The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 25

Can we wonder that the strict Protestants were jealous of the backsliding of the Arminian prelatical clergy and of Laud their leader, when so strict a Calvinist as Bishop Hacket could trick himself up in such fantastic rags and lappets of Popish monkery!--could skewer such frippery patches, cribbed from the tyring room of Romish Parthenolatry, on the sober gown and ca.s.sock of a Reformed and Scriptural Church!

Ib. p. 7.

But to say the truth, was he not safer among the beasts than he could be elsewhere in all the town of Bethlem? His enemies perchance would say unto him, as Jael did to Sisera, 'Turn in, turn in, my Lord', when she purposed to kill him; as the men of Keilah made a fair shew to give David all courteous hospitality, but the issue would prove, if G.o.d had not blessed him, that they meant to deliver him into the hands of Saul that sought his blood. So there was no trusting of the Bethlemites. Who knows, but that they would have prevented Judas, and betrayed him for thirty pieces of silver unto Herod? More humanity is to be expected from the beasts than from some men, and therefore she laid him in a manger.

Did not the life of Archbishop Williams prove otherwise, I should have inferred from these Sermons that Hacket from his first boyhood had been used to make themes, epigrams, copies of verses, and the like, on all the Sunday feasts and festivals of the Church; had found abundant nourishment for this humour of points, quirks, and quiddities in the study of the Fathers and glossers; and remained a 'junior soph' all his life long. I scarcely know what to say: on the one hand, there is a triflingness, a shewman's or relique-hawker's gossip that stands in offensive contrast with the momentous nature of the subject, and the dignity of the ministerial office; as if a preacher having chosen the Prophets for his theme should entertain his congregation by exhibiting a traditional shaving rag of Isaiah's with the Prophet's stubble hair on the dried soap-sud. And yet, on the other hand, there is an innocency in it, a security of faith, a fulness evinced in the play and plash of its overflowing, that at other times give one the same sort of pleasure as the sight of blackberry bushes and children's handkerchief-gardens on the slopes of a rampart, the promenade of some peaceful old town, that stood the last siege in the Thirty Years' war!

Ib. Serm. II. Luke ii. 8.

Tiberius propounded his mind to the senate of Rome, that Christ, the great prophet in Jewry, should be had in the same honour with the other G.o.ds which they worshipped in the Capitol. The motion did not please them, says Eusebius; and this was all the fault, because he was a G.o.d not of their own, but of Tiberius' invention.

Here, I own, the negative evidence of the silence of Seneca and Suetonius--above all, of Tacitus and Pliny--outweigh in my mind the positive testimony of Eusebius, which rested, I suspect, on the same ground with the letters of Pontius Pilate, so boldly appealed to by Tertullian. [2]

Ib. Serm. III. Luke ii. 9.

But our bodies shall revive out of that dust into which they were dissolved, and live for ever in the resurrection of the righteous.

I never could satisfy myself as to the continuance and catholicity of this strange Egyptian tenet in the very face of St. Paul's indignant, 'Thou fool! not that, &c.' I have at times almost been tempted to conjecture that Paul taught a different doctrine from the Palestine disciples on this point, and that the Church preferred the sensuous and therefore more popular belief of the Evangelists' [Greek: kata sarka] to the more intelligible faith of the spiritual sage of the other Athens; for so Tarsus was called.

And was there no symptom of a commencing relapse to the errors of that Church which had equalled the traditions of men, yea, the dreams of phantasts with the revelations of G.o.d, when a chosen elder with the law of truth before him, and professing to divide and distribute the bread of life, could, paragraph after paragraph, place such unwholesome vanities as these before his flock, without even a hint which might apprize them that the gew-gaw comfits were not part of the manna from heaven? All this superst.i.tious trash about angels, which the Jews learned from the Persian legends, a.s.serted as confidently as if Hacket had translated it word for word from one of the four Gospels! Salmasius, if I mistake not, supposes the original word to have been bachelors, young unmarried men. Others interpret angels as meaning the bishop and elders of the Church. More probably it was a proverbial expression derived from the Cherubim in the Temple: something as the country folks used to say to children, Take care, the Fairies will hear you! It was a common notion among the Jews, in the time of St. Paul, that their angels were employed in carrying up their prayers to the throne of G.o.d. Of course they must have been in special attendance in a house of prayer.

After much search and much thought on the subject of angels as a diverse kind of finite beings, I find no sufficing reason to hold it for a revealed doctrine, and if not revealed it is a.s.suredly no truth of philosophy, which, as I have elsewhere remarked, can conceive but three kinds; 1. the infinite reason; 2. the finite rational; and 3. the finite irrational--that is, G.o.d, man, and beast. What indeed, even for the vulgar, is or can an archangel be but a man with wings, better or worse than the wingless species according as the feathers are white or black?

I would that the word had been translated instead of Anglicised in our English Bible.

The following paragraph is one of Hacket's sweetest pa.s.sages. It is really a beautiful little hymn.

