MILTON AND JEREMY TAYLOR. And I shall sigh fond wishes, sweet abode ! Speed it, O Father! let Thy kingdom come! 145 S. T. COLERIDGE: 1772-1834 MILTON AND JEREMY TAYLOR. Ir ever two great men might seem, during their whole lives, to have moved in direct opposition, though neither of them has at any time introduced the name of the other, Milton and Jeremy Taylor were they. The former commenced his career by attacking the Church-Liturgy and all set forms of prayer. The latter, but far more successfully, by defending both. Milton's next work was against the Prelacy and the then-existing Church-government; Taylor's in vindication and support of them. Milton became more and more a stern republican, or rather an advocate for that religious and moral aristocracy which, in his day, was called republicanism, and which, even more than royalism itself, is the direct antipode of modern Jacobinism. Taylor, as more and more sceptical concerning the fitness of men in general for power, became more and more attached to the prerogatives of monarchy. From Calvinism, with a still decreasing respect for Fathers, Councils, and for Church-antiquity in general, Milton seems to have ended in an indifference, if not a dislike, to all forms of ecclesiastic government, and to have retreated wholly into the inward and spiritual Church-communion of his own spirit with the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Taylor, with a growing reverence for authority, an increasing sense of the insufficiency of the Scriptures without the aids of tradition and the consent of authorized interpreters, advanced as far in his approaches to Catholicism as a conscientious minister of the English Church could well venture. Milton would be and would utter the same to all, on all occasions he would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Taylor would become all things to all men, if by any means he might benefit any; hence he availed himself, in his pop ular writings, of opinions and representations which stand often in striking contrast with the doubts and convictions expressed in his more philosophical works. He appears indeed, not too severely to have blamed that management of truth authorized and exemplified by almost all the Fathers. The same antithesis might be carried on with the elements of their several intellectual powers. Milton, austere, condensed, imaginative, supporting his truth by direct enunciation of lofty moral sentiment and by distinct visual representations, and in the same spirit overwhelming what he deemed falsehood by moral denunciation and a succession of pictures appalling or repulsive. In his prose, so many metaphors, so many allegorical miniatures. Taylor, eminently discursive, accumulative, and (to use one of his own words) agglomerative; still more rich in images than Milton himself, but images of Fancy, and presented to the common and passive eye, rather than to the eye of the imagination. Whether supporting or assailing, he makes his way either by argument or by appeals to the affections, unsurpassed even by the Schoolmen in subtilty, agility, and logic-wit, and unrivalled by the most rhetorical of the Fathers in the copiousness and vividness of his expressions and illustrations. Here words that convey feelings, and words that flash images, and words of abstract notion, flow together, and at once whirl and rush onward like a stream, at once rapid and full of eddies; and yet still interfused, here and there, we see a tongue or isle of smooth water, with some picture in it of earth or sky, landscape or living group of quiet beauty. Differing, then, so widely, and almost contrariantly, wherein did these great men agree? wherein did they resemble each other? In Genius, in Learning, in unfeigned Piety, in blameless Purity of Life, and in benevolent aspirations and purposes for the moral and temporal improvement of their fellow creatures! Both of them wrote a Latin Accidence, to render education more easy and less painful to children; both of them composed hymns and psalms proportioned to the capacity of common congregations; both, nearly at the same time, set the glorious example of publicly recommending and supporting general Toleration, and the Liberty both of the Pulpit and the Press! S. T. COLERIDGE. MILTON ON HIS LOSS OF SIGHT. 147 MILTON ON HIS LOSS OF SIGHT. LET the calumniators of the Divine goodness cease to revile, or to make me the object of their superstitious imaginations. Let them consider that my situation, such as it is, is neither an object of my shame nor my regret, that my resolutions are too firm to be shaken, that I am not depressed by any sense of the Divine displeasure that, on the other hand, in the most momentous periods I have had full experience of the Divine favour and protection; and that, in the solace and the strength which have been infused into me from above, I have been enabled to do the will of God; that I may oftener think on what He has bestowed than on what He has withheld: that, in short, I am unwilling to exchange my consciousness of rectitude with that of any other person; and that I feel the recollection a treasured store of tranquillity and delight. But, if the choice were necessary, I would, Sir, prefer my blindness to yours. Yours is a cloud spread over the mind, which darkens both the light of reason and of conscience: mine keeps from my view only the coloured surfaces of things, while it leaves me at liberty to contemplate the beauty and stability of virtue and of truth. How many things are there, besides, which I would not willingly see! how many which I must see, against my will! and how few which I feel any anxiety to see! There is, as the Apostle has remarked, a way to strength through weakness. Let me, then, be the most feeble creature alive, as long as that feebleness serves to invigorate the energies of my rational and immortal spirit; as long as, in that obscurity in which I am enveloped, the light of the Divine presence more clearly shines: then, in proportion as I am weak, I shall be invincibly strong; and in proportion as I am blind, I shall more clearly see. O, that I may thus be perfected by feebleness, and irradiated by obscurity! And, indeed, in my blindness I enjoy in no inconsiderable degree the favour of the Deity; who regards me with more tenderness and compassion in proportion as I am able to behold nothing but Himself. Alas, for him who insults me, who maligns, and merits public execration! For the Divine law not only shields me from injury, but almost renders me too sacred to attack; not indeed so much from the privation of my sight, as from the overshadowing of those heavenly wings which seems to have occasioned this obscurity; which, when occasioned, the Deity is wont to illuminate with an interior light, more precious and more pure. To this I ascribe the more tender assiduities of my friends, their soothing attentions, their kind visits, their reverential observThis extraordinary kindness which I experience cannot be any fortuitous combination; and friends, such as mine, do not suppose that all the virtues of a man are contained in his eyes. ances. FREEDOM THE ELEMENT OF VIRTUE. How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the whole life of man! Yet God commits the managing of so great a trust, without particular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grown man. For those actions which enter into a man, rather than issue out of him, and therefore defile not, God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser: there were but little work left for preaching, if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which heretofore were governed only by exhortation. 5 Good and evil, we know, in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour, to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. 5 Psyche is the classical representative of the human soul as purified by suffering, and thus made capable of true felicity. Her surpassing beauty caused Cupid to fall in love with her; and this drew upon her the jealousy and hatred of Venus, who, having reduced her to slavery, imposed upon her the painful drudgery here spoken of. At length, by a perpetual union with Cupid, that is, with love, Psyche became immortal. In art she was represented as a maiden with the wings of a butterfly. FREEDOM THE ELEMENT OF VIRTUE. 149 As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity rather; that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contemplation of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers, and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a pure; her whiteness is but an excremental whiteness: which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas, — describing true temperance under the person of Guyon, brings him in with his palmer through the Cave of Mammon, and the Bower of earthly Bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain. Since, therefore, the knowledge and survey of vice is in the world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity, than by reading all manner of tractates, and hearing all manner of reason? 8 JOHN MILTON: 1608-1674 MILTON! thou shouldst be living at this hour; • Duns Scotus and Thomas Aquinas were the two most famous Schoolmen of their day, and flourished in the latter half of the thirteenth century. The former was surnamed The Subtile Doctor; the latter, The Angelic Doctor. 7 Sir Guyon is the hero of the second book of Spenser's Faerie Queene. Palmer is, properly, a pilgrim; so called because pilgrims were wont to carry a stick or branch of palm as a badge. 8 Tractate is the old word for treatise or tract. |