lief; he found himself in distress, and shunned by his
family. Through the kindness of an old friend, he obtained the curacy of
Yardley, near Birmingham, but his previous apostacy having reached the
ears of the Bishop, the necessary license was refused, and the rector
received a peremptory notice to dismiss Taylor. This harsh treatment
caused a reaction, and while the rector sought another curate, Taylor
preached a series of sermons, by means of which he shook the faith of
nearly the whole of his congregation. The following is an abstract of
his last sermon at Yardley:--

"The text was, 'For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the
whale's belly, so shall the son of man be three days and three nights in
the heart of the earth.'--Matt, xii., 40. He began, 'Then this glorious
miracle of the man having been swallowed alive by a fish, and remaining
alive for seventy-two hours, undigested and unhurt, in the fish's
bowels, and being vomited up unhurt and safe upon the dry land, was as
true as the gospel; and consequently the gospel was as true, but not
more true, than this sea-sick miracle. He inferred that no person could
have a right to pretend to believe in the death and resurrection of
Christ, who had the least doubt as to the reality of the deglutition and
evomition of the prophet Jonah. As to the natural improbabilities and
physical impossibilities of this very wonderful Bible miracle, these
were nothing in the way of a true and lively faith. Where miracles of
any sort were concerned, there could be no distinction into the greater
and the less, since infinite power was as necessary to the reality of
the least as to the greatest. We should never forget that it was the
Lord who prepared the fish, and prepared him for the express purpose of
swallowing the man, and probably gave him a little opening physic, to
cleanse the apartment for the accommodation of its intended tenant; and
had the purpose been, that the whole ship and all the crew should have
been swallowed as well as he, there's no doubt that they could have been
equally well accommodated. But as to what some wicked Infidels objected,
about the swallow of the whale being too narrow to admit the passage of
the man, it only required a little stretching, and even a herring or
a sprat might have gulped him. He enlarged, most copiously, on the
circumstance of the Lord speaking to the fish, in order to cause him to
vomit; and insisted on the natural efficacy of the