TAYLOR, Thomas.

Scarce third editions of three works by the important early Puritan Thomas Taylor (1576-1632). “Taylor was a prominent member of the group of Perkins’s disciples who came to embody the mainstream of moderate puritan divinity in early Stuart Britain. He had entered the pulpit at the age of twenty-one and preached at Paul’s Cross before Elizabeth I and James I, but he soon clashed with the emerging anti-Calvinist wing of churchmen. At the university church in Cambridge he sharply attacked Archbishop Bancroft’s campaign against puritan ministers. Samuel Harsnett, conducting Bancroft’s metropolitan visitation in 1608, silenced Taylor and threatened him with degradation.” (McGee). There followed a period of seventeen years during which Taylor did not hold any benefice, which he used to write. In his many published works, Taylor appears as a full-throated opponent of popery, separatism, and antinomianism.

The first work examines ‘repentance’, a term which was used by Tyndale and subsequent English scriptural interpreters to translate the New Testament Greek metanoia, which, as a sidenote from the Geneva Bible explains, ‘signifieth a changing of our minds and heart from evil to better’. Taylor’s The Practice of Repentance is a guidebook to the topic of spiritual repentance; it outlines what true repentance is and the ‘signs’ by which it can be discerned, suggests a few ‘helps’ that can assist the believer in carrying out his duty of repentance, and warns the readers against several obstacles or ‘lets of repentance’. The whole work is set out schematically ‘in an easy Method’, according to the Table prefixed’ – the prefatory index sets out in detail the matter contained in each of the forty-one chapters, followed by a fold-out diagrammatic table which divides the whole book into sections and subsections. Taylor’s goal is to provide easily consultable theological instruction for his readers.

In the second work, A Man in Christ, Taylor turns his attention to outlining the character of the Christian individual who has undergone a successful and genuine repentance and has thus become ‘a new creature’, reborn through Christ. Taylor makes it clear that true repentance involves the total renovation of the individual, and analyses the spiritual and ethical condition of the regenerated believer in some detail. The marks of the ‘new man’ involve the disclaiming of one’s own righteousness, the giving of oneself wholly to Christ, and the renunciation of all deliberate sin. The ‘new’, regenerate creature is also distinguished from the old by the vigour and merriness of his actions (“the new Creature doth duties with delight, freedome, cheerefulnesse”).

The last work consists of a series of meditations on the ‘book of nature’. Though the title-page claims that the treatise is presented ‘as it was preached in Aldermanbury’, the length of the piece as well as the schematic layout of the whole suggests that the original content of the sermon or sermons was reworked extensively. Taking Psalms 8:3 as his text, Taylor shows his reader the spiritual benefit to be derived by meditating on the natural and animal world. The natural beatitude and self-contentedness of animals in general teaches us ‘to bewaile our rebellion against God, which all of them reprove. For they all stand in their kinde and station, in which God set them at first’. Living things ‘are the Lords professours, teaching us the invisible things of God […] His Wisedome shineth in the exquisite, and artificiall cunning, in the frame of the smallest creature’. After considering creatures in general, Taylor turns his attention to bringing out the spiritual truths to be found in particular animate and inanimate objects, moving through the planets, sun, moon, stars, light, wind, dew, vegetation, and finally individual animals – the mule, for instance, is a living metaphor of ‘our untaught and refractarie nature’. Taylor encourages the reader to learn the whole spiritual alphabet of creation.