The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3

There is an excellent discourse of the great Hooker's, affixed with two or three others to his Ecclesiastical Polity, on the final perseverance of Saints81; but yet I am very desirous to meet with some judicious experimental treatise, in which the doctrine, with the Scriptures on which it is grounded, is set forth more at large; as likewise the rules by which it may be applied to the purposes of support and comfort, without danger of causing presumption and without diminishing the dread of sin.

Above all, I am anxious to see the subject treated with as little reference as possible to the divine predestination and foresight; the argument from the latter being a mere identical proposition followed by an assertion of God's prescience.

Those who will persevere, will persevere, and God foresees; and as to the proof from predestination, that is, that he who predestines the end necessarily predestines the adequate means, I can more readily imagine logical consequences adverse to the sense of responsibility than Christian consequences, such as an individual may apply for his own edification.

And I am persuaded that the doctrine does not need these supports, according, I mean, to the ordinary notion of predestination. The predestinative force of a free agent's own will in certain absolute acts, determinations, or elections, and in respect of which acts it is one either with the divine or the devilish will; and if the former, the conclusions to be drawn from God's goodness, faithfulness, and spiritual presence; these supply grounds of argument of a very different character, especially where the mind has been prepared by an insight into the error and hollowness of the antithesis between liberty and necessity.

Ib. p. 178.

But how contrary to this is the walk and conduct of some who profess to be pilgrims, and yet can wilfully and deliberately go upon the Devil's ground, and indulge themselves in carnal pleasures and sinful diversions.

Note in Edwards on the Enchanted Ground.

But what pleasures are carnal, – what are sinful diversions, – so I mean as that I may be able to determine what are not? Shew us the criterion, the general principle; at least explain whether each individual case is to be decided for the individual by his own experience of the effects of the pleasure or the diversion, in dulling or distracting his religious feelings; or can a list, a complete list, of all such pleasures be made beforehand?

Part III

In initio.

I strongly suspect that this third part, which ought not to have been thus conjoined with Bunyan's work, was written by a Roman Catholic priest, for the very purpose of counteracting the doctrine of faith so strongly enforced in the genuine Progress.

Ib. p. 443, in Edwards.

Against all which evils fasting is the proper remedy.

It would have been well if the writer had explained exactly what he meant by the fasting, here so strongly recommended; during what period of time abstinence from food is to continue and so on. The effects, I imagine, must in good measure depend on the health of the individual. In some constitutions, fasting so disorders the stomach as to produce the very contrary of good; – confusion of mind, loose imaginations against the man's own will, and the like.

In fine.

One of the most influential arguments, one of those the force of which I feel even more than I see, for the divinity of the New Testament, and with especial weight in the writings of John and Paul, is the unspeakable difference between them and all other the earliest extant writings of the Christian Church, even those of the same age (as, for example, the Epistle of Barnabas,) or of the next following, – a difference that transcends all degree, and is truly a difference in kind. Nay, the catalogue of the works written by the Reformers and in the two centuries after the Reformation, contain many many volumes far superior in Christian light and unction to the best of the Fathers. How poor and unevangelic is Hermas in comparison with our Pilgrim's Progress!

Notes on Select Discourses by John Smith 82

It would make a delightful and instructive essay, to draw up a critical and (where possible) biographical account of the Latitudinarian party at Cambridge, from the close of the reign of James I to the latter half of Charles II.

The greater number were Platonists, so called at least, and such they believed themselves to be, but more truly Plotinists. Thus Cudworth, Dr. Jackson (chaplain of Charles I, and vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne), Henry More, this John Smith, and some others. Taylor was a Gassendist, or inter Epicureos evangelizantes, and, as far as I know, he is the only exception.

They were all alike admirers of Grotius, which in Jeremy Taylor was consistent with the tone of his philosophy. The whole party, however, and a more amiable never existed, were scared and disgusted into this by the catachrestic language and skeleton half-truths of the systematic divines of the Synod of Dort on the one hand, and by the sickly broodings of the Pietists and Solomon's-Song preachers on the other.

