Daily Reading for August 13 • Jeremy Taylor, 1667

Faith supplies charity with argument and maintenance, and charity supplies faith with life and motion; faith makes charity reasonable, and charity makes faith living and effectual. . . . For to think well, or to have a good opinion, or an excellent or a fortunate understanding, entitles us not to the love of God and the consequent inheritance; but to choose the ways of the Spirit, and to relinquish the paths of darkness, this is the way of the kingdom, and the purpose of the gospel, and the proper work of faith.

. . . .

God is present in his essence; which, because it is infinite, cannot be contained within the limits of any place; and as the sun, reflecting upon the mud of strands and shores, is unpolluted in its beams, so is God not dishonored when we suppose him in every one of his creatures, and in every part of every one of them.

From “Discourse on Faith” in The Great Exemplar (1649) and Holy Living by Jeremy Taylor, quoted in Glorious Companions: Five Centuries of Anglican Spirituality by Richard H. Schmidt (Eerdmans, 2002).