The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
Samuel Coleridge




Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3





Preface


For a statement of the circumstances under which the collection of Mr. Coleridge's Literary Remains was undertaken, the Reader is referred to the Preface to the two preceding Volumes published in 1836. But the graver character of the general contents of this Volume and of that which will immediately follow it, seems to justify the Editor in soliciting particular attention to a few additional remarks.

Although the Author in his will contemplated the publication of some at least of the numerous notes left by him on the margins and blank spaces of books and pamphlets, he most certainly wrote the notes themselves without any purpose beyond that of delivering his mind of the thoughts and aspirations suggested by the text under perusal. His books, that is, any person's books – even those from a circulating library – were to him, whilst reading them, as dear friends; he conversed with them as with their authors, praising, or censuring, or qualifying, as the open page seemed to give him cause; little solicitous in so doing to draw summaries or to strike balances of literary merit, but seeking rather to detect and appreciate the moving principle or moral life, ever one and single, of the work in reference to absolute truth. Thus employed he had few reserves, but in general poured forth, as in a confessional, all his mind upon every subject, – not keeping back any doubt or conjecture which at the time and for the purpose seemed worthy of consideration. In probing another's heart he laid his hand upon his own. He thought pious frauds the worst of all frauds, and the system of economizing truth too near akin to the corruption of it to be generally compatible with the Job-like integrity of a true Christian's conscience. Further, he distinguished so strongly between that internal faith which lies at the base of, and supports, the whole moral and religious being of man, and the belief, as historically true, of several incidents and relations found or supposed to be found in the text of the Scriptures, that he habitually exercised a liberty of criticism with respect to the latter, which will probably seem objectionable to many of his readers in this country[1 - See Table Talk, p. 178, 2nd edit.].

His friends have always known this to be the fact; and he vindicated this so openly that it would be folly to attempt to conceal it: nay, he pleaded for it so earnestly – as the only middle path of safety and peace between a godless disregard of the unique and transcendant character of the Bible taken generally, and that scheme of interpretation, scarcely less adverse to the pure spirit of Christian wisdom, which wildly arrays our faith in opposition to our reason, and inculcates the sacrifice of the latter to the former, – that to suppress this important part of his solemn convictions would be to misrepresent and betray him. For he threw up his hands in dismay at the language of some of our modern divinity on this point; – as if a faith not founded on insight were aught else than a specious name for wilful positiveness; – as if the Father of Lights could require, or would accept, from the only one of his creatures whom he had endowed with reason the sacrifice of fools! Did Coleridge, therefore, mean that the doctrines revealed in the Scriptures were to be judged according to their supposed harmony or discrepancy with the evidence of the senses, or the deductions of the mere understanding from that evidence? Exactly the reverse: he disdained to argue even against Transubstantiation on such a ground, well knowing and loudly proclaiming its utter weakness and instability. But it was a leading principle in all his moral and intellectual views to assert the existence in all men equally of a power or faculty superior to, and independent of, the external senses: in this power or faculty he recognized that image of God in which man was made; and he could as little understand how faith, the indivisibly joint act or efflux of our reason and our will, should be at variance with one of its factors or elements, as how the Author and Upholder of all truth should be in contradiction to himself. He trembled at the dreadful dogma which rests God's right to man's obedience on the fact of his almighty power, – a position falsely inferred from a misconceived illustration of St. Paul's, and which is less humbling to the creature than blasphemous of the Creator; and of the awless doctrine that God might, if he had so pleased, have given to man a religion which to human intelligence should not be rational, and exacted his faith in it – Coleridge's whole middle and later life was one deep and solemn denial. He believed in no God in the very idea of whose existence absolute truth, perfect goodness, and infinite wisdom, were not elements essentially necessary and everlastingly copresent.

Thus minded, he sought to justify the ways of God to man in the only way in which they can be justified to any one who deals honestly with his conscience, namely, by showing, where possible, their consequence from, and in all cases their consistency with, the ideas or truths of the pure reason which is the same in all men. With what success he laboured for thirty years in this mighty cause of Christian philosophy, the readers of his other works, especially the Aids to Reflection, will judge: if measured by the number of resolved points of detail his progress may seem small; but if tested by the weight and grasp of the principles which he has established, it may be confidently said that since Christianity had a name few men have gone so far. If ever we are to find firm footing in Biblical criticism between the extremes (how often meeting!) of Socinianism and Popery; – if the indisputable facts of physical science are not for ever to be left in a sort of admitted antagonism to the supposed assertions of Scripture; – if ever the Christian duty of faith in God through Christ is to be reconciled with the religious service of a being gifted by the same God with reason and a will, and subjected to a conscience, – it must be effected by the aid, and in the light, of those truths of deepest philosophy which in all Mr. Coleridge's works, published or unpublished, present themselves to the reader with an almost affecting reiteration. But to do justice to those works and adequately to appreciate the Author's total mind upon any given point, a cursory perusal is insufficient; study and comprehension are requisite to an accurate estimate of the relative value of any particular denial or assertion; and the apparently desultory and discontinuous form of the observations now presented to the Reader more especially calls for the exercise of his patience and thoughtful circumspection.

With this view the Reader is requested to observe the dates which, in some instances, the Editor has been able to affix to the notes with certainty. Most of those on Jeremy Taylor belong to the year 1810, and were especially designed for the perusal of Charles Lamb. Those on Field were written about 1814; on Racket in 1818; on Donne in 1812 and 1829; on The Pilgrim's Progress in 1833; and on Hooker and the Book of Common Prayer between 1820 and 1830. Coleridge's mind was a growing and accumulating mind to the last, his whole life one of inquiry and progressive insight, and the dates of his opinions are therefore in some cases important, and in all interesting.

The Editor is deeply sensible of his responsibility in publishing this Volume; as to which he can only say, in addition to a reference to the general authority given by the Author, that to the best of his knowledge and judgment he has not permitted any thing to appear before the public which Mr. Coleridge saw reason to retract; and further express his hope and belief that, with such allowance for defects inherent in the nature of the work as may rightfully be expected from every really liberal mind, nothing contained in the following pages can fairly be a ground of offence to any one.

It only remains to be added that the materials used in the compilation of this Volume were for the greatest part communicated by Mr. Gillman; and that the rest were furnished by Mr. Wordsworth, the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, the Rev. Edward Coleridge, and the Editor.

Lincoln's Inn, March 26, 1838




Formula Fidei de Sanctissima Trinitate



1830

The Identity

The absolute subjectivity, whose only attribute is the Good; whose only definition is – that which is essentially causative of all possible true being; the ground; the absolute will; the adorable 


, which, whatever is assumed as the first, must be presumed as its antecedent; 


, without an article, and yet not as an adjective. See John i. 18. 





 as differenced from Ib.1, 







But that which is essentially causative of all being must be causative of its own, – causa sui, 


. Thence

The Ipseity

The eternally self-affirmant self-affirmed; the "I Am in that I Am," or the "I shall be that I will to be;" the Father; the relatively subjective, whose attribute is, the Holy One; whose definition is, the essential finific in the form of the infinite; dat sibi fines.

But the absolute will, the absolute good, in the eternal act of self-affirmation, the Good as the Holy One, co-eternally begets

The Alterity

The supreme being; 


; the supreme reason; the Jehovah; the Son; the Word; whose attribute is the True (the truth, the light, the fiat); and whose definition is, the pleroma of being, whose essential poles are unity and distinctity; or the essential infinite in the form of the finite; – lastly, the relatively objective, deitas objectiva in relation to the I Am as the deitas subjectiva; the divine objectivity.

N.B. The distinctities in the pleroma are the eternal ideas, the subsistential truths; each considered in itself, an infinite in the form of the finite; but all considered as one with the unity, the eternal Son, they are the energies of the finific; 





 John i. 3 and 16.

But with the relatively subjective and the relatively objective, the great idea needs only for its completion a co-eternal which is both, that is, relatively objective to the subjective, relatively subjective to the objective. Hence

The Community

The eternal life, which is love; the Spirit; relatively to the Father, the Spirit of Holiness, the Holy Spirit; relatively to the Son, the Spirit of truth, whose attribute is Wisdom; sancta sophia; the Good in the reality of the True, in the form of actual Life. Holy! Holy! Holy! 


.




A Nightly Prayer



1831

Almighty God, by thy eternal Word my Creator, Redeemer and Preserver! who hast in thy free communicative goodness glorified me with the capability of knowing thee, the one only absolute Good, the eternal I Am, as the author of my being, and of desiring and seeking thee as its ultimate end; – who, when I fell from thee into the mystery of the false and evil will, didst not abandon me, poor self-lost creature, but in thy condescending mercy didst provide an access and a return to thyself, even to thee the Holy One, in thine only begotten Son, the way and the truth from everlasting, and who took on himself humanity, yea, became flesh, even the man Christ Jesus, that for man he might be the life and the resurrection! – O Giver of all good gifts, who art thyself the one only absolute Good, from whom I have received whatever good I have, whatever capability of good there is in me, and from thee good alone, – from myself and my own corrupted will all evil and the consequents of evil, – with inward prostration of will, mind, and affections I adore thy infinite majesty; I aspire to love thy transcendant goodness! – In a deep sense of my unworthiness, and my unfitness to present myself before thee, of eyes too pure to behold iniquity, and whose light, the beatitude of spirits conformed to thy will, is a consuming fire to all vanity and corruption; – but in the name of the Lord Jesus, of the dear Son of thy love, in whose perfect obedience thou deignest to behold as many as have received the seed of Christ into the body of this death; – I offer this my bounden nightly sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, in humble trust, that the fragrance of my Saviour's righteousness may remove from it the taint of my mortal corruption. Thy mercies have followed me through all the hours and moments of my life; and now I lift up my heart in awe and thankfulness for the preservation of my life through the past day, for the alleviation of my bodily sufferings and languors, for the manifold comforts which thou hast reserved for me, yea, in thy fatherly compassion hast rescued from the wreck of my own sins or sinful infirmities; – for the kind and affectionate friends thou hast raised up for me, especially for those of this household, for the mother and mistress of this family whose love to me hath been great and faithful, and for the dear friend, the supporter and sharer of my studies and researches; but above all, for the heavenly Friend, the crucified Saviour, the glorified Mediator, Christ Jesus, and for the heavenly Comforter, source of all abiding comforts, thy Holy Spirit! O grant me the aid of thy Spirit, that I may with a deeper faith, a more enkindled love, bless thee, who through thy Son hast privileged me to call thee Abba, Father! O, thou who hast revealed thyself in thy holy word as a God that hearest prayer; before whose infinitude all differences cease of great and small; who like a tender parent foreknowest all our wants, yet listenest well-pleased to the humble petitions of thy children; who hast not alone permitted, but taught us, to call on thee in all our needs, – earnestly I implore the continuance of thy free mercy, of thy protecting providence, through the coming night. Thou hearest every prayer offered to thee believingly with a penitent and sincere heart. For thou in withholding grantest, healest in inflicting the wound, yea, turnest all to good for as many as truly seek thee through Christ, the Mediator! Thy will be done! But if it be according to thy wise and righteous ordinances, O shield me this night from the assaults of disease, grant me refreshment of sleep unvexed by evil and distempered dreams; and if the purpose and aspiration of my heart be upright before thee who alone knowest the heart of man, O in thy mercy vouchsafe me yet in this my decay of life an interval of ease and strength; if so (thy grace disposing and assisting) I may make compensation to thy church for the unused talents thou hast entrusted to me, for the neglected opportunities, which thy loving-kindness had provided. O let me be found a labourer in the vineyard, though of the late hour, when the Lord and Heir of the vintage, Christ Jesus, calleth for his servant.

Our Father, &c.

To thee, great omnipresent Spirit, whose mercy is over all thy works, who now beholdest me, who hearest me, who hast framed my heart to seek and to trust in thee, in the name of my Lord and Saviour Christ Jesus, I humbly commit and commend my body, soul, and spirit.

Glory be to thee, O God!




Notes on The Book of Common Prayer


Prayer

A man may pray night and day, and yet deceive himself; but no man can be assured of his sincerity, who does not pray. Prayer is faith passing into act; a union of the will and the intellect realizing in an intellectual act. It is the whole man that prays. Less than this is wishing, or lip-work; a charm or a mummery. Pray always, says the Apostle; – that is, have the habit of prayer, turning your thoughts into acts by connecting them with the idea of the redeeming God, and even so reconverting your actions into thoughts.

The Sacrament of the Eucharist

The best preparation for taking this sacrament, better than any or all of the books or tracts composed for this end, is, to read over and over again, and often on your knees – at all events, with a kneeling and praying heart – the Gospel according to St. John, till your mind is familiarized to the contemplation of Christ, the Redeemer and Mediator of mankind, yea, and of every creature, as the living and self-subsisting Word, the very truth of all true being, and the very being of all enduring truth; the reality, which is the substance and unity of all reality; the light which lighteth every man, so that what we call reason, is itself a light from that light, lumen a luce, as the Latin more distinctly expresses this fact. But it is not merely light, but therein is life; and it is the life of Christ, the co-eternal son of God, that is the only true life-giving light of men. We are assured, and we believe that Christ is God; God manifested in the flesh. As God, he must be present entire in every creature; – (for how can God, or indeed any spirit, exist in parts?) – but he is said to dwell in the regenerate, to come to them who receive him by faith in his name, that is, in his power and influence; for this is the meaning of the word 'name' in Scripture when applied to God or his Christ. Where true belief exists, Christ is not only present with or among us; – for so he is in every man, even the most wicked; – but to us and for us.



That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe in his name; which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.

    John i. 9-14.

Again



We will come unto him, and make our abode with him.

    John xiv. 23.

As truly and as really as your soul resides constitutively in your living body, so truly, really, personally, and substantially does Christ dwell in every regenerate man.

After this course of study, you may then take up and peruse sentence by sentence the communion service, the best of all comments on the Scriptures appertaining to this mystery. And this is the preparation which will prove, with God's grace, the surest preventive of, or antidote against, the freezing poison, the lethargizing hemlock, of the doctrine of the Sacramentaries, according to whom the Eucharist is a mere practical metaphor, in which things are employed instead of articulated sounds for the exclusive purpose of recalling to our minds the historical fact of our Lord's crucifixion; in short – (the profaneness is with them, not with me) – just the same as when Protestants drink a glass of wine to the glorious memory of William III! True it is, that the remembrance is one end of the sacrament; but it is, Do this in remembrance of me, – of all that Christ was and is, hath done and is still doing for fallen mankind, and of course of his crucifixion inclusively, but not of his crucifixion alone.

14 December, 1827.

Companion to the Altar



First then, that we may come to this heavenly feast holy, and adorned with the wedding garment, Matt. xxii. 11, we must search our hearts, and examine our consciences, not only till we see our sins, but until we hate them.


But what if a man, seeing his sin, earnestly desire to hate it? Shall he not at the altar offer up at once his desire, and the yet lingering sin, and seek for strength? Is not this sacrament medicine as well as food? Is it an end only, and not likewise the means? Is it merely the triumphal feast; or is it not even more truly a blessed refreshment for and during the conflict?



This confession of sins must not be in general terms only, that we are sinners with the rest of mankind, but it must be a special declaration to God of all our most heinous sins in thought, word, and deed.


