Jeremy Taylor week: 'His graces pursue the methods of nature'

In this week when the Church of Ireland calendar of 'worthies' commemorates Jeremy Taylor, who died on 13th August 1667, laudable Practice will each day be sharing extracts from Taylor's sermons.

Each extract will seek to illustrate how Taylor gave expression to defining aspects of the Anglican experience. Today, how Grace does not destroy but perfects Nature.

Which principle divers fanaticks, both among us and in the church of Rome, misunderstanding, look for new revelations, and expect to be conducted by ecstasy, and will not pray but in a transfiguration, and live upon raptures and extravagant expectations, and separate themselves from the conversation of men by affectations, by new measures and singularities, and destroy order, and despise government, and live upon illiterate phantasms and ignorant discourses. These men 'they belie the holy Ghost': for the Spirit of God makes men wise; it is an evil spirit that makes them fools. The Spirit of God makes us 'wise unto salvation'; it does not spend its holy influences in disguises and convulsions of the understanding: God's spirit does not destroy reason, but heightens it; He never disorders the beauties of government, but is a God of order; it is the Spirit of humility, and teaches no pride; He is to be found in churches and pulpits, upon altars and in the doctors' chairs; not in conventicles and mutinous corners of a house: He goes in company with His own ordinances, and makes progressions by the measures of life; His infusions are just as our acquisitions, and His graces pursue the methods of nature; that which was imperfect He leads on to perfection, and that which was weak He makes strong: He opens the heart, not to receive murmurs, or to attend to secret whispers, but to hear the word of God.

'Via Intelligentia; a sermon preached to the University of Dublin' in The Whole Works of Jeremy Taylor, Volume IV.

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