Coleridge\'s Literary Remains, Volume 4. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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THE LITERARY REMAINS
OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
COLLECTED AND EDITED BY
HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE, ESQ. M.A.
VOLUME THE FOURTH
ALBI DISCIP ANGLVS
LONDON
WILLIAM PICKERING
1839
CONTENTS
ADVERTISEMENT
Notes on Luther
Notes on St Theresa
Notes on Bedell
Notes on Baxter
Notes on Leighton
Notes on Sherlock
Notes on Waterland
Notes on Skelton
Notes on Andrew Fuller
Notes on Whitaker
Notes on Oxlee
Notes on A Barrister's Hints
Notes on Davison
Notes on Irving
Notes on Noble
Essay on Faith
* * * * *
ADVERTISEMENT.
For some remarks on the character of this publication, the Editor begs
to refer the Reader to the Preface to the third volume of these Remains.
That volume and the present are expressly connected together as one
work.
The various materials arranged in the following pages were preserved,
and kindly placed in the Editor's hands, by Mr. Southey, Mr. Green, Mr.
Gillman, Mr. Alfred Elwyn of Philadelphia, United States, Mr. Money, Mr.
Hartley Coleridge, and the Rev. Edward Coleridge; and to those gentlemen
the Editor's best acknowledgments are due.
Lincoln's Inn,
9th May, 1839.
* * * * *
LITERARY REMAINS.
* * * * *
NOTES ON LUTHER'S TABLE TALK [1]
I cannot meditate too often, too deeply, or too devotionally on the
personeity of God, and his personality in the Word, [Greek: Gio to
monogenei], and thence on the individuity of the responsible
creature;--that it is a perfection which, not indeed in my intellect,
but yet in my habit of feeling, I have too much confounded with that
'complexus' of visual images, cycles or customs of sensations, and
fellow-travelling circumstances (as the ship to the mariner), which make
up our empirical self: thence to bring myself to apprehend livelily the
exceeding mercifulness and love of the act of the Son of God, in
descending to seek after the prodigal children, and to house with them
in the sty. Likewise by the relation of my own understanding to the
light of reason, and (the most important of all the truths that have
been vouchsafed to me!) to the will which is the reason,--will in the
form of reason--I can form a sufficient gleam of the possibility of the
subsistence of the human soul in Jesus to the Eternal Word, and how it
might perfect itself so as to merit glorification and abiding union with
the Divinity; and how this gave a humanity to our Lord's righteousness
no less than to his sufferings. Doubtless, as God, as the absolute
Alterity of the Absolute, he could not suffer; but that he could not lay
aside the absolute, and by union with the creaturely become affectible,
and a second, but spiritual Adam, and so as afterwards to be partaker of
the absolute in the Absolute, even as the Absolute had partaken of
passion ([Greek: tou paschein]) and infirmity in it, that is, the finite
and fallen creature;--this can be asserted only by one who
(unconsciously perhaps), has accustomed himself to think of God as a
thing,--having a necessity of constitution, that wills, or rather tends
and inclines to this or that, because it is this or that, not as being
that, which is that which it wills to be. Such a necessity is truly
compulsion; nor is it in the least altered in its nature by being
assumed to be eternal, in virtue of an endless remotion or retrusion of
the constituent cause, which being manifested by the understanding
becomes a foreseen despair of a cause.
Sunday 11th February, 1826.
One argument strikes me in favour of the tenet of Apostolic succession,
in the ordination of Bishops and Presbyters, as taught by the Church of
Rome, and by the larger part of the earlier divines of the Church of
England, which I have not seen in any of the books on this subject;
namely, that in strict analogy with other parts of Christian history,
the miracle itself contained a check upon the inconvenient consequences
necessarily attached to all miracles, as miracles, narrowing the
possible claims to any rights not proveable at the bar of universal
reason and experience. Every man among the Sectaries, however ignorant,
may justify himself in scattering stones and fire squibs by an alleged
unction of the Spirit. The miracle becomes perpetual, still beginning,
never ending. Now on the Church doctrine, the original miracle provides
for the future recurrence to the ordinary and calculable laws of the
human understanding and moral sense; instead of leaving every man a
judge of his own gifts, and of his right to act publicly on that
judgment. The initiative alone is supernatural; but all beginning is
necessarily miraculous, that is, hath either no antecedent, or one
[Greek: heterou genous], which therefore is not its, but merely an,
antecedent,--or an incausative alien co-incident in time; as if, for
instance, Jack's shout were followed by a flash of lightning, which
should strike and precipitate the ball on St. Paul's cathedral. This
would be a miracle as long as no causative 'nexus' was conceivable
between the antecedent, the noise of the shout, and the consequent, the
atmospheric discharge.
