The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 27

Ib. s. 104.

It was scarcely to be expected that the pa.s.sions of James's age would allow of this wise distinction between Papists, the intriguing restless partizans of a foreign potentate, and simple Roman-Catholics, who preferred the 'mumpsimus' of their grandsires to the corrected 'sumpsimus' of the Reformation. But that in our age this distinction should have been neglected in the Roman-Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation Bill!

Ib. s. 105.

But this invisible consistory shall be confusedly diffused over all the kingdom, that many of the subjects shall, to the intolerable exhausting of the wealth of the realm, pay double t.i.thes, double offerings, double fees, in regard of their double consistory. And if Ireland be so poor as it is suggested, I hold, under correction, that this invisible consistory is the princ.i.p.al cause of the exhausting thereof.

A memorable remark on the evil of the double priesthood in Ireland.

Ib.

Dr. Bishop, the new Bishop of Chalcedon, is to come to London privately, and I am much troubled at it, not knowing what to advise his majesty as things stand at this present. If you were shipped with the Infanta, the only counsel were to let the judges proceed with him presently; hang him out of the way, and the King to blame my lord of Canterbury or myself for it.

Striking instance and ill.u.s.tration of the tricksy policy which in the seventeenth century pa.s.sed for state wisdom even with the comparatively wise. But there must be a Ulysses before there can be an Aristides and Phocion.

Poor King James's main errors arose out of his superst.i.tious notions of a sovereignty inherent in the person of the king. Hence he would be a sacred person, though in all other respects he might be a very devil.

Hence his yearning for the Spanish match; and the ill effects of his toleration became rightly attributed by his subjects to foreign influence, as being against his own acknowledged principle, not on a principle.

Ib. s. 107.

I have at times played with the thought, that our bishoprics, like most of our college fellowships, might advantageously be confined to single men, if only it were openly declared to be on ground of public expediency, and on no supposed moral superiority of the single state.

Ib. s. 108.

That a rector or vicar had not only an office in the church, but a freehold for life, by the common law, in his benefice.

O! if Archbishop Williams had but seen in a clear point of view what he indistinctly aims at,--the essential distinction between the nationalty and its trustees and holders, and the Christian Church and its ministers. [6]

Ib. s. 111.

I will represent him (the archbishop of Spalato) in a line or two, that he was as indifferent, or rather dissolute, in practice as in opinion. For in the same chapter, art. 35, this is his Nicolaitan doctrine:--'A pluralitate uxorum natura humana non abhorret, imo forta.s.se neque ab earum communitate.'

How so? The words mean only that the human animal is not withholden by any natural instinct from plurality or even community of females. It is not a.s.serted, that reason and revelation do not forbid both the one and the other, or that man unwithholden would not be a Yahoo, morally inferior to the swallow. The emphasis is to be laid on 'natura', not on 'humana'. Humanity forbids plural and promiscuous intercourse, not however by the animal nature of man, but by the reason and religion that const.i.tute his moral and spiritual nature.

Ib. s. 112.

But being thrown out into banishment, and hunted to be destroyed as a partridge in the mountain, he subscribed against his own hand, which yet did not prejudice Athanasius his innocency:--[Greek: ta gar ek basanon para taen ex archaes gn_omaen gignomena, tauta ou t_on phobaethent_on, alla t_on basanizont_on est boulaemata.]

I have ever said this of Sir John Cheke. I regret his recantation as one of the cruelties suffered by him, and always see the guilt flying off from him and settling on his persecutors.

Ib. s. 151.

I conclude, therefore, that his Highness having admitted nothing in these oaths or articles, either to the prejudice of the true, or the equalizing or authorizing of the other, religion, but contained himself wholly within the limits of penal statutes and connivances, wherein the state hath ever challenged and usurped a directing power, &c.

Three points seem wanting to render the Lord Keeper's argument air-tight;--

1. the proof that a king of England even then had a right to dispense, not with the execution in individual cases of the laws, but with the laws themselves 'in omne futurum'; that is, to repeal laws by his own act;

2. the proof that such a tooth-and-talon drawing of the laws did not endanger the equalizing and final mastery of the unlawful religion;

3. the utter want of all reciprocity on the part of the Spanish monarch.

