'Every man must judge of his own case': reading Taylor's 'The Worthy Communicant' in Lent

Today we conclude our Lenten readings from Jeremy Taylor's The Worthy Communicant (1667). We do so with Taylor again emphasising both the significance and effectiveness of the duty of self-examination before receiving the holy Sacrament. Our self-examination is to be thorough and searching. It is the very fact that this is, for Taylor, the fundamental discipline regarding the Sacrament which means that we cannot judge others who come to the Sacrament, for we are called to not judge others but only ourselves, instead exercising grace and mercy to others:

I do not say that persons unprepared may come, for they ought not; and if they do, they die for it: but I say, if they will come, it is at their peril, and to no man's prejudice, but their own, if they be plainly and severely admonished of their duty and their danger; and, therefore, that every man must judge of his own case, with very great severity and fear, even then when the guides of souls must judge with more gentleness, and an easier charity; when we must suspect our little faults to be worse than they seem, and our negligences more inexcusable, and fear a sin when there is none, and are ready to accuse ourselves for every indiscretion, and think no repentance great enough for the foulness of our sins: at the same time, when we judge for others, we ought to esteem their certain good things better than they do, and their certain evils less, and their disputable good things certain, and their uncertain evils none at all, or very excusable. 

This is also the case with "the curate", who is chiefly to minister mercy and who has no means of examining the heart. The minister's role, as indicated in the above extract, is to ensure that communicants are "severely admonished of their duty" regarding self-examination. What the minister cannot do - not least by reason of their vocation to administer mercy - is replace the role of self-examination:

And, therefore, it was to very great purpose, that the apostle gave command, that "every man should examine himself, and so let him eat;" that is, let it be done as it may be done thoroughly; let him do it whose case it is, and who is most concerned that it be done well; let it be done so, that it may not be allayed and lessened by the judgment of charity; and, therefore, let a man do it himself. For when the curate comes to do it, he cannot do it well, unless he do it with mercy; for he must make abatements, which the sinner's case does not often need in order to his reconciliation and returns to God, where severity is much better than gentle sentences. But the minister of religion must receive, in some cases, such persons, who ought not to come, and who should abstain, when themselves give righteous judgment upon themselves.

As a consequence of this, the minister is not - apart from cases of "public conviction or notoriety", of which "orderly, limited, and legal" powers "the bishops are the prime and immediate subjects, partly under Christ and partly under kings" - to exclude from the holy Sacrament those "supposed unworthy to communicate". Again, this is so because the minister cannot search the heart as in the case of self-examination:

Every man is to be presumed fit, that is not known to be unfit; and, he that is not a public criminal, is not to be supposed unworthy to communicate. It may be, he is; but that himself only knows, and he can only take care; but no man is to be prejudiced by imperfect and disputable principles, "by conjectures, and other men's measures, by the rules of sects, and separate communities:" and if a man may belong to God, and himself not know it, he may do so, when his curate knows it not.

If it is argued that this does not adequately fence the Table, Taylor provides a powerful response. The visible Sacraments are ministered to the visible Church, whereas "the kingdom of grace is within us": the character of the invisible Church cannot be applied to the ministrations of the visible Church. Setting up a discipline, administered by the presbyter in the parish, to prevent the possibility of Sacraments being administered to the unworthy necessarily institutes a tyranny over souls:

If it be permitted to the discretion of the parish-priest, you erect a gibbet and a rack, by which he shall be enabled to torment any man, and you give him power to slander or reproach all his neighbours: if you go about to give him measures, you shall never do it wisely or piously; for no rules can be sufficient to convince any proud man: and if you make the parish-curate judge of these rules, you had as good leave it to his discretion; for he will use them as he please: and, after all, you shall never have all the people good; and if not, you shall certainly have them hypocrites; and, therefore, it cannot be avoided, but unfit persons will be admitted: for since the kingdom of grace is within us, and God's chosen ones are his secret ones, and he only knows who are his, it will be strange that visible sacraments should be given only to an invisible society: and after all, if to communicate evil men be unavoidable, it cannot be unlawful.