By this it appears how suitably a beam of admirable light did concur in the angels' message to set out the majesty of the Son of G.o.d: and I beseech you observe,--all you that would keep a good Christmas as you ought,--that the glory of G.o.d is the best celebration of his Son's nativity; and all your pastimes and mirth (which I disallow not, but rather commend in moderate use) must so be managed, without riot, without surfeiting, without excessive gaming, without pride and vain pomp, in harmlessness, in sobriety, as if the glory of the Lord were round about us. Christ was born to save them that were lost; but frequently you abuse his nativity with so many vices, such disordered outrages, that you make this happy time an occasion for your loss rather than for your salvation. Praise him in the congregation of the people! praise him in your inward heart! praise him with the sanct.i.ty of your life! praise him in your charity to them that need and are in want! This is the glory of G.o.d shining round, and the most Christian solemnizing of the birth of Jesus.

SERMONS ON THE TEMPTATION.

As the Temptation is found in the three Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it must have formed part of the 'Prot-evangelion', or original Gospel;--from the Apostles, therefore, it must have come, and from some or all who had heard the account from our Lord himself. How, then, are we to understand it? To confute the whims and superst.i.tious nugacities of these Sermons, and the hundred other comments and interpretations 'ejusdem farinae', would be a sad waste of time. Yet some meaning, and that worthy of Christ, it must have had. The struggle with the suggestions of the evil principle, first, to force his way and compel belief by a succession of miracles, disjoined from moral and spiritual purpose,--miracles for miracles' sake;--second, doubts of his Messianic character and divinity, and temptations to try it by some ordeal at the risk of certain death;--third, to interpret his mission, as his countrymen generally did, to be one of conquest and royalty;--these perhaps--but I am lost in doubt.

SERMON ON THE TRANSFIGURATION.

Luke IX. 33.

'I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh'.

Rom. ix. 3.

St. Paul does not say, "I would desire to be accursed," nor does he speak of any deliberated result of his consideration; but represents a transient pa.s.sion of his soul, an actual but undetermined impulse,--an impulse existing in and for itself in the moment of its ebullience, and not completed by an act and confirmation of the will,--as a striking proof of the exceeding interest which he continued to feel in the welfare of his countrymen, His heart so swelled with love and compa.s.sion for them, that if it were possible, if reason and conscience permitted it, 'Methinks,' says he, 'I could wish that myself were accursed, if so they might be saved.' Might not a mother, figuring to herself as possible and existing an impossible or not existing remedy for a dying child, exclaim, 'Oh, I could fly to the end of the earth to procure it!'

Let it not be irreverent, if I refer to the fine pa.s.sage in Shakspeare--Hotspur's rapture-like reverie--so often ridiculed by shallow wits. In great pa.s.sion, the crust opake of present and existing weakness and boundedness is, as it were, fused and vitrified for the moment, and through the transparency the soul, catching a gleam of the infinity of the potential in the will of man, reads the future for the present. Percy is wrapt in the contemplation of the physical might inherent in the concentrated will; the inspired Apostle in the sudden sense of the depth of its moral strength.

SERMON ON THE RESURRECTION.

Acts II. 4.

Thirdly, the necessity of it: 'for it was not possible that he should be holden of death'.

One great error of textual divines is their inadvertence to the dates, occasion, object and circ.u.mstances, at and under which the words were written or spoken. Thus the simple a.s.sertion of one or two facts introductory to the teaching of the Christian religion is taken as comprising or const.i.tuting the Christian religion itself. Hence the disproportionate weight laid on the simple fact of the resurrection of Jesus, detached from the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption.

Ib.

St. Austin says, that Tully, in his '3 lib. de Republica', disputed against the reuniting of soul and body. His argument was, To what end?

Where should they remain together? For a body cannot be a.s.sumed into heaven. I believe G.o.d caused those famous monuments of his wit to perish, because of such impious opinions wherewith they were farced.

I believe, however, that these books have recently themselves enjoyed a resurrection by the labor of Angelo Mai. [3]

Ib.

And let any equal auditor judge if Job were not an Anti-Socinian; Job xix. 26. 'Though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see G.o.d, whom I shall behold for myself, and mine eyes shall see, and not another'.

This text rightly rendered is perhaps nothing to the purpose, but may refer to the dire cutaneous disease with which Job was afflicted. It may be merely an expression of Job's confidence of his being justified in the eyes of men, and in this life. [4]

In the whole wide range of theological 'mirabilia', I know none stranger than the general agreement of orthodox divines to forget to ask themselves what they precisely meant by the word 'body.' Our Lord's and St. Paul's meaning is evident enough, that is, the personality.

Ib.

St. Chrysostom's judgment upon it ('having loosed the pains of death') is, that when Christ came out of the grave, death itself was delivered from pain and anxiety--[Greek: _odike katechon autn thanatos, ka ta deina epasche.] Death knew it held him captive whom it ought not to have seized upon, and therefore it suffered torments like a woman in travail till it had given him up again. Thus he. But the Scripture elsewhere testifies, that death was put to sorrow because it had lost its sting, rather than released from sorrow by our Saviour's resurrection.

Most noticeable! See the influence of the surrounding myriotheism in the 'dea Mors!'

Ib.

Let any competent judge read Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams, and then these Sermons, and so measure the stultifying, nugifying effect of a blind and uncritical study of the Fathers, and the exclusive prepossession in favor of their authority in the minds of many of our Church dignitaries in the reign of Charles I.

HACKET'S LIFE OF LORD KEEPER WILLIAMS. [5]