Luther was of a different judgment. He would have us feel and groan under our sinfulness and utter incapability of redeeming ourselves from the bondage, rather than hazard the pollution of our imaginations by a recapitulation and renewing of sins and their images in detail. Do not, he says, stand picking the flaws out one by one, but plunge into the river, and drown them! – I venture to be of Luther's doctrine.

Communion Service

In the first Exhortation, before the words 'meritorious Cross and Passion,' I should propose to insert 'his assumption of humanity, his incarnation, and.'

Likewise a little lower down, after the word 'sustenance,' I would insert 'as.'

For not in that sacrament exclusively, but in all the acts of assimilative faith, of which the Eucharist is a solemn, eminent, and representative instance, an instance and the symbol, Christ is our spiritual food and sustenance.

Marriage Service

Marriage, simply as marriage, is not the means 'for the procreation of children,' but for the humanization of the offspring procreated.

Therefore in the Declaration at the beginning, after the words, 'procreation of children,' I would insert, 'and as the means for securing to the children procreated enduring care, and that they may be' &c.

Communion of the Sick

Third rubric at the end.



But if a man, either by reason of extremity of sickness, &c.


I think this rubric, in what I conceive to be its true meaning, a precious document, as fully acquitting our Church of all Romish superstition, respecting the nature of the Eucharist, in relation to the whole scheme of man's redemption. But the latter part of it



'he doth eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ profitably to his soul's health, although he do not receive the Sacrament with his mouth'


seems to me very incautiously expressed, and scarcely to be reconciled with the Church's own definition of a sacrament in general. For in such a case, where is



'the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace given?'[2 - 'Should it occur to any one that the doctrine blamed in the text, is but in accordance with that of the Church of England, in her rubric concerning spiritual communion, annexed to the Office for Communion of the Sick: he may consider, whether that rubric, explained (as if possible it must be) in consistency with the definition of a sacrament in the Catechism, can be meant for any but rare and extraordinary cases: cases as strong in regard of the Eucharist, as that of martyrdom, or the premature death of a well-disposed catechumen, in regard of Baptism.'Keble's Pref. to Hooker, p. 85, n. 70. Ed.]


XI Sunday after Trinity

Epistle. – 1 Cor. xv. 1.



Brethren, I declare unto you the Gospel which I preached unto you.


Why should the obsolete, though faithful, Saxon translation of 


 be retained? Why not 'good tidings?' Why thus change a most appropriate and intelligible designation of the matter into a mere conventional name of a particular book?

Ib.



how that Christ died for our sins.


But the meaning of 


 is, that Christ died through the sins, and for the sinners. He died through our sins, and we live through his righteousness.

Gospel, Luke xviii. 14.



This man went down to his house justified rather than the other.


Not simply justified, observe; but justified rather than the other, 


, – that is, less remote from salvation.

XXV Sunday after Trinity

Collect.



– that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded. …


Rather – "that with that enlarged capacity, which without thee we cannot acquire, there may likewise be an increase of the gift, which from thee alone we can wholly receive."

Psalm VIII

v. 2.



Out of the mouth of very babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies; that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.


To the dispensations of the twilight dawn, to the first messengers of the redeeming word, the yet lisping utterers of light and life, a strength and a power were given because of the enemies, greater and of more immediate influence, than to the seers and proclaimers of a clearer day: – even as the first re-appearing crescent of the eclipsed moon shines for men with a keener brilliance, than the following larger segments, previously to its total emersion.

Ib.v. 5.



Thou madest him lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship.


Power + idea = angel.

Idea – power = man, or Prometheus.

Psalm LXVIII

v. 34.



Ascribe ye the power to God over Israel: his worship and strength is in the clouds.


The 'clouds' in the symbolical language of the Scriptures mean the events and course of things, seemingly effects of human will or chance, but overruled by Providence.

Psalm LXXII

This Psalm admits no other interpretation but of Christ, as the Jehovah incarnate. In any other sense, it would be a specimen of more than Persian or Moghul hyperbole and bombast, of which there is no other instance in Scripture, and which no Christian would dare to attribute to an inspired writer. We know, too, that the elder Jewish Church ranked it among the Messianic Psalms. N.B. The Word in St. John, and the Name of the Most High in the Psalms, are equivalent terms.

v. 1.



Give the king thy judgments, O God; and thy righteousness unto the king's son.


God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, the only begotten, the Son of God and God, King of Kings, and the Son of the King of Kings!

Psalm LXXIV

v. 2.



O think upon thy congregation, whom thou hast purchased and redeemed of old.


The Lamb sacrificed from the beginning of the world, the God-Man, the Judge, the self-promised Redeemer to Adam in the garden!

v. 15.



Thou smotest the heads of Leviathan in pieces; and gavest him to be meat for the people in the wilderness.


Does this allude to any real tradition?[3 - According to Bishop Horne, the allusion is to the destruction of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea. – Ed.] The Psalm appears to have been composed shortly before the captivity of Judah.

Psalm LXXXII vv. 6-7

The reference which our Lord made to these mysterious verses, gives them an especial interest. The first apostasy, the fall of the angels, is, perhaps, intimated.

Psalm LXXXVII

I would fain understand this Psalm; but first I must collate it word by word with the original Hebrew. It seems clearly Messianic.

Psalm LXXXVIII

vv. 10 – 12.



Dost than shew wonders among the dead, or shall the dead rise up again and praise thee? &c.


Compare Ezekiel xxxvii.

Psalm CIV

I think the Bible version might with advantage be substituted for this, which in some parts is scarcely intelligible.

v. 6.



the waters stand in the hills.


No; stood above the mountains. The reference is to the Deluge.

Psalm CV

v. 3.



Let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord.


If even to seek the Lord be joy, what will it be to find him? Seek me, O Lord, that I may be found by thee!

Psalm CX

v. 2.



The Lord shall send the rod of thy power out of Sion; (saying) Rule, &c.


v. 3. Understand:



'Thy people shall offer themselves willingly in the day of conflict in holy clothing, in their best array, in their best arms and accoutrements. As the dew from the womb of the morning, in number and brightness like dew-drops; so shall be thy youth, or the youth of thee, the young volunteer warriors.'


v. 5.



'He shall shake,'


concuss, concutiet reges die iræ suæ,

v. 6. For



'smite in sunder, or wound, the heads;'


some word answering to the Latin conquassare.

v. 7. For 'therefore,' translate 'then shall he lift up his head again;' that is, as a man languid and sinking from thirst and fatigue after refreshment.

N.B. I see no poetic discrepancy between vv. 1 and 5.

Psalm CXVIII

To be interpreted of Christ's church.

Psalm CXXVI

v. 5.



As the rivers in the south.


Does this allude to the periodical rains?[4 - See Horne in loc. note. – Ed.]

As a transparency on some night of public rejoicing, seen by common day, with the lamps from within removed – even such would the Psalms be to me uninterpreted by the Gospel. O honored Mr. Hurwitz! Could I but make you feel what grandeur, what magnificence, what an everlasting significance and import Christianity gives to every fact of your national history – to every page of your sacred records!

Articles of Religion: XX

It is mournful to think how many recent writers have criminated our Church in consequence of their own ignorance and inadvertence in not knowing, or not noticing, the contra-distinction here meant between power and authority. Rites and ceremonies the Church may ordain jure proprio: on matters of faith her judgment is to be received with reverence, and not gainsaid but after repeated inquiries, and on weighty grounds.

Articles of Religion: XXXVII



It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the magistrate, to wear weapons, and to serve in the wars.


This is a very good instance of an unseemly matter neatly wrapped up. The good men recoiled from the plain words:



'It is lawful for Christian men at the command of a king to slaughter as many Christians as they can!'


Well! I could most sincerely subscribe to all these articles.

September, 1831.




Notes on Hooker[5 - The references are to Mr. Keble's edition (1836.) – Ed.]


Life Of Hooker by Walton

p. 67.



Mr. Travers excepted against Mr. Hooker, for that in one of his sermons he declared, 'That the assurance of what we believe by the word of God, is not to us so certain as that which we perceive by sense.' And Mr. Hooker confesseth he said so, and endeavours to justify it by the reasons following.


There is, I confess, a shade of doubt on my mind as to this position of Hooker's. Yet I do not deny that it expresses a truth. The question in my mind is, only, whether it adequately expresses the whole truth. The ground of my doubt lies in my inability to compare two things that differ in kind. It is impossible that any conviction of the reason, even where no act of the will advenes as a co-efficient, should possess the vividness of an immediate object of the senses; for the vividness is given by sensation. Equally impossible is it that any truth of the super-sensuous reason should possess the evidence of the pure sense. Even the mathematician does not find the same evidence in the results of transcendental algebra as in the demonstrations of simple geometry. But has he less assurance? In answer to Hooker's argument I say, – that God refers to our sensible experience to aid our will by the vividness of sensible impressions, and also to aid our understanding of the truths revealed, – not to increase the conviction of their certainty where they have been understood.

Walton's Appendix

Ib. p. 116.

It is a strange blind story this of the last three books, and of Hooker's live relict, the Beast without Beauty. But Saravia? – If honest Isaac's account of the tender, confidential, even confessional, friendship of Hooker and Saravia be accurate, how chanced it that Hooker did not entrust the manuscripts to his friend who stood beside him in his last moments? At all events, Saravia must have known whether they had or had not received the author's last hand. Why were not Mr. Charke and the other Canterbury parson called to account, or questioned at least as to the truth of Mrs. Joan's story? Verily, I cannot help suspecting that the doubt cast on the authenticity of the latter books by the high church party originated in their dislike of portions of the contents. – In short, it is a blind story, a true Canterbury tale, dear Isaac![6 - But see Mr. Keble's statement (Pref. xxix.), and the argument founded on discoveries and collation of MSS. since the note in the text was written. – Ed.]

Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

Pref. c. iii. 7. p. 182.



The next thing hereunto is, to impute all faults and corruptions, wherewith the world aboundeth, unto the kind of ecclesiastical government established.


How readily would this, and indeed all the disputes respecting the powers and constitution of Church government have been settled, or perhaps prevented, had there been an insight into the distinct nature and origin of the National Church and the Church under Christ![7 - See Mr. Coleridge's work On the constitution of the Church and State according to the idea of each. – Ed.] To the ignorance of this, all the fierce contentions between the Puritans and the Episcopalians under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, all the errors and exorbitant pretensions of the Church of Scotland, and the heats and antipathies of our present Dissenters, may be demonstrably traced.

Ib. 9. p. 183.



Pythagoras, by bringing up his scholars in the speculative knowledge of numbers, made their conceits therein so strong, that when they came to the contemplation of things natural, they imagined that in every particular thing they even beheld as it were with their eyes, how the elements of number gave essence and being to the works of nature: a thing in reason impossible; which notwithstanding, through their mis-fashioned pre-conceit, appeared unto them no less certain, than if nature had written it in the very foreheads of all the creatures of God.


I am not so conversant with the volumes of Duns Scotus as to be able to pronounce positively whether he is an exception, but I can think of no other instance of high metaphysical genius in an Englishman. Judgment, solid sense, invention in specialties, fortunate anticipations and instructive foretact of truth, – in these we can shew giants. It is evident from this example from the Pythagorean school that not even our incomparable Hooker could raise himself to the idea, so rich in truth, which is contained in the words



numero, pondere, et mensura generantur cœli et terra.


O, that Hooker had ever asked himself concerning will, absolute will,






,

numerus omues numeros ponens, nunquam positus![8 - See E. P. I. ii. 3. p. 252. – Ed.]


Ib. p. 183.



When they of the 'Family of Love' have it once in their heads, that Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers, &c.


If the Familists thought of Christ as a quality, it was a grievous error indeed. But I have my doubts whether this was not rather an inference drawn by their persecutors.

Ib. 15. p. 191.



When instruction doth them no good, let them feel but the least degree of most mercifully-tempered severity, they fasten on the head of the Lord's vicegerents here on earth, whatsoever they any where find uttered against the cruelty of blood-thirsty men, and to themselves they draw all the sentences which Scripture hath in favor of innocency persecuted for the truth.


How great the influence of the age on the strongest minds, when so eminently wise a man as Richard Hooker could overlook the obvious impolicy of inflicting punishments which the sufferer himself will regard as merits, and all who have any need to be deterred will extol as martyrdom! Even where the necessity could be plausibly pretended, it is war, not punitive law; – and then Augustine's argument for Sarah!

Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 194.



We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole earth, that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been ordered by ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, sithence the time that the blessed apostles were here conversant.


Hooker was so good a man that it would be wicked to suspect him of knowingly playing the sophist. And yet strange it is, that he should not have been aware that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily took for granted) one and the same, contended against with good reason. Knox's ecclesiastical polity (worthy of Lycurgus), adopted bishops under a different name, or rather under a translation instead of corruption of the name 


 He would have had superintendents.

Ib. c. v. 2. p. 204.



A law is the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also.


This is a fiction of law for the purpose of giving to that, which is necessarily empirical, the form and consequence of a science, to the reality of which a code of laws can only approximate by compressing all liberty and individuality into a despotism. As Justinian to Alfred, and Constantinople, the Consuls and Senate of Rome to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of London; so is the imperial Roman code to the common and statute law of England. The advocates of the discipline would, according to our present notions of civil rights, have been justified in putting fact against fiction, and might have challenged Hooker to shew, first, that the constitution of the Church in Christ was a congruous subject of parliamentary legislation; that the legislators were bona fide determined by spiritual views, and that the jealousy and arbitrary principles of the Queen, aided by motives of worldly state policy, – for example, the desire of conciliating the Roman Catholic potentates by retaining all she could of the exterior of the Romish Church, its hierarchy, its ornaments, and its ceremonies, – were not the substitutes for the Holy Spirit in influencing the majorities in the two Houses of Parliament. It is my own belief that the Puritans and the Prelatists divided the truth between them; and, as half-truths are whole errors, were both equally in the wrong; – the Prelatists in contending for that as incident to the Church in Christ, that is, the collective number 





 or ecclesia, which only belonged, but which rightfully did belong, to the National Church as a component estate of the realm, the enclesia; – the Puritans in requiring of the enclesia what was only requisite or possible for the ecclesia[9 - See the Church and State, in which the ecclesia or Church in Christ, is distinguished from the enclesia, or national Church. – Ed.]. Archbishop Grindal is an illustrious exception. He saw the whole truth, and that the functions of the enclesiastic and those of the ecclesiastic were not the less distinct, because both were capable of being exercised by the same person; and vice versa, not the less compatible in the same subject because distinct in themselves. The Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

It is difficult to say, which most shines through this whole passage, the spirit of wisdom or the spirit of meekness. The fatal error of the Romish Church did not consist in the inappellability of the Councils, or that an acquiescence in their decisions and decree was a duty binding on the conscience of the dissentients, – not I say in contending for a practical infallibility of Council or Pope; but in laying claim to an actual and absolute immunity from error, and consequently for the unrepealability of their decisions by any succeeding Council or Pope. Hence, even wise decisions – wise under the particular circumstances and times – degenerated into mischievous follies, by having the privilege of immortality without any exemption from the dotage of superannuation. Hence errors became like glaciers, or ice-bergs in the frozen ocean, unthawed by summer, and growing from the fresh deposits of each returning winter.

