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The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
Hooker's meaning is right; but he falls into a sad confusion of words, blending the thing and the relation of the mind to the thing. The fourth moon of Jupiter is certain in itself; but evident only to the astronomer with his telescope.
Ib. p. 585-588.
The other, which we call the certainty of adherence, is when the heart doth cleave and stick unto that which it doth believe. This certainty is greater in us than the other … (down to) the fourth question resteth, and so an end of this point.
These paragraphs should be written in gold. O! may these precious words be written on my heart!
1. That we all need to be redeemed, and that therefore we are all in captivity to an evil:
2. That there is a Redeemer:
3. That the redemption relatively to each individual captive is, if not effected under certain conditions, yet manifestable as far as is fitting for the soul by certain signs and consequents: – and
4. That these signs are in myself; that the conditions under which the redemption offered to all men is promised to the individual, are fulfilled in myself;
these are the four great points of faith, in which the humble Christian finds and feels a gradation from trembling hope to full assurance; yet the will, the act of trust, is the same in all. Might I not almost say, that it rather increases with the decrease of the consciously discerned evidence? To assert that I have the same assurance of mind that I am saved as that I need a Saviour, would be a contradiction to my own feelings, and yet I may have an equal, that is, an equivalent assurance. How is it possible that a sick man should have the same certainty of his convalescence as of his sickness? Yet he may be assured of it. So again, my faith in the skill and integrity of my physician may be complete, but the application of it to my own case may be troubled by the sense of my own imperfect obedience to his prescriptions. The sort of our beliefs and assurances is necessarily modified by their different subjects. It argues no want of saving faith on the whole, that I cannot have the same trust in myself as I have in my God. That Christ's righteousness can save me, – that Christ's righteousness alone can save – these are simple positions, all the terms of which are steady and copresent to my mind. But that I shall be so saved, – that of the many called I have been one of the chosen, – this is no mere conclusion of mind on known or assured premisses. I can remember no other discourse that sinks into and draws up comfort from the depths of our being below our own distinct consciousness, with the clearness and godly loving-kindness of this truly evangelical God-to-be-thanked-for sermon. But how large, how important a part of our spiritual life goes on like the circulation, absorptions, and secretions of our bodily life, unrepresented by any specific sensation, and yet the ground and condition of our total sense of existence!
While I feel, acknowledge, and revere the almost measureless superiority of the sermons of the divines, who labored in the first, and even the first two centuries of the Reformation, from Luther to Leighton, over the prudential morals and apologizing theology that have characterized the unfanatical clergy since the Revolution in 1688, I cannot but regret, especially while I am listening to a Hooker, that they withheld all light from the truths contained in the words 'Satan', 'the Serpent', 'the Evil Spirit', and this last used plurally.
A Discourse of Justification, Works, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overthrown
Ib. s. 31. p. 659-661.
But we say, our salvation is by Christ alone; therefore howsoever, or whatsoever, we add unto Christ in the matter of salvation, we overthrow Christ. Our case were very hard, if this argument, so universally meant as it is proposed, were sound and good. We ourselves do not teach Christ alone, excluding our own faith, unto justification; Christ alone, excluding our own work, unto sanctification; Christ alone, excluding the one or the other as unnecessary unto salvation. … As we have received, so we teach that besides the bare and naked work, wherein Christ, without any other associate, finished all the parts of our redemption and purchased salvation himself alone; for conveyance of this eminent blessing unto us, many things are required, as, to be known and chosen of God before the foundations of the world; in the world to be called, justified, sanctified; after we have left the world to be received into glory; Christ in every of these hath somewhat which he worketh alone. &c. &c.
No where out of the Holy Scripture have I found the root and pith of Christian faith so clearly and purely propounded as in this section. God, whose thoughts are eternal, beholdeth the end, and in the completed work seeth and accepteth every stage of the process. I dislike only the word 'purchased;' – not that it is not Scriptural, but because a metaphor well and wisely used in the enforcement and varied elucidation of a truth, is not therefore properly employed in its exact enunciation. I will illustrate, amplify and divide the word with Paul; but I will propound it collectively with John. If in this admirable passage aught else dare be wished otherwise, it is the division and yet confusion of time and eternity, by giving an anteriority to the latter.
I am persuaded, that the practice of the Romish church tendeth to make vain the doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ alone; but judging by her most eminent divines, I can find nothing dissonant from the truth in her express decisions on this article. Perhaps it would be safer to say: – Christ alone saves us, working in us by the faith which includes hope and love.
Ib. s. 34. p. 671.
