The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iv Part 10

1810.

P. 12.-14.

Here I must add a pa.s.sage, concerning which I am in doubt whether it reflected more on the sincerity, or on the understanding of the English Amba.s.sador. The breach between the Pope and the Republic was brought very near a crisis, &c.

These pages contain a weak and unhandsome attack on Wotton, who doubtless had discovered that the presentation of the Premonition previously to the reconciliation as publicly completed, but after it had been privately agreed on, between the Court of Rome and the Senate of Venice, would embarra.s.s the latter: whereas, delivered as it was, it shewed the King's and his minister's zeal for Protestantism, and yet supplied the Venetians with an answer not disrespectful to the king.

Besides, what is there in Wotton's whole life (a man so disinterested, and who retired from all his emba.s.sies so poor) to justify the remotest suspicion of his insincerity? What can this word mean less or other than that Sir H. W. was either a crypt-Papist, or had received a bribe from the Romish party? Horrid accusations!--Burnet was notoriously rash and credulous; but I remember no other instance in which his zeal for the Reformation joined with his credulity has misled him into so gross a calumny. It is not to be believed, that Bedell gave any authority to such an aspersion of his old and faithful friend and patron, further than that he had related the fact, and that he and the minister differed in opinion as to the prudence of the measure recommended. How laxly too the story is narrated! The exact date of the recommendation by Father Paul and the divines should have been given;--then the date of the public annunciation of the reconciliation between the Pope and Venetian Republic; and lastly the day on which Wotton did present the book;--for even this Burnet leaves uncertain.

P. 26.

It is true he never returned and changed his religion himself, but his son came from Spain into Ireland, when Bedell was promoted to the Bishopric of Kilmore there, and told him, that his father commanded him to thank him for the pains he was at in writing it. He said, it was almost always lying open before him, and that he had heard him say, "He was resolved to save one." And it seems he instructed his son in the true religion, for he declared himself a Protestant on his coming over.

Southey has given me a bad character of this son of the unhappy convert to the Romish Church. He became, it seems, a spy on the Roman Catholics, availing himself of his father's character among them, a crime which would indeed render his testimony null and more than null; it would be a presumption of the contrary. It is clear from his letters to Bedell that the convert was a very weak man. I owe to him, however, a complete confirmation of my old persuasion concerning Bishop Hall, whom from my first perusal of his works I have always considered as one of the blots (alas! there are too many) of the biography of the Church of England; a self-conceited, coa.r.s.e-minded, persecuting, vulgar priest, and (by way of 'anti-climax') one of the first corrupters of and epigrammatizers of our English prose style. It is not true, that Sir Thomas Brown was the prototype of Dr. Johnson, who imitated him only as far as Sir T. B.

resembles the majority of his predecessors; that is, in the pedantic preference of Latin derivations to Saxon words of the very same force.

In the balance and construction of his periods Dr. Johnson has followed Hall, as any intelligent reader will discover by an attentive comparison.

P. 158.

Yea, will some man say, "But that which marreth all is the opinion of merit and satisfaction." Indeed that is the School doctrine, but the conscience enlightened to know itself, will easily act that part of the Publican, 'who smote his breast, and said, G.o.d be merciful to me a sinner'.

Alas! so far from this being the case with ninety nine out of one hundred in Spain, Italy, Sicily, and Roman Catholic Germany, it is the Gospel tenets that are the true School doctrine, that is confined to books and closets of the learned among them.

P. 161.

And the like may be conceived here, since, especially, the idolatry practised under the obedience of mystical Babylon is rather in false and will-worship of the true G.o.d, and rather commended as profitable than enjoined as absolutely necessary, and the corruptions there maintained are rather in a superfluous addition than retraction in any thing necessary to salvation.

This good man's charity jarring with his love and tender recollections of Father Paul, Fulgentio, and the Venetian divines, has led him to a far, far too palliative statement of Roman idolatry. Not what the Pope has yet ventured to thunder forth from his Anti-Sinai, but what he and his satellites, the Regulars, enforce to the preclusion of all true worship, in the actual practice, life-long, of an immense majority in Spain, Italy, Bavaria, Austria, &c. &c.--this must determine the point.