Ib.6. p. 212.



An argument necessary and demonstrative is such, as being proposed unto any man, and understood, the mind cannot choose but inwardly assent. Any one such reason dischargeth, I grant, the conscience, and setteth it at full liberty.


I would not concede even so much as this. It may well chance that even an argument demonstrative, if understood, may be adducible against some one sentence of a whole liturgy; and yet the means of removing it without a palpable overbalance of evil may not exist for a time; and either there is no command against schism, or we are bound in such small matters to offer the sacrifice of willing silence to the public peace of the Church. This would not, however, prevent a minister from pointing out the defect in his character as a doctor or learned theologian.

Ib.c. viii. 1. p. 2-20.



For adventuring to erect the discipline of Christ without the leave of the Christian magistrate, haply ye may condemn us as fools, in that we hazard thereby our estates and persons further than you which are that way more wise think necessary: but of any offence or sin therein committed against God, with what conscience can you accuse us, when your own positions are, that the things we observe should every of them be dearer unto us than ten thousand lives; that they are the peremptory commandments of God; that no mortal man can dispense with them, and that the magistrate grievously sinneth in not constraining thereunto?


Hoc argumentum ad invidiam nimis sycophanticum est quam ut mihi placeat a tanto viro. Besides, it contradicts Hooker's own very judicious rule, that to discuss and represent is the office of the learned, as individuals, because the truth may be entire in any one mind; but to do belongs to the supreme power as the will of the whole body politic, and in effective action individuals are mere fractions without any legitimate referee to add them together. Hooker's objection from the nobility and gentry of the realm is unanswerable and within half a century afterwards proved insurmountable. Imagine a sun containing within its proper atmosphere a multitude of transparent satellites, lost in the glory, or all joining to form the visible phasis or disk; and then beyond the precincts of this sun a number of opake bodies at various distances, and having a common center of their own round which they revolve, and each more or less according to the lesser or greater distance partaking of the light and natural warmth of the sun, which I have been supposing; but not sharing in its peculiar influences, or in the solar life sustainable only by the vital air of the solar atmosphere. The opake bodies constitute the national churches, the sun the churches spiritual.

The defect of the simile, arising necessarily out of the incompossibility of spiritual prerogatives with material bodies under the proprieties and necessities of space, is, that it does not, as no concrete or visual image can, represent the possible duplicity of the individuals, the aggregate of whom constitutes the national church, so that any one individual, or any number of such individuals, may at the same time be, by an act of their own, members of the church spiritual, and in every congregation may form an ecclesia or Christian community; and how to facilitate and favor this without any schism from the enclesia, and without any disturbance of the body politic, was the problem which Grindal and the bishops of the first generation of the Reformed Church sought to solve, and it is the problem which every earnest Christian endued with competent gifts, and who is at the same time a patriot and a philanthropist, ought to propose to himself, as the ingens desiderium proborum.

8th Sept, 1826.

Ib. c. viii. 7. p. 232.



Baptizing of infants, although confessed by themselves, to have been continued ever sithence the very apostles' own times, yet they altogether condemned.


Quære. I cannot say what the fanatic Anabaptists, of whom Hooker is speaking, may have admitted; but the more sober and learned Antipaedobaptists, who differed in this point only from the reformed churches, have all, I believe, denied the practice of infant baptism during the first century.

B.J. c. ii. 1. p. 249.



That which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure, of working, the same we term a law.


See the essays on method, in the Friend[10 - See the essays generally from the fourth to the ninth, both inclusively, in Vol. III 3rd edition, more especially, the fifth essay. – Ed.]. Hooker's words literally and grammatically interpreted seem to assert the antecedence of the thing to its kind, that is, to its essential characters; – and to its force together with its form and measure of working, that is, to its specific and distinctive characters; in short, the words assert the pre-existence of the thing to all its constituent powers, qualities, and properties. Now this is either – first, equivalent to the assertion of a prima et nuda materia, so happily ridiculed by the author of Hudibras[11 - Part. I. c. i. vv. 151 – 6. – Ed.], and which under any scheme of cosmogony is a mere phantom, having its whole and sole substance in an impotent effort of the imagination or sensuous fancy, but which is utterly precluded by the doctrine of creation which it in like manner negatives: – or secondly, the words assert a self-destroying absurdity, namely, the antecedence of a thing to itself; as if having asserted that water consisted of hydrogen = 77, and oxygen = 23, I should talk of water as existing before the creation of hydrogen and oxygen. All laws, indeed, are constitutive; and it would require a longer train of argument than a note can contain, to shew what a thing is; but this at least is quite certain, that in the order of thought it must be posterior to the law that constitutes it. But such in fact was Hooker's meaning, and the word, thing, is used proleptice in favour of the imagination, as appears from the sentences that follow, in which the creative idea is declared to be the law of the things thereby created. A productive idea, manifesting itself and its reality in the product is a law; and when the product is phænomenal, (that is, an object of the outward senses) it is a law of nature. The law is res noumenon; the thing is res phenomenon[12 - See the essay on the idea of the Prometheus of Æschylus. Literary Remains, Vol. II p. 323. – Ed.] A physical law, in the right sense of the term, is the sufficient cause of the appearance, – causa sub-faciens.

P.S. What a deeply interesting volume might be written on the symbolic import of the primary relations and dimensions of space – long, broad, deep, or depth; surface; upper, under, above and below, right, left, horizontal, perpendicular, oblique: – and then the order of causation, or that which gives intelligibility, and the reverse order of effects, or that which gives the conditions of actual existence! Without the higher the lower would want its intelligibility: without the lower the higher could not have existed. The infant is a riddle of which the man is the solution; but the man could not exist but with the infant as his antecedent.

Ib. 2. p. 250.



In which essential Unity of God, a Trinity personal nevertheless subsisteth, after a manner far exceeding the possibility of man's conceit.


If 'conceit' here means conception, the remark is most true; for the Trinity is an idea, and no idea can be rendered by a conception. An idea is essentially inconceivable. But if it be meant that the Trinity is otherwise inconceivable than as the divine eternity and every attribute of God is and must be, then neither the commonness of the language here used, nor the high authority of the user, can deter me from denouncing it as untrue and dangerous. So far is it from being true, that on the contrary, the Trinity is the only form in which an idea of God is possible, unless indeed it be a Spinosistic or World-God.

Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 264.



But now that we may lift up our eyes (as it were) from the footstool to the throne of God, and leaving these natural, consider a little the state of heavenly and divine, creatures: touching angels which are spirits immaterial and intellectual, &c.


All this disquisition on the angels confirms my remark that our admirable Hooker was a giant of the race Aristotle versus Plato. Hooker was truly judicious, – the consummate synthesis of understanding and sense. An ample and most ordonnant conceptionist, to the tranquil empyrean of ideas he had not ascended. Of the passages cited from Scripture how few would bear a strict scrutiny; being either,

1. divine appearances, Jehovah in human form; or

2. the imagery of visions and all symbolic; or

3. names of honor given to prophets, apostles, or bishops; or lastly,

4. mere accommodations to popular notions!

Ib. 3. p. 267.



Since their fall, their practices have been the clean contrary unto those before mentioned. For being dispersed, some in the air, some on the earth, some in the water, some among the minerals, dens, and caves, that are under the earth; they have, by all means laboured to effect a universal rebellion against the laws, and as far as in them lieth, utter destruction of the works of God.


Childish; but the childishness of the age, without which neither Hooker nor Luther could have acted on their contemporaries with the intense and beneficent energy with which, they (God be praised!) did act.

Ib. p. 268.



Thus much therefore may suffice for angels, the next unto whom in degree are men.


St. Augustine well remarks that only three distinct genera of living beings are conceivable:

1. the infinite rational:

2. the finite rational:

3. the finite irrational:

that is, God, man, brute animal. Ergo, angels can only be with wings on their shoulders. Were our bodies transparent to our souls, we should be angels.

Ib. c. x. 4. p. 303.



It is no improbable opinion therefore which the arch-philosopher was of.


There are, and can be, only two schools of philosophy, differing in kind and in source. Differences in degree and in accident, there may be many; but these constitute schools kept by different teachers with different degrees of genius, talent, and learning; – auditories of philosophizers, not different philosophies. Schools of psilology (the love of empty noise) and misosophy are here out of the question. Schools of real philosophy there are but two, – best named by the arch-philosopher of each, namely, Plato and Aristotle. Every man capable of philosophy at all (and there are not many such) is a born Platonist or a born Aristotelian[13 - 'Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. … Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.'Table Talk, 2d Edit. p. 95. – Ed.]. Hooker, as may be discerned from the epithet of arch-philosopher applied to the Stagyrite, sensu monarchico, was of the latter family, – a comprehensive, vigorous, discreet, and discretive conceptualist, – but not an ideist.

Ib. 8. p. 308.



Of this point therefore we are to note, that sith men naturally have no free and perfect power to command whole politic multitudes of men, therefore utterly without our consent, we could in such sort be at no man's commandment living. And to be commanded we do consent, when that society whereof we are part hath at any time before consented, without revoking the same after by the like universal agreement. Wherefore as any man's deed past is good as long as himself continueth; so the act of a public society of men done five hundred years sithence standeth as theirs who presently are of the same societies, because corporations are immortal; we were then alive in our predecessors, and they in their successors do live still. Laws therefore human, of what kind soever, are available by consent.


No nobler or clearer example than this could be given of what an idea is as contra-distinguished from a conception of the understanding, correspondent to some fact or facts, quorum notæ communes concapiuntur, – the common characters of which are taken together under one distinct exponent, hence named a conception; and conceptions are internal subjective words. Reflect on an original social contract, as an event or historical fact; and its gross improbability, not to say impossibility, will stare you in the face. But an ever originating social contract as an idea, which exists and works continually and efficaciously in the moral being of every free citizen, though in the greater number unconsciously, or with a dim and confused consciousness, – what a power it is![14 - See the Church and State, c. i. – Ed.] As the vital power compared with the mechanic; as a father compared with a moulder in wax or clay, such is the power of ideas compared with the influence of conceptions and notions.

Ib. 15. p. 316.



I nothing doubt but that Christian men should much better frame themselves to those heavenly precepts, which our Lord and Saviour with so great instancy gave us concerning peace and unity, if we did all concur in desire to have the use of ancient Councils again renewed, rather than these proceedings continued, which either make all contentions endless, or bring them to one only determination, and that of all other the worst, which is by sword.


This is indeed a subject that deserves a serious consideration: and it may be said in favour of Hooker's proposal, namely, that the use of ancient Councils be renewed, that a deep and universal sense of the abuse of Councils progressively from the Nicene to that of Trent, and our knowledge of the causes, occasions, and mode of such abuse, are so far presumptive for its non-recurrency as to render it less probable that honest men will pervert them from ignorance, and more difficult for unprincipled men to do so designedly. Something too must be allowed for an honourable ambition on the part of the persons so assembled, to disappoint the general expectation, and win for themselves the unique title of the honest Council. But still comes the argument, the blow of which I might more easily blunt than parry, that if Roman Catholic and Protestant, or even Protestant Episcopalian and Protestant Presbyterian divines were generally wise and charitable enough to form a Christian General Council, there would be no need of one.

N.B. The reasoning in this note, as far as it is in discouragement of a recurrence to general Councils, does not, me saltem judice, conclude against the suffering our Convocation to meet. The virtual abrogation of this branch of our constitution I have long regarded as one of three or four Whig patriotisms, that have succeeded in de-anglicizing the mind of England.

Ib. c. xi. 4. p. 323.



So that nature even in this life doth plainly claim and call for a more divine perfection than either of these two that have been mentioned.


Whenever I meet with an ambiguous or multivocal word, without its meaning being shown and fixed, I stand on my guard against a sophism. I dislike this term, 'nature,' in this place. If it mean the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, it is an inapt term; for reason is supernatural. Now that reason in man must have been first actuated by a direct revelation from God, I have myself proved, and do not therefore deny that faith as the means of salvation was first made known by revelation; but that reason is incapable of seeing into the fitness and superiority of these means, or that it is a mystery in any other sense than as all spiritual truths are mysterious, I do deny and deem it both a false and a dangerous doctrine.

15 Sept. 1826.

Ib. 6. p. 327.



Concerning that faith, hope and charity, without which there can be no salvation; was there ever any mention made saving only in that law which God himself hath from heaven revealed? There is not in the world a syllable muttered with certain truth concerning any of these three, more than hath, been supernaturally received from the mouth of the eternal God.


That reason could have discovered these divine truths is one thing; that when discovered by revelation, it is capable of apprehending the beauty and excellence of the things revealed is another. I may believe the latter, while I utterly reject the former. That all these cognitions, together with the fealty or faithfulness in the will whereby the mind of the flesh is brought under captivity to the mind of the spirit (the sensous understanding to the reason) are supernatural, I not only freely grant, but fervently contend. But why the very perfection of reason, namely, those ideas or truth-powers, in which both the spiritual light and the spiritual life are co-inherent and one, should be called super-rational, I do not see. For reason is practical as well as theoretical; or even though I should exclude the practical reason, and confine the term reason to the highest intellective power, – still I should think it more correct to describe the mysteries of faith as plusquam rationalia than super-rational. But the assertions that provoke the remark arose for the greater part, and still arise, out of the confounding of the reason with the understanding. In Hooker, and the great divines of his age, it was merely an occasional carelessness in the use of the terms that reason is ever put where they meant the understanding; for, from other parts of their writings, it is evident that they knew and asserted the distinction, nay, the diversity of the things themselves; to wit, that there was in man another and higher light than that of the faculty judging according to sense, that is our understandings. But, alas! since the Revolution, it has ceased to be a mere error of language, and in too many it now amounts to a denial of reason!

B. ii. c. v. 3. p. 379.



To urge any thing as part of that supernatural and celestially revealed truth which God hath taught, and not to shew it in Scripture; this did the ancient Fathers evermore think unlawful, impious, execrable.


Even this must be received cum grano salis. To be sure, with the licences of interpretation, which the Fathers of the first three or four centuries allowed themselves, and with the arcana of evolution by word, letter, allegory, yea, punning, which they applied to detached sentences or single phrases of Holy Writ, it would not be easy to imagine a position which they could not 'shew in Scripture.' Let this be elucidated by the texts even now cited by the Romish priests for the truth of purgatory, indulgence, image-worship, invocation of dead men, and the like. The assertion therefore must be thus qualified. The ancient Fathers anathematized any doctrine not consentaneous with Scripture and deducible from it, either pari ratione or by consequence; as when Scripture clearly commands an end, but leaves the means to be determined according to the circumstances, as for example, the frequent assembly of Christians. The appointment of a Sunday or Lord's day is evidently the fittest and most effectual mean to this end; but yet it was not practicable, that is the mean did not exist till the Roman government became Christian. But as soon as this event took place, the duty of keeping the Sunday holy is truly, though implicitly, contained in the Apostolic text.

Ib. vi. 3. p. 392.



Again, with a negative argument, David is pressed concerning the purpose he had to build a temple unto the Lord: Thus saith the Lord, Thou shalt not build me a house to dwelt in. Wheresoever I have walked with all Israel, spake I one word to any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my people, saying, Why have ye not built me a house?


