I have an out-of-print version of Holy Living abridged by Anne Lamb, which i got from a used bookstore a few months ago (there seem to be fewer now). Amazon has an inexpensive paperback edition, but the one user review faults the editor for doing just what i advocate in "Translating English to English".

The text has been "modernised" and "updated" so that large passages of it are no longer recognisable as being in Jeremy Taylor's inimitable literary style.

I also enjoy his style, as well as admiring his abilities as a writer, but at the same time i struggle to understand a 350-year-old version of the language. It's the same argument people use for the King James Version. Yes, it's beautiful, but if the beauty obscures the point (or in fact makes the text more "beautiful" that the original author did), then we're in danger of putting the prose in a glass case to be admired, when it was intended to instruct in practical day-to-day living.

Amazon lists another version in hardcover, but for a pricey $124!

I'm editing some thoughts from Jeremy Taylor, a 17th century devotional writer, about humility. It's quite a challenge to express these in more contemporary English, even though the source language is also English. Many terms he uses aren't common today, and the syntax reflects the didactic style of his era, which often favors compactness and subtle allusion over ready comprehension. You could also argue that we've lost many cultural skills for careful reading.

Here's an example:

Suffer others to be praised in thy presence, and entertain their good and glory with delight; but at no hand disparage them, and think not the advancement of thy brother is a lessening of thy worth.

I might render this as:

Allow others to be complimented in your presence, and be glad to hear good things about them. Don't disparage them: if others think more highly of them, that doesn't make you worth less as a person.

In addition to modifying vocabulary and syntax, i'm also substituting a clearer style of expression for Taylor's more poetic form. My version sounds less polished, but my goal is understanding above asthetics.