What they all wanted was a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part organ, part constituent, of all knowledge, an examination of the scales, weights and measures themselves abstracted from the objects to be weighed or measured by them; in short, a transcendental æsthetic, logic, and noetic. Lord Herbert was at the entrance of, nay, already some paces within, the shaft and adit of the mine, but he turned abruptly back, and the honour of establishing a complete

of philosophy was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards.

From the confounding of Plotinism with Platonism, the Latitudinarian divines fell into the mistake of finding in the Greek philosophy many anticipations of the Christian Faith, which in fact were but its echoes. The inference is as perilous as inevitable, namely, that even the mysteries of Christianity needed no revelation, having been previously discovered and set forth by unaided reason.

…

The argument from the mere universality of the belief, appears to me far stronger in favour of a surviving soul and a state after death, than for the existence of the Supreme Being. In the former, it is one doctrine in the Englishman and in the Hottentot; the differences are accidents not affecting the subject, otherwise than as different seals would affect the same wax, though Molly, the maid, used her thimble, and Lady Virtuosa an intaglio of the most exquisite workmanship.

Far otherwise in the latter. Mumbo Jumbo, or the cercocheronychous Nick-Senior, or whatever score or score thousand invisible huge men fear and fancy engender in the brain of ignorance to be hatched by the nightmare of defenceless and self-conscious weakness – these are not the same as, but are toto genere diverse from, the una et unica substantia of Spinosa, or the World-God of the Stoics.

And each of these again is as diverse from the living Lord God, the creator of heaven and earth. Nay, this equivoque on God is as mischievous as it is illogical: it is the sword and buckler of Deism.

Of the Existence and Nature of God

Besides, when we review our own immortal souls and their dependency upon some Almighty mind, we know that we neither did nor could produce ourselves, and withal know that all that power which lies within the compass of ourselves will serve for no other purpose than to apply several pre-existent things one to another, from whence all generations and mutations arise, which are nothing else but the events of different applications and complications of bodies that were existent before; and therefore that which produced that substantial life and mind by which we know ourselves, must be something much more mighty than we are, and can be no less indeed than omnipotent, and must also be the first architect and

of all other beings, and the perpetual supporter of them.

A Rhodian leap! Where our knowledge of a cause is derived from our knowledge of the effect, which is falsely (I think) here supposed, nothing can be logically, that is, apodeictically, inferred, but the adequacy of the former to the latter. The mistake, common to Smith, with a hundred other writers, arises out of an equivocal use of the word 'know.' In the scientific sense, as implying insight, and which ought to be the sense of the word in this place, we might be more truly said to know the soul by God, than to know God by the soul.

…

So the Sibyl was noted by Heraclitus as

'as one speaking ridiculous and unseemly speeches with her furious mouth.'

This fragment is misquoted and misunderstood: for –

it should be

unperfumed, inornate lays, not redolent of art. – Render it thus:

– – – Not her's

To win the sense by words of rhetoric,

Lip-blossoms breathing perishable sweets;

But by the power of the informing Word

Roll sounding onward through a thousand years

Her deep prophetic bodements.

is with ecstatic mouth.

…

If the ascetic virtues, or disciplinary exercises, derived from the schools of philosophy (Pythagorean, Platonic and Stoic) were carried to an extreme in the middle ages, it is most certain that they are at present in a far more grievous disproportion underrated and neglected. The regula maxima of the ancient

was to conquer the body by abstracting the attention from it. Our maxim is to conciliate the body by attending to it, and counteracting or precluding one set of sensations by another, the servile dependence of the mind on the body remaining the same. Instead of the due subservience of the body to the mind (the favorite language of our Sidneys and Miltons) we hear nothing at present but of health, good digestion, pleasurable state of general feeling, and the like.

Letter to a Godchild

To Adam Steinmetz K 83

My Dear Godchild

I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of His spiritual body, the Church.