The wisdom of the divine goodness both in the negative, the not having authorized any of the preceding Judges from Moses downwards to build a temple – and in the positive, in having commanded David to prepare for it, and Solomon to build it – I have not seen put in the full light in which it so well deserves to be. The former or negative, or the evils of a splendid temple-worship and its effects on the character of the priesthood, – evils, when not changed to good by becoming the antidote and preventive of far greater evils, – would require much thought both to set forth and to comprehend. But to give any reflecting reader a sense of the providential foresight evinced in the latter, and this foresight beyond the reach of any but the Omniscient, it will be only necessary to remind him of the separation of the ten tribes and the breaking up of the realm into the two kingdoms of Judah and Israel in the very next reign. Without the continuity of succession provided for by this vast and splendid temple, built and arranged under the divine sanction attested by miracles – what criterion would there have existed for the purity of this law and worship? what security for the preservation and incorruption of the inspired writings?

Ib.vii. 3. p. 403.



That there is a city of Rome, that Pius Quintus and Gregory the Thirteenth, and others, have been Popes of Rome, I suppose we are certainly enough persuaded. The ground of our persuasion, who never saw the place nor persons before named, can be nothing but man's testimony. Will any man here notwithstanding allege those mentioned human infirmities as reasons why these things should be mistrusted or doubted of? Yea, that which is more, utterly to infringe the force and strength of man's testimony, were to shake the very fortress of God's truth.


In a note on a passage in Skelton's Deism Revealed[15 - See post. – Ed.], I have detected the subtle sophism that lurks in this argument, as applied by later divines in vindication of proof by testimony, in relation to the miracles of the Old and New Testament. As thus applied, it is a 


 though so unobvious, that a very acute and candid reasoner might use the argument without suspecting the paralogism. It is not testimony, as testimony, that necessitates us to conclude that there is such a city as Rome – but a reasoning, that forms a branch of mathematical science. So far is our conviction from being grounded on our confidence in human testimony that it proceeds on our knowledge of its fallible character, and therefore can find no sufficient reason for its coincidence on so vast a scale, but in the real existence of the object. That a thousand lies told by as many several and unconnected individuals should all be one and the same, is a possibility expressible only by a fraction that is already, to all intents and purposes, equal to nought.

B. iii. c. iii. 1. p. 447.



The mixture of those things by speech, which by nature are divided, is the mother of all error.


'The division in thought of those things which in nature are distinct, yet one, that is, distinguished without breach of unity, is the mother,' – so I should have framed the position. Will, reason, life, – ideas in relation to the mind, are instances; entiæ indivise interdistinctæ; and the main arguments of the atheists, materialists, deniers of our Lord's divinity and the like, all rest on the asserting of division as a necessary consequence of distinction.

B. v. c. xix. 3. vol. ii. p. 87.



Of both translations the better I willingly acknowledge that which cometh nearer to the very letter of the original verity; yet so that the other may likewise safely enough be read, without any peril at all of gainsaying as much as the least jot or syllable of God's most sacred and precious truth.


Hooker had far better have rested on the impossibility and the uselessness, if possible, of a faultless translation; and admitting certain mistakes, and oversights, have recommended them for notice at the next revision; and then asked, what objection such harmless trifles could be to a Church that never pretended to infallibility! But in fact the age was not ripe enough even for a Hooker to feel, much less with safety to expose, the Protestants' idol, that is, their Bibliolatry.

Ib. c. xxii. 10. p. 125.



Their only proper and direct proof of the thing in question had been to shew, in what sort and how far man's salvation doth necessarily depend upon the knowledge of the word of God; what conditions, properties, and qualities there are, whereby sermons are distinguished from other kinds of administering the word unto that purpose; and what special property or quality that is, which being no where found but in sermons, maketh them effectual to save souls, and leaveth all other doctrinal means besides destitute of vital efficacy.


Doubtless, Hooker was a theological Talus, with a club of iron against, opponents with pasteboard helmets, and armed only with crabsticks! But yet, I too, too often find occasion to complain of him as abusing his superior strength. For in a good man it is an abuse of his intellectual superiority, not to use a portion of it in stating his Christian opponents' cause, his brethren's (though dissentient, and perhaps erring, yet still brethren's,) side of the question, not as they had stated and argued it, but as he himself with his higher gifts of logic and foresight could have set it forth. But Hooker flies off to the general, in which he is unassailable; and does not, as in candour he should have done, inquire whether the question would not admit of, nay, demand, a different answer, when applied solely or principally to the circumstances, the condition and the needs of the English parishes, and the population at large, at the particular time when the Puritan divines wrote, and he, Hooker, replied to them. Now let the cause be tried in this way, and I should not be afraid to attempt the proof of the paramount efficacy of preaching on the scheme, and in the line of argument laid down by himself in this section. In short, Hooker frequently finds it convenient to forget the homely proverb; 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating.' Whose parishes were the best disciplined, whose flocks the best fed, the soberest livers, and the most awakened and best informed Christians, those of the zealous preaching divines, or those of the prelatic clergy with their readers? In whose churches and parishes were all the other pastoral duties, catechizing, visiting the poor and the like, most strictly practised?

Ib. 11.



The people which have no way to come to the knowledge of God, no prophesying, no teaching, perish. But that they should of necessity perish, where any one way of knowledge lacketh, is more than the words of Solomon import.


But what was the fact? Were those congregations that had those readers of whom the Puritans were speaking – were they, I say, equally well acquainted with, and practically impressed by, the saving truths of the Gospel? Were they not rather perishing for lack of knowledge? To reply, – It was their own fault; they ought to have been more regular in their attendance at church, and more attentive, when there, to what was there read, – is to my mind too shocking, nay, antichristian.

Ib. 16. p.137.



Now all these things being well considered, it shall be no intricate matter for any man to judge with indifferency, on which part the good of the church is most conveniently sought; whether on ours, whose opinion is such as hath been shewed, or else on theirs, who leaving no ordinary way of salvation for them unto whom the word of God is but only read, do seldom name them but with great disdain and contempt, who execute that service in the church of Christ.


If so, they were much to be blamed. But surely this was not the case with the better and wiser part of those who, clinging to the tenets and feelings of the first Reformers, and honouring Archbishop Grindal as much as they dreaded his Arminian successors, were denominated Puritans! They limited their censures to exclusive reading, – to reading as the substitute for, and too often for the purpose of doing away with, preaching.

Ib. lxv. 8. p. 415.



Thus was the memory of that sign which they had in baptism a kind of bar or prevention to keep them even from apostasy, whereinto the frailty of flesh and blood, overmuch fearing to endure shame, might peradventure the more easily otherwise have drawn them.


I begin to fear that Hooker is not suited to my nature. I cannot bear round-abouts for the purpose of evading the short cut straight before my eyes. Exempli gratia; I find myself tempted in this place to ejaculate Psha! somewhat abruptly, and ask, 'How many in twenty millions of Christian men and women ever reverted to the make-believe impression of the Cross on their forehead in unconscious infancy, by the wetted tip of the clergyman's finger as a preservative against anger and resentment? 'The whole church of God!' Was it not the same church which, neglecting and concealing the Scriptures of God, introduced the adoration of the Cross, the worshipping of relics, holy water, and all the other countless mummeries of Popery? Something might be pretended for the material images of the Cross worn at the bosom or hung up in the bed-chamber. These may, and doubtless often do, serve as silent monitors; but this eye-falsehood or pretence of making a mark that is not made, is a gratuitous superstition, that cannot be practised without serious danger of leading the vulgar to regard it as a charm. Hooker should have asked – Has it hitherto had this effect on Christians generally? Is it likely to produce this effect and this principally? In common honesty he must have answered, No! – Do I then blame the Church of England for retaining this ceremony? By no means. I justify it as a wise and pious condescension to the inveterate habits of a people newly dragged, rather than drawn, out of Papistry; and as a pledge that the founders and fathers of the Reformation in England regarded innovation as per se an evil, and therefore requiring for its justification not only a cause, but a weighty cause. They did well and piously in deferring the removal of minor spots and stains to the time when the good effects of the more important reforms had begun to shew themselves in the minds and hearts of the laity. – But they do not act either wisely or charitably who would eulogize these maculæ as beauty-spots and vindicate as good what their predecessors only tolerated as the lesser evil.

12th Aug. 1826.

Ib. 15. p. 424.



For in actions of this kind we are more to respect what the greatest part of men is commonly prone to conceive, than what some few men's wits may devise in construction of their own particular meanings. Plain it is, that a false opinion of some personal divine excellency to be in those things which either nature or art hath framed causeth always religious adoration.


How strongly might this most judicious remark be turned against Hooker's own mode of vindicating this ceremony!

Ib. lxvi. 2. p. 432.



The Church had received from Christ a promise that such as have believed in him these signs and tokens should follow them.

'To cast out devils, to speak with tongues, to drive away serpents, to be free from the harm which any deadly poison could work, and to cure diseases by imposition of hands.' Mark xvi.


The man who verily and sincerely believes the narrative in St. John's Gospel of the feeding of five thousand persons with a few loaves and small fishes, and of the raising of Lazarus, in the plain and literal sense, cannot be reasonably suspected of rejecting, or doubting, any narrative concerning Christ and his Apostles, simply as miraculous. I trust, therefore, that no disbelief of, or prejudice against, miraculous events and powers will be attributed to me, as the ground or cause of my strong persuasion that the latter verses of the last chapter of St. Mark's Gospel were an additament of a later age, for which St. Luke's Acts of the Apostles misunderstood supplied the hints.

Ib. lxxii. 15 & 16. p.539.

If Richard Hooker had written only these two precious paragraphs, I should hold myself bound to thank the Father of lights and Giver of all good gifts for his existence and the preservation of his writings.

B. viii. c. ix. 2. vol. iii. p. 537.



As there could be in natural bodies no motion of anything, unless there were some which moveth all things, and continueth immoveable; even so in politic societies, there must be some unpunishable, or else no man shall suffer punishment.


It is most painful to connect the venerable, almost sacred, name of Richard Hooker with such a specimen of puerile sophistry, scarcely worthy of a court bishop's trencher chaplain in the slavering times of our Scotch Solomon. It is, however, of some value, some interest at least, as a striking example of the confusion of an idea with a conception. Every conception has its sole reality in its being referable to a thing or class of things, of which, or of the common characters of which, it is a reflection. An idea is a power, 


 which constitutes its own reality, and is in order of thought necessarily antecedent to the things in which it is more or less adequately realized, while a conception is as necessarily posterior.

Sermon of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect

Vol. iii. p. 583.

The following truly admirable discourse is, I think, the concluding sermon of a series unhappily not preserved.

Ib. p.584.



If it were so in matters of faith, then, as all men have equal certainty of this, so no believer should be more scrupulous and doubtful than another. But we find the contrary. The angels and spirits of the righteous in heaven have certainty most evident of things spiritual: but this they have by the light of glory. That which we see by the light of grace, though it be indeed more certain; yet it is not to us so evidently certain, as that which sense or the light of nature will not suffer a man to doubt of.


Hooker's meaning is right; but he falls into a sad confusion of words, blending the thing and the relation of the mind to the thing. The fourth moon of Jupiter is certain in itself; but evident only to the astronomer with his telescope.

Ib. p. 585-588.



The other, which we call the certainty of adherence, is when the heart doth cleave and stick unto that which it doth believe. This certainty is greater in us than the other … (down to) the fourth question resteth, and so an end of this point.


These paragraphs should be written in gold. O! may these precious words be written on my heart!

1. That we all need to be redeemed, and that therefore we are all in captivity to an evil:

2. That there is a Redeemer:

3. That the redemption relatively to each individual captive is, if not effected under certain conditions, yet manifestable as far as is fitting for the soul by certain signs and consequents: – and

4. That these signs are in myself; that the conditions under which the redemption offered to all men is promised to the individual, are fulfilled in myself;

these are the four great points of faith, in which the humble Christian finds and feels a gradation from trembling hope to full assurance; yet the will, the act of trust, is the same in all. Might I not almost say, that it rather increases with the decrease of the consciously discerned evidence? To assert that I have the same assurance of mind that I am saved as that I need a Saviour, would be a contradiction to my own feelings, and yet I may have an equal, that is, an equivalent assurance. How is it possible that a sick man should have the same certainty of his convalescence as of his sickness? Yet he may be assured of it. So again, my faith in the skill and integrity of my physician may be complete, but the application of it to my own case may be troubled by the sense of my own imperfect obedience to his prescriptions. The sort of our beliefs and assurances is necessarily modified by their different subjects. It argues no want of saving faith on the whole, that I cannot have the same trust in myself as I have in my God. That Christ's righteousness can save me, – that Christ's righteousness alone can save – these are simple positions, all the terms of which are steady and copresent to my mind. But that I shall be so saved, – that of the many called I have been one of the chosen, – this is no mere conclusion of mind on known or assured premisses. I can remember no other discourse that sinks into and draws up comfort from the depths of our being below our own distinct consciousness, with the clearness and godly loving-kindness of this truly evangelical God-to-be-thanked-for sermon. But how large, how important a part of our spiritual life goes on like the circulation, absorptions, and secretions of our bodily life, unrepresented by any specific sensation, and yet the ground and condition of our total sense of existence!

While I feel, acknowledge, and revere the almost measureless superiority of the sermons of the divines, who labored in the first, and even the first two centuries of the Reformation, from Luther to Leighton, over the prudential morals and apologizing theology that have characterized the unfanatical clergy since the Revolution in 1688, I cannot but regret, especially while I am listening to a Hooker, that they withheld all light from the truths contained in the words 'Satan', 'the Serpent', 'the Evil Spirit', and this last used plurally.

A Discourse of Justification, Works, and How the Foundation of Faith is Overthrown

Ib. s. 31. p. 659-661.



But we say, our salvation is by Christ alone; therefore howsoever, or whatsoever, we add unto Christ in the matter of salvation, we overthrow Christ. Our case were very hard, if this argument, so universally meant as it is proposed, were sound and good. We ourselves do not teach Christ alone, excluding our own faith, unto justification; Christ alone, excluding our own work, unto sanctification; Christ alone, excluding the one or the other as unnecessary unto salvation. … As we have received, so we teach that besides the bare and naked work, wherein Christ, without any other associate, finished all the parts of our redemption and purchased salvation himself alone; for conveyance of this eminent blessing unto us, many things are required, as, to be known and chosen of God before the foundations of the world; in the world to be called, justified, sanctified; after we have left the world to be received into glory; Christ in every of these hath somewhat which he worketh alone. &c. &c.


No where out of the Holy Scripture have I found the root and pith of Christian faith so clearly and purely propounded as in this section. God, whose thoughts are eternal, beholdeth the end, and in the completed work seeth and accepteth every stage of the process. I dislike only the word 'purchased;' – not that it is not Scriptural, but because a metaphor well and wisely used in the enforcement and varied elucidation of a truth, is not therefore properly employed in its exact enunciation. I will illustrate, amplify and divide the word with Paul; but I will propound it collectively with John. If in this admirable passage aught else dare be wished otherwise, it is the division and yet confusion of time and eternity, by giving an anteriority to the latter.

I am persuaded, that the practice of the Romish church tendeth to make vain the doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ alone; but judging by her most eminent divines, I can find nothing dissonant from the truth in her express decisions on this article. Perhaps it would be safer to say: – Christ alone saves us, working in us by the faith which includes hope and love.

