous and low spirited, suffering under continued ill health, and indulging, more than her husband seems to have patiently endured in the privileges and fears, of a hypochondriac invalid and the austere retirement of a religious votary: a zealous pupil, at one period of her life, of the sublime absurdities of cabalistic Platonism; at another the confiding patient, of the miraculous Greatraiks, and at length, entirely surrounded by Quakers and enthusiasts of a yet wilder character. To such a person the Consolations which Taylor could offer might have been abundantly necessary and valuable and, in fact, there is none of his works better calculated to bind up, with rational and warrantable comfort, the wounds of an afflicted spirit, and to confirm a weak and wavering one in the safe and authentic path of faith and duty.

The treatise begins with stating the necessity of applying comfort rather than terror to those who are really impressed with a deep sense of the solemn truths of Christianity, and with shortly laying down the sources whence Christian comfort may be derived, from faith, from hope, from the graces of the Holy Ghost, from prayer, and the two sacraments. All these as conducing to our present happiness as well as holiness, he discusses in five chapters, none of them distinguished by the glowing beauties of some of his other productions, but all sensible judicious and affecting.

The following passage is interesting, not only from its own merit, but as in some respects (in all essential re

*Note TT.

spects, indeed,) differing from the language which he would have held when he wrote the "Doctrine of Repentance." The Christian Consolations, it may be observed was one of Taylor's last compositions

"Be merciful unto my sin, for it is great, says David. This is not the way to deal with mortal judges, when we stand at their bar: but this is the way to obtain propitiation from our God. Heal me, for I am sore wounded, cure me, for I am very sick be merciful unto my sin, for it is very great: Zozimus, a Pagan that envied the honour of Constantine the Great, makes this tale to discredit him in his history; that Constantine had put his wife Fausta and his son Crispus to death: after which, being haunted with an ill conscience that gave him no quiet, he sought among the heathen priests for expiation, and they could give him no peace; but he was told that the religion of Christians was so audacious as to promise pardon to all sins, were they never so horrible. Is not this to commend both the emperor and his religion under the form of a dispraise? For what rest could a troubled mind attain to from the rites and superstitions of Idol Gods? But in the immense treasure of the price of the blood of Christ, there is redemption for every sinner that repents and believes."

Not that he, at any time forgot the parts and offices of repentance.

"And beware that you overlook not these multitudes of sins of the under size, as if little grief or anxiety would serve for them. Are they not numberless grains of sand? And may not a weight of too much sand sink down a ship as soon as a burden of too much iron? The dailiness of sin must be bewailed with the dailiness of sorrow; and then, when thou liest down, thou shalt not be afraid; yea, thou shalt lie down, and thy sleep shall be sweet."

The notions which he at this time, entertained as to original sin, are also worth extracting. He is speaking of the difficulties which oppose us in our way to heaven; and what he now says sufficiently exculpates him from having imbibed the error of the Perfectionists.

"These difficulties are either in ourselves or in our

adventure, in ourselves partly through natural imbecillity, partly through contracted impotency. Our natural languor, is that of original cantagion, which makes us so weak that there is none that doth good, no not one. Which is not to be extenuated, as if the malignity of it might be be suppressed with a little resistance. It is good to know the power of so strong an enemy that we may be fortified against it. It is a root of bitterness never to be digged up out of corrupt nature; a coal of fire spitting out sparks of temptation continually, as inward to us as the marrow is in our bones. Yet there is hope in Christ, to slake this fire, though not utterly, in this life, to quench it. Therefore since God is our help against the insurrection of this rebellious sin, let us be comforted in his help and not in excuses. For we must not plead our personal maladies and natural inclinations, and think that God will take it for an answer, and ask no more. To what purpose are the pourings out of the Spirit, but that what is wickedly inbred from our conception, should be shaken off from the tree, and a better fruit spring up in its place from the increase of God ?"

