The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 4

How readily would this, and indeed all the disputes respecting the powers and const.i.tution of Church government have been settled, or perhaps prevented, had there been an insight into the distinct nature and origin of the National Church and the Church under Christ! [3] To the ignorance of this, all the fierce contentions between the Puritans and the Episcopalians under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, all the errors and exorbitant pretensions of the Church of Scotland, and the heats and antipathies of our present Dissenters, may be demonstrably traced.

Ib. 9. p. 183.

Pythagoras, by bringing up his scholars in the speculative knowledge of numbers, made their conceits therein so strong, that when they came to the contemplation of things natural, they imagined that in every particular thing they even beheld as it were with their eyes, how the elements of number gave essence and being to the works of nature: a thing in reason impossible; which notwithstanding, through their mis-fashioned pre-conceit, appeared unto them no less certain, than if nature had written it in the very foreheads of all the creatures of G.o.d.

I am not so conversant with the volumes of Duns Scotus as to be able to p.r.o.nounce positively whether he is an exception, but I can think of no other instance of high metaphysical genius in an Englishman. Judgment, solid sense, invention in specialties, fortunate antic.i.p.ations and instructive foretact of truth,--in these we can shew giants. It is evident from this example from the Pythagorean school that not even our incomparable Hooker could raise himself to the idea, so rich in truth, which is contained in the words

'numero, pondere, et mensura generantur coeli et terra'.

O, that Hooker had ever asked himself concerning will, absolute will,

[Greek: ho arithms hyperarithmis], 'numerus omues numeros ponens, nunquam positus!' [4]

Ib. p. 183.

When they of the 'Family of Love' have it once in their heads, that Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers, &c.

If the Familists thought of Christ as a quality, it was a grievous error indeed. But I have my doubts whether this was not rather an inference drawn by their persecutors.

Ib. 15. p. 191.

When instruction doth them no good, let them feel but the least degree of most mercifully-tempered severity, they fasten on the head of the Lord's vicegerents here on earth, whatsoever they any where find uttered against the cruelty of blood-thirsty men, and to themselves they draw all the sentences which Scripture hath in favor of innocency persecuted for the truth.

How great the influence of the age on the strongest minds, when so eminently wise a man as Richard Hooker could overlook the obvious impolicy of inflicting punishments which the sufferer himself will regard as merits, and all who have any need to be deterred will extol as martyrdom! Even where the necessity could be plausibly pretended, it is war, not punitive law;--and then Augustine's argument for Sarah!

Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 194.

We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole earth, that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been ordered by ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, sithence the time that the blessed apostles were here conversant.

Hooker was so good a man that it would be wicked to suspect him of knowingly playing the sophist. And yet strange it is, that he should not have been aware that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily took for granted) one and the same, contended against with good reason.

Knox's ecclesiastical polity (worthy of Lycurgus), adopted bishops under a different name, or rather under a translation instead of corruption of the name [Greek: epaskapoi]. He would have had superintendents.

Ib. c. v. 2. p. 204.

A law is the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also.

This is a fiction of law for the purpose of giving to that, which is necessarily empirical, the form and consequence of a science, to the reality of which a code of laws can only approximate by compressing all liberty and individuality into a despotism. As Justinian to Alfred, and Constantinople, the Consuls and Senate of Rome to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of London; so is the imperial Roman code to the common and statute law of England. The advocates of the discipline would, according to our present notions of civil rights, have been justified in putting fact against fiction, and might have challenged Hooker to shew, first, that the const.i.tution of the Church in Christ was a congruous subject of parliamentary legislation; that the legislators were 'bona fide' determined by spiritual views, and that the jealousy and arbitrary principles of the Queen, aided by motives of worldly state policy,--for example, the desire of conciliating the Roman Catholic potentates by retaining all she could of the exterior of the Romish Church, its hierarchy, its ornaments, and its ceremonies,--were not the subst.i.tutes for the Holy Spirit in influencing the majorities in the two Houses of Parliament. It is my own belief that the Puritans and the Prelatists divided the truth between them; and, as half-truths are whole errors, were both equally in the wrong;--the Prelatists in contending for that as incident to the Church in Christ, that is, the collective number [Greek: t_on ekkaloumen_on] or 'ecclesia', which only belonged, but which rightfully did belong, to the National Church as a component estate of the realm, the 'enclesia';--the Puritans in requiring of the 'enclesia' what was only requisite or possible for the 'ecclesia'.[5]