What they are themselves,--not what they would persuade Protestants is their essentials or Faith,--this is the main thing.

P. 164.

I answer, under correction of better judgments, they have the ministry of reconciliation by the communion which is given at their Ordination, being the same which our Saviour left in his Church:--'whose sins ye remit, they are remitted, whose sins ye retain, they are retained'.

Could Bishop Bedell believe that the mere will of a priest could have any effect on the everlasting weal or woe of a Christian! Even to the immediate disciples and Apostles could the text (if indeed it have reference to sins in our sense at all,) mean more than this,--Whenever you discover, by the spirit of knowledge which I will send unto you, repentance and faith, you shall declare remission of sins; and the sins shall be remitted;-and where the contrary exists, your declaration of exclusion from bliss shall be fulfilled? Did Christ say, that true repentance and actual faith would not save a soul, unless the priest's verbal remission was superadded?

'In fine.'

If it were in my power I would have this book printed in a convenient form, and distributed through every house, at least, through every village and parish throughout the kingdom. A volume of thought and of moral feelings, the offspring of thought, crowd upon me, as I review the different parts of this admirable man's life and creed. Only compare his conduct to James Wadsworth (probably some ancestral relative of my honoured friend, William Wordsworth: for the same name in Yorkshire, from whence his father came, is p.r.o.nounced Wadsworth) with that of the far, far too highly rated, Bishop Hall; his letter to Hall tenderly blaming his (Hall's) bitterness to an old friend mistaken, and then his letter to that friend defending Hall! What a picture of goodness! I confess, in all Ecclesiastical History I have read of no man so spotless, though of hundreds in which the biographers have painted them as masters of perfection: but the moral tact soon feels the truth.

[Footnote 1: In one of the volumes of this work used by the Editor for ascertaining the references, the following note is written by a former owner.

"October 12, 1788. Begged of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary to take my salvation on herself, and obtain it for Saint Hyacinthe's sake; to whom she has promised to grant any thing, or never to refuse any thing begged for his sake."

It would be very interesting to know how far the feeling expressed in this artless effusion coexisted with a faith in the atonement and mediation of the one Lord Jesus Christ.--Ed.]

NOTES ON BAXTER'S LIFE OF HIMSELF.

1820. [1]

Among the grounds for recommending the perusal of our elder writers, Hooker--Taylor--Baxter--in short almost any of the folios composed from Edward VI. to Charles II. I note:

1. The overcoming the habit of deriving your whole pleasure pa.s.sively from the book itself, which can only be effected by excitement of curiosity or of some pa.s.sion. Force yourself to reflect on what you read paragraph by paragraph, and in a short time you will derive your pleasure, an ample portion of it, at least, from the activity of your own mind. All else is picture sunshine.

2. The conquest of party and sectarian prejudices, when you have on the same table before you the works of a Hammond and a Baxter, and reflect how many and momentous their points of agreement, how few and almost childish the differences, which estranged and irritated these good men.

Let us but imagine what their blessed spirits now feel at the retrospect of their earthly frailties, and can we do other than strive to feel as they now feel, not as they once felt? So will it be with the disputes between good men of the present day; and if you have no other reason to doubt your opponent's goodness than the point in dispute, think of Baxter and Hammond, of Milton and Taylor, and let it be no reason at all.

3. It will secure you from the idolatry of the present times and fashions, and create the n.o.blest kind of imaginative power in your soul, that of living in past ages; wholly devoid of which power, a man can neither antic.i.p.ate the future, nor even live a truly human life, a life of reason in the present.

4. In this particular work we may derive a most instructive lesson, that in certain points, as of religion in relation to law, the 'medio tutissimus ibis' is inapplicable. There is no 'medium' possible; and all the attempts, as those of Baxter, though no more required than "I believe in G.o.d through Christ," prove only the mildness of the proposer's temper, but as a rule would be equal to nothing, at least exclude only the two or three in a century that make it a matter of religion to declare themselves Atheists, or else be just as fruitful a rule for a persecutor as the most complete set of articles that could be framed by a Spanish Inquisition.