Ib. s. 34. p. 671.



If it were not a strong deluding spirit which hath possession of their hearts; were it possible but that they should see how plainly they do herein gainsay the very ground of apostolic faith?… The Apostle, as if he had foreseen how the Church of Rome would abuse the world in time by ambiguous terms, to declare in what sense the name of grace must be taken, when we make it the cause of our salvation, saith, He saved us according to his mercy, &c.


In all Christian communities there have been and ever will be too many Christians in name only; – too many in belief and notion only: but likewise, I trust, in every acknowledged Church, Eastern or Western, Greek, Roman, Protestant, many of those in belief, more or less erroneous, who are Christians in faith and in spirit. And I neither do nor can think, that any pious member of the Church of Rome did ever in his heart attribute any merit to any work as being his work.[16 - But see the language of the Council of Trent:Si quis dixerit justitiam acceptam non conservari atque etiam augeri coram. Deo per bona opera; sed opera ipsa fructus solummodo et signa esse justificationis adeptæ, non autem ipsius augendæ causam; anathema sit.Sess. VI. Can. 24.… Si quis dixerit hominis justificati bona opera ita esse dona Dei, ut non sint etiam bona ipsius justificati merita; aut ipsum justificatum bonis operibus, quæ ab eo per Dei gratiam, et Jesu Christi meritum, cujus vivum membrum est, fiunt, non vere mereri augmentum gratiæ, vitam æternam, et ipsius vitæ æternæ, si tamen in gratia decesserit, conscecutionem atque etiam gloriæ augmentum, anathema sit.Ib. Can. 32. – Ed.] A grievous error and a mischievous error there was practically in mooting the question at all of the condignity of works and their rewards. In short, to attribute merit to any agent but God in Christ, our faith as Christians forbids us; and to dispute about the merit of works abstracted from the agent, common sense ought to forbid us.

A Supplication Made to the Council by Master Walter Travers

Ib. p. 698.



I said directly and plainly to all men's understanding, that it was not indeed to be doubted, but many of the Fathers were saved; but the means, said I, was not their ignorance, which excuseth no man with God, but their knowledge and faith of the truth, which, it appeareth, God vouchsafed them, by many notable monuments and records extant of it in all ages.


Not certainly, if the ignorance proceeded directly or indirectly from a defect or sinful propensity of the will; but where no such cause is imaginable, in such cases this position of Master Travers is little less than blasphemous to the divine goodness, and in direct contradiction to an assertion of St. Paul's[17 - Rom. ii. 12. – Ed.], and to an evident consequence from our Saviour's own words on the polygamy of the fathers.[18 - Matt. xix. 8. – Ed.]

Answer to Travers

Ib. p. 719.



The next thing discovered, is an opinion about the assurance of men's persuasion in matters of faith. I have taught, he saith, 'That the assurance of things which we believe by the word, is not so certain as of that we perceive by sense.'


A useful instance to illustrate the importance of distinct, and the mischief of equivocal or multivocal, terms. Had Hooker said that the fundamental truths of religion, though perhaps even more certain, are less evident than the facts of sense, there could have been no misunderstanding. Thus the demonstrations of algebra possess equal certainty with those of geometry, but cannot lay claim to the same evidence. Certainty is positive, evidence relative; the former, strictly taken, insusceptible of more or less, the latter capable of existing in many different degrees.

Writing a year or more after the preceding note, I am sorry to say that Hooker's reasoning on this point seems to me sophistical throughout. That a man must see what he sees is no persuasion at all, nor bears the remotest analogy to any judgment of the mind. The question is, whether men have a clearer conception and a more stedfast conviction of the objective reality to which the image moving their eye appertains, than of the objective reality of the things and states spiritually discovered by faith. And this Travers had a right to question wherever a saving faith existed.

August, 1826.

Sermon IV a Remedy Against Sorrow and Fear

Ib. p. 801.



In spirit I am with you to the world's end.


O how grateful should I be to be made intuitive of the truth intended in the words – In spirit I am with you!

Ib. p. 808.



Touching the latter affection of fear, which respecteth evils to come, as the other which we have spoken of doth present evils; first, in the nature thereof it is plain that we are not every future evil afraid. Perceive we not how they, whose tenderness shrinketh at the least rase of a needle's point, do kiss the sword that pierceth their souls quite thorow?


In this and in sundry similar passages of this venerable writer there is 


 a very plausible, but even therefore the more dangerous, sophism; but the due detection and exposure of which would exceed the scanty space of a marginal comment. Briefly, what does Hooker comprehend in the term 'pain?' Whatsoever the soul finds adverse to her well being, or incompatible with her free action? In this sense Hooker's position is a mere truism. But if pain be applied exclusively to the soul finding itself as life, then it is an error.

Ib. p. 811.



Fear then in itself being mere nature cannot in itself be sin, which sin is not nature, but therefore an accessary deprivation.


I suspect a misprint, and that it should be depravation. But if not nature, then it must be a super-induced and incidental depravation of nature. The principal, namely fear, is nature; but the sin, that is, that it is a sinful fear, is but an accessary




Notes on Field on the Church[19 - Folio 1628. – Ed.]




Fly-leaf. – Hannah Scollock, her book, February 10, 1787.


		This, Hannah Scollock! may have been the case;
		Your writing therefore I will not erase.
		But now this book, once yours, belongs to me,
		The Morning Post's and Courier's S. T. C.; —
		Elsewhere in College, knowledge, wit and scholerage
		To friends and public known, as S. T. Coleridge.
		Witness hereto my hand, on Ashly Green,
		One thousand, twice four hundred, and fourteen
		Year of our Lord – and of the month November,
		The fifteenth day, if right I do remember.

28 March, 1819.[20 - The following letter was written on, and addressed with, the book to the Rev. Derwent Coleridge. – Ed.]

My Dear Derwent,

This one volume, thoroughly understood and appropriated, will place you in the highest ranks of doctrinal Church of England divines (of such as now are), and in no mean rank as a true doctrinal Church historian.

Next to this I recommend Baxter's own Life, edited by Sylvester, with my marginal notes. Here, more than in any of the prelatical and Arminian divines from Laud to the death of Charles II, you will see the strength and beauty of the Church of England, that is, its liturgy, homilies, and articles. By contrasting, too, its present state with that which such excellent men as Baxter, Calamy, and the so called Presbyterian or Puritan divines, would have made it, you will bless it as the bulwark of toleration.

Thirdly, you must read Eichorn's Introduction to the Old and New Testament, and the Apocrypha, and his comment on the Apocalypse; to all which my notes and your own previous studies will supply whatever antidote is wanting; – these will suffice for your Biblical learning, and teach you to attach no more than the supportable weight to these and such like outward evidences of our holy and spiritual religion.

So having done, you will be in point of professional knowledge such a clergyman as will make glad the heart of your loving father,



    S. T .Coleridge.

N. B. – See Book iv Chap. 7, p. 351, both for a masterly confutation of the Paleyo-Grotian evidences of the Gospel, and a decisive proof in what light that system was regarded by the Church of England in its best age. Like Grotius himself, it is half way between Popery and Socinianism.

B. i. c. 3. p. 5.



But men desired only to be like unto God in omniscience and the general knowledge of all things which may be communicated to a creature, as in Christ it is to his human soul.


Surely this is more than doubtful; and even the instance given is irreconcilable with Christ's own assertion concerning the last day, which must be understood of his human soul, by all who hold the faith delivered from the foundation, namely, his deity. Field seems to have excerpted this incautiously from the Schoolmen, who on this premiss could justify the communicability of adoration, as in the case of the saints. Omniscience, it may be proved, implies omnipotence. The fourth of the arguments in this section, and, as closely connected with it, the first (only somewhat differently stated) seem the strongest, or rather the only ones. For the second is a mere anticipation of the fourth, and all that is true in the third is involved in it.

Ib. c. 5. p. 9.



And began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.


That is, I humbly apprehend, in other than the Hebrew and Syrochaldaic languages, which (with rare and reluctant exceptions in favor of the Greek) were appropriated to public prayer and exhortation, just as the Latin in the Romish Church. The new converts preached and prayed, each to his companions in his and their dialect; – they were all Jews, but had assembled from all the different provinces of the Roman and Parthian empires, as the Quakers among us to the yearly meeting in London; this was a sign, not a miracle. The miracle consisted in the visible and audible descent of the Holy Ghost, and in the fulfilment of the prophecy of Joel, as explained by St. Peter himself. Acts ii. 15.

Ib. p. 10.



Aliud est etymologia nominis et aliud significatio nominis. Etymologia attenditur secundum id it quo imponitur nomen ad significandum: nominis vero significatio secundum id ad quod significandum imponitur.


This passage from Aquinas would be an apt motto for a critique on Horne Tooke's Diversions of Purley. The best service of etymology is, when the sense of a word is still unsettled, and especially when two words have each two meanings; A=a-b, and B=a-b, instead of A=a and B=b. Thus reason and understanding as at present popularly confounded. Here the etyma, – ratio, the relative proportion of thoughts and things, – and understanding, as the power which substantiates phænomena (substat eis) – determine the proper sense. But most often the etyma being equivalent, we must proceed ex arbitrio, as 'law compels,' 'religion obliges;' or take up what had been begun in some one derivative. Thus 'fanciful' and 'imaginative,' are discriminated; – and this supplies the ground of choice for giving to fancy and imagination, each its own sense. Cowley is a fanciful writer, Milton an imaginative poet. Then I proceed with the distinction, how ill fancy assorts with imagination, as instanced in Milton's Limbo.[21 - P. L. III. 487. – Ed.]

Ib.

I should rather express the difference between the faithful of the Synagogue and those of the Church, thus: – That the former hoped generally by an implicit faith; – "It shall in all things be well with all that love the Lord; therefore it cannot but be good for us and well with us to rest with our forefathers." But the Christian hath an assured hope by an explicit and particular faith, a hope because its object is future, not because it is uncertain. The one was on the road journeying toward a friend of his father's, who had promised he would be kind to him even to the third and fourth generation. He comforts himself on the road, first, by means of the various places of refreshment, which that friend had built for travellers and continued to supply; and secondly, by anticipation of a kind reception at the friend's own mansion-house. But the other has received an express invitation to a banquet, beholds the preparations, and has only to wash and put on the proper robes, in order to sit down.

Ib. p. 11.



The reason why our translators, in the beginning, did choose rather to use the word 'congregation' than 'Church,' was not, as the adversary maliciously imagineth, for that they feared the very name of the Church; but because as by the name of religion and religious men, ordinarily in former times, men understood nothing but factitias religiones, as Gerson out of Anselme calleth them, that is, the professions of monks and friars, so, &c.


For the same reason the word religion for 


 in St. James[22 - i. 27. See Aids to Reflection. 3d edit. p. 17. n. – Ed.] ought now to be altered to ceremony or ritual. The whole version has by change of language become a dangerous mistranslation, and furnishes a favorite text to our moral preachers, Church Socinians and other christened pagans now so rife amongst us. What was the substance of the ceremonial law is but the ceremonial part of the Christian religion; but it is its solemn ceremonial law, and though not the same, yet one with it and inseparable, even as form and substance. Such is St. James's doctrine, destroying at one blow Antinomianism and the Popish popular doctrine of good works.

Ib. c. 18. p. 27.



But if the Church of God remains in Corinth, where there were divisions, sects, emulations, &c. … who dare deny those societies to be the Churches of God, wherein the tenth part of these horrible evils and abuses is not to be found?


It is rare to meet with sophistry in this sound divine; but here he seems to border on it. For first the Corinthian Church upon admonition repented of its negligence; and secondly, the objection of the Puritans was, that the constitution of the Church precluded discipline.

B. II. c. 2. p. 31.

'Miscreant' is twice used in this page in its original sense of misbeliever.

Ib. c. 4. p. 35.

'Discourse' is here used for the discursive acts of the understanding, even as 'discursive, is opposed to 'intuitive' by Milton[23 - – – whence the soulReason receives, and reason is her being,Discursive or intuitive.P. L. v. 426. – Ed.] and others. Thus understand Shakspeare's "discourse of reason" for those discursions of mind which are peculiar to rational beings.

B. III. c. 1.p. 53.



The first publishers of the Gospel of Christ delivered a rule of faith to the Christian Churches which they founded, comprehending all those articles that are found in that epitome of Christian religion, which we call the Apostles' Creed.


This needs proof. I rather believe that the so called Apostles' Creed was really the Creed of the Roman or Western church, (and possibly in its present form, the catechismal rather than the baptismal creed), – and that other churches in the East had Creeds equally ancient, and, from their being earlier troubled with Anti Trinitarian heresies, more express on the divinity of Christ than the Roman.

Ib. p. 58.



Fourthly, that it is no less absurd to say, as the Papists do, that our satisfaction is required as a condition, without which Christ's satisfaction is not appliable unto us, than to say, Peter hath paid the debt of John, and he to whom it was due accepteth of the same payment, conditionally if he pay it himself also.


This[24 - The reader of the Aids to Reflection will recognize in this note the rough original of the passages p. 313, &c. of the 3d edition of that work. – Ed.] propriation of a metaphor, namely, forgiveness of sin and abolition of guilt through the redemptive power of Christ's love and of his perfect obedience during his voluntary assumption of humanity, expressed, on account of the sameness of the consequences in both cases, by the payment of a debt for another, which debt the payer had not himself incurred, – the propriation of this, I say, by transferring the sameness from the consequents to the antecedents is the one point of orthodoxy (so called, I mean) in which I still remain at issue. It seems to me so evidently a 


 A metaphor is an illustration of something less known by a more or less partial identification of it with something better understood. Thus St. Paul illustrates the consequences of the act of redemption by four different metaphors drawn from things most familiar to those, for whom it was to be illustrated, namely, sin-offerings or sacrificial expiation; reconciliation; ransom from slavery; satisfaction of a just creditor by vicarious payment of the debt. These all refer to the consequences of redemption.

Now, St. John without any metaphor declares the mode by and in which it is effected; for he identifies it with a fact, not with a consequence, and a fact too not better understood in the one case than in the other, namely, by generation and birth. There remains, therefore, only the redemptive act itself, and this is transcendant, ineffable, and a fortiori, therefore, inexplicable. Like the act of primal apostasy, it is in its own nature a mystery, known only through faith in the spirit.

James owes John £100, which (to prevent James's being sent to prison) Henry pays for him; and John has no longer any claim. But James is cruel and ungrateful to Mary, his tender mother. Henry, though no relation, acts the part of a loving and dutiful son to Mary. But will this satisfy the mother's claims on James, or entitle him to her esteem, approbation, and blessing? If, indeed, by force of Henry's example or persuasion, or any more mysterious influence, James repents and becomes himself a good and dutiful child, then, indeed, Mary is wholly satisfied; but then the case is no longer a question of debt in that sense in which it can be paid by another, though the effect, of which alone St. Paul was speaking, is the same in both cases to James as the debtor, and to James as the undutiful son. He is in both cases liberated from the burthen, and in both cases he has to attribute his exoneration to the act of another; as cause simply in the payment of the debt, or as likewise causa causæ in James's reformation. Such is my present opinion: God grant me increase of light either to renounce or confirm it.

