Jeremy Taylor's Holy Living (1650) and Holy Dying (1651) are the twin peaks of seventeenth-century Anglican devotional literature and together constitute the most comprehensive guide to practical Christian ethics and the art of dying well in the English language before the nineteenth century. Taylor was a Welsh-born clergyman who served as chaplain to Archbishop Laud and King Charles I, lost his parish and his liberty in the Civil War, and spent the Interregnum under house arrest in Wales, where he produced his greatest work.
Holy Living - full title The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living - addresses the entire range of practical Christian ethics through a threefold structure drawn from Romans 12-15: sobriety (the regulation of the self, including care of the body, use of time, and chastity), justice (duties toward others, including truthfulness, mercy, and the obligations of various vocations), and religion (prayer, fasting, preparation for the sacraments, and the practice of the presence of God). The book does not merely list moral requirements but explains their grounding in scripture and reason, and offers extensive practical guidance for their implementation in daily life.
Romans 12:17 - 'Provide things honest in the sight of all men' - establishes the ethical standard Taylor applies consistently: the Christian's behavior must be genuinely virtuous, not merely compliant with external requirements. Taylor is equally attentive to James 1:27 - 'Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world' - which grounds religion in practical mercy rather than doctrinal correctness or liturgical observance.
Holy Dying was written in 1651 in immediate response to the death of Lady Frances Carbery, the wife of Taylor's patron, who died at age thirty-seven after years of illness borne with what Taylor regarded as exemplary faith. The book is the finest example in English of the ars moriendi - the medieval tradition of guides to dying well - transposed into Protestant and specifically Anglican terms. Its opening meditation on the brevity of human life, drawing on Job and the Psalms, is among the most eloquent passages in seventeenth-century English prose.
Hebrews 9:27 - 'And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment' - is the text that grounds Taylor's insistence that the Christian must prepare for death throughout life, not merely in extremis. The preparation is not morbid resignation but the cultivation of a posture toward life that is compatible with dying well: gratitude, detachment from worldly goods, reconciliation with enemies, trust in divine mercy.
1 Corinthians 15:55 - 'O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?' - provides the eschatological horizon against which Taylor's meditation on mortality is set. The Christian does not fear death as annihilation but faces it as the passage to a fuller life, made possible by Christ's conquest of death in the Resurrection.
Taylor's prose style is the characteristic achievement of Caroline Anglican culture: ornate, rhythmically complex, rich with classical allusion, and yet always in the service of pastoral purpose. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had absorbed Taylor deeply, called Holy Living and Holy Dying 'among the few books in which all that one would wish to say has been said.' John Wesley's inclusion of both in his fifty-volume Christian Library (1750) ensured their circulation throughout the Methodist movement, and through Wesley they shaped the devotional practice of the English-speaking Protestant world for generations.
The books have been reprinted continuously since their first publication and are still used in Anglican clergy formation, in hospice chaplaincy training, and in theological education. Their combination of doctrinal seriousness, biblical grounding, and practical wisdom represents a standard that most subsequent guides to Christian living have aspired to and few have matched.
The books have been reprinted continuously since their first publication and are still used in Anglican clergy formation, in hospice chaplaincy training, and in theological education. Their combination of doctrinal seriousness, biblical grounding, and practical wisdom represents a standard that most subsequent guides to Christian living have aspired to and few have matched. Taylor's conviction that the Christian life is a unity - that sobriety, justice, and religion are not three separate domains but three dimensions of a single life oriented toward God - anticipates the holistic approach to discipleship that contemporary spiritual directors continue to advocate.
The influence of Holy Living and Holy Dying extends beyond their direct readership. Samuel Johnson, who read Taylor extensively, absorbed his prose rhythms and his moral seriousness; C.S. Lewis, who commended Taylor to his correspondents, drew on his analysis of the moral virtues in The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. The tradition of Christian moral theology that Taylor represented - attentive to scripture, engaged with classical ethics, pastorally practical, and stylistically ambitious - is a tradition that the English-speaking Church has periodically rediscovered and periodically neglected, and Taylor's books are the clearest statement of what that tradition looks like at its best.
Taylor's conviction that the Christian life is a unity - that sobriety, justice, and religion are not three separate domains but three dimensions of a single life oriented toward God - anticipates the holistic approach to discipleship that contemporary spiritual directors continue to advocate. C.S. Lewis, who commended Taylor to his correspondents, drew on his analysis of the moral virtues in The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. The tradition of Christian moral theology that Taylor represented remains a standard that most subsequent guides to Christian living have aspired to and few have matched.