Holy Living and Holy Dying: Holy Dying (Oxford English Texts)

Rating:
Summary: The most beautiful prose in the English language
Review: While this is a rather high price to pay for this now hard to find English spiritual classic, it is worth every penny.

Jeremy Taylor seems to be one of those authors that no one reads anymore; at least judging from the fact that his works are so hard to come by now. "Holy Living and Holy Dying" was once on every bookshelf, and it deserves to be.

As to its value as a spiritual tract, it was one of the works that John Wesley prized, and a profound influence on his life. I am no theologian, and have no special competence to critique the doctrine or spiritual presented here, though it seems unobjectionable and thoroughly orthodox, and enjoyable by Christians of any denomination. Southey's original -Father William- poem tells us that it was once a virtue to think and speak of death. Jeremy Taylor reminds us why.

It is Taylor's exalted prose style, at once solemn and rapturous, at once lush and austere, that draws me again and again to his writing. His majestic and mellifluous words, devoted here to the grand themes of the Christian life and hope, of mortality and eternity, are what drew in Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas DeQuincey [upon whom the influence is obvious]. A taste is in order:

"As our life is very short, so it is very miserable; and therefore it is well that it is short. God, in pity to mankind, lest his burden should be insupportable and his nature an intolerable load, hath reduced our state of misery to an abbreviature; and the greater our misery is, the less while it is like to last; the sorrows of a man's spirit being like ponderous weights, which by the greatness of their burden make a swifter motion, and descend into the grave to rest and ease our wearied limbs; for then only we shall sleep quietly, when those fetters are knocked off, which not only bound our souls in prison, but also ate the flesh till the very bones opened the secret garments of their cartilages, discovering their nakedness and sorrow."

--- I envy his chops! You can -hear- him preaching. There are few finer masters of the music of English prose than Jeremy Taylor.