Preaching and Preachers [pp. 454-483]

Preacheng and Preachers.
mirable discourse on the duty and reward of bounty to the
poor took him up three hours and a half in preaching." His
bust in Westminster Abbey will be fresh in the recollection of
all clerical travellers.
How abrupt is the transition to the'"Shakspeare of the
pulpit!" Bishop Taylor, in his own manner, has had a few
imitators, but never a competitor. If we except the great dramatist, no man can be named in any department of literature,
who stands more clearly alone. Never were there sermons, we
suppose, which purely for intellectual pleasure have been read
with such satisfaction. In everything but the outward guise,
they are often the highest poetry. Imagination has no flights
more lofty and adventurous, than many which have been quoted
again and again. He soars in a grand similitude, with a boldness of preparation and a sustaining power of wing, and then
descends to the earth with a graceful undulation and gentle
subsidence, which are absolutely without a parallel. The voluptuous melody of the rythm gives a charm to his diction.
Interwoven with these brilliant strands of fancy, there is often
a subtle thread of argumentation which wins your assent before
you are aware; often, unfortunately, to worse than semi-pelagian laxity; for Taylor was very remote from the orthodoxy of
his day. Along with all this, there is poured 6ut upon us a
profusion of learning as from a golden horn of plenty. No
preacher of our day would venture to quote as much Greek,
during his whole life, as Jeremy Taylor sometimes brings out
in a single sermon. But the reminiscences and allusions of
classic learning spin from him spontaneously in every paragraph. While his invective is sometimes of a scalding heat, he
is often tender and pathetic; and there is a scholarly negligence in the style which charms while it baffles all attempts at
imitation. It must now be admitted that with all these claims
to our wonder, Taylor seldom makes prominent the peculiarly
gracious doctrines of the evangelical system. There is a saintly
calm about his ethics, which reminds us of the purer class of
Romish preachers, but the ascetic directions and the exaltation
of human merit belong to the blemishes of the same school.
The amplitude of his comparisons, sometimes conducted with a
sameness of display which runs into mannerism, did not escape
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