Perhaps the different terms of the above position may be more clearly stated thus:

1. agens causator

2. actus causativus:

3. effectus causatus:

4. consequentia ab effecto.

5. The co-eternal Son of the living God, incarnate, tempted, crucified, resurgent, communicant of his spirit, ascendant, and obtaining for his church the descent of the Holy Ghost.

6. A spiritual and transcendant mystery.

7. The being born anew, as before in the flesh to the world, so now in the spirit to Christ: where the differences are, the spirit opposed to the flesh, and Christ to the world; the punctum indifferens, or combining term, remaining the same in both, namely, a birth.

8. Sanctification from sin and liberation from the consequences of sin, with all the means and process of sanctification, being the same for the sinner relatively to God and his own soul, as the satisfaction of a creditor for a debt, or as the offering of an atoning sacrifice for a transgressor of the law; as a reconciliation for a rebellious son or a subject to his alienated parent or offended sovereign; and as a ransom is for a slave in a heavy captivity.

Now my complaint is that our systematic divines transfer the paragraph 4 to the paragraphs 2 and 3, interpreting proprio sensu et ad totum what is affirmed sensu metaphorico et ad partem, that is, ad consequentia a regeneratione effecta per actum causativum primi agentis, uempe 


 redemptoris, and by this interpretation substituting an identification absolute for an equation proportional.

4th May, 1819.

Ib. p. 62.



Personality is nothing but the existence of nature itself.


God alone had his nature in himself; that is, God alone contains in himself the ground of his own existence. But were this definition of Field's right, we might predicate personality of a worm, or wherever we find life. Better say, – personality is individuality existing in itself, but with a nature as its ground.

Ib. p.66.



Accursing Eutyches as a heretic.


It puzzles me to understand what sense Field gave to the word, heresy. Surely every slight error, even though persevered in, is not to be held a heresy, or its asserters accursed. The error ought at least to respect some point of faith essential to the great ends of the Gospel. Thus the phrase 'cursing Eutyches,' is to me shockingly unchristian. I could not dare call even the opinion cursed, till I saw how it injured the faith in Christ, weakened our confidence in him, or lessened our love and gratitude.

Ib. p.71.



If ye be circumcised ye are fallen from grace, and Christ can profit you nothing.


It seems impossible but that these words had a relation to the particular state of feeling and belief, out of which the anxiety to be circumcised did in those particular persons proceed, and not absolutely, and at all times to the act itself, seeing that St. Paul himself circumcised Timothy from motives of charity and prudence.

Ib. c.3. p.76.



The things that pertain to the Christian faith and religion are of two sorts; for there are some things explicite, some things implicite credenda; that is, there are some things that must be particularly and expressly known and believed, as that the Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Ghost God, and yet they are not three Gods but one God; and some other, which though all men, at all times, be not bound upon the peril of damnation to know and believe expressly, yet whosoever will be saved must believe them at least implicite, and in generality, as that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fled into Egypt.


Merciful Heaven! Eternal misery and the immitigable wrath of God, and the inextinguishable fire of hell amid devils, parricides, and haters of God and all goodness – this is the verdict which a Protestant divine passes against the man, who though sincerely believing the whole Nicene creed and every doctrine and precept taught in the New Testament, and living accordingly, should yet have convinced himself that the first chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke were not parts of the original Gospels!

Ib. p.77.



So in the beginning, Nestorius did not err, touching the unity of Christ's person in the diversity of the natures of God and man; but only disliked that Mary should be called the mother of God: which form of speaking when some demonstrated to be very fitting and unavoidable, if Christ were God and man in the unity of the same person, he chose rather to deny the unity of Christ's person than to acknowledge his temerity and rashness in reproving that form of speech, which the use of the church had anciently received and allowed.


A false charge grounded on a misconception of the Syriac terms. Nestorius was perfectly justifiable in his rejection of the epithet 


 as applied to the mother of Jesus. The Church was even then only too ripe for the idolatrous hyper-dulia of the Virgin. Not less weak is Field's defence of the propriety of the term. Set aside all reference to this holy mystery, and let me ask, I trust without offence, whether by the same logic a mule's dam might not be called 


 because the horse and ass were united in one and the same subject. The difference in the perfect God and perfect man does not remove the objection: for an epithet, which conceals half of a truth, the power and special concerningness of which, relatively to our redemption by Christ, depends on our knowledge of the whole, is a deceptive and a dangerously deceptive epithet.

Ib. c.20. p.110.



Thus, then, the Fathers did sometimes, when they had particular occasions to remember the Saints, and to speak of them, by way of apostrophe, turn themselves unto them, and use words of doubtful compellation, praying them, if they have any sense of these inferior things, to be remembrancers to God for them.


The distinct gradations of the process, by which commemoration and rhetorical apostrophes passed finally into idolatry, supply an analogy of mighty force against the heretical hypothesis of the modern Unitarians. Were it true, they would have been able to have traced the progress of the Christolatry from the lowest sort of Christodulia with the same historical distinctness against the universal Church, that the Protestants have that of hierolatry against the Romanists. The gentle and soft censures which our divines during the reign of the Stuarts pass on the Roman Saint worship, or hieroduly, as an inconvenient superstition, must needs have alarmed the faithful adherents to the Protestantism of Edward VI and the surviving exiles of bloody Queen Mary's times, and their disciples.

Ib. p.111.



The miracles that God wrought in times past by them made many to attribute more to them than was fit, as if they had a generality of presence, knowledge, and working; but the wisest and best advised never durst attribute any such thing unto them.


To a truly pious mind awfully impressed with the surpassing excellency of God's ineffable love to fallen man, in the revelation of himself to the inner man through the reason and conscience by the spiritual light and substantiality – (for the conscience is to the spirit or reason what the understanding is to the sense, a substantiative power); this consequence of miracles is so fearful, that it cannot but redouble his zeal against that fashion of modern theologists which would convert miracles from a motive to attention and solicitous examination, and at best from a negative condition of revelation, into the positive foundation of Christian faith. Ib.c.22. p.116.



But if this be as vile a slander as ever Satanist devised, the Lord reward them that have been the authors and advisers of it according to their works.


O no! no! this the good man did not utter from his heart, but from his passion. A vile and wicked slander it was and is. O may God have turned the hearts of those who uttered it, or may it be among their unknown sins done in ignorance, for which the infinite merits of Christ may satisfy! I am most assured that if Dr. Field were now alive, or if any one had but said this to him, he would have replied – "I thank thee, brother, for thy Christian admonition. Add thy prayer, and pray God to forgive me my inconsiderate zeal!"

Ib. c. 23. p. 119.



For what rectitude is due to the specifical act of hating God? or what rectitude is it capable of?


Is this a possible act to any man understanding by the word God what we mean by God?

Ib. p. 129.

It is this complicated dispute, as to the origin and permission of evil, which supplies to atheism its most plausible, because its only moral, arguments; but more especially to that species of atheism which existed in Greece in the form of polytheism, admitting moral and intelligent shapers and governors of the world, but denying an intelligent ground, or self-conscious Creator of the universe; their gods being themselves the offspring of chaos and necessity, that is, of matter and its essential laws or properties. The Leibnitzian distinction of the Eternal Reason, or nature of God, 


 (the 


 of Timæus Locrus) from the will or personal attributes of God – 





 – planted the germ of the only possible solution, or rather perhaps, in words less exceptionable and more likely to be endured in the schools of modern theology, brought forward the truth involved in Behmen's too bold distinction of God and the ground of God; – who yet in this is to be excused, not only for his good aim and his ignorance of scholastic terms, but likewise because some of the Fathers expressed themselves no less crudely in the other extreme; though it is not improbable that the meaning was the same in both. At least Behmen constantly makes self-existence a positive act, so as that by an eternal 


 or mysterious intercirculation God wills himself out of the ground


), – indifferentia absoluta realitatis infinitæ et infinitæ potentialitatis) – and again by his will, as God existing, gives being to the ground, 





. Solus Deus est; – itaque principium, qui ex seipso dedit sibi ipse principium. Deus ipse sui origo est, suæque causa substantiæ, id quod est, ex se et in se continens. Ex seipso procreatus ipse se fecit, &c., of Synesius, Jerome, Hilary, and Lactantius and others involve the same conception.

Ib. c.27. p.140.



The seventh is the heresy of Sabellius, which he saith was revived by Servetus. So it was indeed, that Servetus revived in our time the damnable heresy of Sabellius, long since condemned in the first ages of the Church. But what is that to us? How little approbation he found amongst us, the just and honourable proceeding against him at Geneva will witness to all posterity.


Shocking as this act must and ought to be to all Christians at present; yet this passage and a hundred still stronger from divines and Church letters contemporary with Calvin, prove Servetus' death not to be Calvin's guilt especially, but the common opprobrium of all European Christendom, – of the Romanists whose laws the Senate of Geneva followed, and from fear of whose reproaches (as if Protestants favoured heresy) they executed them, – and of the Protestant churches who applauded the act and returned thanks to Calvin and the Senate for it.[25 - See Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 283. Melancthon's words to Calvin are:Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmu etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse, quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, interfecerunt.14th Oct. 1554. – Ed.]

Ib. c. 30. p. 143.



The twelfth heresy imputed to us is the heresy of Jovinian, concerning whom we must observe, that Augustine ascribeth unto him two opinions which Hierome mentioneth not; who yet was not likely to spare him, if he might truly have been charged with them. The first, that Mary ceased to be a virgin when she had borne Christ; the second, that all sins are equal.


Neither this nor that is worthy the name of opinion; it is mere unscriptural, nay, anti-scriptural gossiping. Are we to blame, or not rather to praise, the anxiety manifested by the great divines of the church of England under the Stuarts not to remove further than necessary from the Romish doctrines? Yet one wishes a bolder method; for example, as to Mary's private history after the conception and birth of Christ, we neither know nor care about it.

Ib. c. 31. p. 146.



For the opinions wherewith Hierome chargeth him, this we briefly answer. First, if he absolutely denied that the Saints departed do pray for us, as it seemeth he did by Hierome's reprehension, we think he erred.


Yet not heretically; and if he meant only that we being wholly ignorant, whether they do or no, ought to act as if we knew they did not, he is perfectly right; for whatever ye do, do it in faith. As to the ubiquity of saints, it is Jerome who is the heretic, nay, idolater, if he reduced his opinion to practice. It perplexes me, that Field speaks so doubtingly on a matter so plain as the incommunicability of omnipresence.

Ib. c. 32. p. 147.



Touching the second objection, that Bucer and Calvin deny original sin, though not generally, as did Zuinglius, yet at least in the children of the faithful. If he had said that these men affirm the earth doth move, and the heavens stand still, he might have as soon justified it against them, as this he now saith.


Very noticeable. A similar passage occurs even so late as in Sir Thomas Brown, just at the dawn of the Newtonian system, and after Kepler. What a lesson of diffidence![26 - 'But to circle the earth, as the heavenly bodies do,' &c. 'So we may see that the opinion of Copernicus touching the rotation of the earth, which astronomy itself cannot correct, because it is not repugnant to any of the phænomena, yet natural history may correct.'Advancement of Learning, B. II. – Ed.]

Ib. p. 148.



For we do not deny the distinction of venial and mortal sins; but do think, that some sins are rightly said to be mortal and some venial; not for that some are worthy of eternal punishment and therefore named mortal, others of temporal only, and therefore judged venial as the Papists imagine: but for that some exclude grace out of that man in which they are found and so leave him in a state wherein he hath nothing in himself that can or will procure him pardon: and other, which though in themselves considered, and never remitted, they be worthy of eternal punishment, yet do not so far prevail as to banish grace, the fountain of remission of all misdoings.


Would not the necessary consequence of this be, that there are no actions that can be pronounced mortal sins by mortals; and that what we might fancy venial might in individual cases be mortal and vice versa.

Ib.



First, because every offence against God may justly be punished by him in the strictness of his righteous judgments with eternal death, yea, with annihilation; which appeareth to be most true, for that there is no punishment so evil, and so much to be avoided, as the least sin that may be imagined. So that a man should rather choose eternal death, yea, utter annihilation, than commit the least offence in the world.


I admit this to be Scriptural; but what is wanted is, clearly to state the difference between eternal death and annihilation. For who would not prefer the latter, if the former mean everlasting misery?

Ib. c. 41. p. 62.



But he will say, Cyprian calleth the Roman Church the principal Church whence sacerdotal unity hath her spring; hereunto we answer, that the Roman Church, not in power of overruling all, but in order is the first and principal; and that therefore while she continueth to hold the truth, and encroacheth not upon the right of other Churches, she is to have the priority; but that in either of these cases she may be forsaken without breach of that unity, which is essentially required in the parts of the Church.


This is too large a concession. The real ground of the priority of the Roman see was that Rome, for the first three or perhaps four centuries, was the metropolis of the Christian world. Afterwards for the very same reason the Patriarch of New Rome or Constantinople claimed it; and never ceased to assert at least a co-equality. Had the Apostolic foundation been the cause, Jerusalem and Antioch must have had priority; not to add that the Roman Church was not founded by either Paul or Peter as is evident from the epistle to the Romans.

Append. B. III. p. 205. I do not think the attack on Transubstantiation the most successful point of the orthodox Protestant controversialists. The question is, what is meant in Scripture, as in John vi. by Christ's body or flesh and blood. Surely not the visible, tangible, accidental body, that is, a cycle of images and sensations in the imagination of the beholders; but his supersensual body, the noumenon of his human nature which was united to his divine nature. In this sense I understand the Lutheran ubiquity. But may not the "oblations" referred to by Field in the old canon of the Mass, have meant the alms, offerings always given at the Eucharist? If by "substance" in the enunciation of the article be meant id quod vere est, and if the divine nature be the sole ens vere ens, then it is possible to give a philosophically intelligible sense to Luther's doctrine of consubstantiation; at least to a doctrine that might bear the same name; – at all events the mystery is not greater than, if it be not rather the same as, the assumption of the human by the divine nature. Now for the possible conception of this we must accurately discriminate the incompossibile negativum from the incompatibile privativum. Of the latter are all positive imperfections, as error, vice, and evil passions; of the former simple limitation. Thus if (per impossible) human nature could make itself sinless and perfect, it would become or pass into God; and if God should abstract from human nature all imperfection, it might without impropriety be affirmed, even as Scripture doth affirm, that God assumed or took up into himself the human nature. Thus, to use a dim similitude and merely as a faint illustration, all materiality abstracted from a circle, it would become space, and though not infinite, yet one with infinite space. The mystery of omnipresence greatly aids this conception; totus in omni parte: and in truth this is the divine character of all the Christian mysteries, that they aid each other, and many incomprehensibles render each of them, in a certain qualified sense, less incomprehensible.

Ib.p. 208.



But first, it is impious to think of destroying Christ in any sort. For though it be true, that in sacrificing of Christ on the altar of the cross, the destroying and killing of him was implied, and this his death was the life of the world, yet all that concurred to the killing of him, as the Jews, the Roman soldiers, Pilate, and Judas sinned damnably, and so had done, though they had shed his blood with an intention and desire, that by it the world might be redeemed.