If it were not a strong deluding spirit which hath possession of their hearts; were it possible but that they should see how plainly they do herein gainsay the very ground of apostolic faith?… The Apostle, as if he had foreseen how the Church of Rome would abuse the world in time by ambiguous terms, to declare in what sense the name of grace must be taken, when we make it the cause of our salvation, saith, He saved us according to his mercy, &c.
In all Christian communities there have been and ever will be too many Christians in name only; – too many in belief and notion only: but likewise, I trust, in every acknowledged Church, Eastern or Western, Greek, Roman, Protestant, many of those in belief, more or less erroneous, who are Christians in faith and in spirit. And I neither do nor can think, that any pious member of the Church of Rome did ever in his heart attribute any merit to any work as being his work.16 A grievous error and a mischievous error there was practically in mooting the question at all of the condignity of works and their rewards. In short, to attribute merit to any agent but God in Christ, our faith as Christians forbids us; and to dispute about the merit of works abstracted from the agent, common sense ought to forbid us.
A Supplication Made to the Council by Master Walter Travers
Ib. p. 698.
I said directly and plainly to all men's understanding, that it was not indeed to be doubted, but many of the Fathers were saved; but the means, said I, was not their ignorance, which excuseth no man with God, but their knowledge and faith of the truth, which, it appeareth, God vouchsafed them, by many notable monuments and records extant of it in all ages.
Not certainly, if the ignorance proceeded directly or indirectly from a defect or sinful propensity of the will; but where no such cause is imaginable, in such cases this position of Master Travers is little less than blasphemous to the divine goodness, and in direct contradiction to an assertion of St. Paul's17, and to an evident consequence from our Saviour's own words on the polygamy of the fathers.18
Answer to Travers
Ib. p. 719.
The next thing discovered, is an opinion about the assurance of men's persuasion in matters of faith. I have taught, he saith, 'That the assurance of things which we believe by the word, is not so certain as of that we perceive by sense.'
A useful instance to illustrate the importance of distinct, and the mischief of equivocal or multivocal, terms. Had Hooker said that the fundamental truths of religion, though perhaps even more certain, are less evident than the facts of sense, there could have been no misunderstanding. Thus the demonstrations of algebra possess equal certainty with those of geometry, but cannot lay claim to the same evidence. Certainty is positive, evidence relative; the former, strictly taken, insusceptible of more or less, the latter capable of existing in many different degrees.
Writing a year or more after the preceding note, I am sorry to say that Hooker's reasoning on this point seems to me sophistical throughout. That a man must see what he sees is no persuasion at all, nor bears the remotest analogy to any judgment of the mind. The question is, whether men have a clearer conception and a more stedfast conviction of the objective reality to which the image moving their eye appertains, than of the objective reality of the things and states spiritually discovered by faith. And this Travers had a right to question wherever a saving faith existed.
August, 1826.
Sermon IV a Remedy Against Sorrow and Fear
Ib. p. 801.
In spirit I am with you to the world's end.
O how grateful should I be to be made intuitive of the truth intended in the words – In spirit I am with you!
Ib. p. 808.
Touching the latter affection of fear, which respecteth evils to come, as the other which we have spoken of doth present evils; first, in the nature thereof it is plain that we are not every future evil afraid. Perceive we not how they, whose tenderness shrinketh at the least rase of a needle's point, do kiss the sword that pierceth their souls quite thorow?
In this and in sundry similar passages of this venerable writer there is
Ib. p. 811.
Fear then in itself being mere nature cannot in itself be sin, which sin is not nature, but therefore an accessary deprivation.
I suspect a misprint, and that it should be depravation. But if not nature, then it must be a super-induced and incidental depravation of nature. The principal, namely fear, is nature; but the sin, that is, that it is a sinful fear, is but an accessary
Notes on Field on the Church 19
Fly-leaf. – Hannah Scollock, her book, February 10, 1787.
This, Hannah Scollock! may have been the case;Your writing therefore I will not erase.But now this book, once yours, belongs to me,The Morning Post's and Courier's S. T. C.; —Elsewhere in College, knowledge, wit and scholerageTo friends and public known, as S. T. Coleridge.Witness hereto my hand, on Ashly Green,One thousand, twice four hundred, and fourteenYear of our Lord – and of the month November,The fifteenth day, if right I do remember.28 March, 1819.20
My Dear Derwent,
This one volume, thoroughly understood and appropriated, will place you in the highest ranks of doctrinal Church of England divines (of such as now are), and in no mean rank as a true doctrinal Church historian.
