Blair Worden - A Book of Friendship

BRIAN YOUNG

Philosophy had satisfactorily proved the immateriality and the immortality of the soul, but the reasonings of the ‘speculative and the wise’ could not influence ‘the generality of mankind.’ That required, uniquely, the exemplification of Christ’s resurrection; Scripture was sufficient for this purpose, and in a cumbrous echo of Milton’s ‘in wandering mazes lost’ ( Paradise Lost , II. 561), the Letter enjoined the virtues of piety over the vices of speculative unbelief, for: ‘they who will not humbly stop at those limits which their Creator has set to their knowledge, are deservedly left to wander in the labyrinths of endless intricacy, when they have forsaken the light of revelation, to wander after the illusive meteors of fanciful conjectures.’ This is late Augustan Anglicanism, replete with a becoming sense of distance between the Creator and His Creation: ‘An inquiry into the general scheme of providence is surely a very noble and interesting speculation. But let such inquiries be begun with humility, and conducted with piety. Let him that searches into the ways of God, remember the boundless disparity between his intellectual powers and the subject that employs them!’ 17 For all his materialistic worldliness, Taylor’s theology was entirely consonant with that of his lifelong friend, and it was much more practical than it was in any sense speculative divinity. There are many textual and argumentative echoes between the Letter and Johnson’s funeral sermon for his wife, Tetty, which we are told Taylor refused to preach finding her totally unfit to be his wife’s friend, principally because she was the cause of much of his unhappiness. 18 Deeply personal letters from Johnson to Taylor, dating from the death of Tetty in 1752 to his dying days in 1784, were printed as an appendix to the published Letter . The intimacies of friendship had become integral to confessional apologetic, biography had become applied theology. When recalling his childhood ‘infidelity’ and early doubts concerning the soul’s immortality to Hester Thrale Piozzi, Johnson wondered why he was telling her of a shameful matter which he had hitherto

17 John Taylor, A Letter to Samuel Johnson, LL.D. On the subject of a future state (London, 1787), pp. 2, 6-7, 14, 15. 18 Taylor, Life of John Taylor , p. 54; Clifford, Young Man Johnson , pp. 298-99; ‘Sermon 26’ in Johnson, Sermons , pp. 261-71.

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