Note 424 — Chapter XIII

I do not attempt to vindicate this great man against the charge of inconsistency. One side of a subject was everything to him while he gazed at it. He had no faculty for harmonizing apparently opposite truths, and was apt, as ardent men are, to fall into errors, from which his clearly expressed opinion on certain points ought to have saved him. Mr. Hallam (Literature of Europe, iii. 112), in whose severe judgment of Taylor's inconsistency I cannot coincide, thinks that one inconsistent chapter, (the seventeenth) was interpolated after the rest of the treatise was complete. This is possible, but it is also possible that Taylor when first writing his book might suddenly swing from one side to the other, and then come round again. It has been said that Taylor forgot his liberality when he became a bishop. His biographer, Bishop Heber, attempts to meet this charge.—Works, i. 30. It may be added, that the Dissuasive from Popery, published in 1664, proceeds on the same principles as the Liberty of Prophesying. See Dissuasive, part ii. book i.—Works, x. 383.

How Taylor's work was regarded by a Royalist and an Episcopalian may be seen in Mrs. Sadleir's Letter to Roger Williams. "I have also read Taylor's book of the Liberty of Prophesying, though it please not me, yet I am sure it does you, or else I know you would not have wrote to me to have read it. I say, it and you would make a good fire. But have you seen his 'Divine Institution of the Office Ministerial?'" Life of Roger Williams, 99. Mrs. Sadleir was daughter of Sir Edward Coke. A writer in the Ecclesiastic, April, 1853, p. 179, remarks: "Whatever Taylor may have been thought of since, certainly his contemporaries amongst the Church party had no very high opinion of him."