Jeremy Taylor Week: Taylor, Ussher, and 'the best Reformed Church'
Jeremy Taylor's declaration in his sermon at Bramhall's funeral would have won the vigorous agreement of Bramhall's predecessor as Archbishop of Armagh, Ussher. Something of this was indicated by Richard Parr, a chaplain to Ussher and later biographer, describing how the Archbishop viewed the fate of the Church of England in the 1640s as "the greatest blow that had been ever given to the Reformed Churches". When Charles Richard Elrington - Regius Professor of Divinity, Trinity College Dublin - edited the works of Ussher in the mid-19th century, his introduction used the same phrase to describe Ussher's view of the Churches of England and Ireland: "the best reformed in the world".
For Taylor, no less than for Ussher, the Churches of England and Ireland were Reformed. Both Taylor the Laudian and Ussher the Reformed Conformist were sons of the Reformation. In controversy with Counter-Reformation apologists, both understood the Reformation as a restoration of catholicity, not the creation of a new church. As Ussher stated in his 1624 sermon 'A brief declaration of the universality of the Church of Christ':
Wee preach no new faith, but the same Catholique faith that ever hath beene preached: neyther was it any part of our meaning to begin a new Church in these latter dayes of the world, but to reforme the old. A tree that hath the luxurious branches lopped off, and the noxious things that cleave unto it taken away; is not by this pruning and purging of it made another tree than it was before: neyther is the Church reformed in our dayes, another Church than that which was deformed in the dayes of our fore-fathers.
Taylor declared likewise in Letter written to a Gentlewoman who had abandoned the communion of the Church of England for that of the Church of Rome:
we are not willing with the loss of truth to change ... from a Reformed to a Church that will not be reformed ... For [the Church of England's] doctrine, It is certain it professes the belief of all that is written in the Old and New Testament, all that which is in the three Creeds, the Apostolical, the Nicene, and that of Athanasius, and whatsoever was decreed in the four General Councils, or in any other truly such, and whatsoever was condemned in these, our Church hath legally declared it to be Heresie ... So that the Church of England hath the same faith without dispute that the Church had for 400 or 500 Years, and therefore there could be nothing wanting here to saving faith, if we live according to our belief ... our Church before Luther was there where your Church was, in the same place and in the same persons.
This shared understanding of the Reformation also led to a shared articulation of defining characteristics of the magisterial Reformation. On the fundamental issue of the sufficiency of Scripture, Ussher (in Answers to a Jesuit, 1622) and Taylor (in his Dissuasive from Popery, 1664-67) both explicitly invoked 2 Timothy 3:15-17.
Ussher:
the express warrant of the Apostle, 2 Tim. iii, testifying of the holy Scriptures, not only that they are able to make us wise unto salvation, (which they should not be able to do, if they did not contain all things necessary to salvation,) but also that by them the man of God (that is, the minister of God's word, unto whom it appertaineth to declare all the counsel of God,) may be perfectly instructed to every good work: which could not be, if the Scriptures did not contain all the counsel of God which was fit for him to learn, or if there were any other word of God which he were bound to teach, that should not be contained within the limits of the book of God.
Taylor:
if Christ himself and the Apostles proved the resurrection, and the passion, and the supreme Kingdom of Christ out of the Scriptures, if the Apostle proved him to be the Messias, and that be ought to suffer and to rise again the third day by no other precedent topic, and that upon these things Christian religion relied as upon it's entire foundation, and on the other side the Jewish Doctors had brought in many things by tradition, to which our Blessed Saviour gave no countenance, but reproved many of them, and made it plain that tradition was not the first and self evident principle to rely upon in religion, but a way by which they had corrupted the Commandment of God: It will follow from hence, that the Scriptures are the way that Christ and his Apostles walked in, and that oral tradition was not.
On the issue of purgatory, Ussher and Taylor both point to patristic teaching as entirely denying any such notion.
Ussher:
For extinguishing the imaginary flames of ... Purgatory ... if we need the assistance of the ancient Fathers in this business, behold they be here ready with full buckets in their hands ... Gregory Nazianzen, in his funeral Orations, hath many sayings to the same purpose; being so far from thinking of any purgatory pains prepared for men in the other world, that he plainly denieth that after the night of this present life "there is any purging" to be expected. And therefore he telleth us, that it is better to be corrected and purged now, than to be sent unto the torment there, where the time of punishing is, and not of purging." St Jerome comforteth Paula for the death of her daughter Blæsilla in this manner: "Let the dead be lamented, but such a one whom Gehenna doth receive, whom hell doth devour, for whose pain the everlasting fire doth burn. Let us, whose departure a troop of angels doth accompany, whom Christ cometh forth to meet, be more grieved if we do longer dwell in this tabernacle of death; because, as long as we remain here, we are pilgrims from God."
Taylor:
And this was the sense of the whole church; for after death there is no change of state before the general trial: no passing from pain to rest in the state of separation, and therefore either there are no purgatory-pains; or if there be, there is no ease of them before the day of judgment, and the prayers and masses of the church cannot give remedy to one poor soul; and this must of necessity be confessed by the Roman doctors, or else they must shew that ever any one catholic father did teach, that after death, and before the day of judgment, any souls are translated into a state of bliss out of a state of pain: that is, that from purgatory they go to heaven before the day of judgment. He that can shew this, will teach me what I have not yet learned; but he that cannot shew it, must not pretend, that the Roman doctrine of purgatory was ever known to the ancient fathers of the church.
As a final example of Ussher and Taylor adhering to a shared Reformation understanding, we turn to images. Both, in classic Reformed fashion, pointed to the Second Commandment as definitively prohibiting for the Church the adoration of images, and critiqued Counter-Reformation interpretation of that Commandment.
Ussher:
Against this use, or rather horrible abuse, of images, to what purpose should we heap up any testimonies of holy Scripture, if the words of the second commandment, uttered by God's own mouth with thundering and lightning upon Mount Sinai, may not be heard? Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, nor the likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them. Which thunderclap from heaven the guides of the Romish Church discerning to threaten sore that fearful idolatry which daily they commit, thought fit in wisdom first to conceal the knowledge of this from the people, by excluding those words out of the Decalogue that went abroad for common use, under pretence, forsooth, of including it in the first commandment; and then afterwards to put this conceit into men's heads, that this first commandment was so far from condemning the veneration of images, that it commanded the same, and condemned the contrary neglect thereof.
Taylor:
The matter of worshipping images looks so ill, so like idolatry, so like the forbidden practices of the heathens, that it was infinitely reasonable, that if it were the practice and doctrine of the primitive church, the primitive priests and bishops should at least have considered, and stated the question how far, and in what sense, it was lawful, and with what intention, and in what degrees, and with what caution and distinctions, this might lawfully be done; particularly when they preached, and wrote commentaries and explications upon the decalogue; especially since there was at least so great a semblance of opposition and contradiction between the commandment and any such practice ... in the next place I consider, that the second commandment is so plain, so easy, so peremptory, against all the making and worshipping any image or likeness of any thing, that besides that every man naturally would understand all such to be forbidden, it is so expressed, that upon supposition that God did intend to forbid it wholly, it could not more plainly have been expressed. For the prohibition is absolute and universal, and therefore of all particulars; and there is no word or sign, by the virtue of which it can, with any probability, be pretended that any one of any kind is excepted. Now then to this when the church of Rome pretends to answer, they overdo it, and make the matter the more suspicious.
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