Jeremy Taylor

Feast of Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down & Connor, Priest, Teacher, 1667 Commemoration of Florence Nightingale, Social Reformer, 1910 Commemoration read more

Feast of Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down & Connor, Priest, Teacher, 1667 Commemoration of Florence Nightingale, Social Reformer, 1910 Commemoration of Octavia Hill, Worker for the Poor, 1912 The law of nature is nothing but the law of God given to mankind for the conservation of his nature and the promotion of his perfective end: a law of which a man sees a reason and feels a necessity.

A good wife is heaven's last, best gift to man, - his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels; read more

A good wife is heaven's last, best gift to man, - his gem of many virtues, his casket of jewels; her voice is sweet music, her smiles his brightest day, her kiss the guardian of his innocence, her arms the pale of his safety...

Thus Nero went up and down Greece and challenged the fiddlers at
their trade. Aeropus, a Macedonian, made lanterns, read more

Thus Nero went up and down Greece and challenged the fiddlers at
their trade. Aeropus, a Macedonian, made lanterns, Harcatius,
the king of Parthia, was a mole-catcher; and Biantes, the Lydian,
filed needles.

Celibacy, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined read more

Celibacy, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity; but marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house, and gathers sweetness from every flower, and labors and unites

Love is the greatest thing that God can give us; for Himself is love: and it is the greatest thing read more

Love is the greatest thing that God can give us; for Himself is love: and it is the greatest thing we can give to God; for it will also give ourselves, and carry with it all that is ours. The apostle calls it the band of perfection; it is the old, and it is the new, and it is the great commandment, and it is all the commandments; for it is the fulfilling of the Law. It does the work of all the graces without any instrument but its own immediate virtue. For as the love of sin makes a man sin against all his own reason, and all the discourses of wisdom, and all the advices of his friends, and without temptation and without opportunity, so does the love of God: it makes a man chaste without the laborious arts of fasting and exterior disciplines, temperate in the midst of feasts, and is active enough to choose it without any intermedial appetites, and reaches at glory through the very heart of grace, without any other aims but those of love. It is a grace that loves God for Himself, and our neighbors for God. The consideration of God's goodness and bounty, the experience of those profitable and excellent emanations from Him, may be, and most commonly are, the first motive of our love; but when we are once entered, and have tasted the goodness of God, we love the spring for its own excellency, passing from passion to reason, from thanking to adoring, from sense to spirit, from considering ourselves to union with God: and this is the image and little representation of heaven; it is beatitude in picture, or rather the infancy and beginning of glory.