For to 'believe,' must mean to believe aright--and 'G.o.d' must mean the true G.o.d--and 'Christ' the Christ in the sense and with the attributes understood by Christians who are truly Christians. An established Church with a Liturgy is a sufficient solution of the problem 'de jure magistratus'. Articles of faith are in this point of view superfluous; for is it not too absurd for a man to hesitate at subscribing his name to doctrines which yet in the more awful duty of prayer and profession he dares affirm before his Maker! They are therefore in this sense merely superfluous;--not worth re-enacting, had they ever been done away with;--not worth removing now that they exist.

5. The characteristic contradistinction between the speculative reasoners of the age before the Revolution, and those since, is this: --the former cultivated metaphysics, without, or neglecting, empirical psychology the latter cultivate a mechanical psychology to the neglect and contempt of metaphysics. Both therefore are almost equi-distant from pure philosophy. Hence the belief in ghosts, witches, sensible replies to prayer, and the like, in Baxter and in a hundred others. See also Luther's Table Talk.

6. The earlier part of this volume is interesting as materials for medical history. The state of medical science in the reign of Charles I.

was almost incredibly low.

The saddest error of the theologians of this age is, [Greek: hos emoige dokei], the disposition to urge the histories of the miraculous actions and incidents, in and by which Christ attested his Messiahship to the Jewish eye-witnesses, in fulfilment of prophecies, which the Jewish Church had previously understood and interpreted as marks of the Messiah, before they have shewn what and how excellent the religion itself is including the miracles as for us an harmonious part of the internal or self-evidence of the religion. Alas! and even when our divines do proceed to the religion itself as to a something which no man could be expected to receive except by a compulsion of the senses, which by force of logic only is propagated from the eye witnesses to the readers of the narratives in 1820--(which logic, namely, that the evidence of a miracle is not diminished by lapse of ages, though this includes loss of doc.u.ments and the like; which logic, I say, whether it be legitimate or not, G.o.d forbid that the truth of Christianity should depend on the decision!)--even when our divines do proceed to the religion itself, on what do they chiefly dwell? On the doctrines peculiar to the religion? No! these on the contrary are either evaded or explained away into metaphors, or resigned in despair to the next world where faith is to be swallowed up in certainty.

But the worst product of this epidemic error is, the fashion of either denying or undervaluing the evidence of a future state and the survival of individual consciousness, derived from the conscience, and the holy instinct of the whole human race. Dreadful is this:--for the main force of the reasoning by which this scepticism is vindicated consists in reducing all legitimate conviction to objective proof: whereas in the very essence of religion and even of morality the evidence, and the preparation for its reception, must be subjective;--'Blessed are they that have not seen and yet believe'. And dreadful it appears to me especially, who in the impossibility of not looking forward to consciousness after the dissolution of the body ('corpus phoenomenon',) have through life found it (next to divine grace.) the strongest and indeed only efficient support against the still recurring temptation of adopting, nay, wishing the truth of Spinoza's notion, that the survival of consciousness is the highest prize and consequence of the highest virtue, and that of all below this mark the lot after death is self-oblivion and the cessation of individual being. Indeed, how a Separatist or one of any other sect of Calvinists, who confines Redemption to the comparatively small number of the elect, can reject this opinion, and yet not run mad at the horrid thought of an innumerable mult.i.tude of imperishable self-conscious spirits everlastingly excluded from G.o.d, is to me inconceivable.

Deeply am I persuaded of Luther's position, that no man can worthily estimate, or feel in the depth of his being, the Incarnation and Crucifixion of the Son of G.o.d who is a stranger to the terror of immortality as ingenerate in man, while it is yet unquelled by the faith in G.o.d as the Almighty Father.

Book I. Part I. p. 2.

But though my conscience would trouble me when I sinned, yet divers sins I was addicted to, and oft committed against my conscience; which for the warning of others I will confess here to my shame.

1. I was much addicted when I feared correction to lie, that I might scape.

2. I was much addicted to the excessive gluttonous eating of apples and pears, &c.