The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iv Part 43

This is something; and true as far as it goes; that is, however, but a very little way. The great power of both spiritual and physical mountebanks rests on that irremovable property of human nature, in force of which indefinite instincts and sufferings find no echo, no resting-place, in the definite and comprehensible. Ignorance unnecessarily enlarges the sphere of these: but a sphere there is,--facts of mind and cravings of the soul there are,--in which the wisest man seeks help from the indefinite, because it is nearer and more like the infinite, of which he is made the image:--for even we are infinite, even in our finiteness infinite, as the Father in his infinity. In many caterpillars there is a large empty s.p.a.ce in the head, the destined room for the pus.h.i.+ng forth of the 'antennae' of its next state of being.

Ib. p. 12.

But the anti-moralists aver * * that they are quoted unfairly;--that although they disavow, it is true, the necessity, and deny the value, of practical morality and personal holiness, and declare them to be totally irrelevant to our future salvation, yet that * * I might have found occasional recommendations of moral duty which I have neglected to notice.

The same 'crambe bis decies cocta' of one self-same charge grounded on one gross and stupid misconception and mis-statement: and to which there needs no other answer than this simple fact. Let the Barrister name any one gross offence against the moral law, for which he would shun a man's acquaintance, and for that same vice the Methodist would inevitably be excluded publicly from their society; and I am inclined to think that a fair list of the Barrister's friends and acquaintances would prove that the Calvinistic Methodists are the austerer and more watchful censors of the two. If this be the truth, as it notoriously is, what but the cataract of stupidity uncouched, or the thickest film of bigot-slime, can prevent a man from seeing that this tenet of justification by faith alone is exclusively a matter between the Calvinist's own heart and his Maker, who alone knows the true source of his words and actions; but that to his neighbours and fellow-creedsmen, his spotless life and good works are demanded, not, indeed, as the prime efficient causes of his salvation, but as the necessary and only possible signs of that faith, which is the means of that salvation of which Christ's free grace is the cause, and the sanctifying Spirit the perfecter. But I fall into the same fault I am arraigning, by so often exposing and confuting the same blunder, which has no claim even at its first enunciation to the compliment of a philosophical answer. But why, in the name of common sense, all this endless whoop and hubbub against the Calvinistic Methodists? I had understood that the Arminian Methodists, or Wesleyans, are the more numerous body by far. Has there been any union lately? Have the followers of Wesley abjured the doctrines of their founder on this head?

Ib. p. 16.

We are told by our new spiritual teachers, that reason is not to be applied to the inquiry into the truth or falsehood of their doctrines; they are spiritually discerned, and carnal reason has no concern with them.

Even under this aversion to reason, as applied to religious grounds, a very important truth lurks: and the mistake (a very dangerous one I admit,) lies in the confounding two very different faculties of the mind under one and the same name;--the pure reason or 'vis scientifica'; and the discourse, or prudential power, the proper objects of which are the 'phaenomena' of sensuous experience. The greatest loss which modern philosophy has through wilful scorn sustained, is the grand distinction of the ancient philosophers between the [Greek: noumena], and [Greek: phainomena]. This gives the true sense of Pliny--'venerare Deos' (that is, their statues, and the like,) 'et numina Deorum', that is, those spiritual influences which are represented by the images and persons of Apollo, Minerva, and the rest.

Ib. p. 17.

Religion has for its object the moral care and the moral cultivation of man. Its beauty is not to be sought in the regions of mystery, or in the flights of abstraction.

What ignorance! Is there a single moral precept of the Gospels not to be found in the Old Testament? Not one. A new edition of White's 'Diatessaron', with a running comment the Hebrew, Greek, and Roman writers before Christ, and those after him who, it is morally certain, drew no aids from the New Testament, is a grand 'desideratum'; and if anything could open the eyes of Socinians, this would do it.

Ib. p. 24.

The masculine strength and moral firmness which once distinguished the great ma.s.s of the British people is daily fading away. Methodism with all its cant, &c.

