The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iv Part 15

Had not the Governors had bitter proofs that there are other and more cruel vices than swearing and careless living;--and that these were predominant chiefly among such as made their religion their business?

Ib.

And whereas you speak of opening a gap to Sectaries for private conventicles, and the evil consequents to the state, we only desire you to avoid also the cheris.h.i.+ng of ignorance and profaneness, and _suppress all Sectaries_, and spare not, in a way that will not suppress the means of knowledge and G.o.dliness.

The present company, that is, our own dear selves, always excepted.

Ib. p. 250.

Otherwise the poor undone Churches of Christ will no more believe you in such professions than we believed that those men intended the King's just power and greatness, who took away his life.

Or who, like Baxter, joined the armies that were showering cannon b.a.l.l.s and bullets around his inviolable person! Whenever by reading the Prelatical writings and histories, I have had an over dose of anti-Prelatism in my feelings, I then correct it by dipping into the works of the Presbyterians, and their fellows, and so bring myself to more charitable thoughts respecting the Prelatists, and fully subscribe to Milton's a.s.sertion, that "Presbyter was but Old Priest writ large."

Ib. p. 254.

The apocryphal matter of your lessons in Tobit, Judith, Bel and the Dragon, &c., is scarce agreeable to the word of G.o.d.

Does not Jude refer to an apocryphal book?

Ib.

Our experience unresistibly convinceth us that a continued prayer doth more to help most of the people, and carry on their desires, than turning almost every pet.i.tion into a distinct prayer; and making prefaces and conclusions to be near half the prayers.

This now is the very point I most admire in our excellent Liturgy. To any particular pet.i.tion offered to the Omniscient, there may be a sinking of faith, a sense of its superfluity; but to the lifting up of the soul to the Invisible and there fixing it on his attributes, there can be no scruple.

Ib. p. 257.

The not abating of the impositions is the carting off of many hundreds of your brethren out of the ministry, and of many thousand Christians out of your communion; but the abating of the impositions will so offend you as to silence or excommunicate none of you at all. For example, we think it a sin to subscribe, or swear canonical obedience, or use the transient image of the Cross in Baptism, and therefore these must cast us out, &c.

As long as independent single Churches, or voluntarily synodical were forbidden and punishable by penal law, this argument remained irrefragable. The imposition of such trifles under such fearful threats was the very bitterness of spiritual pride and vindictiveness;--after the law pa.s.sed by which things became as they now are, it was a mere question of expediency for the National Church to determine in relation to its own comparative interests. If the Church chose unluckily, the injury has been to itself alone.

It seems strange that such men as Baxter should not see that the use of the ring, the surplice and the like, are indifferent according to his own confession, yea, mere trifles, in comparison with the peace of the Church; but that it is no trifle, that men should refuse obedience to lawful authority in matters indifferent, and prefer the sin of schism to offending their taste and fancy. The Church did not, upon the whole, contend for a trifle, nor for an indifferent matter, but for a principle on which all order in society must depend. Still this is true only, provided the Church enacts no ordinances that are not necessary or at least plainly conducive to order or (generally) to the ends for which it is a Church. Besides, the point which the King had required them to consider was not what ordinances it was right to obey, but what it was expedient to enact or not to enact.

Ib. p. 269.

That the Pastors of the respective parishes may be allowed not only publicly to preach, but personally to catechize or otherwise instruct the several families, admitting none to the Lord's Table that have not personally owned their Baptismal covenant by a credible profession of faith and obedience; and to admonish and exhort the scandalous, in order to their repentance: to hear the witnesses and the accused party, and to appoint fit times and places for these things, and to deny such persons the communion of the Church in the holy Eucharist, that remain impenitent, or that wilfully refuse to come to their Pastors to be instructed, or to answer such probable accusations; and to continue such exclusion of them till they have made a credible profession of repentance, and then to receive them again to the communion of the Church;--provided there be place for due appeals to superior power.

Suppose only such men Pastors as are now most improperly, whether as boast or as sneer, called Evangelical, what an insufferable tyranny would this introduce! Who would not rather live in Algiers? This alone would make this minute history of the ecclesiastic factions invaluable, that it must convince all sober lovers of independence and moral self-government, how dearly we ought to prize our present Church Establishment with all its faults.

Ib. p. 272.

Therefore we humbly crave that your Majesty will here declare, that it is your Majesty's pleasure that none be punished or troubled for not using the Book of Common Prayer, till it be effectually reformed by divines of both persuasions equally deputed thereunto.

