LENT · 19 MARCH & TRINITY · 13 AUGUST Bishops & Confessors · The Pastoral Tradition
Thomas Ken & Jeremy Taylor
Bishops & Confessors · The Pastoral Tradition · d. 1667 & 1711
Ken — KEN · Non-juror — non-JOO-rer · Longleat — LONG-leet · Taylor — TAY-ler · Dromore — droh-MOR · Doxology — dok-SOL-oh-jee
O God, who by thy servants Thomas and Jeremy didst teach thy Church how to live and how to die in thy presence; Grant that we may take up the daily rule they commend, offer thee the morning praise they shaped, and meet whatever dying comes to us with the patience and hope they set before us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
If Hooker and Andrewes built the intellectual and devotional architecture of the Anglican tradition, and Donne and Herbert inhabited it as poets and priests, then Thomas Ken (KEN) and Jeremy Taylor (TAY-ler) furnished it for daily use — the two great pastoral theologians of the seventeenth-century Church who between them produced the most practical and the most beautiful devotional writing the Anglican tradition has ever offered to the ordinary Christian trying to live the Christian life in the ordinary world. Ken gave the Church its morning and evening hymns; Taylor gave it its most profound account of how to live and die as a Christian. Their feast days are at opposite ends of the year — Ken on 19 March in Lent, Taylor on 13 August in Trinity — and the distance between them is the distance between the daily discipline of morning prayer and the ultimate test of everything that discipline has prepared.
Thomas Ken was Bishop of Bath and Wells, a Non-juror (non-JOO-rer) — one of the bishops who refused to take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary after the Glorious Revolution, on the grounds that they had already sworn allegiance to James II and could not conscientiously swear to his supplanter — and as a consequence was deprived of his see and spent the last twenty-one years of his life in retirement at Longleat (LONG-leet), the house of his friend Lord Weymouth, living in poverty and prayer. He is remembered chiefly for the doxology — Praise God from whom all blessings flow — which he wrote as the final verse of his Morning Hymn and Evening Hymn for the scholars of Winchester College in 1674, and which has been sung by more Christians in more contexts than almost any other verse in the English language. The Morning Hymn begins Awake, my soul, and with the sun thy daily stage of duty run — it is the hymn of the ordinary Christian day, the daily offering of the waking self to God before the world’s noise begins. Ken himself rose each morning at three o’clock to pray and sing, and his Non-juring witness — his refusal to compromise his oath for comfort or position — is itself a kind of daily martyrdom, the persistent offering of principle over pragmatism that cost him everything the world could offer and gave him a reputation for holiness that outlasted all his contemporaries.
Jeremy Taylor was the chaplain of Charles I during the Civil War, was imprisoned three times by the Parliamentary forces, lost everything in the wars, and wrote his two great works — The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651) — in poverty and obscurity, for the families of Royalist gentry who had also lost everything and needed to know how to keep the faith without churches, without clergy, without the familiar structures of the established order. Holy Living is a complete programme of Christian life: the management of time, the examination of conscience, prayer, fasting, the ordering of the Christian household, the practice of the virtues, the reception of the sacraments — all set out with a pastoral precision and a prose style of such sustained beauty that Coleridge called it the most eloquent book in the English language after the King James Bible. Holy Dying is its companion: how to prepare for death, how to visit the dying, how to pray in extremity, how to hold the faith when everything that supports it has been taken away. Taylor became Bishop of Dromore (droh-MOR) in Ireland at the Restoration, but his pastoral masterpieces had already been written, and they belong to the years of dispossession rather than the years of preferment, as the greatest things usually do.
Ken and Taylor between them cover the full range of the Anglican pastoral tradition: the daily discipline of morning prayer and the final discipline of holy dying, the doxology sung at the beginning of every day and the commendation of the soul at its ending. The Lauds service in this archive opens with Ken’s tradition — the morning discipline of praise and psalmody, the offering of the waking self — and if there were a corresponding Compline service it would close with Taylor’s — the examination of the dying day, the commendation of the night. Between them they hold the whole daily arc of the Christian life: from the moment of waking to the moment of sleeping, from the first Alleluia to the last Amen, the tradition insists that every hour is God’s and can be offered to God, and that the offering, made daily, in small things as in great, is what the Christian life consists of. Thomas Ken knew this when he rose at three in the morning to pray, and Jeremy Taylor knew it when he wrote for people who had nothing left but their faith and their daily life and the conviction that both were sufficient.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant Thomas didst give to thy Church a hymn for every morning and a doxology for every ending, and by thy servant Jeremy didst show how the whole of daily life, from its beginning to its close, may be lived as an act of worship; Grant that we may take up the daily rule they commend, offer thee the morning praise they shaped, and meet whatever dying comes to us with the patience and hope they set before us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.