The Epistle Dedicatory.
But this will be your glory and inexpugnable, if you cleave in truth
and practice to God's holy service, worship and religion: that
religion and faith of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is pure and
undefiled before God even the Father, which is to visit the fatherless
and widows in their affliction, and to keep yourselves unspotted from
the world.
James i. 27.
Few mistranslations (unless indeed the word used by the translator of
St. James meant differently from its present meaning), have led astray
more than this rendering of [Greek: Thraeskeia.] (outward or ceremonial
worship, 'cultus', divine service,) by the English 'religion'. St. James
sublimely says: What the 'ceremonies' of the law were to morality,
'that' morality itself is to the faith in Christ, that is, its outward
symbol, not the substance itself.
Chap. I. p. 1, 2.
That the Bible is the word of God (said Luther) the same I prove as
followeth: All things that have been and now are in the world; also
how it now goeth and standeth in the world, the same was written
altogether particularly at the beginning, in the first book of Moses
concerning the creation. And even as God made and created it, even so
it was, even so it is, and even so doth it stand to this present day.
And although King Alexander the Great, the kingdom of Egypt, the
Empire of Babel, the Persian, Grecian and Roman monarchs; the Emperors
Julius and Augustus most fiercely did rage and swell against this
Book, utterly to suppress and destroy the same; yet notwithstanding
they could prevail nothing, they are all gone and vanished; but this
Book from time to time hath remained, and will remain unremoved in
full and ample manner as it was written at the first.
A proof worthy of the manly mind of Luther, and compared with which the
Grotian pretended demonstrations, from Grotius himself to Paley, are
mischievous underminings of the Faith, pleadings fitter for an Old
Bailey thieves' counsellor than for a Christian divine. The true
evidence of the Bible is the Bible,--of Christianity the living fact of
Christianity itself, as the manifest 'archeus' or predominant of the
life of the planet.
Ib. p. 4.
The art of the School divines (said Luther) with their speculations in
the Holy Scriptures, are merely vain and human cogitations, spun out
of their own natural wit and understanding. They talk much of the
union of the will and understanding, but all is mere fantasy and
fondness. The right and true speculation (said Luther) is this,
Believe in Christ; do what thou oughtest to do in thy vocation, &c.
This is the only practice in divinity. Also, 'Mystica Theologia
Dionysii' is a mere fable, and a lie, like to Plato's fables. 'Omnia
sunt non ens, et omnia sunt ens'; all is something, and all is
nothing, and so he leaveth all hanging in frivolous and idle sort.
Still, however, 'du theure Mann Gottes, mein verehrter Luther'! reason,
will, understanding are words, to which real entities correspond; and we
may in a sound and good sense say that reason is the ray, the projected
disk or image, from the Sun of Righteousness, an echo from the Eternal
Word--'the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world';
and that when the will placeth itself in a right line with the reason,
there ariseth the spirit, through which the will of God floweth into and
actuates the will of man, so that it willeth the things of God, and the
understanding is enlivened, and thenceforward useth the materials
supplied to it by the senses symbolically; that is, with an insight into
the true substance thereof.
Ib. p. 9.
The Pope usurpeth and taketh to himself the power to expound and to
construe the Scriptures according to his pleasure. What he saith, must
stand and be spoken as from heaven. Therefore let us love and
preciously value the divine word, that thereby we may be able to
resist the Devil and his swarm.
As often as I use in prayer the 16th verse of the 71st Psalm, (in our
Prayer-book version), my thoughts especially revert to the subject of
the right appreciation of the Scriptures, and in what sense the Bible
may be called the word of God, and how and under what conditions the
unity of the Spirit is translucent through the letter, which, read as
the letter merely, is the word of this and that pious but fallible and
imperfect man. Alas for the superstition, where the words themselves are
made to be the Spirit! O might I live but to utter all my meditations on
this most concerning point!
Ib. p. 12.
Bullinger said once in my hearing (said Luther) that he was earnest
against the Anabaptists, as contemners of God's word, and also against
those which attributed too much to the literal word, for (said he)
such do sin against God and his almighty power; as the Jews did in
naming the ark, God. But, (said he) whoso holdeth a mean between both,
the same is taught what is the right use of the word and sacraments.