Archbishop Grindal is an ill.u.s.trious exception. He saw the whole truth, and that the functions of the enclesiastic and those of the ecclesiastic were not the less distinct, because both were capable of being exercised by the same person; and _vice versa_, not the less compatible in the same subject because distinct in themselves. The Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Ib. c. vi. 3. p. 209.

G.o.d was not ignorant, that the priests and judges, whose sentence in matters of controversy he ordained should stand, both might and oftentimes would be deceived in their judgment. However, better it was in the eye of His understanding, that sometime an erroneous sentence definitive should prevail, till the same authority perceiving such oversight, might afterwards correct or reverse it, than that strifes should have respite to grow, and not come speedily to some end.

It is difficult to say, which most shines through this whole pa.s.sage, the spirit of wisdom or the spirit of meekness. The fatal error of the Romish Church did not consist in the inappellability of the Councils, or that an acquiescence in their decisions and decree was a duty binding on the conscience of the dissentients,--not I say in contending for a practical infallibility of Council or Pope; but in laying claim to an actual and absolute immunity from error, and consequently for the unrepealability of their decisions by any succeeding Council or Pope.

Hence, even wise decisions--wise under the particular circ.u.mstances and times--degenerated into mischievous follies, by having the privilege of immortality without any exemption from the dotage of superannuation.

Hence errors became like _glaciers_, or ice-bergs in the frozen ocean, unthawed by summer, and growing from the fresh deposits of each returning winter.

Ib. 6. p. 212.

An argument necessary and demonstrative is such, as being proposed unto any man, and understood, the mind cannot choose but inwardly a.s.sent. Any one such reason dischargeth, I grant, the conscience, and setteth it at full liberty.

I would not concede even so much as this. It may well chance that even an argument demonstrative, if understood, may be adducible against some one sentence of a whole liturgy; and yet the means of removing it without a palpable overbalance of evil may not exist for a time; and either there is no command against schism, or we are bound in such small matters to offer the sacrifice of willing silence to the public peace of the Church. This would not, however, prevent a minister from pointing out the defect in his character as a doctor or learned theologian.

Ib. c. viii. 1. p. 2-20.

For adventuring to erect the discipline of Christ without the leave of the Christian magistrate, haply ye may condemn us as fools, in that we hazard thereby our estates and persons further than you which are that way more wise think necessary: but of any offence or sin therein committed against G.o.d, with what conscience can you accuse us, when your own positions are, that the things we observe should every of them be dearer unto us than ten thousand lives; that they are the peremptory commandments of G.o.d; that no mortal man can dispense with them, and that the magistrate grievously sinneth in not constraining thereunto?

'Hoc argumentum ad invidiam nimis sycophantic.u.m est quam ut mihi placeat a tanto viro'. Besides, it contradicts Hooker's own very judicious rule, that to discuss and represent is the office of the learned, as individuals, because the truth may be entire in any one mind; but to do belongs to the supreme power as the will of the whole body politic, and in effective action individuals are mere fractions without any legitimate referee to add them together. Hooker's objection from the n.o.bility and gentry of the realm is unanswerable and within half a century afterwards proved insurmountable. Imagine a sun containing within its proper atmosphere a mult.i.tude of transparent satellites, lost in the glory, or all joining to form the visible 'phasis' or disk; and then beyond the precincts of this sun a number of opake bodies at various distances, and having a common center of their own round which they revolve, and each more or less according to the lesser or greater distance partaking of the light and natural warmth of the sun, which I have been supposing; but not sharing in its peculiar influences, or in the solar life sustainable only by the vital air of the solar atmosphere. The opake bodies const.i.tute the national churches, the sun the churches spiritual.

