"Religion is a public virtue": Jeremy Taylor on the priority of public worship over private devotions

Yesterday at Evensong the second lesson was Luke 2:40-52, the account of the Christ Child, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and Joseph going up to Jerusalem for the Passover. Taylor interprets this passage in The Great Exemplar (I.V.III) as emphasising the priority of public worship over private devotions. Key to this, says Taylor, is the nature of religion as "public virtue", witnessing to "the God of all the world", the God of our common not merely private experience: "the very design, temper, and constitution of religion is to be a public address to God".

We might regard Taylor here as giving expression to a key characteristic shared by the earlier Conformity of the Elizabethan Settlement and the Anglicanism of the 'long 18th century': the centrality of public worship and Common Prayer to the shaping and sustaining of communal flourishing and well-being, in which our shared life is experienced as flowing from and oriented towards God the Creator and Redeemer.

Recovering this sense of the priority of public worship over private devotions might assist Christianity in establishing a cultural resonance in the 21st century West - that rather than being an odd hobby, public worship is intimately related (indeed, is integral) to communal flourishing. For, as Taylor put it, "religion is a public virtue".

For all those holy prayers and ravishments of love, those excellent meditations and intercourses with God, their private readings and discourses were but entertainments and satisfaction of their necessities, they lived with them during their retirements; but it was a feast when they went to Jerusalem, and the freer and more indulgent reſection of the spirit: for in public solemnities God opens his treasures, and pours out his grace more abundantly.

Private devotions and secret offices of religion are like refreshing of a garden with the distilling and petty drops of a water-pot; but addresses at the temple, and serving God in the public communion of saints, is like rain from heaven, where the offices are described by a public spirit, heightened by the greater portions of assistance, and receive advantages by the adunations and symbols of charity, and increment, by their distinct title to promises appropriate even to their assembling and mutual support, by the piety of example, by the communication of counsels, by the awfulness of public observation, and the engagements of holy customs.

For religion is a public virtue; it is the ligature of souls, and the great instrument of the conservation of bodies politic, and is united in a common object, the God of all the world, and is managed by public ministries, by sacrifice, adoration, and prayer, in which, with variety of circumstances indeed, but with infinite consent and union of design, all the sons of Adam are taught to worship God: and it is a publication of God's honour, its very purpose being to declare to all the world how great things God hath done for us, whether in public donatives or private missives, so that the very design, temper, and constitution of religion is to be a public address to God.

And although God is present in closets, and there also distils his blessings in small rain; yet to the societies of religion and publication of worship as we are invited by the great blessings and advantages of communion, so also we are in some proportions more straitly limited by the analogy and exigence of the duty [a footnote references Hebrews 10:2].

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