Taylor is one of the last men to whom we are to look for cautious and qualified statements. He had a mind of that order which “moveth altogether if it move at all.” He could say nothing by halves;--and, no doubt, his glowing periods require qualification. But, when all possible allowance has been made, the passage just quoted conveys something which is very much like the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation. Yet, strange to say, the same author, who holds that there is a real change in the Lord’s Supper, interprets our Lord’s words, “This is my body”--to mean no more than this: “it figuratively represents my body:” and he denies that the passage in the sixth chapter of John, often urged in support of the doctrine of the real presence, has anything to do with the Lord’s Supper.[406] In his notion of original sin, he deviates from Anglican as well as Puritan standards. The superiority of Adam before the fall, in Taylor’s opinion, consisted in certain superadded qualifications which he forfeited by the first sin--and he thought that men now come into the world, not with any evil taint or tendency, not with anything of corruption or degeneracy, but simply without those superadded qualifications. He says of human sinfulness, that “a great part is a natural impotency, and the other is brought in by our own folly.” He imputes it, in great part, to the “many _concurrent_ causes of evil which have influence upon communities of men; such as are evil examples, the similitude of Adam’s transgression, vices of princes, wars, impurity, ignorance, error, false principles, flattery, interest, fear, partiality, authority, evil laws, heresy, schism, spite and ambition, natural inclination, and other principiant causes, which proceeding from the natural weakness of human constitution, are the fountain and proper causes of many consequent evils.”[407] His doctrine has in it altogether a strong taint of Pelagianism; and what he says of “concurrent causes,” is pronounced by Bishop Heber--a mild critic and a moderate Divine--to be “neither good logic nor good divinity.” No one can be more definite and precise than Jeremy Taylor in his doctrine of the sacraments, but he shows elsewhere a remarkable leaning to what is general and vague. What he means exactly by original sin--how he distinguished it from actual sin, and what effect he believed the sin of Adam to have upon his posterity, it is difficult to say; and the same and even greater indefiniteness is manifest in his views of the doctrine of justification. Indeed, here he avowedly eschews all precision of language. He differs from Thorndike and Bull, not only in not defining justification as they do, but in not defining it at all, and he speaks almost pettishly on the subject. [Sidenote: ANGLICANS.--TAYLOR.]