Whereupon (said Luther) I answered him and said; Bullinger, you err,
you know neither yourself, nor what you hold; I mark well your tricks
and fallacies: Zuinglius and OEcolampadius likewise proceeded too far
in the ungodly meaning: but when Brentius withstood them, they then
lessened their opinions, alleging, they did not reject the literal
word, but only condemned certain gross abuses. By this your error you
cut in sunder and separate the word and the spirit, &c.
In my present state of mind, and with what light I now enjoy,--(may God
increase it, and cleanse it from the dark mist into the 'lumen siccum'
of sincere knowledge!)--I cannot persuade myself that this vehemence of
our dear man of God against Bullinger, Zuinglius and OEcolampadius on
this point could have had other origin, than his misconception of what
they intended. But Luther spoke often (I like him and love him all the
better therefor,) in his moods and according to the mood. Was not that a
different mood, in which he called St. James's Epistle a 'Jack-Straw
poppet'; and even in this work selects one verse as the best in the
whole letter,--evidently meaning, the only verse of any great value?
Besides he accustomed himself to use the term, 'the word,' in a very
wide sense when the narrower would have cramped him. When he was on the
point of rejecting the Apocalypse, then 'the word' meant the spirit of
the Scriptures collectively.
Ib. p. 21.
I, (said Luther), do not hold that children are without faith when
they are baptized; for inasmuch as they are brought to Christ by his
command, and that the Church prayeth for them; therefore, without all
doubt, faith is given unto them, although with our natural sense and
reason we neither see nor understand it.
Nay, but dear honoured Luther! is this fair? If Christ or Scripture had
said in one place, 'Believe, and thou mayest be baptized'; and in
another place, 'Baptize infants'; then we might perhaps be allowed to
reconcile the two seemingly jarring texts, by such words as "faith is
given to them, although, &c." But when no such text, as the latter, is
to be found, nor any one instance as a substitute, then your conclusion
seems arbitrary.
Ib. p. 25.
This argument (said Luther), concludeth so much as nothing; for,
although they had been angels from heaven, yet that troubleth me
nothing at all; we are now dealing about God's word, and with the
truth of the Gospel, that is a matter of far greater weight to have
the same kept and preserved pure and clear; therefore we (said
Luther), neither care nor trouble ourselves for, and about, the
greatness of Saint Peter and the other Apostles, or how many and great
miracles they wrought: the thing which we strive for is, that the
truth of the Holy Gospel may stand; for God regardeth not men's
reputations nor persons.
Oh, that the dear man Luther had but told us here what he meant by the
term, Gospel! That St. Paul had seen even St. Luke's, is but a
conjecture, grounded on a conjectural interpretation of a single text,
doubly equivocal; namely, that the Luke mentioned was the same with the
Evangelist Luke; and that the 'evangelium' signified a book; the latter,
of itself improbable, derives its probability from the undoubtedly very
strong probability of the former. If then not any book, much less the
four books, now called the four Gospels, were meant by Paul, but the
contents of those books, as far as they are veracious, and whatever else
was known on equal authority at that time, though not contained in those
books; if, in short, the whole sum of Christ's acts and discourses be
what Paul meant by the Gospel; then the argument is circuitous, and
returns to the first point,--What 'is' the Gospel? Shall we believe you,
and not rather the companions of Christ, the eye and ear witnesses of
his doings and sayings? Now I should require strong inducements to make
me believe that St. Paul had been guilty of such palpably false logic;
and I therefore feel myself compelled to infer, that by the Gospel Paul
intended the eternal truths known ideally from the beginning, and
historically realized in the manifestation of the Word in Christ Jesus;
and that he used the ideal immutable truth as the canon and criterion of
the oral traditions. For example, a Greek mathematician, standing in the
same relation of time and country to Euclid as that in which St. Paul
stood to Jesus Christ, might have exclaimed in the same spirit: "What do
you talk to me of this, that, and the other intimate acquaintance of
Euclid's? My object is to convey the sublime system of geometry which he
realized, and by that must I decide." "I," says St. Paul, "have been
taught by the spirit of Christ, a teaching susceptible of no addition,
and for which no personal anecdotes, however reverendly attested, can be
a substitute." But dearest Luther was a translator; he could not, must
not, see this.
Ib. p. 32.
That God's word, and the Christian Church, is preserved against the
raging of the world.
