The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 31

Ib. s. xii. ib.

It began early to discover its inconvenience; for when certain zealous persons fled to Frankfort to avoid the funeral piles kindled by the Roman Bishops in Queen Mary's time, as if they had not enemies enough abroad, they fell foul with one another, and the quarrel was about the Common Prayer Book.

But who began the quarrel? Knox and his recent biographer lay it to Dr. c.o.x and the Liturgists.

Ib. s. xiii. p. 289.

Here therefore it became law, was established by an act of Parliament, was made solemn by an appendant penalty against all that on either hand did prevaricate a sanction of so long and so prudent consideration.

Truly evangelical way of solemnizing a party measure, and sapientizing Calvin's 'tolerabiles ineptias' by making them 'ineptias usque ad carcerem et verbera intolerantes!'

Ib. s. xiv. ib.

But the Common Prayer Book had the fate of St. Paul; for when it had scaped the storms of the Roman See, yet a viper sprung out of Queen Mary's fires, &c.

As Knox and his friends confined themselves to the inspired word, whether vipers or no, they were not adders at all events.

Ib. xxvi. p. 296.

For, if we deny to the people a liberty of reading the Scriptures, may they not complain, as Isaac did against the inhabitants of the land, that the Philistines had spoiled his well and the fountains of living water? If a free use to all of them and of all Scriptures were permitted, should not the Church herself have more cause to complain of the infinite licentiousness and looseness of interpretations, and of the commencement of ten thousand errors, which would certainly be consequent to such permission? Reason and religion will chide us in the first, reason and experience in the latter ... The Church with great wisdom hath first held this torch out; and though for great reasons intervening and hindering, it cannot be reduced to practice, yet the Church hath shewn her desire to avoid the evil that is on both hands, and she hath shewn the way also, if it could have been insisted in.

If there were not, at the time this Preface, or this paragraph at least, was written or published, some design on foot or 'sub lingua' of making advances to the continental catholicism for the purpose of conciliating the courts of Austria, France and Spain, in favor of the Cavalier and Royalist party at home and abroad, this must be considered as a useless and worse than useless avowal. The Papacy at the height of its influence never a.s.serted a higher or more anti-Protestant right than this of dividing the Scriptures into permitted and forbidden portions. If there be a functionary of divine inst.i.tution, synodical or unipersonal, who with the name of the 'Church' has the right, under circ.u.mstances of its own determination, to forbid all but such and such parts of the Bible, it must possess potentially, and under other circ.u.mstances, a right of withdrawing the whole book from the unlearned, who yet cannot be altogether unlearned; for the very prohibition supposes them able to do what, a few centuries before, the majority of the clergy themselves were not qualified to do, that is, read their Bible throughout. Surely it would have been politic in the writer to have left out this sentence, which his Puritan adversaries could not fail to translate into the Church shewing her teeth though she dared not bite. I bitterly regret these pa.s.sages; neither our incomparable Liturgy, nor this full, masterly, and unanswerable defence of it, requiring them.

Ib. s. xlv, p. 308.

So that the Church of England, in these manners of dispensing the power of the keys, does cut off all disputings and impertinent wranglings, whether the priest's power were judicial or declarative; for possibly it is both, and it is optative too, and something else yet; for it is an emanation from all the parts of his ministry, and he never absolves, but he preaches or prays, or administers a sacrament; for this power of remission is a transcendent, pa.s.sing through all the parts of the priestly offices. For the keys of the kingdom of heaven are the promises and the threatenings of the Scripture, and the prayers of the Church, and the Word, and the Sacraments, and all these are to be dispensed by the priest, and these keys are committed to his ministry, and by the operation of them all he opens and shuts heaven's gates ministerially.

No more ingenious way of making nothing of a thing than by making it every thing. Omnify the disputed point into a transcendant, and you may defy the opponent to lay hold of it. He might as well attempt to grasp an 'aura electrica'.

Apology, &c. s. ii. p. 320.

And it may be when I am a little more used to it, I shall not wonder at a synod, in which not one Bishop sits in the capacity of a Bishop, though I am most certain this is the first example in England since it was first christened.

Is this quite fair? Is it not, at least logically considered and at the commencement of an argument, too like a 'pet.i.tio principii' or 'presumptio rei litigatae'? The Westminster divines were confessedly not prelates, but many in that a.s.sembly were, in all other points, orthodox and affectionate members of the Establishment, who with Bedell, Lightfoot, and Usher, held them to be Bishops in the primitive sense of the term, and who yet had no wish to make any other change in the hierarchy than that of denominating the existing English prelates Archbishops. They thought that what at the bottom was little more than a question of names among Episcopalians, ought not to have occasioned such a dispute; but yet the evil having taken place, they held a change of names not too great a sacrifice, if thus the things themselves could be preserved, and Episcopacy maintained against the Independents and Presbyterians.

Ib. s. v. p. 321.