In his account of the ministry of the "curate of souls" in the approach to the holy Sacrament, Taylor reflects the understanding found in the first Exhortation in the Prayer Book Holy Communion. Firstly, the curate sets out the duty of self-examination, in the context of the spiritual dangers of unworthy reception:

my duty is to exhort you in the mean season to consider the dignity of that holy mystery, and the great peril of the unworthy receiving thereof; and so to search and examine your own consciences, and that not lightly, and after the manner of dissemblers with God: but so that ye may come holy and clean to such a heavenly Feast, in the marriage-garment required by God in holy Scripture, and be received as worthy partakers of that holy Table.

The way and means thereto is; First, to examine your lives and conversations by the rule of God's commandments; and whereinsoever ye shall perceive yourselves to have offended, either by will, word, or deed, there to bewail your own sinfulness, and to confess yourselves to Almighty God, with full purpose of amendment of life.

Secondly, the curate ministers mercy to those whose consciences need to be quietened. Crucially, as Taylor emphasised, this ministry of the curate is not intended to be a replacement of or alternative to self-examination. Here the curate has no pretensions to examine the heart of another but, rather, to provide assurance of God's forgiveness:

And because it is requisite, that no man should come to the holy Communion, but with a full trust in God's mercy, and with a quiet conscience; therefore if there be any of you, who by this means cannot quiet his own conscience herein, but requireth further comfort or counsel, let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned Minister of God's Word, and open his grief; that by the ministry of God's holy Word he may receive the benefit of absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his conscience, and avoiding of all scruple and doubtfulness.

In The Great Exemplar, Taylor also laid out how the presbyter's duty of exhortation before the Sacrament was they key expression of their ministry regarding the approach to the Sacrament:

The surest way, most agreeable to the precedents of Scripture and the analogy of the gospel, is, that by the word of their proper ministry all sinners should be separate from the holy communion; that is, threatened by the words of God with damnation, and fearful temporal dangers, if themselves, knowing an unrepented sin, and a remanent affection to sin to be within them, shall dare to profane that body and blood of our Lord by so impure an address. The evil is to themselves; and if the ministers declare this powerfully, they are acquitted.

Even in matters of open and notorious sin, outside "solemnities of law", the presbyter's ministry, Taylor insists, is not that of ecclesiastical judge but of pastor and preacher:

When the matter is public, evident, and notorious, the man is to be admonished of his danger by the minister, but not by him to be forced from it: for the power of the minister of holv things is but the power of a preacher and a counsellor, of a physician and a guide: it hath in it no coercion or violence, but what is indulged to it by human laws and by consent, which may vary as its principle.

As for "solemnities of law" excluding from the Table, this - as in The Worthy Communicant - is to be exercised by bishops who, precisely because they stand apart from the situation and circumstances, and are not subject to the communal pressures experienced by a presbyter, are more likely to act wisely and prudently:

when the power of separation and interdiction is only in some more eminent and authorized persons, who take public cognizance of causes by solemnities of law, and exercise their power but in some rare instances, and then also for the public interest, in which, although they may be deceived, yet they are the most competent and likely judges; much of the inconvenience, which might otherwise follow, is avoided. 

This also protects the laity against the spiritual tyranny which particularly repulsed Taylor:

But it is not to be endured that single presbyters should upon vain pretences erect so high a tribunal

and tyranny over consciences.

It is, perhaps, an appropriate way to draw these Lenten readings from The Worthy Communicant to a close. Taylor's robust insistence on a searching self-examination before partaking of the holy Sacrament was the means of ensuring that "every man must judge of his own case", rather than handing power to presbyters to fence the Table, leading to a "tyranny over consciences". Nor could such a tyranny prepare the heart, known to God alone, for the Sacrament. It is the duty of self-examination - almost entirely rejected by the spirituality of the Parish Communion movement - which alone can be the means to prepare us to partake of the Sacrament. As Taylor declared in the Introduction to this work:

But although the things of this world are common to good and bad, yet sacraments and spiritual joys, the food of the soul, and the blessing of Christ, are the peculiar right of saints; and the rites of our religion are to be handled by the measures of religion, and the things of God by the rules of the Spirit: and the sacraments are mysteries, and to be handled by mystic persons, and to be received by saints; and, therefore, whoever will partake of God's secrets, must first look into his own; he must pare off whatsoever is amiss, and not without holiness approach to the holiest of all holies, nor eat of this sacrifice with a defiled head, nor come to this feast without a nuptial garment, nor take this remedy without a just preparative.