Years must pass before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write; but I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who, by his only begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light – out of death, but into life – out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the Lord our Righteousness; I trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind.

My dear Godchild! – You received from Christ's minister at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspiration and ever-paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed – in will, mind, and affections.

I too, your Godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience which more than threescore years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction) that health is a great blessing, – competence obtained by honorable industry a great blessing, – and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, and bodily infirmities; and, for the last three or four years, have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick-room, and at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy recovery; and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in His promises to them that truly seek Him, is faithful to perform what He hath promised, and has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw His Spirit from me in the conflict, and in His own time will deliver me from the Evil One!

O, my dear Godchild! eminently blessed are those who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ!

O, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen Godfather and friend,

S. T. Coleridge.

July 13, 183484.

END OF VOLUME THREE

1

See Table Talk, p. 178, 2nd edit.

2

'Should it occur to any one that the doctrine blamed in the text, is but in accordance with that of the Church of England, in her rubric concerning spiritual communion, annexed to the Office for Communion of the Sick: he may consider, whether that rubric, explained (as if possible it must be) in consistency with the definition of a sacrament in the Catechism, can be meant for any but rare and extraordinary cases: cases as strong in regard of the Eucharist, as that of martyrdom, or the premature death of a well-disposed catechumen, in regard of Baptism.'

Keble's Pref. to Hooker, p. 85, n. 70. Ed.

3

According to Bishop Horne, the allusion is to the destruction of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea. – Ed.

4

See Horne in loc. note. – Ed.

5

The references are to Mr. Keble's edition (1836.) – Ed.

6

But see Mr. Keble's statement (Pref. xxix.), and the argument founded on discoveries and collation of MSS. since the note in the text was written. – Ed.

7

See Mr. Coleridge's work On the constitution of the Church and State according to the idea of each. – Ed.

8

See E. P. I. ii. 3. p. 252. – Ed.

9

See the Church and State, in which the ecclesia or Church in Christ, is distinguished from the enclesia, or national Church. – Ed.

10

See the essays generally from the fourth to the ninth, both inclusively, in Vol. III 3rd edition, more especially, the fifth essay. – Ed.

11

Part. I. c. i. vv. 151 – 6. – Ed.

12

See the essay on the idea of the Prometheus of Æschylus. Literary Remains, Vol. II p. 323. – Ed.

13

'Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. … Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.'

Table Talk, 2d Edit. p. 95. – Ed.

14

See the Church and State, c. i. – Ed.

15

See post. – Ed.

16

But see the language of the Council of Trent:

Si quis dixerit justitiam acceptam non conservari atque etiam augeri coram. Deo per bona opera; sed opera ipsa fructus solummodo et signa esse justificationis adeptæ, non autem ipsius augendæ causam; anathema sit.

Sess. VI. Can. 24.

… Si quis dixerit hominis justificati bona opera ita esse dona Dei, ut non sint etiam bona ipsius justificati merita; aut ipsum justificatum bonis operibus, quæ ab eo per Dei gratiam, et Jesu Christi meritum, cujus vivum membrum est, fiunt, non vere mereri augmentum gratiæ, vitam æternam, et ipsius vitæ æternæ, si tamen in gratia decesserit, conscecutionem atque etiam gloriæ augmentum, anathema sit.

Ib. Can. 32. – Ed.

17

Rom. ii. 12. – Ed.

18

Matt. xix. 8. – Ed.

19

Folio 1628. – Ed.

20

The following letter was written on, and addressed with, the book to the Rev. Derwent Coleridge. – Ed.

21

P. L. III. 487. – Ed.

22

i. 27. See Aids to Reflection. 3d edit. p. 17. n. – Ed.

23

– – whence the soul

Reason receives, and reason is her being,

Discursive or intuitive.

P. L. v. 426. – Ed.

24

The reader of the Aids to Reflection will recognize in this note the rough original of the passages p. 313, &c. of the 3d edition of that work. – Ed.