Is not this going too far? Would it not imply almost that Christ himself could not righteously sacrifice himself, especially when we consider that the Romanists would have a right to say, that Christ himself had commanded it? But Bellarmine's conceit[27 - That Christ had a twofold being, natural and sacramental; that the Jews destroyed and sacrificed his natural being, and that Christian priests destroy and sacrifice in the Mass his sacramental being. – Ed.] is so absurd that it scarce deserves the compliment of a serious confutation. For if sacramental being be opposed to natural or material, as noumenon to phænomenon, place is no attribute or possible accident of it in se; consequently, no alteration of place relatively to us can affect, much less destroy, it; and even were it otherwise, yet translocation is not destruction; for the body of Christ, according to themselves, doth indeed nourish our souls, even as a fish eaten sustains another fish, but yet with this essential difference, that it ceases not to be and remain itself, and instead of being converted converts; so that truly the only things sacrificed in the strict sense are all the evil qualities or deficiencies which divide our souls from Christ.

Ib. p. 218.



That which we do is done in remembrance of that which was then done; for he saith, Do this in remembrance of me.


This is a metastasis of Scripture. Do this in remembrance of me, that is, that which Christ was then doing. But Christ was not then suffering, or dying on the cross.

Ib. p. 223.



That the Saints do pray for us in genere, desiring God to be merciful to us, and to do unto us whatsoever in any kind he knoweth needful for our good, there is no question made by us.


To have placed this question in its true light, so as to have allowed the full force to the Scriptures asserting the communion of Saints and the efficacy of their intercession without undue concessions to the hierolatria of the Romish church, would have implied an acquaintance with the science of transcendental analysis, and an insight into the philosophy of ideas not to be expected in Field, and which was then only dawning in the mind of Lord Bacon. The proper reply to Brerely would be this: the communion and intercession of Saints is an idea, and must be kept such. But the Romish church has changed it away into the detail of particular and individual conceptions, and imaginations, into names and fancies.

N. B. Instead of the 'Roman Catholic' read throughout in this and all other works, and everywhere and on all occasions, unless where the duties of formal courtesy forbid, say, the 'Romish anti-Catholic Church;' Romish – to mark that the corruptions in discipline, doctrine and practice do for the worst and far larger part owe both their origin and their perpetuation to the court and local tribunals of the city of Rome, and are not and never have been the catholic, that is, universal faith of the Roman empire, or even of the whole Latin or Western church; and anti-Catholic, – because no other Church acts on so narrow and excommunicative a principle, or is characterized by such a jealous spirit of monopoly and particularism, counterfeiting catholicity by a negative totality and heretical self-circumscription, cutting off, or cutting herself off from, all the other members of Christ's Body.

12th March, 1824.

It is of the utmost importance, wherever clear and distinct conceptions are required, to make out in the first instance whether the term in question, or the main terms of the question in dispute, represents or represent a fact or class of facts simply, or some self-established and previously known idea or principle, of which the facts are instances and realizations, or which is introduced in order to explain and account for the facts. Now the term 'merits,' as applied to Abraham and the saints, belongs to the former. It is a mere nomen appellativum of the facts.

Ib. c. 5. p. 252.



The Papists and we agree that original sin is the privation of original righteousness; but they suppose there was in nature without that addition of grace, a power to do good, &c.


Nothing seems wanting to this argument but a previous definition and explanation of the term, 'nature.' Field appears to have seen the truth, namely, that nature itself is a peccant (I had almost said an unnatural) state, or rather no State at all, 


.

Ib. c. 6. p. 269.



And surely the words of Augustine do not import that she had no sin, but that she overcame it, which argueth a conflict; neither doth he say he will acknowledge she was without sin, but that he will not move any question touching her, in this dispute of sins and sinners.


Why not say at once, that this anti-Scriptural superstition had already begun? I scarcely know whether to be pleased or grieved with that edging on toward the Roman creed, that exceeding, almost Scriptural, tenderness for the divines of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries, which distinguishes the Church of England dignitaries, from Elizabeth inclusively to our Revolution in 1688, from other Protestants.

Ib. c. 10. p. 279.

Derwent! should this page chance to fall under your eye, for my sake read, fag, subdue, and take up into your proper mind this chapter 10 of Free Will.

Ib. p. 281.



Of these five kinds of liberty, the two first agree only to God, so that in the highest degree 


, that is, freedom of will is proper to God only; and in this sense Calvin and Luther rightly deny that the will of any creature is or ever was free.


I add, except as in God, and God in us. Now the latter alone is will; for it alone is ens super ens. And here lies the mystery, which I dare not openly and promiscuously reveal.

Ib.



Yet doth not God's working upon the will take from it the power of dissenting, and doing the contrary; but so inclineth it, that having liberty to do otherwise, yet she will actually determine so.


This will not do. Were it true, then my understanding would be free in a mathematical proportion; or the whole position amounts only to this, that the will, though compelled, is still the will. Be it so; yet not a free will. In short, Luther and Calvin are right so far. A creaturely will cannot be free; but the will in a rational creature may cease to be creaturely, and the creature, 


 finally cease in consequence; and this neither Luther nor Calvin seem to have seen. In short, where omnipotence is on one side, what but utter impotence can remain for the other? To make freedom possible, the antithesis must be removed. The removal of this antithesis of the creature to God is the object of the Redemption, and forms the glorious liberty of the Gospel. More than this I am not permitted to expose.

Ib. p. 283.

It is not given, nor is it wanting, to all men to have an insight into the mystery of the human will and its mode of inherence on the will which is God, as the ineffable causa sui; but this chapter will suffice to convince you that the doctrines of Calvin were those of Luther in this point; – that they are intensely metaphysical, and that they are diverse toto genere from the merely moral and psychological – tenets of the modern Calvinists. Calvin would have exclaimed, 'fire and fagots!' before he had gotten through a hundred pages of Dr. Williams's Modern Calvinism.

Ib. c. 11. p. 296.



Neither can Vega avoid the evidence of the testimonies of the Fathers, and the decree of the Council of Trent, so that he must be forced to confess that no man can so collectively fulfil the law as not to sin, and consequently, that no man can perform that the law requireth.


The paralogism of Vega as to this perplexing question seems to lurk in the position that God gives a law which it is impossible we should obey collectively. But the truth is, that the law which God gave, and which from the essential holiness of his nature it is impossible he should not have given, man deprived himself of the ability to obey. And was the law of God therefore to be annulled? Must the sun cease to shine because the earth has become a morass, so that even that very glory of the sun hath become a new cause of its steaming up clouds and vapors that strangle the rays? God forbid! But for the law I had not sinned. But had I not been sinful the law would not have occasioned me to sin, but would have clothed me with righteousness, by the transmission of its splendour. Let God be just, and every man a liar.

B. iv. c. 4. p. 346.



The Church of God is named the 'Pillar of Truth;' not as if truth did depend on the Church, &c.


Field might have strengthened his argument, by mention of the custom of not only affixing records and testimonials to the pillars, but books, &c.

Ib. c. 7. p. 353.



Others therefore, to avoid this absurdity, run into that other before mentioned, that we believe the things that are divine by the mere and absolute command of our will, not finding any sufficient motives and reasons of persuasion.


Field, nor Count Mirandula have penetrated to the heart of this most fundamental question. In all proper faith the will is the prime agent, but not therefore the choice. You may call it reason if you will, but then carefully distinguish the speculative from the practical reason, and the reason itself from the understanding.

Ib. c. 8. p. 356.



Illius virtute (saith he) illuminati, jam non aut nostro, aut aliorum judicio credimus a Deo esse Scripturam, sed supra humanum judicium certo certius constituimus, non secus ac si ipsius Dei numen illic intueremur, hominum ministerio ab ipsissimo Dei ore fluxisse.


Greatly doth this fine passage need explanation, that knowing what it doth mean, the reader may understand what it doth not mean, nor of necessity imply. Without this insight, our faith may be terribly shaken by difficulties and objections. For example; If all the Scripture, then each component part; thence every faithful Christian infallible, and so on.

Ib. p. 357.



In the second the light of divine reason causeth approbation of that they believe: in the third sort, the purity of divine understanding apprehendeth most certainly the things believed, and causeth a foretasting of those things that hereafter more fully shall be enjoyed.


Here too Field distinguishes the understanding from the reason, as experience following perception of sense. But as perception through the mere presence of the object perceived, whether to the outward or inner sense, is not insight which belongs to the 'light of reason,' therefore Field marks it by 'purity' that is unmixed with fleshly sensations or the idola of the bodily eye. Though Field is by no means consistent in his epitheta of the understanding, he seldom confounds the word itself. In theological Latin, the understanding, as influenced and combined with the affections and desires, is most frequently expressed by cor, the heart. Doubtless the most convenient form of appropriating the terms would be to consider the understanding as man's intelligential faculty, whatever be its object, the sensible or the intelligible world; while reason is the tri-unity, as it were, of the spiritual eye, light, and object.

Ib. c. 10. p. 358.



Of the Papists preferring the Church's authority before the Scripture.


Field, from the nature and special purpose of his controversy, is reluctant to admit any error in the Fathers, – too much so indeed; and this is an instance. We all know what we mean by the Scriptures, but how know we what they mean by the Church, which is neither thing nor person? But this is a very difficult subject.

Ib. p. 359.



First, so as if the Church might define contrary to the Scriptures, as she may contrary to the writings of particular men, how great soever.


Verbally, the more sober divines of the Church of Rome do not assert this; but practically and by consequence they do. For if the Church assign a sense contradictory to the true sense of the Scripture, none dare gainsay it.[28 - Fides catholica, says Bellarmine, docet omnem virtutem esse bonam, omne vitium esse malum. Si autem erraret Papa præcipiendo vitia vel prohibendo virtutes, teneretur Ecclesia credere vitia esse bona et virtutes malas, nisi vellet contra conscientiam peccare.De Pont. Roman. IV. 5. – Ed.]

Ib.



This we deny, and will in due place improve their error herein.


That is, prove against, detect, or confute.

Ib. c. 11. p. 360.



If the comparison be made between the Church consisting of all the believers that are and have been since Christ appeared in the flesh, so including the Apostles, and their blessed assistants the Evangelists, we deny not but that the Church is of greater authority, antiquity, and excellency than the Scriptures of the New Testament, as the witness is better than his testimony, and the law-giver greater than the laws made by him, as Stapleton allegeth.


The Scriptures may be and are an intelligible and real one, but the Church on earth can in no sense be such in and through itself, that is, its component parts, but only by their common adherence to the body of truth made present in the Scripture. Surely you would not distinguish the Scripture from its contents?

Ib. c. 12. p. 361.



For the better understanding whereof we must observe, as Occam fitly noteth, that an article of faith is sometimes strictly taken only for one of those divine verities, which are contained in the Creed of the Apostles: sometimes generally for any catholic verity.


I am persuaded, that this division will not bear to be expanded into all its legitimate consequences sine periculo vel fidei vel charitatis. I should substitute the following:

1. The essentials of that saving faith, which having its root and its proper and primary seat in the moral will, that is, in the heart and affections, is necessary for each and every individual member of the church of Christ:

2. Those truths which are essential and necessary in order to the logical and rational possibility of the former, and the belief and assertion of which are indispensable to the Church at large, as those truths without which the body of believers, the Christian world, could not have been and cannot be continued, though it be possible that in this body this or that individual may be saved without the conscious knowledge of, or an explicit belief in, them.

Ib.



And therefore before and without such determination, men seeing clearly the deduction of things of this nature from the former, and refusing to believe them, are condemned of heretical pertinacy.


Rather, I should think, of a nondescript lunacy than of heretical pravity. A child may explicitly know that 5 + 5 = 10, yet not see that therefore 10 – 5 = 5; but when he has seen it how he can refrain from believing the latter as much as the former, I have no conception.

Ib. c. 16. p. 367.



And the third of jurisdiction; and so they that have supreme power, that is, the Bishops assembled in a general Council, may interpret the Scriptures, and by their authority suppress all them that shall gainsay such interpretations, and subject every man that shall disobey such determinations as they consent upon, to excommunication and censures of like nature.


This would be satisfactory, if only Field had cleared the point of the communion in the Lord's Supper; whether taken spiritually, though in consequence of excommunication not ritually, it yet sufficeth to salvation. If so, excommunication is merely declarative, and the evil follows not the declaration but that which is truly declared, as when Richard says that Francis deserves the gallows, as a robber. The gallows depends on the fact of the robbery, not on Richard's saying.

Ib. c. 29. p. 391.



In the 1 Cor. 15. the Greek, that now is, hath in all copies; the first man was of the earth, earthly; the second man is the Lord from heaven. The latter part of this sentence Tertullian supposeth to have been corrupted, and altered by the Marcionites. Instead of that the Latin text hath; the second man was from heaven, heavenly, as Ambrose, Hierome, and many of the Fathers read also.


There ought to be, and with any man of taste there can be, no doubt that our version is the true one. That of Ambrose and Jerome is worthy of mere rhetoricians; a flat formal play of antithesis instead of the weight and solemnity of the other.[29 - The ordinary Greek text is:


The Vulgate is:primus homo de terra, terrenus; secundus homo de cœlis, cœlestis.Ed.] According to the former the scales are even, in the latter the scale of Christ drops down at once, and the other flies to the beam like a feather weighed against a mass of gold.

Append. Part. I. s. 4. p. 752.



And again he saith, that every soul, immediately upon the departure hence, is in this appointed invisible place, having there either pain, or ease and refreshing; that there the rich man is in pain, and the poor in a comfortable estate. For, saith he, why should we not think, that the souls are tormented, or refreshed in this invisible place, appointed for them in expectation of the future judgment?


This may be adduced as an instance, specially, of the evil consequences of introducing the idolon of time as an ens reale into spiritual doctrines, thus understanding literally what St. Paul had expressed by figure and adaptation. Hence the doctrine of a middle state, and hence Purgatory with all its abominations; and an instance, generally, of the incalculable possible importance of speculative errors on the happiness and virtue of man-kind.




Notes on Donne[30 - The LXXX Sermons, fol. 1640. – Ed.]


There have been many, and those illustrious, divines in our Church from Elizabeth to the present day, who, overvaluing the accident of antiquity, and arbitrarily determining the appropriation of the words 'ancient,' 'primitive,' and the like to a certain date, as for example, to all before the fourth, fifth, or sixth century, were resolute protesters against the corruptions and tyranny of the Romish hierarch, and yet lagged behind Luther and the Reformers of the first generation. Hence I have long seen the necessity or expedience of a threefold division of divines. There are many, whom God forbid that I should call Papistic, or, like Laud, Montague, Heylyn, and others, longing for a Pope at Lambeth, whom yet I dare not name Apostolic. Therefore I divide our theologians into,

1. Apostolic or Pauline:

2. Patristic:

3. Papal.

Even in Donne, and still more in Bishops Andrews and Hackett, there is a strong Patristic leaven. In Jeremy Taylor this taste for the Fathers and all the Saints and Schoolmen before the Reformation amounted to a dislike of the divines of the continental Protestant Churches, Lutheran or Calvinistic. But this must, in part at least, be attributed to Taylor's keen feelings as a Carlist, and a sufferer by the Puritan anti-prelatic party.

