I can make although they fall short of what your worth does most reasonably challenge, and can proceed but towards you with forward desires and distant approaches, yet I am desirous to believe that those who walk between us may receive assistances from this intercourse; and the following papers may be auxiliary to the enkindling of their piety, as to the confirming and establishing yours. For although the great prudence of your most noble lord, and the modesties of your own temperate and sweeter dispositions, become the great endearments of virtue to you; yet because it is necessary that you make religion the business of your life, I thought it not an impertinent application to express my thankfulness to your honour by that which may best become my duty and my gratitude, because it may do you the greatest service. Madam, I must beg your pardon that I have opened the sanctuary of your retired virtues; but I was obliged to publish the endearments and favours of your noble lord and yourself towards me and my relatives: for as your hands are so clasped that one ring is the ligature of them both; so I have found emanations from that conjuncture of hands with a consent so forward and apt, that nothing can satisfy for my obligations but by being in the greatest eminency of thankfulness and humility of person, MADAM, your honour's most obliged and most humble servant, JER. TAYLOR. TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE AND VIRTUOUS LADY, THE LADY ALICE", COUNTESS OF CARBERY. : MADAM, By the divine providence which disposes all things wisely and charitably, you are in the affections of your noblest lord successor to a very dear and most excellent person, and designed to fill up those offices of piety to her dear pledges, which the haste which God made to glorify and secure her would not permit her to finish. I have much ado to refrain from telling great stories of her wisdom, piety, judgment, sweetness, and religion; but that it would renew the wound, and make our sins bleed afresh at the memory of that dear saint and we hope that much of the storm of the divine anger is over, because He hath repaired the breach by sending you to go on upon her account, and to give countenance and establishment to all those graces which were warranted and derived from her example. Madam, the nobleness of your family, your education, and your excellent principles, your fair dispositions, and affable comportment, have not only made all your servants confident of your worthiness and great virtues, but have disposed you so highly and necessarily towards an active and a zealous religion, that we expect it should grow to the height of a great example; that you may draw others a [This dedication was added in the third edition; the former countess of Car bery having died meantime, and the lady Alice Egerton succeeded in her room.] : after you, as the eye follows the light, in all the angles of its retirement, or open stages of its publication. In order to this, I have chosen your honour into a new relation, and have endeared you to this instrument of piety; that if you will please to do it countenance, and employ it in your counsels and pious offices, it may minister to your appetites of religion; which as they are already fair and prosperous, so they may swell up to a vastness large enough to entertain all the secrets and pleasures of religion that so you may add to the blessings and prosperities which already dwell in that family where you are now fixed, new title to more, upon the stock of all those promises which have secured and entailed felicities upon such persons who have no vanities, but very many virtues. Madam, I could not do you any service but by doing myself this honour, to adorn my book with this fairest title and inscription of your name. observe, but cannot blame, my ambition; so long as it is instanced in a religious service, and means nothing but this, that I may signify how much I honour that person who is designed to bring new blessings to that family, which is so honourable in itself, and for so many reasons dear to me. Madam, upon that account, besides the stock of your own worthiness, I am your honour's most humble You may and obedient servant, JER. TAYLOR. THE HISTORY OF THE LIFE AND DEATH OF THE HOLY JESUS. PART III. BEGINNING AT THE SECOND YEAR OF HIS PREACHING UNTIL HIS ASCENSION. SECTION XIII. Of the second year of the preaching of Jesus. 1. WHEN the first year of Jesus, the year of peace and undisturbed preaching, was expired, "there was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalema." This feast was the second passover He kept after He began to preach; not the feast of pentecost, or tabernacles, both which were past before Jesus came last from Judea: whither when He was now come, He finds an "impotent person lying at the pool of Bethesda, waiting till the angel should move the waters, after which whosoever first stepped in was cured of his infirmity." The poor man had waited thirty-eight years, and still was prevented by some other of the hospital that needed a physician. But Jesus seeing him had pity on him, cured him, and bade him "take up his bed and walk." This cure happened to be wrought 66 upon the sabbath," for which the Jews were so moved with indignation, that they "thought to slay Him" and their anger was enraged by His calling Himself "the Son of God," and "making Himself equal with God." 2. Upon occasion of this offence, which they snatched at before it was ministered, Jesus discourses upon His mission and derivation of His authority from the Father; of the union between them, and the excellent communications of power, participation of dignity, delegation of judicature, reciprocations and reflections of honour from the Father to the Son, and back again to the Father. He preaches of life and salvation to them that believe in Him; prophesies of the resurrection of the dead by the efficacy of the voice of the Son of God; speaks of the day of judgment, the differing conditions after, a John v. 1 sqq. b Iren. [Adv. hær., lib. ii. cap. 22. § 3. p. 147.] John v. 19, &c. of salvation and damnation respectively; confirms His words and mission by the testimony of John the baptist, of Moses, and the other scriptures, and of God himself. And still the scandal rises higher for "in the second sabbathd after the first," that is, in the first day of unleavened bread, which happened the next day after the weekly sabbath, the disciples of Jesus pull ripe ears of corn, rub them in their hands, and eat them, to satisfy their hunger; for which He offered satisfaction to their scruples, convincing them, that works of necessity are to be permitted, even to the breach of a positive temporary constitution; and that works of mercy are the best serving of God upon any day whatsoever, or any part of the day, that is vacant to other offices, and proper for a religious festival. 3. But when neither reason nor religion would give them satisfaction, but that they went about to kill Him, He withdrew Himself from Jerusalem, and returned to Galilee; whither the scribes and pharisees followed Him, observing His actions, and whether or not He would prosecute that which they called profanation of their sabbath, by doing acts of mercy upon that day. He still did so for entering into one of the synagogues of Galilee upon the sabbath, Jesus saw a man (whom St. Hierome reports to have been a mason) coming to Tyre, and complaining that his hand was withered', and desiring help of Him, that he might again be restored to the use of his hands, lest he should be compelled with misery and shame to beg his bread. Jesus restored his hand as whole as the other, in the midst of all those spies and enemies. Upon which act being confirmed in their malice, the pharisees went forth and joined with the herodians (a sect of people who said Herod was the Messias, because by the decree of the Roman senate, when the sceptre departed from Judah, he was declared kings) and both together took counsel how they might kill Him. 4. Jesus therefore departed again to the sea coast, and His companies increased as His fame; for He was now followed by new "multitudes from Galilee, from Judea, from Jerusalem, from Idumea, from beyond Jordan, from about Tyre and Sidon;" who hearing the report of His miraculous power to cure all diseases by the word of His mouth, or the touch of His hand, or the handling His garment, came with their ambulatory hospital of sick, and their possessed; and they pressed on Him but to touch Him, and were all immediately cured: the devils confessing publicly that He was "the Son of God," till they were upon all such occasions restrained, and compelled to silence. d Suidas, voc. σáßßatov, [col. 3238.] Evangel. Naz. quod S. Hieron, ex Hebr. in Græcum transtulit. [in Matt. xii. 10. tom. iv. par. i. col. 47.] 1 “Ημισύ μου τέθνηκε, τὸ δὲ ἥμισυ λιμὸς ἐλέγχει. Σωσόν μου, βασιλεῦ, μουσικὸν ἡμίτομον. - [Antholog. Brunck., tom. ii. p. 261.] Sic Tertullianus [De præscr. hær. § 45. p. 219 B.] Epiphanius [Adv. hær. xx. lib. i. tom. i. p. 45.] Chrysostomus et Theophylactus [In Marc. iii. 6. p. 204.] et Hieron. Dialog. advers. Lucif. [tom. iv. par. ii. col. 304.] uno ore affirmant. |