1. During the period immediately following our Lord's Ascension, or the so called Apostolic age, all the gifts of the Spirit, and of course the gift of prayer, as graces bestowed, not merely or principally for the benefit of the Apostles and their contemporaries, but likewise and eminently for the advantage of all after-ages, and as means of establishing the foundations of Christianity, differed in kind, degree, mode, and object, from those ordinary graces promised to all true believers of all times; and possessed a character of extraordinary partaking of the nature of miracles, to which no believer under the present and regular dispensations of the Spirit can make pretence without folly and presumption.
  2. Yet it is certain that even the first miraculous gifts and graces bestowed on the Apostles themselves supervened on, but did not supersede, their natural faculties and acquired knowledge, nor enable them to dispense with the ordinary means and instruments of cultivating the one, and applying the other, by study, reading, past experience, and whatever else Providence has appointed for all men as the conditions and efficients of moral and intellectual progression. The capabilities of deliberating, selecting, and aptly disposing of our thoughts and works are God's good gifts to man, which the superadded graces of the Spirit, vouchsafed to Christians, work on and with, call forth and perfect. Therefore deliberation, selection, and method become duties, inasmuch as they are the bases and recipients of the Spirit, even as the polished crystal is of the light. But if the Prophets and Apostles did not (as Taylor demonstrates that they did not) find in miraculous aids any such infusions of light as precluded or rendered superfluous the exertion of their natural faculties and personal attainments, then a fortiori not the possessors or legatees of the ordinary graces bequeathed by Christ to his Church as the usufructuary property of all its members; and he who wilfully lays aside all premeditation, selection, and ordonnance, that he may enter unprepared on the highest and most awful function of the soul, — that of public prayer, — is guilty of no less indecency and irreverence than if, having to present a petition as the representative of a community before the throne, he purposely put off his seemly garments in order to enter into the presence of the monarch naked or in rags: and expects no less an absurdity than to become a passive automaton, in which the Holy Spirit is to play the ventriloquist.
  3. If, then, each congregation is to receive a prepared form of prayer from its head or minister, why not rather from the collective wisdom of the Church represented in the assembled heads and spiritual Fathers?
  4. This is admitted by implication by the Westminster Assembly. But they are not contented with the existing form, and therefore substitute for it a Directory as the fruits of their meditations and counsels. The whole question, then, is now reduced to the comparative merits and fitness of the Directory and the book of Common Prayer; and how complete the victory of the latter, how glaring the defects, how many the deficiencies, of the former, Jeremy Taylor evinces unanswerably.

Such is the substance of this Tract. What the author proposed to prove he has satisfactorily proved.

The faults of the work are:

  1. The intermixture of weak and strong arguments, and the frequent interruption of the stream of his logic by doubtful, trifling, and impolitic interruptions; arguments resting in premisses denied by the antagonists, and yet taken for granted; in short, appendages that cumber, accessions that subtract, and confirmations that weaken: —
  2. That he commences with a proper division of the subject into two distinct branches, that is, extempore prayer as opposed to set forms, and, The Directory, as prescribing a form opposed to the existing Liturgy; but that in the sequel he blends and confuses and intermingles one with the other, and presses most and most frequently on the first point, which a vast majority of the party he is opposing had disowned and reprobated no less than himself, and which, though easiest to confute, scarcely required confutation.

[Index p. 2]

[Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying, with its Just Limits and Temper]

Epistle Dedicatory, p. cccciii.

And first I answer, that whatsoever is against the foundation of faith is out of the limits of my question, and does not pretend to compliance or toleration.

But as all truths hang together, what error is there which may not be proved to be against the foundation of faith? An inquisitor might make the same code of toleration, and in the next moment light the faggots around a man who had denied the infallibility of Pope and Council.