It is a matter of high importance in all days, and especially in days of popular anxiety like our own, to keep before us the examples of minds distinguished in the former trials of our country. No theory of virtue is equal in value to its practice embodied in a wise, pure, and manly understanding. History, the biography of nations, is too vast, abstract, and simple, for the guidance of the individual. Its events, like the stars in their courses, large and luminous, moving at a height above the reach of man, and influenced by powers and impulses which perplex his science, may excite the wonder or instruct the wisdom of the philosopher, but the school of mankind is man. To discover the source alike of his energies and errors, we must have before our eyes the mechanism of the human frame.
The world is but a perpetual recurrence. The scenes of the great theater shift continually, but the same characters move across the stage. The story of the drama may be more sullen, or more splendid, but while Providence is the guide, and man the agent, the moral will be unchanged. It is thus a subject of more than curiosity, to determine how generous and lofty spirits have acted in the emergencies of other times; with what magnanimity they sustained misfortune, or with what vigour they repelled injustice; with what purity they withstood temptation, or with what piety they submitted their wrongs to the hand of Heave. If, in days like ours, the wider knowledge of human right, itself only the offspring of the wider knowledge of religion, renders persecution less perilous, yet temptation will always exist. The distinctions of the world will always be at the service of the world. There has been in every age a Babylon, and men have had the alternative of worshipping its golden idol, or paying the penalty of their faith in obscurity and exclusion. It is then that the man who is not resolved to degrade himself, should solicit new strength in the communion of those who have fought the good fight and have gained the crown; that the patriot should study the shape and countenance of public virtue, as in a gallery of the illustrious dead, and feel the littleness of all fame that gravitates to faction; that, above all, the Christian, surrounding himself with their recollections, and shutting out, as with the curtains of the sanctuary, the heated passions and petulant caprices of the time, should imbibe new energies of immortality. It is by such uses that the renown of genius, patriotism, and sanctity becomes a splendid realization; that the suffering of the past revives as the lesson of present wisdom; that the living eye catches light from beyond the grave, and the forms catches light from beyond the grave, and the forms of the saint and martyr stand before us, like Moses and Elias in the mount, in their glory, telling at once of the brief suffering and the imperishable reward.
Jeremy, afterwards Bishop of Down, Connor, and Dromore in Ireland, was born in Trinity parish, Cambridge, the third son of Nathaniel and Mary Taylor, and baptized, August 15, 1613. Like many others destined for future eminence, he owed nothing to birth, for his father was a barber. But his genius could dispense with the honors of ancestry; and the man who could at once instruct the wise by his learning, and delight the elegant by his fancy, required but little extrinsic aid for fame. Yet even his father’s trade, connected as it then was with the rude practice of surgery, was less humble than at present; and his family had once possessed a small estate in Gloucestershire, himself being the direct descendant of the memorable Dr. Rowland Taylor, chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer, and martyred in the third year of Mary of bloody memory, on Aldham Common, in his parish of Hadleigh, in the county of Suffolk.
The rector of Hadleigh was a man of acquirements sufficient to have moved the envy of the ignorant, and of principles obnoxious to the bigots of his day; but Gardner, his persecutor, is said to have had the additional motive, of coveting the family estate at Frampton, on which that rapacious minister laid his hands, like another Ahab; like his Jewish prototype, to perish before he could enjoy the possession. The family were thus reduced to sudden poverty, and retained in poverty by adopting, what was not uncommon among the families of the persecuted, a turn for puritanism. This could earn but little favour from the vigorous government of Elizabeth, which had suffered too much from Popish turbulence to look without alarm on religious disputes of any kind; and still less from the loose government of James, in which alternate superstitions seemed to take the lead in the royal mind, everything was patronized but truth, and every art of government was practiced but manliness and honour.
In his thirteenth year, August 18, 1626, the future bishop was sent to Caius College, Cambridge, as a sizer, or “poor scholar;” an order of free students analogous to the “lay-brothers” of the Romish convents. The duties of this class were, literally, to serve the higher rank of students, at least in all the public ministrations of the college. The feelings of our later age revolt from this employment of men running the common race of learning. But it should be remembered, that in the time of Taylor, the division of ranks in general society was at once more distinct and less painful; that this education was the only one attainable by the poor; and that, in the precarious property and narrow funds of the colleges, there was the stronger ground for insisting on the natural maxim, that those who cannot pay in money must pay in kind.
At Cambridge it cannot be discovered that Taylor succeeded in any of the more public objects of scholarship, increase of rank or increase of income. The dignities and emoluments of the University were then, as now, devoted to proficiency in the severer sciences. And we can be as little surprised that the poetic richness of his mind should have sought other means of distinctions, than we can regret that his future eloquence and various literature were not involved at their birth in the robe of the mathematician. Accident first brought his peculiar faculties into notice. A fellow-student, Risdon, having been appointed lecturer in St. Paul’s Cathedral, employed Taylor as his substitute during a temporary absence. The youth of the new preacher, for he was then but twenty years old, his happiness of expression and fervour of piety, pleased the people. His rising fame reached the ears of Laud, then newly translated from London to the see of Canterbury the archbishop sent for him, objected only to his youth, a fault which Taylor, in the quaint humour of the age, prayed his grace to forgive, as, if he lived, he would amend it; and took him under his protection.