Aye! this is excellent indeed, and worthy of a guardian angel of the Church. When Jeremy Taylor escapes from the Mononomian Romaism, which netted him in his too eager recoil from the Antinomian boar, brought forth and foddered (as he imagined) in Calvin's stye; when from this wiry net he escapes into the devotional and the dietetic, as into a green meadow-land, with springs, and rivulets, and sheltering groves, where he leads his flock like a shepherd;--then it is that he is most himself,--then only he is all himself, the whole Jeremy Taylor; or if there be one other subject graced by the same total heautophany, it is in the pouring forth of his profound common sense on the ways and weaknesses of men and conflicting sects, as for instance, in the admirable birth, parentage, growth, and consummation of a religious controversy in his 'Dissuasive from Popery'. Ib. s. xiii. p. 502. Let every old man that repents of the sins of his evil life be very diligent in the search of the particulars; that by drawing them into a heap, and spreading them before his eyes, he may be mightily ashamed at their number and burthen. I dare not condemn, but I am doubtful of this as a universal rule. If there be a true hatred of sin, the precious time and the spiritual 'nisus' will, I think, be more profitably employed in enkindling meditation on holiness, and thirstings after the mind of Christ. Ib. ss. xxxi-xxxv. pp..517, 518. Scarce a word in all this but for form's sake concerning the merits and sacrifice of the Incarnate God! Surely Luther would not have given this advice to a dying penitent, but have directed him rather to employ his little time in agony of prayer to Christ, or in earnest meditations on the astounding mystery of his death. In Taylor man is to do every thing. Vol. IX. s. xi. p. 5. For God was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue that punishment even to the lesser sins and sinners, which he only had first threatened to Adam; and so Adam brought it upon them. And such a phrase as this used by a man in a refutation of Original Sin, on the ground of its incompatibility with God's attributes! "Exasperated" with those whom Taylor declares to have been innocent and most unfortunate, the two things that most conciliate love and pity! Ib. p. 6. If the sequel of the paragraph, comparing God to David in one of his worst actions, be not blasphemy, the reason is that the good man meant it not as such. 'In facto est, sed non' in agents. Ib. ss. xvi. xvii. pp. 8, 9. For the further explication of which it is observable that the word 'sinner' and 'sin' in Scripture is used for any person, that hath a fault or a legal impurky, a debt, a vitiosity, defect, or imposition, &c.