The defect of the simile, arising necessarily out of the incompossibility of spiritual prerogatives with material bodies under the proprieties and necessities of s.p.a.ce, is, that it does not, as no concrete or visual image can, represent the possible duplicity of the individuals, the aggregate of whom const.i.tutes the national church, so that any one individual, or any number of such individuals, may at the same time be, by an act of their own, members of the church spiritual, and in every congregation may form an 'ecclesia' or Christian community; and how to facilitate and favor this without any schism from the 'enclesia', and without any disturbance of the body politic, was the problem which Grindal and the bishops of the first generation of the Reformed Church sought to solve, and it is the problem which every earnest Christian endued with competent gifts, and who is at the same time a patriot and a philanthropist, ought to propose to himself, as the 'ingens desiderium proborum'.

8th Sept, 1826.

Ib. c. viii. 7. p. 232.

Baptizing of infants, although confessed by themselves, to have been continued ever sithence the very apostles' own times, yet they altogether condemned.

'Quaere'. I cannot say what the fanatic Anabaptists, of whom Hooker is speaking, may have admitted; but the more sober and learned Antipaedobaptists, who differed in this point only from the reformed churches, have all, I believe, denied the practice of infant baptism during the first century.

B.J. c. ii. 1. p. 249.

That which doth a.s.sign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a law.

See the essays on method, in the 'Friend'. [6] Hooker's words literally and grammatically interpreted seem to a.s.sert the antecedence of the thing to its kind, that is, to its essential characters;--and to its force together with its form and measure of working, that is, to its specific and distinctive characters; in short, the words a.s.sert the pre-existence of the thing to all its const.i.tuent powers, qualities, and properties.

Now this is either--first, equivalent to the a.s.sertion of a 'prima et nuda materia', so happily ridiculed by the author of 'Hudibras', [7] and which under any scheme of cosmogony is a mere phantom, having its whole and sole substance in an impotent effort of the imagination or sensuous fancy, but which is utterly precluded by the doctrine of creation which it in like manner negatives:--or secondly, the words a.s.sert a self-destroying absurdity, namely, the antecedence of a thing to itself; as if having a.s.serted that water consisted of hydrogen = 77, and oxygen = 23, I should talk of water as existing before the creation of hydrogen and oxygen.

All laws, indeed, are const.i.tutive; and it would require a longer train of argument than a note can contain, to shew what a thing is; but this at least is quite certain, that in the order of thought it must be posterior to the law that const.i.tutes it. But such in fact was Hooker's meaning, and the word, thing, is used 'proleptice' in favour of the imagination, as appears from the sentences that follow, in which the creative idea is declared to be the law of the things thereby created. A productive idea, manifesting itself and its reality in the product is a law; and when the product is phaenomenal, (that is, an object of the outward senses) it is a law of nature. The law is 'res noumenon'; the thing is 'res phenomenon' [8] A physical law, in the right sense of the term, is the sufficient cause of the appearance,--'causa sub-faciens'.

P.S. What a deeply interesting volume might be written on the symbolic import of the primary relations and dimensions of s.p.a.ce--long, broad, deep, or depth; surface; upper, under, above and below, right, left, horizontal, perpendicular, oblique:--and then the order of causation, or that which gives intelligibility, and the reverse order of effects, or that which gives the conditions of actual existence! Without the higher the lower would want its intelligibility: without the lower the higher could not have existed. The infant is a riddle of which the man is the solution; but the man could not exist but with the infant as his antecedent.

Ib. 2. p. 250.

In which essential Unity of G.o.d, a Trinity personal nevertheless subsisteth, after a manner far exceeding the possibility of man's conceit.

If 'conceit' here means conception, the remark is most true; for the Trinity is an idea, and no idea can be rendered by a conception. An idea is essentially inconceivable. But if it be meant that the Trinity is otherwise inconceivable than as the divine eternity and every attribute of G.o.d is and must be, then neither the commonness of the language here used, nor the high authority of the user, can deter me from denouncing it as untrue and dangerous. So far is it from being true, that on the contrary, the Trinity is the only form in which an idea of G.o.d is possible, unless indeed it be a Spinosistic or World-G.o.d.

Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 264.