During the English civil war the Episcopalian theologian Jeremy Taylor earned wide respect for the power and eloquence of his preaching and devotional writing. His theological writings were more controversial, and he gained a certain opprobrium--even from his own party, on some occasions--for being too tolerant. While his theological works are now studied only by specialists, and his sermons, despite the acknowledged effectiveness of the prose style, are seldom looked at even by rhetoricians, he remains a living writer in his devotional works. In The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (1650) and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651) he still strikes a chord of sympathy with the devout for his meditation on the human condition, and in these works the effectiveness of his loose prose style still stirs the admiration of students of rhetoric. Indeed, Ralph Waldo Emerson called him the "Shakespeare of English Divines."

The third...