It is a thing of no present importance, but as a point of history, it is worth a question whether there were any divines in the Westminster a.s.sembly who adopted by antic.i.p.ation the notions of the Seekers, Quakers and others 'ejusdem farin?.' Baxter denies it. I understand the controversy to have been, whether the examinations at the admission to the ministry did or not supersede the necessity of any directive models besides those found in the sacred volumes:--if not necessary, whether there was any greater expedience in providing by authority forms of prayer for the minister than forms of sermons. Reading, whether of prayers or sermons, might be discouraged without encouraging unpremeditated praying and preaching. But the whole question as between the prelatists and the a.s.sembly divines has like many others been best solved by the trial. A vast majority among the Dissenters themselves consider the antecedents to the sermon, with exception of their congregational hymns, as the defective part of their public service, and admit the superiority of our Liturgy.

P.S.--It seems to me, I confess, that the controversy could never have risen to the height it did, if all the parties had not thrown too far into the back ground the distinction in nature and object between the three equally necessary species of worship, that is, public, family, and private or solitary, devotion. Though the very far larger proportion of the blame falls on the anti-Liturgists, yet on the other hand, too many of our Church divines--among others that exemplar' of a Churchman and a Christian, the every way excellent George Herbert--were scared by the growing fanaticism of the Geneva malcontents into the neighbourhood of the opposite extreme; and in their dread of enthusiasm, will-worship, insubordination, indecency, carried their preference of the established public forms of prayer almost to superst.i.tion by exclusively both using and requiring them even on their own sick-beds. This most a.s.suredly was neither the intention nor the wish of the first compilers. However, if they erred in this, it was an error of filial love excused, and only not sanctioned, by the love of peace and unity, and their keen sense of 'the beauty of holiness' displayed in their mother Church. I mention this the rather, because our Church, having in so incomparable a way provided for our public devotions, and Taylor having himself enriched us with such and so many models of private prayer and devotional exercise--(from which, by the by, it is most desirable that a well arranged collection should be made; a selection is requisite rather from the opulence, than the inequality, of the store;)--we have nothing to wish for but a collection of family and domestic prayers and thanksgivings equally (if that be not too bold a wish) appropriate to the special object, as the Common Prayer Book is for a Christian community, and the collection from Taylor for the Christian in his closet or at his bed side. Here would our author himself again furnish abundant materials for the work. For surely, since the Apostolic age, never did the spirit of supplication move on the deeps of a human soul with a more genial life, or more profoundly impregnate the rich gifts of a happy nature, than in the person of Jeremy Taylor! To render the fruits available for all, we need only a combination of Christian experience with that finer sense of propriety which we may venture to call devotional taste in the individual choosing, or chosen, to select, arrange and methodize; and no less in the dignitaries appointed to revise and sanction the collections.

Perhaps another want is a scheme of Christian psalmody fit for all our congregations, and which should not exceed 150 or 200 psalms and hymns.

Surely if the Church does not hesitate in the t.i.tles of the Psalms and of the chapters of the Prophets to give the Christian sense and application, there can be no consistent objection to do the same in its spiritual songs. The effect on the morals, feelings, and information of the people at large is not to be calculated. It is this more than any other single cause that has saved the peasantry of Protestant Germany from the contagion of infidelity.

Ib. s. xvii. p. 325.

Thus the Holy Ghost brought to their memory all things which Jesus spake and did, and, by that means, we come to know all that the Spirit knew to be necessary for us.

Alas! it is one of the sad effects or results of the enslaving Old Bailey fashion of defending, or, as we may well call it, apologizing for, Christianity,--introduced by Grotius and followed up by the modern 'Alogi', whose wordless, lifeless, spiritless, scheme of belief it alone suits,--that we dare not ask, whether the pa.s.sage here referred to must necessarily be understood as a.s.serting a miraculous remembrancing, distinctly sensible by the Apostles; whether the gift had any especial reference to the composition of the Gospels; whether the a.s.sumption is indispensable to a well grounded and adequate confidence in the veracity of the narrators or the verity of the narration; if not, whether it does not unnecessarily entangle the faith of the acute and learned inquirer in difficulties, which do not affect the credibility of history in its common meaning--rather indeed confirm our reliance on its authority in all the points of agreement, that is, in every point which we are in the least concerned to know,--and expose the simple and unlearned Christian to objections best fitted to perplex, because easiest to be understood, and within the capacity of the shallowest infidel to bring forward and exaggerate; and lastly, whether the Scriptures must not be read in that faith which comes from higher sources than history, that is, if they are read to any good and Christian purpose. G.o.d forbid that I should become the advocate of mechanical infusions and possessions, superseding the reason and responsible will. The light 'a priori', in which, according to my conviction, the Scriptures must be read and tried, is no other than the earnest, 'What shall I do to be saved?' with the inward consciousness,--the gleam or flash let into the inner man through the rent or cranny of the prison of sense, however produced by earthquake, or by decay,--as the ground and antecedent of the question; and with a predisposition towards, and an insight into, the 'a priori' probability of the Christian dispensation as the necessary consequents. This is the holy spirit in us praying to the Spirit, without which 'no man can say that Jesus is the Lord:' a text which of itself seems to me sufficient to cover the whole scheme of modern Unitarianism with confusion, when compared with that other,--'I am the Lord (Jehovah): that is my name; and my glory will I not give to another'. But in the Unitarian's sense of 'Lord,' and on his scheme of evidence, it might with equal justice be affirmed, that no man can say that Tiberius was the Emperor but by the Holy Ghost.

