The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iv Part 20

This natural men may discourse of, and that very knowingly, and give a kind of natural credit to it as to a history that may be true; but firmly to believe that there is divine truth in all these things, and to have a persuasion of it stronger than of the very things we see with our eyes; such an a.s.sent as this is the peculiar work of the Spirit of G.o.d, and is certainly saving faith.

'Lord I believe: help thou my unbelief!' My reason acquiesces, and I believe enough to fear. O, grant me the belief that brings sweet hope!

Ib. p. 76.

Faith * * causes the soul to find all that is spoken of him in the word, and his beauty there represented, to be abundantly true, makes it really taste of his sweetness, and by that possesses the heart more strongly with his love, persuading it of the truth of those things, not by reasons and arguments, but by an inexpressible kind of evidence, that they only know that have it.

Either this is true, or religion is not religion; that is, it adds nothing to our human reason; 'non religat'. Grant it, grant it me, O Lord!

Ib. pp. 104-5.

This sweet stream of their doctrine did, as the rivers, make its own banks fertile and pleasant as it ran by, and flowed still forward to after ages, and by the confluence of more such prophecies grew greater as it went, till it fell in with the main current of the Gospel in the New Testament, both acted and preached by the great Prophet himself, whom they foretold to come, and recorded by his Apostles and Evangelists, and thus united into one river, clear as crystal. This doctrine of salvation in the Scriptures hath still refreshed the city of G.o.d, his Church under the Gospel, and still shall do so, till it empty itself into the ocean of eternity.

In the whole course of my studies I do not remember to have read so beautiful an allegory as this; so various and detailed, and yet so just and natural.

Ib. p. 121.

There is a truth in it, that all sin arises from some kind of ignorance * * *. For were the true visage of sin seen at a full light, undressed and unpainted, it were impossible, while it so appeared, that any one soul could be in love with it, but would rather flee from it as hideous and abominable.

This is the only (defect, shall I say? No, but the only) omission I have felt in this divine Writer--for him we understand by feeling, experimentally--that he doth not notice the horrible tyranny of habit.

What the Archbishop says, is most true of beginners in sin; but this is the foretaste of h.e.l.l, to see and loathe the deformity of the wedded vice, and yet still to embrace and nourish it.

Ib. p. 122.

He calls those times wherein Christ was unknown to them, 'the times of their ignorance'. Though the stars shine never so bright, and the moon with them in its full, yet they do not, altogether, make it day: still it is night till the sun appear.

How beautiful, and yet how simple, and as it were unconscious of its own beauty!

Ib. p. 124.

You were running to destruction in the way of sin, and there was a voice, together with the Gospel preaching to your ear, that spake into your heart, and called you back from that path of death to the way of holiness, which is the only way of life. He hath severed you from the ma.s.s of the profane world, and picked you out to be jewels for himself.

O, how divine! Surely, nothing less than the Spirit of Christ could have inspired such thoughts in such language. Other divines,--Donne and Jeremy Taylor for instance,--have converted their worldly gifts, and applied them to holy ends; but here the gifts themselves seem unearthly.

Ib. p. 138.

As in religion, so in the course and practice of men's lives, the stream of sin runs from one age to another, and every age makes it greater, adding somewhat to what it receives, as rivers grow in their course by the accession of brooks that fall into them; and every man when he is born, falls like a drop into this main current of corruption, and so is carried down it, and this by reason of its strength, and his own nature, which willingly dissolves into it, and runs along with it.

In this single period we have religion, the spirit,--philosophy, the soul,--and poetry, the body and drapery united;--Plato glorified by St.

Paul; and yet coming as unostentatiously as any speech from an innocent girl of fifteen.

Ib. p. 158.

The chief point of obedience is believing; the proper obedience to truth is to give credit to it.

This is not quite so perspicuous and single-sensed as Archbishop Leighton's sentences in general are. This effect is occasioned by the omission of the word "this," or "divine," or the truth "in Christ." For truth in the ordinary and scientific sense is received by a spontaneous, rather than chosen by a voluntary, act; and the apprehension of the same (belief) supposes a position of congruity rather than an act of obedience. Far otherwise is it with the truth that is the object of Christian faith: and it is this truth of which Leighton is speaking.

Belief indeed is a living part of this faith; but only as long as it is a living part. In other words, belief is implied in faith; but faith is not necessarily implied in belief. 'The devils believe.'

Ib. p. 166.

Hence learn that true conversion is not so slight a work as we commonly account it. It is not the outward change of some bad customs, which gains the name of a reformed man in the ordinary dialect; it is new birth and being, and elsewhere called 'a new creation. Though it be but a change in qualities', yet it is such a one, and the qualities so far distant from what they before were, &c.