I would thus class the pentad of operative Christianity: —








The Papacy elevated the Church to the virtual exclusion or suppression of the Scriptures: the modern Church of England, since Chillingworth, has so raised up the Scriptures as to annul the Church; both alike have quenched the Holy Spirit, as the mesothesis of the two, and substituted an alien compound for the genuine Preacher, who should be the synthesis of the Scriptures and the Church, and the sensible voice of the Holy Spirit.

Serm. I. Coloss. i. 19, 20. p. 1.

Ib. E.



What could God pay for me? What could God suffer? God himself could not; and therefore God hath taken a body that could.


God forgive me, – or those who first set abroad this strange 


 this debtor and creditor scheme of expounding the mystery of Redemption, or both! But I never can read the words, 'God himself could not; and therefore took a body that could' – without being reminded of the monkey that took the cat's paw to take the chestnuts out of the fire, and claimed the merit of puss's sufferings. I am sure, however, that the ludicrous images, under which this gloss of the Calvinists embodies itself to my fancy, never disturb my recollections of the adorable mystery itself. It is clear that a body, remaining a body, can only suffer as a body: for no faith can enable us to believe that the same thing can be at once A. and not A. Now that the body of our Lord was not transelemented or transnatured by the pleroma indwelling, we are positively assured by Scripture. Therefore it would follow from this most unscriptural doctrine, that the divine justice had satisfaction made to it by the suffering of a body which had been brought into existence for this special purpose, in lieu of the debt of eternal misery due from, and leviable on, the bodies and souls of all mankind! It is to this gross perversion of the sublime idea of the Redemption by the cross, that we must attribute the rejection of the doctrine of redemption by the Unitarian, and of the Gospel in toto by the more consequent Deist.

Ib. p. 2. C.



And yet, even this dwelling fullness, even in this person Christ Jesus, by no title of merit in himself, but only quia complacuit, because it pleased the Father it should be so.


This, in the intention of the preacher, may have been sound, but was it safe, divinity? In order to the latter, methinks, a less equivocal word than 'person' ought to have been adopted; as 'the body and soul of the man Jesus, considered abstractedly from the divine Logos, who in it took up humanity into deity, and was Christ Jesus.' Dare we say that there was no self-subsistent, though we admit no self-originated, merit in the Christ? It seems plain to me, that in this and sundry other passages of St. Paul, the Father means the total triune Godhead.

It appears to me, that dividing the Church of England into two æras – the first from Ridley to Field, or from Edward VI to the commencement of the latter third of the reign of James I, and the second ending with Bull and Stillingfleet, we might characterize their comparative excellences thus: That the divines of the first æra had a deeper, more genial, and a more practical insight into the mystery of Redemption, in the relation of man toward both the act and the author, namely, in all the inchoative states, the regeneration and the operations of saving grace generally; – while those of the second æra possessed clearer and distincter views concerning the nature and necessity of Redemption, in the relation of God toward man, and concerning the connection of Redemption with the article of Tri-unity; and above all, that they surpassed their predecessors in a more safe and determinate scheme of the divine economy of the three persons in the one undivided Godhead. This indeed, was mainly owing to Bishop Bull's masterly work De Fide Nicæna,[31 - "Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicoenoe, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the Church of England, and in good humour with the Church of Rome."Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 41. – Ed.] which in the next generation Waterland so admirably maintained, on the one hand, against the philosophy of the Arians, – the combat ending in the death and burial of Arianism, and its descent and metempsychosis into Socinianism, and thence again into modern Unitarianism, – and on the other extreme, against the oscillatory creed of Sherlock, now swinging to Tritheism in the recoil from Sabellianism, and again to Sabellianism in the recoil from Tritheism.

Ib.



First, we are to consider this fullness to have been in Christ, and then, from this fullness arose his merits; we can consider no merit in Christ himself before, whereby he should merit this fullness; for this fullness was in him before he merited any thing; and but for this fullness he had not so merited. Ille homo, ut in unitatem filii Dei assumeretur, unde meruit? How did that man (says St. Augustine, speaking of Christ, as of the son of man), how did that man merit to be united in one person with the eternal Son of God? Quid egit ante? Quid credidit? What had he done? Nay, what had he believed? Had he either faith or works before that union of both natures?


Dr. Donne and St. Augustine said this without offence; but I much question whether the same would be endured now. That it is, however, in the spirit of Paul and of the Gospel, I doubt not to affirm, and that this great truth is obscured by what in my judgment is the post-Apostolic Christopœdia, I am inclined to think.

Ib.



What canst thou imagine he could foresee in thee? a propensness, a disposition to goodness, when his grace should come? Either there is no such propensness, no such disposition in thee, or, if there be, even that propensness and disposition to the good use of grace, is grace; it is an effect of former grace, and his grace wrought before he saw any such propensness, any such disposition; grace was first, and his grace is his, it is none of thine.


One of many instances in dogmatic theology, in which the half of a divine truth has passed into a fearful error by being mistaken for the whole truth.

Ib. p. 6. D.



God's justice required blood, but that blood is not spilt, but poured from that head to our hearts, into the veins and wounds of our own souls: there was blood shed, but no blood lost.


It is affecting to observe how this great man's mind sways and oscillates between his reason, which demands in the word 'blood' a symbolic meaning, a spiritual interpretation, and the habitual awe for the letter; so that he himself seems uncertain whether he means the physical lymph, serum, and globules that trickled from the wounds of the nails and thorns down the sides and face of Jesus, or the blood of the Son of Man, which he who drinketh not cannot live. Yea, it is most affecting to see the struggles of so great a mind to preserve its inborn fealty to the reason under the servitude to an accepted article of belief, which was, alas! confounded with the high obligations of faith; – faith the co-adunation of the finite individual will with the universal reason, by the submission of the former to the latter. To reconcile redemption by the material blood of Jesus with the mind of the spirit, he seeks to spiritualize the material blood itself in all men! And a deep truth lies hidden even in this. Indeed the whole is a profound subject, the true solution of which may best, God's grace assisting, be sought for in the collation of Paul with John, and specially in St. Paul's assertion that we are baptized into the death of Christ, that we may be partakers of his resurrection and life[32 - Rom. vi.3, 4, 5. – Ed.]. It was not on the visible cross, it was not directing attention to the blood-drops on his temples and sides, that our blessed Redeemer said, This is my body, and this is my blood!

Ib. p. 9. A.



But if we consider those who are in heaven, and have been so from the first minute of their creation, angels, why have they, or how have they any reconciliation? &c.


The history and successive meanings of the term 'angels' in the Old and New Testaments, and the idea that shall reconcile all as so many several forms, and as it were perspectives, of one and the same truth – this is still a desideratum in Christian theology.

Ib. C.



For, at the general resurrection, (which is rooted in the resurrection of Christ, and so hath relation to him) the creature shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God; for which the whole creation groans, and travails in pain yet. (Rom. viii. 21.) This deliverance then from this bondage the whole creature hath by Christ, and that is their reconciliation. And then are we reconciled by the blood of his cross, when having crucified ourselves by a true repentance, we receive the real reconciliation in his blood in the sacrament. But the most proper and most literal sense of these words, is, that all things in heaven and earth be reconciled to God (that is, to his glory, to a fitter disposition to glorify him) by being reconciled to another in Christ; that in him, as head of the church, they in heaven, and we upon earth, be united together as one body in the communion of saints.


A very meagre and inadequate interpretation of this sublime text. The philosophy of life, which will be the corona et finis coronans of the sciences of comparative anatomy and zoology, will hereafter supply a fuller and nobler comment.

Ib. p. 9. A. and B.



The blood of the sacrifices was brought by the high priest in sanctum sanctorum, into the place of greatest holiness; but it was brought but once, in festo expiationis, in the feast of expiation; but in the other parts of the temple it was sprinkled every day. The blood of the cross of Christ Jesus hath had this effect in sancto sanctorum, &c. … (to) Christ Jesus.


A truly excellent and beautiful paragraph.

Ib. C.



If you will mingle a true religion, and a false religion, there is no reconciling of God and Belial in this text. For the adhering of persons born within the Church of Rome to the Church of Rome, our law says nothing to them if they come; but for reconciling to the Church of Rome, for persons born within the allegiance of the king, or for persuading of men to be so reconciled, our law hath called by an infamous and capital name of treason, and yet every tavern and ordinary is full of such traitors, &c.


A strange transition from the Gospel to the English statute-book! But I may observe, that if this statement could be truly made under James I, there was abundantly ampler ground for it in the following reign. And yet with what bitter spleen does Heylyn, Laud's creature, arraign the Parliamentarians for making the same complaint!

Serm. II. Isaiah vii. 14. p. 11.

The fear of giving offence, especially to good men, of whose faith in all essential points we are partakers, may reasonably induce us to be slow and cautious in making up our minds finally on a religious question, and may, and ought to, influence us to submit our conviction to repeated revisals and rehearings. But there may arrive a time of such perfect clearness of view respecting the particular point, as to supersede all fear of man by the higher duty of declaring the whole truth in Jesus. Therefore, having now overpassed six-sevenths of the ordinary period allotted to human life, – resting my whole and sole hope of salvation and immortality on the divinity of Christ, and the redemption by his cross and passion, and holding the doctrine of the Triune God as the very ground and foundation of the Gospel faith, – I feel myself enforced by conscience to declare and avow, that, in my deliberate judgment, the Christopædia prefixed to the third Gospel and concorporated with the first, but, according to my belief, in its present form the latest of the four, was unknown to, or not recognized by, the Apostles Paul and John; and that, instead of supporting the doctrine of the Trinity, and the Filial Godhead of the Incarnate Word, as set forth by John i 1, and by Paul, it, if not altogether irreconcilable with this faith, doth yet greatly weaken and bedim its evidence; and that, by the too palpable contradictions between the narrative in the first Gospel and that in the third, it has been a fruitful magazine of doubts respecting the historic character of the Gospels themselves. I have read most of the criticisms on this text, and my impression is, that no learned Jew can be expected to receive the common interpretation as the true primary sense of the words. The severely literal Aquila renders the Hebrew word 







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notes



1


See Table Talk, p. 178, 2nd edit.




2




'Should it occur to any one that the doctrine blamed in the text, is but in accordance with that of the Church of England, in her rubric concerning spiritual communion, annexed to the Office for Communion of the Sick: he may consider, whether that rubric, explained (as if possible it must be) in consistency with the definition of a sacrament in the Catechism, can be meant for any but rare and extraordinary cases: cases as strong in regard of the Eucharist, as that of martyrdom, or the premature death of a well-disposed catechumen, in regard of Baptism.'


Keble's Pref. to Hooker, p. 85, n. 70. Ed.




3


According to Bishop Horne, the allusion is to the destruction of Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea. – Ed.




4


See Horne in loc. note. – Ed.




5


The references are to Mr. Keble's edition (1836.) – Ed.




6


But see Mr. Keble's statement (Pref. xxix.), and the argument founded on discoveries and collation of MSS. since the note in the text was written. – Ed.




7


See Mr. Coleridge's work On the constitution of the Church and State according to the idea of each. – Ed.




8


See E. P. I. ii. 3. p. 252. – Ed.




9


See the Church and State, in which the ecclesia or Church in Christ, is distinguished from the enclesia, or national Church. – Ed.




10


See the essays generally from the fourth to the ninth, both inclusively, in Vol. III 3rd edition, more especially, the fifth essay. – Ed.




11


Part. I. c. i. vv. 151 – 6. – Ed.




12


See the essay on the idea of the Prometheus of Æschylus. Literary Remains, Vol. II p. 323. – Ed.




13




'Every man is born an Aristotelian, or a Platonist. I do not think it possible that any one born an Aristotelian can become a Platonist; and I am sure no born Platonist can ever change into an Aristotelian. They are the two classes of men, beside which it is next to impossible to conceive a third. The one considers reason a quality, or attribute; the other considers it a power. I believe that Aristotle never could get to understand what Plato meant by an idea. … Aristotle was, and still is, the sovereign lord of the understanding; the faculty judging by the senses. He was a conceptualist, and never could raise himself into that higher state, which was natural to Plato, and has been so to others, in which the understanding is distinctly contemplated, and, as it were, looked down upon, from the throne of actual ideas, or living, inborn, essential truths.'


Table Talk, 2d Edit. p. 95. – Ed.




14


See the Church and State, c. i. – Ed.




15


See post. – Ed.




16


But see the language of the Council of Trent:



Si quis dixerit justitiam acceptam non conservari atque etiam augeri coram. Deo per bona opera; sed opera ipsa fructus solummodo et signa esse justificationis adeptæ, non autem ipsius augendæ causam; anathema sit.


Sess. VI. Can. 24.



… Si quis dixerit hominis justificati bona opera ita esse dona Dei, ut non sint etiam bona ipsius justificati merita; aut ipsum justificatum bonis operibus, quæ ab eo per Dei gratiam, et Jesu Christi meritum, cujus vivum membrum est, fiunt, non vere mereri augmentum gratiæ, vitam æternam, et ipsius vitæ æternæ, si tamen in gratia decesserit, conscecutionem atque etiam gloriæ augmentum, anathema sit.


Ib. Can. 32. – Ed.




17


Rom. ii. 12. – Ed.




18


Matt. xix. 8. – Ed.




19


Folio 1628. – Ed.




20


The following letter was written on, and addressed with, the book to the Rev. Derwent Coleridge. – Ed.




21


P. L. III. 487. – Ed.




22


i. 27. See Aids to Reflection. 3d edit. p. 17. n. – Ed.




23




– – whence the soul

Reason receives, and reason is her being,

Discursive or intuitive.


P. L. v. 426. – Ed.




24


The reader of the Aids to Reflection will recognize in this note the rough original of the passages p. 313, &c. of the 3d edition of that work. – Ed.




25


See Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 283. Melancthon's words to Calvin are:



Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmu etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse, quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, interfecerunt.


14th Oct. 1554. – Ed.




26




'But to circle the earth, as the heavenly bodies do,' &c. 'So we may see that the opinion of Copernicus touching the rotation of the earth, which astronomy itself cannot correct, because it is not repugnant to any of the phænomena, yet natural history may correct.'


Advancement of Learning, B. II. – Ed.




27


That Christ had a twofold being, natural and sacramental; that the Jews destroyed and sacrificed his natural being, and that Christian priests destroy and sacrifice in the Mass his sacramental being. – Ed.




28




Fides catholica, says Bellarmine, docet omnem virtutem esse bonam, omne vitium esse malum. Si autem erraret Papa præcipiendo vitia vel prohibendo virtutes, teneretur Ecclesia credere vitia esse bona et virtutes malas, nisi vellet contra conscientiam peccare.


De Pont. Roman. IV. 5. – Ed.




29


The ordinary Greek text is:









The Vulgate is:



primus homo de terra, terrenus; secundus homo de cœlis, cœlestis.


Ed.




30


The LXXX Sermons, fol. 1640. – Ed.




31




"Mr. Coleridge's admiration of Bull and Waterland as high theologians was very great. Bull he used to read in the Latin Defensio Fidei Nicoenoe, using the Jesuit Zola's edition of 1784, which, I think, he bought at Rome. He told me once, that when he was reading a Protestant English Bishop's work on the Trinity, in a copy edited by an Italian Jesuit in Italy, he felt proud of the Church of England, and in good humour with the Church of Rome."


Table Talk, 2d edit. p. 41. – Ed.




32


Rom. vi.3, 4, 5. – Ed.