Ib. s. xxix. p. 331.

And that this is for this reason called 'a gift and grace,' or issue of the Spirit, is so evident and notorious, that the speaking of an ordinary revealed truth, is called in Scripture, 'a speaking by the spirit', 1 Cor. xii. 8. 'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by the Holy Ghost'. For, though the world could not acknowledge Jesus for the Lord without a revelation, yet now that we are taught this truth by Scripture, and by the preaching of the Apostles, to which they were enabled by the Holy Ghost, we need no revelation or enthusiasm to confess this truth, which we are taught in our creeds and catechisms, &c.

I do not, nay I dare not, hesitate to denounce this a.s.sertion as false in fact and the paralysis of all effective Christianity. A greater violence offered to Scripture words is scarcely conceivable. St. Paul a.s.serts that 'no man can.' Nay, says Taylor, every man that knows his catechism can; but unless some six or seven individuals had said it by the Holy Ghost some seventeen or eighteen hundred years ago, no man could say so.

Ib. s. x.x.xii. p. 334.

And yet, because the Holy Ghost renewed their memory, improved their understanding, supplied to some their want of human learning, and so a.s.sisted them that they should not commit an error in fact or opinion, neither in the narrative nor dogmatical parts, therefore they wrote by the spirit.

And where is the proof?--and to what purpose, unless a distinct and plain diagnostic were given of the divinities and the humanities which Taylor himself expressly admits in the text of the Scriptures?

And even then what would it avail unless the interpreters and translators, not to speak of the copyists in the first and second centuries, were likewise a.s.sisted by inspiration?

As to the larger part of the Prophetic books, and the whole of the Apocalypse, we must receive them as inspired truths, or reject them as simple inventions or enthusiastic delusions.

But in what other book of Scripture does the writer a.s.sign his own work to a miraculous dictation or infusion? Surely the contrary is implied in St. Luke's preface. Does the hypothesis rest on one possible construction of a single pa.s.sage in St. Paul, 2 'Tim'. iii. 16.?

And that construction resting materially on a [Greek: kai (theopneustos, kai _ophelimos)] not found in the oldest MSS., when the context would rather lead us to understand the words as parallel with the other a.s.sertion of the Apostle, that all good works are given from G.o.d,--that is, 'Every divinely inspired writing is profitable, &c'.

Finally, will not the certainty of the competence and single mindedness of the writers suffice; this too confirmed by the high probability, bordering on certainty, that G.o.d's especial grace worked in them; and that an especial providence watched over the preservation of writings, which, we know, both are and have been of such pre-eminent importance to Christianity, and yet by natural means?

But alas! any thing will be pretended, rather than admit the necessity of internal evidence, or than acknowledge, among the external proofs, the convictions and spiritual experiences of believers, though they should be common to all the faithful in all ages of the Church!

But in all superst.i.tion there is a heart of unbelief, and, 'vice versa', where an individual's belief is but a superficial acquiescence, credulity is the natural result and accompaniment, if only he be not required to sink into the depths of his being, where the sensual man can no longer draw breath. It is not the profession of Socinian tenets, but the spirit of Socinianism in the Church itself that alarms me. This, this, is the dry rot in the beams and timbers of the Temple!

Ib. s. li. p. 348.

So that let the devotion be ever so great, set forms of prayer will be expressive enough of any desire, though importunate as extremity itself.

This, and much of the same import in this treatise, is far more than Taylor, mature in experience and softened by afflictions, would have written. Besides, it is in effect, though not in logic, a deserting of his own strong and unshaken ground of the means and ends of public worship.

Ib. s. s. lxix. lxx. pp. 359-60.

These two sections are too much in the vague mythical style of the Italian and Jesuit divines, and the argument gives to these a greater advantage against our Church than it gains over the Sectarians in its support.

We well know who and how many the compilers of our Liturgy were under Edward VI, and know too well what the weather-c.o.c.k Parliaments were, both then and under Elizabeth, by which the compilation was made law.

The argument therefore should be inverted;--not that the Church (A. B., C. D., F. L., &c.) compiled it; 'ergo', it is un.o.bjectionable; but (and truly we may say it) it is so un.o.bjectionable, so far transcending all we were ent.i.tled to expect from a few men in that state of information and such difficulties, that we are justified in concluding that the compilers were under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.