Daily Inspiration Quote by Jeremy Taylor

Jeremy Taylor is quietly picking a fight with his own profession. In a century when English Christianity was being torn apart by doctrinal trench warfare - Laudian ceremony versus Puritan rigor, crown versus parliament, sermons as political weapons - he offers a disarming criterion for what counts as "best". Not the cleanest system, not the sharpest distinctions, not the most citation-heavy argument. A life.

The phrase works because it demotes "knowledge" without sneering at learning. Taylor isn't anti-intellectual; he's anti-vanity. "Divine knowledge" can mean the catalog of correct propositions: the kind of theology that wins debates, sorts heretics, and flatters the mind. In the post-Reformation world, that kind of expertise often functioned like a badge - proof you belonged to the right camp and could punish the wrong one. Taylor's "rather" is a scalpel: he's separating the pursuit of God from the performance of being right about God.

"Divine life" signals something older and more dangerous: sanctity as evidence, ethics as argument, spiritual practice as the real epistemology. The subtext is pastoral and political at once. If holiness outranks doctrinal micromanagement, then the anxious machinery of confessional policing looks less like fidelity and more like ego. Taylor, an Anglican cleric who lived through civil war and religious repression, is pressing for a Christianity that can't be reduced to slogans or enforced by the state.

The line lands because it reverses the expected hierarchy. Knowledge feels like mastery; life requires surrender. Taylor is betting that the divine is best approached not as an object to be possessed, but as a reality to be inhabited.