The Papists have lost the cause; with God's word they are not able to
resist or withstand us. * * * 'The kings of the earth stand up, and
the rulers take counsel together, &c'. God will deal well enough with
these angry gentlemen, and will give them but small thanks for their
labor, in going about to suppress his word and servants; he hath sat
in counsel above these five thousand five hundred years, hath ruled
and made laws. Good Sirs! be not so choleric; go further from the
wall, lest you knock your pates against it. 'Kiss the Son lest he be
angry, &c'. That is, take hold on Christ, or the Devil will take hold
on you, &c.
The second Psalm (said Luther), is a proud Psalm against those
fellows. It begins mild and simply, but it endeth stately and
rattling. * * * I have now angered the Pope about his images of
idolatry. O! how the sow raiseth her bristles! * * The Lord saith:
'Ego suscitabo vos in novissimo die': and then he will call and say:
ho! Martin Luther, Philip Melancthon, Justus Jonas, John Calvin, &c.
Arise, come up, * * * Well on, (said Luther), let us be of good
comfort.
A delicious paragraph. How our fine preachers would turn up their
Tom-tit beaks and flirt with their tails at it! But this is the way in
which the man of life, the man of power, sets the dry bones in motion.
Chap. II. p. 37.
This is the thanks that God hath for his grace, for creating, for
redeeming, sanctifying, nourishing, and for preserving us: such a
seed, fruit, and godly child is the world. O, woe be to it!
Too true.
Ib. p. 54.
That out of the best comes the worst.
Out of the Patriarchs and holy Fathers came the Jews that crucified
Christ; out of the Apostles came Judas the traitor; out of the city
Alexandria (where a fair illustrious and famous school was, and from
whence proceeded many upright and godly learned men), came Arius and
Origenes.
Poor Origen! Surely Luther was put to it for an instance, and had never
read the works of that very best of the old Fathers, and eminently
upright and godly learned man.
Ib.
The sparrows are the least birds, and yet they are very hurtful, and
have the best nourishment.
'Ergo digni sunt omni persecutione'. Poor little Philip Sparrows! Luther
did not know that they more than earn their good wages by destroying
grubs and other small vermin.
Ib. p. 61.
He that without danger will know God, and will speculate of him, let
him look first into the manger, that is, let him begin below, and let
him first learn to know the Son of the Virgin Mary, born at Bethlehem,
that lies and sucks in his mother's bosom; or let one look upon him
hanging on the Cross. ** But take good heed in any case of high
climbing cogitations, to clamber up to heaven without this ladder,
namely, the Lord Christ in his humanity.
To know God as God ([Greek: ton Zaena], the living God) we must assume
his personality: otherwise what were it but an ether, a gravitation?
--but to assume his personality, we must begin with his humanity, and
this is impossible but in history; for man is an historical--not an
eternal being. 'Ergo'. Christianity is of necessity historical and not
philosophical only.
Ib. p. 62.
'What is that to thee'? said Christ to Peter. 'Follow thou me'--me,
follow me, and not thy questions, or cogitations.
Lord! keep us looking to, and humbly following, thee!
Chap. VI. p. 103.
The philosophers and learned heathen (said Luther) have described God,
that he is as a circle, the point whereof in the midst is every where;
but the circumference, which on the outside goeth round about, is no
where: herewith they would shew that God is all, and yet is nothing.
What a huge difference the absence of a blank space, which is nothing,
or next to nothing, may make! The words here should have been printed,
"God is all, and yet is no thing;" For what does 'thing' mean? Itself,
that is, the 'ing', or inclosure, that which is contained within an
outline, or circumscribed. So likewise to 'think' is to inclose, to
determine, confine and define. To think an infinite is a contradiction
in terms equal to a boundless bound. So in German 'Ding, denken'; in
Latin 'res, reor'.
Chap. VII. p. 113.
Helvidius alleged the mother of Christ was not a virgin; so that
according to his wicked allegation, Christ was born in original sin.
O, what a tangle of impure whimsies has this notion of an immaculate
conception, an Ebionite tradition, as I think, brought into the
Christian Church! I have sometimes suspected that the Apostle John had a
particular view to this point, in the first half of the first chapter of
his Gospel. Not that I suppose our present Matthew then in existence, or
that, if John had seen the Gospel according to Luke, the 'Christopaedia'
had been already prefixed to it. But the rumor might have been whispered
about, and as the purport was to give a psilanthropic explanation and
solution of the phrases, Son of God and Son of Man,--so Saint John met
it by the true solution, namely, the eternal Filiation of the Word.
