Jeremy Taylor is better known and more renowned for the rhythm of his rhetorical diction, the exuberance and felicity of his poetical illustrations, and the inexhaustible stores of his varied knowledge, than for Biblical scholarship, or for the depth, wisdom, and soundness of his theological reasonings. Yet he was a learned, painstaking, and diligent Divine, as well as a surprisingly eloquent and persuasive preacher: and though he has left behind him no body of divinity, there are some points distinctive of the Anglican school which he has treated with especial fulness; and, whilst faithful to its theology as a whole, there are portions of it which he has handled after a manner of his own. The influence of his patristic studies may be traced throughout his works; and the patronage of Archbishop Laud, and his friendship with Christopher Davenport--a learned and able Franciscan friar--were not likely to be altogether without effect upon so sensitive a nature as that of young Jeremy Taylor. [Sidenote: ANGLICANS.--TAYLOR.] He has much to say upon baptismal regeneration. In baptism, according to his teaching, we are admitted to the kingdom of Christ, we are presented unto Him, we are consigned with His sacrament, and we enter into His militia. It is also an adoption into the covenant, and a new birth. In it, all our sins are pardoned. “The catechumen descends,” he says,--following the words of Bede,--“into the font a sinner, he arises purified; he goes down the son of death, he comes up the son of the resurrection; he enters in, the son of folly and prevarication, he returns the son of reconciliation; he stoops down the child of wrath, and ascends the heir of mercy; he was the child of the devil, and now he is the servant and the son of God.” Baptism not only pardons past sins, but puts us into a state of pardon for time to come. It is a sanctification by the spirit of grace. It is the suppletory of original righteousness. Its effects are illumination, new life, and a holy resurrection. In short, by baptism we are saved. After having thus, in the most unqualified way, exhausted, one might suppose, all which imagination could conceive of the efficacy of the rite, Taylor says, there is less need to descend to temporal blessings, or rare contingencies, or miraculous events, or probable notices of things less certain; and then he speaks of miraculous cures effected by the baptismal water, and of the appointment of an angel guardian to each baptized person--which, indeed, he does not insist upon, although it seems to him “hugely probable.” Resuming a poetical theology, he adds, in patristic phraseology, that baptism is a new birth, “a chariot carrying us to God, the great circumcision, a circumcision made without hands, the key of the kingdom, the _paranymph_ of the kingdom, the earnest of our inheritance, the answer of a good conscience, the robe of light, the sacrament of a new life, and of eternal salvation,