Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/236

216 famous sermons which ultimately made up the Eniautos (1655), and here he wrote the works by which he is probably best known to-day, his Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651), as well as other more controversial treatises. A Discourse of Friendship (1657) was addressed to "the most ingenious and excellent Mrs Katherine Philips," better known as the matchless Orinda. The Ductor Dubitantium, on which he spent so much labour, his magnum opus in the rather barren field of casuistry, was published in 1660. The last years of the Commonwealth were years of trouble and bereavement, and although the Restoration brought greater temporal prosperity, the hard fate which sent him to struggle with Presbyterians in the north of Ireland prevented that prosperity from spelling happiness and leisure for congenial work. He died in 1667.

It was not an altogether unkind fate which cut short the career that Laud had mapped out for Taylor. His strength did not really lie in the kind of argumentative, doctrinal, controversial preaching of Andrewes and Donne, which he would have had to cultivate as a champion of the Anglican Church. His controversial works are the least interesting of his writings. The Liberty of Prophesying is the most valuable because it handles the largest question, and is an expression of temperament, not merely a product of learning. Even so it can easily be overrated. It is a symptom rather than a cause of the growth of liberality in thoughtful minds, which the bitter and endless religious controversies were accelerating. Chillingworth and Hales are more thoroughgoing representatives of the