In short, it is pardonable in Hacket, but would be contemptible in any other person, not to see this advice of the Lord Keeper's as a black blotch in his character, both as a Protestant Bishop and as a councillor of state in a free and Protestant country.

Ib. s. 152.

Yet opinions were so various, that some spread it for a fame, that, &c.

Was it not required of--at all events usual for--all present at a Council to subscribe their names to the act of the majority? There is a modern case in point, I think, that of Sir Arthur Wellesley's signature to the Convention of Cintra.

Ib. s. 164.

For to forbid judges against their oath, and justices of peace (sworn likewise), not to execute the law of the land, is a thing unprecedented in this kingdom. 'Durus sermo', a harsh and bitter pill to be digested upon a sudden, and without some preparation.

What a fine India-rubber conscience Hacket, as well as his patron, must have had! Policy with innocency,' 'cunning with conscience,' lead up the dance to the tune of ''Tantara' rogues all!'

Upon my word, I can scarcely conceive a greater difficulty than for an honest, warm-hearted man of principle of the present day so to discipline his mind by reflection on the circ.u.mstances and received moral system of the Stuarts' age (from Elizabeth to the death of Charles I), and its proper place in the spiral line of ascension, as to be able to regard the Duke of Buckingham as not a villain, and to resolve many of the acts of those Princes into pa.s.sions, conscience-warped and hardened by half-truths and the secular creed of prudence, as being itself virtue instead of one of her handmaids, when interpreted by minds const.i.tutionally and by their accidental circ.u.mstances imprudent and rash, yet fearful and suspicious; and with casuists and codes of casuistry as their conscience-leaders! One of the favorite works of Charles I was Sanderson 'de Juramento'.

Ib. s. 200.

Wherefore he waives the strong and full defence he had made upon stopping of an original writ, and deprecates all offence by that maxim of the law which admits of a mischief rather than an inconvenience: which was as much as to say, that he thought it a far less evil to do the lady the probability of an injury (in her own name) than to suffer those two courts to clash together again.

All this is a tangle of sophisms. The a.s.sumption is, it is better to inflict a private wrong than a public one: we ought to wrong one rather than many. But even then, it is badly stated. The principle is true only where the tolerating of the private wrong is the only means of preventing a greater public wrong. But in this case it was the certainty of the wrong of one to avoid the chance of an inconvenience that might perchance be the occasion of wrong to many, and which inconvenience both easily might and should have been remedied by rightful measures, by mutual agreement between the Bishop and Chancellor, and by the King, or by an act of Parliament.

Ib. s. 203.

'Truly, Sir, this is my dark lantern, and I am not ashamed to inquire of a Dalilah to resolve a riddle; for in my studies of divinity I have gleaned up this maxim, 'licet uti alieno peccato';--though the Devil make her a sinner, I may make good use of her sin.' Prince, merrily, 'Do you deal in such ware?' 'In good faith, Sir,' says the Keeper, 'I never saw her face.'

And Hacket's evident admiration, and not merely approbation, of this base Jesuitry,--this divinity which had taught the Archbishop 'licere uti alieno peccato'! But Charles himself was a student of such divinity, and yet (as rogues of higher rank comfort the pride of their conscience by despising inferior knaves) I suspect that the 'merrily' was the Sardonic mirth of bitter contempt; only, however, because he disliked Williams, who was simply a man of his age, his baseness being for us, not for his contemporaries, or even for his own mind. But the worst of all is the Archbishop's heartless disingenuousness and moon-like nodes towards his kind old master the King. How much of truth was there in the Spaniard's information respecting the intrigues of the Prince and the Duke of Buckingham? If none, if they were mere slanders, if the Prince had acted the filial part toward his father and King, and the Duke the faithful part towards his master and only too fond and affectionate benefactor, what more was needed than to expose the falsehoods? But if Williams knew that there was too great a mixture of truth in the charges, what a cowardly ingrate to his old friend to have thus curried favor with the rising sun by this base jugglery!

Ib. s. 209.

He was the topsail of the n.o.bility, and in power and trust of offices far above all the n.o.bility.