Collection

The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying

Jeremy Taylor

Written in Welsh exile after the royalist defeat, while its author mourned wife, patrons, and a whole ecclesiastical world, this 1651 manual takes up the ancient discipline of preparing for a good death and turns it into something at once pastoral and lyrical. Taylor moves from long meditation on human frailty — lives figured as bubbles, as summer flowers, as the dust of a broken statue — into practical rules for the daily rehearsal of dying, then into the conduct of sickness itself and the offices of the priest at the bedside. Scripture, patristic story, classical anecdote, and Jacobean cadence are braided together so that doctrine keeps arriving through image. What emerges is a Christian art of dying grounded in the ordinary means of grace that have sustained the believer all along.