Jeremy Taylor: Holy Living

It is a matter of high importance in all days, and especially in days of popular anxiety like our own, to keep before us the examples of minds distinguished in the former trials of our country. No theory of virtue is equal in value to its practice embodied in a wise, pure, and manly understanding. History, the biography of nations, is too vast, abstract, and simple, for the guidance of the individual. Its events, like the stars in their courses, large and luminous, moving at a height above the reach of man, and influenced by powers and impulses which perplex his science, may excite the wonder or instruct the wisdom of the philosopher, but the school of mankind is man. To discover the source alike of his energies and errors, we must have before our eyes the mechanism of the human frame.

The world is but a perpetual recurrence. The scenes of the great theater shift continually, but the same characters move across the stage. The story of the drama may be more sullen, or more splendid, but while Providence is the guide, and man the agent, the moral will be unchanged. It is thus a subject of more than curiosity, to determine how generous and lofty spirits have acted in the emergencies of other times; with what magnanimity they sustained misfortune, or with what vigour they repelled injustice; with what purity they withstood temptation, or with what piety they submitted their wrongs to the hand of Heave. If, in days like ours, the wider knowledge of human right, itself only the offspring of the wider knowledge of religion, renders persecution less perilous, yet temptation will always exist. The distinctions of the world will always be at the service of the world. There has been in every age a Babylon, and men have had the alternative of worshipping its golden idol, or paying the penalty of their faith in obscurity and exclusion. It is then that the man who is not resolved to degrade himself, should solicit new strength in the communion of those who have fought the good fight and have gained the crown; that the patriot should study the shape and countenance of public virtue, as in a gallery of the illustrious dead, and feel the littleness of all fame that gravitates to faction; that, above all, the Christian, surrounding himself with their recollections, and shutting out, as with the curtains of the sanctuary, the heated passions and petulant caprices of the time,…