Ib. p. 120. Of Christ's riding into Jerusalem.
But I hold (said Luther) that Christ himself did not mention that
prophecy of Zechariah, but rather, that the Apostles and Evangelists
did use it for a witness.
Worth remembering for the purpose of applying it to the text in which
our Lord is represented in the first (or Matthew's) Gospel, and by that
alone, as citing Daniel by name. It was this text that so sorely, but I
think very unnecessarily, perplexed and gravelled Bentley, who was too
profound a scholar and too acute a critic to admit the genuineness of
the whole of that book.
Ib.
The Prophets (said Luther) did set, speak, and preach of the second
coming of Christ in manner as we now do.
I regret that Mr. Irving should have blended such extravagancies and
presumptuous prophesyings with his support and vindication of the
Millennium, and the return of Jesus in his corporeal individuality,
--because these have furnished divines in general, both Churchmen and
Dissenting, with a pretext for treating his doctrine with silent
contempt. Had he followed the example of his own Ben Ezra, and argued
temperately and learnedly, the controversy must have forced the
momentous question on our Clergy:--Are Christians bound to believe
whatever an Apostle believed,--and in the same way and sense? I think
Saint Paul himself lived to doubt the solidity of his own literal
interpretation of our Lord's words.
The whole passage in which our Lord describes his coming is so
evidently, and so intentionally expressed in the diction and images of
the Prophets, that nothing but the carnal literality common to the Jews
at that time and most strongly marked in the disciples, who were among
the least educated of their countrymen, could have prevented the
symbolic import and character of the words from being seen. The whole
Gospel and the Epistles of John, are a virtual confutation of this
reigning error--and no less is the Apocalypse whether written by, or
under the authority of, the Evangelist.
The unhappy effect which St. Paul's (may I not say) incautious language
respecting Christ's return produced on the Thessalonians, led him to
reflect on the subject, and he instantly in the second epistle to them
qualified the doctrine, and never afterwards resumed it; but on the
contrary, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, c. 15, substitutes
the doctrine of immortality in a celestial state and a spiritual body.
On the nature of our Lord's future epiphany or phenomenal person, I am
not ashamed to acknowledge, that my views approach very nearly to those
of Emanuel Swedenborg.
Ib. p. 121.
Doctor Jacob Schenck never preacheth out of his book, but I do, (said
Luther), though not of necessity, but I do it for example's sake to
others.
As many notes, 'memoranda', cues of connection and transition as the
preacher may find expedient or serviceable to him; well and good. But to
read in a manuscript book, as our Clergy now do, is not to preach at
all. Preach out of a book, if you must; but do not read in it, or even
from it. A read sermon of twenty minutes will seem longer to the hearers
than a free discourse of an hour.
Ib.
My simple opinion is (said Luther) and I do believe that Christ for us
descended into hell, to the end he might break and destroy the same,
as in Psalm xvi, and Acts ii, is shewed and proved.
Could Luther have been ignorant, that this clause was not inserted into
the Apostle's Creed till the sixth century after Christ? I believe the
original intention of the clause was no more than 'vere mortuus est'--in
contradiction to the hypothesis of a trance or state of suspended
animation.
Chap. VII. p. 122.
When Christ (said Luther) forbiddeth to spread abroad or to make known
his works of wonder; there he speaketh as being sent from the Father,
and doth well and right therein in forbidding them, to the end that
thereby he might leave us an example, not to seek our own praise and
honor in that wherein we do good; but we ought to seek only and alone
the honor of God.
Not satisfactory. Doubtless, the command was in connection with the
silence enjoined respecting his Messiahship.
Chap. VIII. p. 147.
Doctor Hennage said to Luther, Sir, where you say that the Holy Spirit
is the certainty in the word towards God, that is, that a man is
certain of his own mind and opinion; then it must needs follow that
all sects have the Holy Ghost, for they will needs be most certain of
their doctrine and religion.
Luther might have answered, "positive, you mean, not certain."
Chap. IX. p. 160.
But who hath power to forgive or to detain sins? Answer; the Apostles
and all Church servants, and (in case of necessity) every Christian.
Christ giveth them not power over money, wealth, kingdoms, &c; but
over sins and the consciences of human creatures, over the power of
the Devil, and the throat of Hell.