'Let not your sermons be busy arguings': wisdom from Jeremy Taylor on preaching

In the second of his two sermons - both entitled 'The Minister's Duty in Life and Doctrine' - delivered at his 1661 primary visitation of the Diocese of Down and Connor, at Lisburn, Jeremy Taylor called his clergy to focus their preaching upon building up congregations in confession of the faith and holy living. This was a characteristic Episcopalian response to the experience of the preaching associated with the ecclesiastical confusion of the Interregnum. As Taylor had stated in his preface to The Golden Grove (1655):

the people are fallen under the harrows and saws of impertinent and ignorant Preachers, who think all Religion is a Sermon, and all Sermons ought to be libels against Truth and old Governours, and expound Chapters that the meaning may never be understood, and pray, that they may be thought able to talk, but not to hold their peace.

For Episcopalians, the sermon during Interregnum had often been a cause of strife and divisive controversy, provoking sectarian conflict, and encouraging ceaseless theological disputes. By contrast, Taylor desired his the pulpit ministry of his clergy to be "like the natural and amiable simplicity of Jesus, [who] by plain and easy propositions, leads us in wise paths to a place where sin and strife shall never enter". Obscure portions of Scripture and and "busy arguings" over doctrinal issues are not to be the stuff of preaching. Rather, as he declared in his Rules and Advices to his clergy, the preacher was to teach the faith "with plainness and simplicity, and confirm it with easie arguments and plain words of Scripture".

While the crisis of preaching many contemporary churches have experienced is significantly different in nature to that Taylor witnessed during the Interregnum, his advice nevertheless continues to be relevant. The answer to weak, impoverished preaching is not a reaction in which sermons, as Taylor warned against, wade into "the secret and high things of God", engage in "busy arguings" over doctrinal disputes, or take a perverse delight in "hard places of Scripture". There should, instead, be a "plainness and simplicity" to preaching, which seeks to ground hearers in the essentials of the faith and holy living:

Let not your sermons and discourses to your people be busy arguings about hard places of Scripture; if you strike a hard against a hard, you may chance to strike fire, or break a man's head; but it never makes a good building: "Philosophiam ad syllabas vocare," that is to no purpose; your sermons must be for edification, something to make the people better and wiser, "wiser unto salvation," not wiser to discourse; for, if a hard thing get into their heads, I know not what work you will make of it, but they will make nothing of it, or something that is very strange: dress your people unto the imagery of Christ, dress them for their funerals, help them to make their accounts up against the day of judgment.

I have known some persons and some families that would religiously educate their children, and bring them up in the Scriptures from their cradle; and they would teach them to tell who was the first man, and who was the oldest, and who was the wisest, and who was the strongest; but I never observed them to ask who was the best, and what things were required to make a man good: the apostles' creed was not the entertainment of their pretty talkings, nor the life of Christ, the story of his bitter passion, and his incomparable sermon on the mount, went not into their catechisms. What good can your flocks receive, if you discourse well and wisely, whether Jephthah sacrificed his daughter, or put her into the retirements of a solitary life; nor how David's numbering the people did differ from Joshua's; or whether God took away the life of Moses by an apoplexy, or by the kisses of his mouth? 

If scholars be idly busy in these things in the schools, custom, and some other little accidents, may help to excuse them; but the time that is spent in your churches, and conversation with your people, must not be so thrown away ... that is your rule; "let your speech be grave," and wise, and useful, and holy, and intelligible; something to reform their manners, to correct their evil natures, to amend their foolish customs; "to build them up in a most holy faith."