Next to this I recommend Baxter's own Life, edited by Sylvester, with my marginal notes. Here, more than in any of the prelatical and Arminian divines from Laud to the death of Charles II, you will see the strength and beauty of the Church of England, that is, its liturgy, homilies, and articles. By contrasting, too, its present state with that which such excellent men as Baxter, Calamy, and the so called Presbyterian or Puritan divines, would have made it, you will bless it as the bulwark of toleration.
Thirdly, you must read Eichorn's Introduction to the Old and New Testament, and the Apocrypha, and his comment on the Apocalypse; to all which my notes and your own previous studies will supply whatever antidote is wanting; – these will suffice for your Biblical learning, and teach you to attach no more than the supportable weight to these and such like outward evidences of our holy and spiritual religion.
So having done, you will be in point of professional knowledge such a clergyman as will make glad the heart of your loving father,
S. T .Coleridge.N. B. – See Book iv Chap. 7, p. 351, both for a masterly confutation of the Paleyo-Grotian evidences of the Gospel, and a decisive proof in what light that system was regarded by the Church of England in its best age. Like Grotius himself, it is half way between Popery and Socinianism.
B. i. c. 3. p. 5.
But men desired only to be like unto God in omniscience and the general knowledge of all things which may be communicated to a creature, as in Christ it is to his human soul.
Surely this is more than doubtful; and even the instance given is irreconcilable with Christ's own assertion concerning the last day, which must be understood of his human soul, by all who hold the faith delivered from the foundation, namely, his deity. Field seems to have excerpted this incautiously from the Schoolmen, who on this premiss could justify the communicability of adoration, as in the case of the saints. Omniscience, it may be proved, implies omnipotence. The fourth of the arguments in this section, and, as closely connected with it, the first (only somewhat differently stated) seem the strongest, or rather the only ones. For the second is a mere anticipation of the fourth, and all that is true in the third is involved in it.
Ib. c. 5. p. 9.
And began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
That is, I humbly apprehend, in other than the Hebrew and Syrochaldaic languages, which (with rare and reluctant exceptions in favor of the Greek) were appropriated to public prayer and exhortation, just as the Latin in the Romish Church. The new converts preached and prayed, each to his companions in his and their dialect; – they were all Jews, but had assembled from all the different provinces of the Roman and Parthian empires, as the Quakers among us to the yearly meeting in London; this was a sign, not a miracle. The miracle consisted in the visible and audible descent of the Holy Ghost, and in the fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, as explained by St. Peter himself. Acts ii. 15.
Ib. p. 10.
Aliud est etymologia nominis et aliud significatio nominis. Etymologia attenditur secundum id it quo imponitur nomen ad significandum: nominis vero significatio secundum id ad quod significandum imponitur.
This passage from Aquinas would be an apt motto for a critique on Horne Tooke's Diversions of Purley. The best service of etymology is, when the sense of a word is still unsettled, and especially when two words have each two meanings; A=a-b, and B=a-b, instead of A=a and B=b. Thus reason and understanding as at present popularly confounded. Here the etyma, – ratio, the relative proportion of thoughts and things, – and understanding, as the power which substantiates phænomena (substat eis) – determine the proper sense. But most often the etyma being equivalent, we must proceed ex arbitrio, as 'law compels,' 'religion obliges;' or take up what had been begun in some one derivative. Thus 'fanciful' and 'imaginative,' are discriminated; – and this supplies the ground of choice for giving to fancy and imagination, each its own sense. Cowley is a fanciful writer, Milton an imaginative poet. Then I proceed with the distinction, how ill fancy assorts with imagination, as instanced in Milton's Limbo.21
Ib.
I should rather express the difference between the faithful of the Synagogue and those of the Church, thus: – That the former hoped generally by an implicit faith; – "It shall in all things be well with all that love the Lord; therefore it cannot but be good for us and well with us to rest with our forefathers." But the Christian hath an assured hope by an explicit and particular faith, a hope because its object is future, not because it is uncertain. The one was on the road journeying toward a friend of his father's, who had promised he would be kind to him even to the third and fourth generation. He comforts himself on the road, first, by means of the various places of refreshment, which that friend had built for travellers and continued to supply; and secondly, by anticipation of a kind reception at the friend's own mansion-house. But the other has received an express invitation to a banquet, beholds the preparations, and has only to wash and put on the proper robes, in order to sit down.
Ib. p. 11.
The reason why our translators, in the beginning, did choose rather to use the word 'congregation' than 'Church,' was not, as the adversary maliciously imagineth, for that they feared the very name of the Church; but because as by the name of religion and religious men, ordinarily in former times, men understood nothing but factitias religiones, as Gerson out of Anselme calleth them, that is, the professions of monks and friars, so, &c.
For the same reason the word religion for
Ib. c. 18. p. 27.
