It may not be useless or uninteresting to the readers of Bishop Jeremy
Taylor to bring under their notice a point in which the editor of the
last edition seems to have fallen into an error. In Part II. of the
Sermon "On the Invalidity of a Death-bed Repentance" (p. 395.), the
Bishop says:
"Only be pleased to observe this one thing: that this place of
Ezekiel [_i.e._ xviii. 21.] is it which is so often mistaken for
that common saying, 'At what time soever a sinner repents him of
his sins from the bottom of his heart, I will put all his
wickedness out of my remembrance, saith the Lord:' yet there are
no such words in the whole Bible, nor any nearer to the sense of
them, than the words I have now read to you out of the prophet
Ezekiel."
Now the editor, as a reference for this "common saying," says in a
note--
"+ See Jer. xviii. 7, 8.:"
whence I suppose that he thinks that text to be the nearest quotation to
it that can be found. But he has altogether overlooked the fact that
this "common saying" is, as the Bishop has here quoted it, the exact
form in which the first of the sentences at the beginning of Morning
Prayer occurs in the Second Book of Edward, and down to the time of the
last review, with the exception of the Scotch book. As it did not agree
with the translation of the Bible then in use, Bishop Taylor seems to
have considered it as a paraphrase. This also is the view which
Chillingworth took of it, who makes this reflection on it, in a sermon
preached before Charles I.:
"I would to God (says he) the composers of our Liturgy, out of a
care of avoiding mistakes, and to take away occasion of cavilling
our Liturgy, and out of fear of encouraging carnal men to security
in sinning, had been so provident as to set down in terms the
first sentence, taken out of the 18th of Ezekiel, and not have put
in the place of it an ambiguous, and (though not in itself, but
accidentally, by reason of the mistake to which it is subject) I
fear very often a pernicious paraphrase: for whereas they make it,
'_At what time soever ... saith the Lord_;' the plain truth, if
you will hear it, is, the Lord doth not say so; these are not the
very words of God, but the paraphrase of men."
Thus, I think, it is evident that this "sentence" has nothing to do with
the passage of Jeremiah to which the editor refers us; and its being
read continually in the church explains the application of the word
"common" to it in this place.
While on this subject I would go on to mention that both Chillingworth
and Taylor seemed to have erred in calling it a paraphrase, and saying
that it does not occur in the Bible; for according to L'Estrange (c.
iii. n. F.) the sentence is taken from the Great Bible, or Coverdale's
translation. It is, however, remarkable that this fact should not have
been known to these divines.