The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 54

PART III.

'In initio'.

I strongly suspect that this third part, which ought not to have been thus conjoined with Bunyan's work, was written by a Roman Catholic priest, for the very purpose of counteracting the doctrine of faith so strongly enforced in the genuine Progress.

Ib. p. 443, in Edwards.

Against all which evils fasting is the proper remedy.

It would have been well if the writer had explained exactly what he meant by the fasting, here so strongly recommended; during what period of time abstinence from food is to continue and so on. The effects, I imagine, must in good measure depend on the health of the individual. In some const.i.tutions, fasting so disorders the stomach as to produce the very contrary of good;--confusion of mind, loose imaginations against the man's own will, and the like.

'In fine'.

One of the most influential arguments, one of those the force of which I feel even more than I see, for the divinity of the New Testament, and with especial weight in the writings of John and Paul, is the unspeakable difference between them and all other the earliest extant writings of the Christian Church, even those of the same age (as, for example, the Epistle of Barnabas,) or of the next following,--a difference that transcends all degree, and is truly a difference in kind. Nay, the catalogue of the works written by the Reformers and in the two centuries after the Reformation, contain many many volumes far superior in Christian light and unction to the best of the Fathers. How poor and unevangelic is Hermas in comparison with our Pilgrim's Progress!

[Footnote 1: P. 98, &c. of the edition by Murray and Major, 1830 Ed.]

[Footnote 2: See 'ante'. Ed.]

[Footnote 3: Prefixed to an edition of the Pilgrim's Progress, by R.

Edwards, 1820. Ed.]

[Footnote 4: The second of two 'Letters written to persons under trouble of mind.' Ed.]

[Footnote 5: Sermon of the certainty and perpetuity of faith in the elect. Vol. iii. p. 583. Keale's edit. Ed.]

NOTES ON SELECT DISCOURSES BY JOHN SMITH. [1]

It would make a delightful and instructive essay, to draw up a critical and (where possible) biographical account of the Lat.i.tudinarian party at Cambridge, from the close of the reign of James I to the latter half of Charles II.

The greater number were Platonists, so called at least, and such they believed themselves to be, but more truly Plotinists. Thus Cudworth, Dr.

Jackson (chaplain of Charles I, and vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne), Henry More, this John Smith, and some others. Taylor was a Ga.s.sendist, or 'inter Epicureos evangelizantes', and, as far as I know, he is the only exception.

They were all alike admirers of Grotius, which in Jeremy Taylor was consistent with the tone of his philosophy. The whole party, however, and a more amiable never existed, were scared and disgusted into this by the catachrestic language and skeleton half-truths of the systematic divines of the Synod of Dort on the one hand, and by the sickly broodings of the Pietists and Solomon's-Song preachers on the other.

What they all wanted was a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part organ, part const.i.tuent, of all knowledge, an examination of the scales, weights and measures themselves abstracted from the objects to be weighed or measured by them; in short, a transcendental aesthetic, logic, and noetic. Lord Herbert was at the entrance of, nay, already some paces within, the shaft and adit of the mine, but he turned abruptly back, and the honour of establishing a complete [Greek: propaideia] of philosophy was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards.

From the confounding of Plotinism with Platonism, the Lat.i.tudinarian divines fell into the mistake of finding in the Greek philosophy many antic.i.p.ations of the Christian Faith, which in fact were but its echoes.

The inference is as perilous as inevitable, namely, that even the mysteries of Christianity needed no revelation, having been previously discovered and set forth by unaided reason.

The argument from the mere universality of the belief, appears to me far stronger in favour of a surviving soul and a state after death, than for the existence of the Supreme Being. In the former, it is one doctrine in the Englishman and in the Hottentot; the differences are accidents not affecting the subject, otherwise than as different seals would affect the same wax, though Molly, the maid, used her thimble, and Lady 'Virtuosa' an 'intaglio' of the most exquisite workmanship.

Far otherwise in the latter. 'Mumbo Jumbo', or the 'cercocheronychous Nick-Senior', or whatever score or score thousand invisible huge men fear and fancy engender in the brain of ignorance to be hatched by the nightmare of defenceless and self-conscious weakness--these are not the same as, but are 'toto genere' diverse from, the 'una et unica substantia' of Spinosa, or the World-G.o.d of the Stoics.

And each of these again is as diverse from the living Lord G.o.d, the creator of heaven and earth. Nay, this equivoque on G.o.d is as mischievous as it is illogical: it is the sword and buckler of Deism.

OF THE EXISTENCE AND NATURE OF G.o.d.

Besides, when we review our own immortal souls and their dependency upon some Almighty mind, we know that we neither did nor could produce ourselves, and withal know that all that power which lies within the compa.s.s of ourselves will serve for no other purpose than to apply several pre-existent things one to another, from whence all generations and mutations arise, which are nothing else but the events of different applications and complications of bodies that were existent before; and therefore that which produced that substantial life and mind by which we know ourselves, must be something much more mighty than we are, and can be no less indeed than omnipotent, and must also be the first architect and [Greek: daemiourgs] of all other beings, and the perpetual supporter of them.

A Rhodian leap! Where our knowledge of a cause is derived from our knowledge of the effect, which is falsely (I think) here supposed, nothing can be logically, that is, apodeictically, inferred, but the adequacy of the former to the latter. The mistake, common to Smith, with a hundred other writers, arises out of an equivocal use of the word 'know.' In the scientific sense, as implying insight, and which ought to be the sense of the word in this place, we might be more truly said to know the soul by G.o.d, than to know G.o.d by the soul.

So the Sibyl was noted by Herac.l.i.tus as [Greek: mainomen_o stomati gelasta ka akall_opista phtheggomenae] 'as one speaking ridiculous and unseemly speeches with her furious mouth.'

This fragment is misquoted and misunderstood: for--[Greek: gelasta] it should be [Greek: amurista]. unperfumed, inornate lays, not redolent of art.--Render it thus:

... Not her's To win the sense by words of rhetoric, Lip-blossoms breathing perishable sweets; But by the power of the informing Word Roll sounding onward through a thousand years Her deep prophetic bodements.

[Greek: Stomati mainomen_o] is with ecstatic mouth.

If the ascetic virtues, or disciplinary exercises, derived from the schools of philosophy (Pythagorean, Platonic and Stoic) were carried to an extreme in the middle ages, it is most certain that they are at present in a far more grievous disproportion underrated and neglected.

The 'regula maxima' of the ancient [Greek: askaesis] was to conquer the body by abstracting the attention from it. Our maxim is to conciliate the body by attending to it, and counteracting or precluding one set of sensations by another, the servile dependence of the mind on the body remaining the same. Instead of the due subservience of the body to the mind (the favorite language of our Sidneys and Miltons) we hear nothing at present but of health, good digestion, pleasurable state of general feeling, and the like.

[Footnote 1: Of Queen's College, Cambridge, 1660.]

TO ADAM STEINMETZ K------. [1]

MY DEAR G.o.dCHILD,

I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of His spiritual body, the Church.

Years must pa.s.s before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write; but I trust that the all-gracious G.o.d, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who, by his only begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light--out of death, but into life--out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the 'Lord our Righteousness'; I trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind.