The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume I Part 43

'Harberous', that is, harbourous, is the old version of St. Paul's 'philoxenos', and a beautiful word it is. 'Kosmis' should be rendered a gentleman in dress and address, in appearance and demeanour, a man of the world in an innocent sense. The Latin 'mundus' has the same double force in it; only that to the rude early Romans, to have a clean pair of hands and a clean dress, was to be drest; just as we say to boys, "Put on your clean clothes!"

The different meanings attached to the same word or phrase in different sentences, will, of course, be accompanied with a different feeling in the mind; this will affect the p.r.o.nunciation, and hence arises a new word. We should vainly try to produce the same feeling in our minds by 'and he' as by 'who'; for the different use of the latter, and its feeling having now coalesced. Yet 'who' is properly the same word and p.r.o.nunciation, as 'ho' with the digammate prefix, and as 'qui' kai ho.

AN ADMONITION.

There are two sides to every question. If thou hast genius and poverty to thy lot, dwell on the foolish, perplexing, imprudent, dangerous, and even immoral, conduct of promise-breach in small things, of want of punctuality, of procrastination in all its shapes and disguises. Force men to reverence the dignity of thy moral strength in and for itself,--seeking no excuses or palliations from fortune, or sickness, or a too full mind that, in opulence of conception, overrated its powers of application. But if thy fate should be different, shouldest thou possess competence, health and ease of mind, and then be thyself called upon to judge such faults in another so gifted,--O! then, upon the other view of the question, say, Am I in ease and comfort, and dare I wonder that he, poor fellow, acted so and so? Dare I accuse him? Ought I not to shadow forth to myself that, glad and luxuriating in a short escape from anxiety, his mind over-promised for itself; that, want combating with his eager desire to produce things worthy of fame, he dreamed of the n.o.bler, when he should have been producing the meaner, and so had the meaner obtruded on his moral being, when the n.o.bler was making full way on his intellectual? Think of the manifoldness of his acc.u.mulated petty calls! Think, in short, on all that should be like a voice from heaven to warn thyself against this and this, and call it all up for pity and for palliation; and then draw the balance. Take him in his whole,--his head, his heart, his wishes, his innocence of all selfish crime, and a hundred years hence, what will be the result? The good,--were it but a single volume that made truth more visible, and goodness more lovely, and pleasure at once more akin to virtue and, self-doubled, more pleasurable! and the evil,--while he lived, it injured none but himself; and where is it now? in his grave. Follow it not thither.

TO THEE CHERUBIM AND SERAPHIM CONTINUALLY DO CRY.

The mighty kingdoms angelical, like the thin clouds at dawn, receiving and hailing the first radiance, and singing and sounding forth their blessedness, increase the rising joy in the heart of G.o.d, spread wide and utter forth the joy arisen, and in innumerable finite glories interpret all they can of infinite bliss.

DEFINITION OF MIRACLE.

A phaenomenon in no connection with any other phaenomenon, as its immediate cause, is a miracle; and what is believed to have been such, is miraculous for the person so believing When it is strange and surprising, that is, with out any a.n.a.logy in our former experience--it is called a miracle. The kind defines the thing:--the circ.u.mstances the word.

To stretch out my arm is a miracle, unless the materialists should be more cunning than they have proved themselves. .h.i.therto. To reanimate a dead man by an act of the will, no intermediate agency employed, not only is, but is called, a miracle. A scripture miracle, therefore, must be so defined, as to express, not only its miracular essence, but likewise the condition of its appearing miraculous; add therefore to the preceding, the words 'praeter omnem prior em experientiam'.

It might be defined likewise an effect, not having its cause in any thing congenerous. That thought calls up thought is no more miraculous than that a billiard ball moves a billiard ball; but that a billiard ball should excite a thought, that is, be perceived, is a miracle, and, were it strange, would be called such. For take the converse, that a thought should call up a billiard ball! Yet where is the difference, but that the one is a common experience, the other never yet experienced?

It is not strictly accurate to affirm, that every thing would appear a miracle, if we were wholly uninfluenced by custom, and saw things as they are:--for then the very ground of all miracles would probably vanish, namely, the heterogeneity of spirit and matter. For the 'quid ulterius?' of wonder, we should have the 'ne plus ultra' of adoration.

Again--the word miracle has an objective, a subjective, and a popular meaning;--as objective,--the essence of a miracle consists in the heterogeneity of the consequent and its causative antecedent;--as subjective,--in the a.s.sumption of the heterogeneity. Add the wonder and surprise excited, when the consequent is out of the course of experience, and we know the popular sense and ordinary use of the word.

DEATH, AND GROUNDS OF BELIEF IN A FUTURE STATE.

It is an important thought, that death, judged of by corporeal a.n.a.logies, certainly implies discerption or dissolution of parts; but pain and pleasure do not; nay, they seem inconceivable except under the idea of concentration. Therefore the influence of the body on the soul will not prove the common destiny of both. I feel myself not the slave of nature (nature used here as the 'mundus sensibilis') in the sense in which animals are. Not only my thoughts and affections extend to objects trans-natural, as truth, virtue, G.o.d; not only do my powers extend vastly beyond all those, which I could have derived from the instruments and organs, with which nature has furnished me; but I can do what nature 'per se' cannot. I ingraft, I raise heavy bodies above the clouds, and guide my course over ocean and through air. I alone am lord of fire and light; other creatures are but their alms-folk, and of all the so called elements, water, earth, air, and all their compounds (to speak in the ever-enduring language of the senses, to which nothing can be revealed, but as compact, or fluid, or aerial), I not merely subserve myself of them, but I employ them. 'Ergo', there is in me, or rather I am, a praeter-natural, that is, a super-sensuous thing: but what is not nature, why should it perish with nature? why lose the faculty of vision, because my spectacles are broken?

Now to this it will be objected, and very forcibly too;--that the soul or self is acted upon by nature through the body, and water or caloric, diffused through or collected in the brain, will derange the faculties of the soul by deranging the organization of the brain; the sword cannot touch the soul; but by rending the flesh, it will rend the feelings.

Therefore the violence of nature may, in destroying the body, mediately destroy the soul! It is to this objection that my first sentence applies; and is an important, and, I believe, a new and the only satisfactory reply I have ever heard.

The one great and binding ground of the belief of G.o.d and a hereafter, is the law of conscience: but as the apt.i.tudes, and beauty, and grandeur, of the world, are a sweet and beneficent inducement to this belief, a constant fuel to our faith, so here we seek these arguments, not as dissatisfied with the one main ground, not as of 'little faith', but because, believing it to be, it is natural we should expect to find traces of it, and as a n.o.ble way of employing and developing, and enlarging the faculties of the soul, and this, not by way of motive, but of a.s.similation, producing virtue.

2d April, 1811.

HATRED OF INJUSTICE.

It is the mark of a n.o.ble nature to be more shocked with the unjust condemnation of a bad man than of a virtuous one; as in the instance of Strafford. For in such cases the love of justice, and the hatred of the contrary, are felt more nakedly, and const.i.tute a strong pa.s.sion 'per se', not only unaided by, but in conquest of, the softer self-repaying sympathies. A wise foresight too inspires jealousy, that so may principles be most easily overthrown. This is the virtue of a wise man, which a mob never possesses, even as a mob never, perhaps, has the malignant 'finis ultimus', which is the vice of a man.

RELIGION.

Amongst the great truths are these:--

I. That religion has no speculative dogmas; that all is practical, all appealing to the will, and therefore all imperative. 'I am the Lord thy G.o.d: Thou shall have none other G.o.ds but me.'

II. That, therefore, miracles are not the proofs, but the necessary results, of revelation. They are not the key of the arch and roof of evidence, though they may be a compacting stone in it, which gives while it receives strength. Hence, to make the intellectual faith a fair a.n.a.logon or unison of the vital faith, it ought to be stamped in the mind by all the evidences duly co-ordinated, and not designed by single pen-strokes, beginning either here or there.

III. That, according to No. I., Christ is not described primarily and characteristically as a teacher, but as a doer; a light indeed, but an effective light, the sun which causes what it shows, as well as shows what it first causes.

IV. That a certain degree of morality is presupposed in the reception of Christianity; it is the 'substratum' of the moral interest which substantiates the evidence of miracles. The instance of a profligate suddenly converted, if properly sifted, will be found but an apparent exception.

V. That the being of a G.o.d, and the immortality of man, are every where a.s.sumed by Christ.

VI. That Socinianism is not a religion, but a theory, and that, too, a very pernicious, or a very unsatisfactory, theory. Pernicious,--for it excludes all our deep and awful ideas of the perfect holiness of G.o.d, his justice and his mercy, and thereby makes the voice of conscience a delusion, as having no correspondent in the character of the legislator; regarding G.o.d as merely a good-natured pleasure-giver, so happiness be produced, indifferent as to the means:--Unsatisfactory, for it promises forgiveness without any solution of the difficulty of the compatibility of this with the justice of G.o.d; in no way explains the fallen condition of man, nor offers any means for his regeneration. "If you will be good, you will be happy," it says: that may be, but my will is weak; I sink in the struggle.

VII. That Socinianism never did and never can subsist as a general religion. For 1. It neither states the disease, on account of which the human being hungers for revelation, nor prepares any remedy in general, nor ministers any hope to the individual.

2. In order to make itself endurable on scriptural grounds, it must so weaken the texts and authority of scripture, as to leave in scripture no binding ground of proof of any thing.

3. Take a pious Jew, one of the Maccabees, and compare his faith and its grounds with Priestley's; and then, for what did Christ come?

VIII. That Socinianism involves the shocking thought that man will not, and ought not to be expected to, do his duty as man, unless he first makes a bargain with his Maker, and his Maker with him. Give me, the individual me, a positive proof that I shall be in a state of pleasure after my death, if I do so and so, and then I will do it, not else! And the proof asked is not one dependent on, or flowing from, his moral nature and moral feelings, but wholly 'extra'-moral, namely, by his outward senses, the subjugation of which to faith, that is, the pa.s.sive to the actional and self-created belief, is the great object of all religion!

IX. That Socinianism involves the dreadful reflection, that it can establish its probability (its certainty being wholly out of the question and impossible, Priestley himself declaring that his own continuance as a Christian depended on a contingency,) only on the destruction of all the arguments furnished for our permanent and essential distinction from brutes; that it must prove that we have no grounds to obey, but, on the contrary, that in wisdom we ought to reject and declare utterly null, all the commands of conscience, and all that is implied in those commands, reckless of the confusion introduced into our notions of means and ends by the denial of truth, goodness, justice, mercy, and the other fundamental ideas in the idea of G.o.d; and all this in order to conduct us to a Mahomet's bridge of a knife's edge, or the breadth of a spear, to salvation. And, should we discover any new doc.u.ments, or should an acuter logician make plain the sophistry of the deductions drawn from the present doc.u.ments (and surely a man who has pa.s.sed from orthodoxy to the loosest Arminianism, and thence to Arianism, and thence to direct Humanism, has no right from his experience to deny the probability of this)--then to fall off into the hopeless abyss of atheism. For the present life, we know, is governed by fixed laws, which the atheist acknowledges as well as the theist; and if there be no spiritual world, and no spiritual life in a spiritual world, what possible bearing can the admission or rejection of this hypothesis have on our practice or feelings?

Lastly, the Mosaic dispensation was a scheme of national education; the Christian is a world-religion; and the former was susceptible of evidence and probabilities which do not, and cannot, apply to the latter. A savage people forced, as it were, into a school of circ.u.mstances, and gradually in the course of generations taught the unity of G.o.d, first and for centuries merely as a practical abstinence from the worship of any other,--how can the principles of such a system apply to Christianity, which goes into all nations and to all men, the most enlightened, even by preference?

Writing several years later than the date of the preceding paragraphs, I commend the modern Unitarians for their candour in giving up the possible worshipability of Christ, if not very G.o.d,--a proof that truth will ultimately prevail. The Arians, then existing, against whom Waterland wrote, were not converted; but in the next generation the arguments made their way. This is fame 'versus' reputation.

THE APOSTLES' CREED.

Is it not probable from what is found in the writings of Cyril, Eusebius, Cyprian, Marcellus of Ancyra and others, that our present Apostles' Creed is not the very 'Symbolum Fidei', which was not to be written, but was always repeated at baptism? For this latter certainly contained the doctrine of the eternal generation of the Logos; and, therefore, it seems likely that the present Apostles' creed was an introductory, and, as it were, alphabetical, creed for young catechumens in their first elementation. Is it to be believed that the 'Symbolum Fidei' contained nothing but the mere history of Jesus, without any of the peculiar doctrines, or that, if it did not contain something more, the great and vehement defenders of the Trinity would speak of it so magnificently as they do, even preferring its authority to that of the scriptures?--Besides, does not Austin positively say that our present Apostles' creed was gathered out of the scriptures? Whereas the 'Symbolum Fidei' was elder than the Gospels, and probably contained only the three doctrines of the Trinity, the Redemption, and the Unity of the Church. May it not have happened, when baptism was administered so early, and at last even to infants, that the old 'Symbolum Fidei' became gradually 'inusitatum', as being appropriated to adult proselytes from Judaism or Paganism? This seems to me even more than probable; for in proportion to the majority of born over converted Christians must the creed of instruction have been more frequent than that of doctrinal profession.

A GOOD HEART.

There is in Abbt's Essays an attempt to determine the true sense of this phrase, at least to unfold ('auseinandersetzen') what is meant and felt by it. I was much pleased with the remarks, I remember, and with the counterposition of Tom Jones and Sir Charles Grandisori. Might not Luther and Calvin serve? But it is made less noticeable in these last by its co-existence with, and sometimes real, more often apparent, subordination to fixed conscious principles, and is thus less naturally characteristic. Parson Adams contrasted with Dr. Harrison in Fielding's Amelia would do. Then there is the suppression of the good heart and the subst.i.tution of principles or motives for the good heart, as in Laud, and the whole race of conscientious persecutors. Such principles const.i.tute the virtues of the Inquisition. A good heart contrasts with the Pharisaic righteousness. This last contemplation of the Pharisees, the dogmatists, and the rigorists 'in toto genere', serves to reconcile me to the fewness of the men who act on fixed principles. For unless there exist intellectual power to determine aright what are the 'principia jam fixa et formata', and unless there be the wisdom of love preceding the love of wisdom, and unless to this be added a graciousness of nature, a loving kindness,--these rigorists are but bigots often to errors, and active, yea, remorseless in preventing or staying the rise and progress of truth. And even when bigotted adherents to true principles, yet they render truth unamiable, and forbid little children to come thereunto. As human nature now is, it is well, perhaps, that the number should be few, seeing that of the few, the greater part are pre-maturities.

The number of those who act from good hearted impulses, a kindly and cheerful mood, and the play of minute sympathies, continuous in their discontinuity, like the sand-thread of the hour-gla.s.s, and from their minuteness and transiency not calculated to stiffen or inflate the individual, and thus remaining unendangered by egotism, and its unhandsome vizard contempt, is far larger: and though these temperamental 'pro'-virtues will too often fail, and are not built to stand the storms of strong temptation; yet on the whole they carry on the benignant scheme of social nature, like the other instincts that rule the animal creation. But of all the most numerous are the men, who have ever more their own dearliest beloved self, as the only or main goal or b.u.t.t of their endeavours straight and steady before their eyes, and whose whole inner world turns on the great axis of self-interest.

These form the majority, if not of mankind, yet of those by whom the business of life is carried on; and most expedient it is, that so it should be; nor can we imagine any thing better contrived for the advantage of society. For these are the most industrious, orderly, and circ.u.mspect portion of society, and the actions governed by this principle with the results, are the only materials on which either the statesman, or individuals can safely calculate.

There is, indeed, another sort, (a cla.s.s they can scarcely be called), who are below self-interest; who live under the mastery of their senses and appet.i.tes; and whose selfishness is an animal instinct, a goad 'a tergo', not an attraction, 'a re prospecta', or (so to speak) from a projected self. In fact, such individuals cannot so properly be said to have a self, as to be machines for the self of nature: and are as little capable of loving themselves as of loving their neighbours. Such there are. Nay, (if we were to count only without weighing) the aggregate of such persons might possibly form a larger number than the cla.s.s preceding. But they may safely be taken up into the latter, for the main ends of society, as being or sure to become its materials and tools.