His observations on spiritual influence, on prayer, and on the sacraments, are all excellent. On baptism he

states that

"Spiritual regeneration is that which the Gospel hath set forth to be the principal correlative of baptism. O happy it is for us to be born again by water and the Holy Ghost! For better it were never to be born than not to be born twice. I have assurance that the spirit is not disjoined from the water, for Christ's word cannot fail that we shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost. But ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. There is another cavil made by some, that notwithstanding baptism, original sin remains in us all the days of our life. True, the sin is not blotted out in the infant; but it is blotted out of the book of God. And, as actual sins are pardoned for Christ's sake, yet it cannot be brought to pass that they should never be done which are done and past, but it is enough that they shall not be imput

ed; so original sin cleaves unto us: it is not cast out, for I feel it in me, but it is remitted."

Enough however, has already been instanced to show the value of this long neglected and almost unknown manual, of which one single copy only was known to exist, in the Bodleian Library,from which the reprint is taken which appears in the present volume. I will only give two more extracts. The one is so characteristic of Taylor's manner, as to be, in itself, almost sufficient to establish the authenticity of the volume.

"Mark the rain that falls from above, and the same shower that, dropped out of one cloud, increaseth sundry plants in a garden, and severally according to the condition of every plant. In one stalk it makes a rose, in another a violet, divers in a third, and sweet in all. So the Spirit works its multiformous effects in several complexions, and all according to the increase of God."

The other I do not quote as praising or agreeing with it. It is a hard, and, I conceive, an unfounded statement of, at least in one very important instance, the spiritual state of the heathen. He maintains that neither Jews, nor Mahometans, nor Pagans, get any thing by that prayer to which the promise is made, "Ask, and ye shall have." -"Such a faith as possessed idolaters is not that which impetrates mercy from God."

Surely the instance, which he himself brings forward, of Nineveh, is a proof that even idolaters, and a fortiori,' Mahometans and, Jews by prayer and repentance of some of their most crying sins, may obtain from God very eminent and illustrious mercies.

His Sermons next offer themselves to our observation, sixty-four in number, of which all, even those which were preached on public and political occasions, may be regarded as in a great degree practical. Of them a less accurate examination is necessary, inasmuch as no sermons of that age, perhaps of any other age, are more frequently on the tables and in the hands of general readers. To praise them would be idle and unnecessary; and their faults, like their merits, are obvious even to a careless observer. To estimate, however, those merits sufficiently,

it is necessary to bear in mind the difficulties attendant on this style of composition, and the few good models (besides St. Chrysostom, whom in many respects he much resembled,) which Taylor, at the commencement of his career, had before him.

It would be a long enquiry, and one which is by no means necessary to my subject, to enter into the causes of that remarkable decay of eloquence, which may be said to have taken its rise among the Greeks and Romans, from the time at which the usurpation of the Cæsars had reduced their world to the sullen calm of despotism. This deficiency, beyond a doubt, as it extended to Pagans as well as Christians, and was felt while Christianity was as yet politically insignificant, arose from causes distinct from any peculiar habits of the Christian church.

Yet, so far as this last was concerned, (in which the popular form of government, and the sermons preached in their assemblies, might have led us to expect a different result,) it is evident that the system of homilies, of which description are most of the addresses of the fathers to their congregations, though of all others, perhaps, the best fitted for general edification, was in itself unfavourable to the exercise of oratorical talent.

A running commentary requires conciseness, and even abruptness; and the necessity of discussing many different passages in succession, is almost inconsistent with a connected and lucid chain of argument, with a brilliant peroration, or a comprehensive exposition of general principles.

And there were other causes which tended still more to corrupt the taste of preachers; of which the first was that fondness, derived from the cabalistic Jews, of detecting an internal sense in the plainest passages of Scripture: and still more, the custom of applying such passages "by way of accommodation," to subjects the most foreign from their known meaning,--of which a good many instances may be found in Jerome, in succeeding fathers still more, and, most of all, in the divines of what are called the dark ages.

Thus, when Jerome allegorizes, in his epistle to Fabio