But if the Church of God remains in Corinth, where there were divisions, sects, emulations, &c. … who dare deny those societies to be the Churches of God, wherein the tenth part of these horrible evils and abuses is not to be found?
It is rare to meet with sophistry in this sound divine; but here he seems to border on it. For first the Corinthian Church upon admonition repented of its negligence; and secondly, the objection of the Puritans was, that the constitution of the Church precluded discipline.
B. II. c. 2. p. 31.
'Miscreant' is twice used in this page in its original sense of misbeliever.
Ib. c. 4. p. 35.
'Discourse' is here used for the discursive acts of the understanding, even as 'discursive, is opposed to 'intuitive' by Milton23 and others. Thus understand Shakspeare's "discourse of reason" for those discursions of mind which are peculiar to rational beings.
B. III. c. 1.p. 53.
The first publishers of the Gospel of Christ delivered a rule of faith to the Christian Churches which they founded, comprehending all those articles that are found in that epitome of Christian religion, which we call the Apostles' Creed.
This needs proof. I rather believe that the so called Apostles' Creed was really the Creed of the Roman or Western church, (and possibly in its present form, the catechismal rather than the baptismal creed), – and that other churches in the East had Creeds equally ancient, and, from their being earlier troubled with Anti Trinitarian heresies, more express on the divinity of Christ than the Roman.
Ib. p. 58.
Fourthly, that it is no less absurd to say, as the Papists do, that our satisfaction is required as a condition, without which Christ's satisfaction is not appliable unto us, than to say, Peter hath paid the debt of John, and he to whom it was due accepteth of the same payment, conditionally if he pay it himself also.
This24 propriation of a metaphor, namely, forgiveness of sin and abolition of guilt through the redemptive power of Christ's love and of his perfect obedience during his voluntary assumption of humanity, expressed, on account of the sameness of the consequences in both cases, by the payment of a debt for another, which debt the payer had not himself incurred, – the propriation of this, I say, by transferring the sameness from the consequents to the antecedents is the one point of orthodoxy (so called, I mean) in which I still remain at issue. It seems to me so evidently a
Now, St. John without any metaphor declares the mode by and in which it is effected; for he identifies it with a fact, not with a consequence, and a fact too not better understood in the one case than in the other, namely, by generation and birth. There remains, therefore, only the redemptive act itself, and this is transcendant, ineffable, and a fortiori, therefore, inexplicable. Like the act of primal apostasy, it is in its own nature a mystery, known only through faith in the spirit.
James owes John £100, which (to prevent James's being sent to prison) Henry pays for him; and John has no longer any claim. But James is cruel and ungrateful to Mary, his tender mother. Henry, though no relation, acts the part of a loving and dutiful son to Mary. But will this satisfy the mother's claims on James, or entitle him to her esteem, approbation, and blessing? If, indeed, by force of Henry's example or persuasion, or any more mysterious influence, James repents and becomes himself a good and dutiful child, then, indeed, Mary is wholly satisfied; but then the case is no longer a question of debt in that sense in which it can be paid by another, though the effect, of which alone St. Paul was speaking, is the same in both cases to James as the debtor, and to James as the undutiful son. He is in both cases liberated from the burthen, and in both cases he has to attribute his exoneration to the act of another; as cause simply in the payment of the debt, or as likewise causa causæ in James's reformation. Such is my present opinion: God grant me increase of light either to renounce or confirm it.
Perhaps the different terms of the above position may be more clearly stated thus:
1. agens causator
2. actus causativus:
3. effectus causatus:
4. consequentia ab effecto.
5. The co-eternal Son of the living God, incarnate, tempted, crucified, resurgent, communicant of his spirit, ascendant, and obtaining for his church the descent of the Holy Ghost.
6. A spiritual and transcendant mystery.
7. The being born anew, as before in the flesh to the world, so now in the spirit to Christ: where the differences are, the spirit opposed to the flesh, and Christ to the world; the punctum indifferens, or combining term, remaining the same in both, namely, a birth.
8. Sanctification from sin and liberation from the consequences of sin, with all the means and process of sanctification, being the same for the sinner relatively to God and his own soul, as the satisfaction of a creditor for a debt, or as the offering of an atoning sacrifice for a transgressor of the law; as a reconciliation for a rebellious son or a subject to his alienated parent or offended sovereign; and as a ransom is for a slave in a heavy captivity.
Now my complaint is that our systematic divines transfer the paragraph 4 to the paragraphs 2 and 3, interpreting proprio sensu et ad totum what is affirmed sensu metaphorico et ad partem, that is, ad consequentia a regeneratione effecta per actum causativum primi agentis, uempe
