Taylor then plunges into theological history
for support of his contentions, finding it in the
writings of Origen, Theophylactus, Haymo of
Halberstadt, Grotius, and Paraeus. From them
he derives another idea regarding the garment.
By putting on the righteousness of Christ’s sat-
isfaction for man’s sins, the soul in a sense puts
on Christ, who, ‘‘as he adorns the Soul with his
Righteousness is the Wedden Garment’’ (p. 24).
When Taylor, then, in ‘‘Huswifery’’ and in the
meditations petitions to be adorned in holy
robes, he is asking for visible signs that he is
sanctified, that his sins have been justified and
he placed among God’s chosen, that he has
already attained the highest earthly spiritual
state. He is asking for the righteousness earned
for him by Christ and promised by the Gospels.
This he makes clear by offering eight additional
arguments that the wedding garment is evangel-
ical righteousness.
Among these arguments, the Word of the
Gospel holds a position of high importance, for
it is through the Holy Word that evangelical
righteousness comes to men: ‘‘this Wedden Gar-
ment must needs be the best accomplishments
that the Gospell Shops afford.... Its Such a rich
Web, that onely the Gospell markets afford: its
Such a Web that is onely wove in the Looms of
the Gospell, nay, and a richer web, and better
huswifry it gets not up’’ (p. 27). The garment has
such special value for Taylor because it is the
only means whereby the soul secures fellowship,
favor, honor, and familiarity with God. Not to
have the garment is disastrous, for ‘‘the Shame of
Spirituall Nakedness is Damning’’ (p. 29), and
Stoddard, by opening the Lord’s Supper to the
unconverted in hopes that that ordinance would
give the garment of righteousness to them, was
sending them naked to hell. For the garment
must be on the soulbeforeone approaches the
sacrament, and that garment is secured, according
to Taylor, primarily through ‘‘the Looms of the
Gospell.’’ ‘‘The preaching of the Word is ordain’d
for the Converting of the Soul to Christ. And so
for the adorning of it with the Wedden Garment.
The web of Grace is wrought in the Soule by the
Shuttles of the word’’ (p. 31). It follows from this,
then, that the ‘‘Ordinances’’ that are the fulling
mills of ‘‘Huswifery’’ cannot be all Christ’s ordi-
nances, but only those designed to prepare the
soul for the highest ordinance, the Lord’s Supper.
Though Taylor nowhere in ‘‘Huswifery’’
explicitly declares the reason for which the robe
is worn and the specific end for which it is
intended, I believe that his ‘‘Treatise’’ necessitates
our accepting ‘‘Huswifery’’ as a poem about the
preparation for the sacrament. The ‘‘Holy robes
for glory’’ in the last line of the poem are identi-
fied in these sermons with the wedding garment,
which Taylor says ‘‘alone is the Robe to adorn
the Soule for Glory. It is the White Robe to walk
in with Christ for ever and ever’’ (p. 152). And
there is no question but that this preparation is
for Taylor the highest activity of the soul in this
world. When one appreciates the eternal conse-
quences of the robe for Taylor, to whom ‘‘the
Web and its Needle work containe all,’’ the last
lines of Taylor’s poem open such terrifying impli-
cations that one might well experience in them
the ‘‘metaphysical shudder’’ Professor William-
son found so characteristic of the verse of
Donne and his followers. For it is a robe on
whichalldepends, and Taylor exhorts his con-
gregation to search for it, making sure that it is
the web woven by Christ himself (as ‘‘Huswifery’’
prays in line 9) and not the counterfeit garb of
those who come to ‘‘the Feast in cloath of their
own Web, and weaving’’ (p. 126).
‘‘Huswifery,’’ in short, is another prepara-
tory meditation. It is, in fact, his only occasional
or miscellaneous poem that uses the decasyl-
labic,ababccstanza form of the Preparatory
Meditations. More important, if, as I have
assumed and tried to demonstrate in this paper,
the image of the garment and its function is
closely related throughout all of Taylor’s writ-
ing, then the apparently simple poem ‘‘Huswif-
ery’’ is only fully understood when one explores
the cumulative associations of its imagery in his
other poems. But one must go even further, trac-
ing the imagery in Taylor’s prose, where it often
originated (the sermons especially reveal unex-
pected meanings behind Taylor’s language or
make apparently adventitious associations an
integral part of Taylor’s reasoning)....
Source:Norman S. Grabo, ‘‘Edward Taylor’s Spiritual
Huswifery,’’ inPMLA, Vol. 79, No. 5, December 1964,
pp. 554–60.Sidney E. Lind
In the following excerpt, Lind evaluates Taylor’s
status as a poet and, based on poems such as ‘‘Hus-
wifery,’’ concludes that Taylor’s ‘‘most rewarding’’
instances of expression occur when he ‘‘has lapsed
from Puritan standards.’’Huswifery