Faith & Spirit Quote by Jeremy Taylor

Mystery is doing heavy theological labor here, less as incense-and-candles ambience than as an argument about scale. Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century Anglican cleric writing in an England racked by civil war, sectarian purges, and the Puritan drive to strip Christianity down to what could be plainly warranted by text and reason, is drawing a boundary line. If your religion is fully explainable, fully domesticated into a set of propositions any competent mind can master, then whatever you are worshipping is not God but a manageable substitute: ethics, ideology, social cohesion, the self.

The line also carries a strategic warning to Taylor's own side. Anglicanism, especially in its more Laudian, sacramental mood, insisted that God is encountered not only through interpretation but through liturgy, symbol, and an irreducible excess of meaning. Taylor is defending that posture against the era's confidence in transparency: the fantasy that the divine can be rendered administratively clear, like a statute.

Subtext: a religion that cannot tolerate mystery tends to compensate with certainty. It will police, systematize, and persecute because it needs closure. Taylor flips the script by treating uncertainty not as weakness but as a mark of contact with the infinite. Mystery becomes a kind of humility test: if the faith fits neatly inside the human intellect, it is likely just the human intellect talking to itself.