Faith & Spirit Quote by Jeremy Taylor

“Meditation” here isn’t a wellness hack or a private productivity ritual; it’s speech. Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century Anglican cleric writing in a century of civil war, sectarian suspicion, and contested religious authority, frames inward devotion as its own kind of rhetoric. The line flatters the practice by giving it a job usually reserved for sermons and scripture: it becomes the soul’s “tongue,” the spirit’s “language.” In other words, prayerful contemplation isn’t silent at all. It is communication on the only channel that matters when public words are compromised, censored, or politically dangerous.

Taylor’s intent is pastoral and persuasive. He’s coaching his audience toward a discipline that can’t be audited by bishops or parliaments. The subtext is that outward piety is unreliable theater; true religion happens in the interior, where conscience has to do the talking. By choosing bodily metaphors (“tongue,” “language”), he also makes the invisible feel concrete. Meditation is not a vague mood but an organ of articulation, a practiced fluency. You don’t merely have feelings about God; you learn to speak Godward.

There’s also a quiet hierarchy embedded in the phrasing. If meditation is the spirit’s native language, then a life without it is, implicitly, inarticulate - spiritually mute, stuck in borrowed phrases. Taylor turns contemplation into literacy: a mark of seriousness, not mysticism, and a way to stabilize faith when the public world is loud, unreliable, and armed.