'Meditation being the soul of prayer': Jeremy Taylor on the feast of the Presentation as an invitation to meditation

In The Great Exemplar, following his 'Considerations Upon the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple', Jeremy Taylor appropriately offers a discourse 'Of Meditation'. This reflects, of course, the faithful, prayerful waiting of Simeon and Anna, and also how the Gospel of the feast tells that the Blessed Virgin and Saint Joseph "marvelled at those things which were spoken" of the Christ Child.  Taylor says of this, "and treasured them in their hearts; and they became matter of devotion and mental prayer, or meditation". Likewise, Taylor's urging that "meditation is the duty of all", echoes his earlier description of Simeon and Anna: "of diverse sexes, and like piety, Simeon and Anna, the one who lived an active and secular, the other a retired and contemplative life". 

Today's feast, therefore, is, for Taylor, an invitation to meditation, to a prayerful dwelling upon the life of Christ - in which "the greatest mysteries are plainest, and yet most fruitful of meditation" - that we may "draw water from the fountains of our Saviour":

If in the definition of meditation, I should call it an unaccustomed and unpractised duty, I should speak a truth, though somewhat inartificially for not only the interior beauties and brighter excellencies are as unfelt as ideas and abstractions are, but also the practice and common knowledge of the duty itself are strangers to us, like the retirements of the deep, or the undiscovered treasures of the Indian hills. And this is a very great cause of the dryness and expiration of men's devotion, because our souls are so little refreshed with the waters and holy dews of meditation ... We draw our water from standing pools, which never are filled but with sudden showers, and therefore we are dry so often whereas, if we should draw water from the fountains of our Saviour, and derive them through the channel of diligent and prudent meditations, our devotion would be a continual current, and safe against the barrenness of frequent droughts ...

He that means to meditate in the best order to the productions of piety, must not be inquisitive for the highest mysteries, but the plainest propositions are to him of the greatest use and evidence. For meditation is the duty of all, and therefore God hath fitted such matter for it which is proportioned to every understanding; and the greatest mysteries of Christianity are plainest, and yet most fruitful of meditation, and most useful to the production of piety. High speculations are as barren as the tops of cedars; but the fundamentals of Christianity are fruitful as the valleys or the creeping vine. For know, that it is no meditation, but it may be an illusion, when you consider mysteries to become more learned, without thoughts of improving piety. Let your affections be as high as you can climb towards God, so your considerations be humble, fruitful, and practically mysterious ...

Want of learning and disability to consider great secrets of theology, does not at all retard our progress to spiritual perfections: love to Jesus may be better promoted by the plainer understandings of honest and unlettered people, than by the finer and more exalted speculations of great clerks that have less devotion ...

For meditation is that part of prayer which knits the soul to its right object, and confirms and makes actual our intention and devotion. Meditation is the tongue of the soul, and the language of our spirit; and our wandering thoughts in prayer are but the neglects of meditation, and recessions from that duty; and according as we neglect meditation, so are our prayers imperfect, meditation being the soul of prayer, and the intention of our spirit. But in all other things meditation is the instrument and conveyance: it habituates our affections to heaven.