I dare not affirm that this is erroneously said; but it is one of the comparatively few pa.s.sages that are of service as reminding me that it is not the Scripture that I am reading. Not the qualities merely, but the root of the qualities is trans-created. How else could it be a birth,--a creation?

Ib. p. 170.

This natural life is compared, even by natural men, to the vainest things, and scarce find they things light enough to express it vain; and as it is here called gra.s.s, so they compare the generations of men to the leaves of trees. * * * 'Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower and is cut down. Job' xiv. 1, 2. Psalm xc. 12; x.x.xix. 4.

It is the fashion to decry scholastic distinctions as useless subtleties, or mere phantoms--'entia logica, vel etiam verbalia solum'.

And yet in order to secure a safe and Christian interpretation to these and numerous other pa.s.sages of like phrase and import in the Old Testament, it is of highest concernment that we should distinguish the personeity or spirit, as the source and principle of personality, from the person itself as the particular product at any one period, and as that which cannot be evolved or sustained but by the co-agency of the system and circ.u.mstances in which the individuals are placed. In this latter sense it is that 'man' is used in the Psalms, in Job, and elsewhere--and the term made synonymous with flesh. That which const.i.tutes the spirit in man, both for others and itself, is the real man; and to this the elements and elementary powers contribute its bulk ([Greek: t] 'videri et tangi') wholly, and its phenomenal form in part, both as co-efficients, and as conditions. Now as these are under a law of vanity and incessant change,--[Greek: ta mae onta, all' aei ginomena],--so must all be, to the production and continuance of which they are indispensable. On this hangs the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, as an essential part of the doctrine of immortality;--on this the Scriptural (and only true and philosophical) sense of the soul, 'psyche' or life, as resulting from the continual a.s.surgency of the spirit through the body;--and on this the begetting of a new life, a regenerate soul, by the descent of the divine Spirit on the spirit of man. When the spirit by sanctification is fitted for an incorruptible body, then shall it be raised into a world of incorruption, and a celestial body shall burgeon forth thereto, the germ of which had been implanted by the redeeming and creative Word in this world. Truly hath it been said of the elect:--They fall asleep in earth, but awake in heaven. So St. Paul expressly teaches: and as the pa.s.sage (1. 'Cor'. xv.

35--54,) was written for the express purpose of rectifying the notions of the converts concerning the Resurrection, all other pa.s.sages in the New Testament must be interpreted in harmony with it. But John, likewise,--describing the same great event, as subsequent to, and contra-distinguished from, the partial or millennary Resurrection--which (whether we are to understand the Apostle symbolically or literally) is to take place in the present world,--beholds 'a new earth' and 'a new heaven' as antecedent to, or coincident with, the appearance of the New Jerusalem,--that is, the state of glory, and the resurrection to life everlasting. The old earth and its heaven had pa.s.sed away from the face of Him on the throne, at the moment that it gave up the dead. 'Rev'.

xx.-xxi.

Ib. pp. 174-5.

'But the word of the Lord endureth for ever.'

And with respect to those learned men that apply the text to G.o.d, I remember not that this 'abiding for ever' is used to express G.o.d's eternity in himself.

No; nor is it here used for that purpose; but yet I cannot doubt but that either the Word, [Greek: Ho Logos en archae], or the Divine promises in and through the incarnate Word, with the gracious influences proceeding from him, are here meant--and not the written [Greek: rhaemata] or Scriptures.

Ib. p. 194.

If any one's head or tongue should grow apace, and all the rest stand at a stay, it would certainly make him a monster; and they are no other that are knowing and discovering Christians, and grow daily in that, but not at all in holiness of heart and life, which is the proper growth of the children of G.o.d.

Father in heaven, have mercy on me! Christ, Lamb of G.o.d, have mercy on me! Save me, Lord, or I perish! Alas! I am perishing.

Ib. p. 200.

A well-furnished table may please a man, while he hath health and appet.i.te; but offer it to him in the height of a fever, how unpleasant it would be then! Though never so richly decked, it is then not only useless, but hateful to him. But the kindness and love of G.o.d is then as seasonable and refreshing to him, as in health, and possibly more.

To the regenerate;--but to the conscious sinner a source of terrors insupportable.

Ib. p. 211.

These things hold likewise in the other stones of this building, chosen before time: all that should be of this building are fore-ordained in G.o.d's purpose, all written in that book beforehand, and then in due time they are chosen, by actual calling, according to that purpose, hewed out and severed by G.o.d's own hand from the quarry of corrupt nature;--dead stones in themselves, as the rest, but made living by his bringing them to Christ, and so made truly precious', and accounted precious by him that hath made them so.