'A more excellent ministry': Jeremy Taylor and the collect of the Third Sunday in Advent
Words from Jeremy Taylor in The Great Exemplar (1649), Part I Ad. Section VIII 'Considerations upon the Preaching of John the Baptist', offer a meditation on the words of the collect of the Third Sunday in Advent and of the Advent Ember Week. As with the collect, Taylor invokes the public ministry of the Baptist as an example for ordained ministers. What is more, just as the Baptist's public ministry - rather than his previous life of solitude - is understood by the four Evangelists' to be the fulfilment of Isaiah's prophecy, so Taylor emphasises that this public ministry in the congregation is "a more excellent ministry" than the life of solitude:
And yet after all these excellencies [of the Baptist's solitude in the wilderness], the Spirit of God called the Baptist forth to a more excellent ministry: for in solitude pious persons might go to heaven by the way of prayers and devotion, but in society they might go to heaven by the way of mercy and charity and dispensations to others. In solitude there are fewer occasions of vices, but there is also the exercise of fewer virtues; and the temptations, though they be not from many objects, yet are in some circumstances more dangerous; not only because the worst of evils, spiritual pride, does seldom miss to creep upon those goodly oaks, like ivy, and suck their heart out; and a great mortifier, without some complacencies in himself, or affectations or opinions, or something of singularity, is almost as unusual as virgin purity and unstained thoughts in the Bordelli; (St. Jerome had tried it, and found it so by experience, and he it was that said so;) but also because whatsoever temptation does invade such retired persons, they have privacies enough to act it in, and no eyes and we know by experience, that a witness of our conversation is a great restraint to the inordination of our actions. Men seek out darknesses and secrecies to commit a sin: and "the evil that no man sees, no man reproves; and that makes the temptation bold and confident, and the iniquity easy and ready." So that as they have not so many tempters as they have abroad, so neither have they so many restraints: their vices are not so many, but they are more dangerous in themselves, and to the world safe and opportune. And as they communicate less with the world, so they do less charity and fewer offices of mercy. No sermons there but when solitude is made popular, and the city removes into the wilderness; no comforts of a public religion, or visible remonstrances of the communion of saints; and of all the kinds of spiritual mercy, only one can there properly be exercised, and of the corporal none at all. And this is true in lives and in institutions of less retirement, in proportion to the degree of the solitude. And therefore church story reports of divers very holy persons, who left their wildernesses and sweetnesses of devotion in their retirement to serve God in public, by the ways of charity and exterior offices. Thus St. Antony and Acepsamas came forth to encourage the fainting people to contend to death for the crown of martyrdom; and Aphraates, in the time of Valens the Arian emperor, came abroad to assist the church in the suppressing the flames kindled by the Arian faction. And upon this ground they that are the greatest admirers of eremitical life, call the episcopal function the state of perfection, and a degree of ministerial and honorary excellency beyond the pieties and contemplations of solitude, because of the advantages of gaining souls, and religious conversation, and going to God by doing good to others.
Comments
Post a Comment