The dispensing power of the Crown not only acknowledged, but earnestly invoked! Cruel as the conduct of Laud and that of Sheldon to the Dissentients was, yet G.o.d's justice stands clear towards them; for they demanded that from others, which they themselves would not grant. They were to be allowed at their own fancies to denounce the ring in marriage, and yet impowered to endungeon, through the magistrate, the honest and peaceable Quaker for rejecting the outward ceremony of water in Baptism, as seducing men to take it as a subst.i.tute for the spiritual reality;--though the Quakers, no less than themselves, appealed to Scripture authority--the Baptist's own contrast of Christ's with the water Baptism.

Ib. p. 273.

We are sure that kneeling in any adoration at all, in any wors.h.i.+p, on any Lord's Day in the year, or any week day between Easter and Pentecost, was not only disused, but forbidden by General Councils, &c.--and therefore that kneeling in the act of receiving is a novelty contrary to the decrees and practice of the Church for many hundred years after the Apostles.

Was not this because kneeling was the agreed sign of sorrow and personal contrition, which was not to be introduced into the public wors.h.i.+p on the great day and the solemn seasons of the Church's joy and thanksgiving? If so, Baxter's appeal to this usage is a gross sophism, a mere pun.

Ib. p. 308.

Baxter's Exceptions to the Common Prayer Book.

1. Order requireth that we begin with reverent prayer to G.o.d for his acceptance and a.s.sistance, which is not done.

Enunciation of G.o.d's invitations, and promises in G.o.d's own words, as in the Common Prayer Book, much better.

2. That the Creed and Decalogue containing the faith, in which we profess to a.s.semble for G.o.d's wors.h.i.+p, and the law which we have broken by our sins, should go before the confession and Absolution; or at least before the praises of the Church; which they do not.

Might have deserved consideration, if the people or the larger number consisted of uninstructed 'catechumeni', or mere candidates for Church-members.h.i.+p. But the object being, not the first teaching of the Creed and Decalogue, but the lively reimpressing of the same, it is much better as it is.

3. The Confession omitteth not only original sin, but all actual sin as specified by the particular commandments violated, and almost all the aggravations of those sins.... Whereas confession, being the expression of repentance, should be more particular, as repentance itself should be.

Grounded, on one of the grand errors of the whole Dissenting party, namely, the confusion of public common prayer, praise, and instruction, with domestic and even with private devotion. Our Confession is a perfect model for Christian communities.

4. When we have craved help for G.o.d's prayers, before we come to them, we abruptly put in the pet.i.tion for speedy deliverance--('O G.o.d, make speed to save us: O Lord make haste to help us',) without any intimation of the danger that we desire deliverance from, and without any other pet.i.tion conjoined.

5. It is disorderly in the manner, to sing the Scripture in a plain tune after the manner of reading.

6. ('The Lord be with you. And with thy spirit',) being pet.i.tions for divine a.s.sistance, come in abruptly in the midst or near the end of morning prayer: And ('Let us pray'.) is adjoined when we were before in prayer.

Mouse-like squeak and nibble.

7. ('Lord have mercy upon us: Christ have mercy upon us: Lord have mercy upon us'.) seemeth an affected tautology without any special cause or order here; and the Lord's Prayer is annexed that was before recited, and yet the next words are again but a repet.i.tion of the aforesaid oft repeated general ('O Lord, shew thy mercy upon us'.)

Still worse. The spirit in which this and similar complaints originated has turned the prayers of Dissenting ministers into irreverent preachments, forgetting that tautology in words and thoughts implies no tautology in the music of the heart to which the words are, as it were, set, and that it is the heart that lifts itself up to G.o.d. Our words and thoughts are but parts of the enginery which remains with ourselves; and logic, the rustling dry leaves of the lifeless reflex faculty, does not merit even the name of a pulley or lever of devotion.

8. The prayer for the King ('O Lord, save the King'.) is without any order put between the foresaid pet.i.tion and another general request only for audience. ('And mercifully hear us when we call upon thee').

A trifle, but just.

9. The second Collect is int.i.tuled ('For Peace'.) and hath not a word in it of pet.i.tion for peace, but only 'for defence in a.s.saults of enemies', and that we 'may not fear their power'. And the prefaces ('in knowledge of whom standeth', &c. and 'whose service', &c.) have no more evident respect to a pet.i.tion for peace than to any other. And the prayer itself comes in disorderly, while many prayers or pet.i.tions are omitted, which according both to the method of the Lord's Prayer, and the nature of the things, should go before.

10. The third Collect int.i.tuled ('For Grace'.) is disorderly, &c....

And thus the main parts of prayer, according to the rule of the Lord's Prayer and our common necessities, are omitted.

Not wholly unfounded: but the objection proceeds on an arbitrary and (I think) false a.s.sumption, that the Lord's Prayer was universally prescriptive in form and arrangement.