25

See Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 283. Melancthon's words to Calvin are:

Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmu etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse, quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, interfecerunt.

14th Oct. 1554. – Ed.

26

'But to circle the earth, as the heavenly bodies do,' &c. 'So we may see that the opinion of Copernicus touching the rotation of the earth, which astronomy itself cannot correct, because it is not repugnant to any of the phænomena, yet natural history may correct.'

Advancement of Learning, B. II. – Ed.

27

That Christ had a twofold being, natural and sacramental; that the Jews destroyed and sacrificed his natural being, and that Christian priests destroy and sacrifice in the Mass his sacramental being. – Ed.

28

Fides catholica, says Bellarmine, docet omnem virtutem esse bonam, omne vitium esse malum. Si autem erraret Papa præcipiendo vitia vel prohibendo virtutes, teneretur Ecclesia credere vitia esse bona et virtutes malas, nisi vellet contra conscientiam peccare.

De Pont. Roman. IV. 5. – Ed.

29

The ordinary Greek text is:

The Vulgate is:

primus homo de terra, terrenus; secundus homo de cœlis, cœlestis.

Ed.

30

The LXXX Sermons, fol. 1640. – Ed.

31

"Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicoenoe, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the Church of England, and in good humour with the Church of Rome."

Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 41. – Ed.

32

Rom. vi.3, 4, 5. – Ed.

33

John i 14. Gal. iv 4. Ed.

34

See the whole argument on the difference of the reason and the understanding, in the Aids to Reflection, 3d edit. pp. 206-227. Ed.

35

See the author's entire argument upon this subject in the Church and State. – Ed.

36

Galat. ii 20. – Ed.

37

Compare Hamlet, Act V. sc. 1. This sermon was preached, March 8, 1628-9. – Ed.

38

C. iii. 13, &c. – Ed.

39

See, however, the author's expressions at, I believe, a rather later period.

"I now think, after many doubts, that the passage; I know that my Redeemer liveth, &c. may fairly be taken as a burst of determination, a quasi prophecy. I know not how this can be; but in spite of all my difficulties, this I do know, that I shall be recompensed!"

Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 80. – Ed.

40

How so? Is it not admitted that Robert Stephens first divided the New Testament into verses in 1551? See the testimony to that effect of Henry Stephens, his son, in the Preface to his Concordance. – Ed.

41

Rom. viii. 3. Mr. C. afterwards expressed himself to the same effect:

"Christ's body, as mere body, or rather carcase (for body is an associated word), was no more capable of sin or righteousness than mine or yours; that his humanity had a capacity of sin, follows from its own essence. He was of like passions as we, and was tempted. How could he be tempted, if he had no formal capacity of being seduced?"

Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 261. – Ed.

42

See Hooker's admirable declaration of the doctrine: —

"These natures from the moment of their first combination have been and are for ever inseparable. For even when his soul forsook the tabernacle of his body, his Deity forsook neither body nor soul. If it had, then could we not truly hold either that the person of Christ was buried, or that the person of Christ did raise up itself from the dead. For the body separated from the Word can in no true sense be termed the person of Christ; nor is it true to say that the Son of God in raising up that body did raise up himself, if the body were not both with him and of him even during the time it lay in the sepulchre. The like is also to be said of the soul, otherwise we are plainly and inevitably Nestorians. The very person of Christ therefore for ever one and the self-same, was only touching bodily substance concluded within the grave, his soul only from thence severed, but by personal union his Deity still unseparably joined with both."

E. P. V. 52. 4. – Keble's edit. Ed.

43

xix. 41. – Ed.

44

(C.) which should be (B.)

"The object of the preceding discourse was to recommend the Bible as the end and centre of our reading and meditation. I can truly affirm of myself, that my studies have been profitable and availing to me only so far, as I have endeavored to use all my other knowledge as a glass enabling me to receive more light in a wider field of vision from the Word of God."

Ed.

45

Ep. 99. See Pearson, Art. v. – Ed.

46

Folio. 1708. – Ed.

47