Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/237

Rh, and indeed Jeremy Taylor's thought probably owes a good deal to the former. Neither controversy nor casuistry was the latter's forte, but edification, the exposition in eloquence of unsurpassed poetic richness of the beauty of holiness, the folly and misery of sin, the vanity of life, as these appeared to a nature of greater delicacy and purity of feeling than strength and originality of intellect, and endowed with an almost Shakespearean wealth of language. Liberated from the thorns of scholastic theology and patristic quotations, with which the sermons of Andrewes and Donne are beset, Jeremy Taylor is able to develop his own ardent and refined thought in sentences comparatively simple and direct in structure and balance, but matchlessly full in flow, and in imagery shot with all the colours of a poetic imagination. If he quotes, it is not to fix a definition or indicate and refute an error so much as to enrich the setting of his own thought, and the quotation is as often from the poets of Greece and Rome as from the Fathers. No preacher of the day is more golden-mouthed than Jeremy Taylor. If he is not, nevertheless, widely read, it is because of the limitation of his thought and the somewhat Sunday-school character of his ethical teaching. He hardly comes into close enough contact with the realities and conditions of everyday life.

There was no lack of either sermons or treatises on the Puritan side of the controversy which agitated the century. Not many, however, belong to literature. Whoever has turned over the pages of the endless sermons preached by Scottish and other divines