Well! but in G.o.d's name can Methodism be at once the effect and the cause of this loss of masculine strength and moral firmness?--Did Whitfield and Wesley blow them out at the first puff--these grand virtues of masculine strength and moral firmness? Admire, I pray you, the happy ant.i.thesis. Yet "feminine" would be an improvement, as then the sense too would be ant.i.thetic. However, the sound is sufficient, and modern rhetoric possesses the virtue of economy.

Ib. p. 27.

So with the Tinker; I would give him the care of kettles, but I would not give him 'the cure of souls'. So long as he attended to the management and mending of his pots and pans, I would wish success to his ministry: but when he came to declare 'himself' a "chosen vessel,"

and demand permission to take the souls of the people into his holy keeping, I should think that, instead of a 'licence', it would be more humane and more prudent to give him a pa.s.sport to St. Luke's. Depend upon it, such men were never sent by Providence to rule or to regulate mankind.

Whoo! Bounteous Providence that always looks at the body clothes and the parents' equipage before it picks out the proper soul for the baby! Ho!

the d.u.c.h.ess of Manchester is in labour:--quick, Raphael, or Uriel, bring a soul out of the Numa bin, a young Lycurgus. Or the Archbishop's lady:--ho! a soul from the Chrysostom or Athanasian locker.--But poor Moll Crispin is in the throes with twins:--well! there are plenty of cobblers' and tinkers' souls in the hold--John Bunyan!! Why, thou miserable Barrister, it would take an angel an eternity to tinker thee into a skull of half his capacity!

Ib. p. 30, 31.

"A 'truly' awakened conscience," (these anti-moral editors of the Pilgrim's Progress a.s.sure us,) "can never find relief from the law: (that is, the 'moral law'.) The more he looks for peace 'this way, his guilt', like a heavy burden, becomes more intolerable; when he becomes 'dead' to the 'law',--as to 'any dependence upon it for salvation',--by the body of Christ, and married to him, who was raised from the dead, then, and not till then, his heart is set at liberty, to run the way of G.o.d's commandments."

Here we are taught that the 'conscience' can never find relief from obedience to the law of the Gospel.

False. We are told by Bunyan and his editors that the conscience can never find relief for its disobedience to the Law in the Law itself;--and this is as true of the moral as of the Mosaic Law. I am not defending Calvinism or Bunyan's theology; but if victory, not truth, were my object, I could desire no easier task than to defend it against our doughty Barrister. Well, but I repent--that is, regret it!--Yes! and so you doubtless regret the loss of an eye or arm:--will that make it grow again?--Think you this nonsense as applied to morality? Be it so!

But yet nonsense most tremendously suited to human nature it is, as the Barrister may find in the arguments of the Pagan philosophers against Christianity, who attributed a large portion of its success to its holding out an expiation, which no other religion did. Read but that most affecting and instructive anecdote selected from the Hindostan Missionary Account by the Quarterly Review. [4] Again let me say I am not giving my own opinion on this very difficult point; but of one thing I am convinced, that the 'I am sorry for it, that's enough'--men mean nothing but regret when they talk of repentance, and have consciences either so pure or so callous, as not to know what a direful and strange thing remorse is, and how absolutely a fact 'sui generis'! I have often remarked, and it cannot be too often remarked (vain as this may sound), that this essential heterogeneity of regret and remorse is of itself a sufficient and the best proof of free will and reason, the co-existence of which in man we call conscience, and on this rests the whole superstructure of human religion--G.o.d, immortality, guilt, judgment, redemption. Whether another and different superstructure may be raised on the same foundation, or whether the same edifice is susceptible of important alteration, is another question. But such is the edifice at present, and this its foundation: and the Barrister might as rationally expect to blow up Windsor Castle by discharging a popgun in one of its cellars, as hope to demolish Calvinism by such arguments as his.

Ib. p. 35, 36.

"And behold a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do 'to inherit eternal life'?"

"He said unto him, 'What is written in the law? How readest thou?'"

"And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy G.o.d with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with 'all thy strength', and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself."

"And he said unto him, Thou 'hast answered right. This do, and thou shall live.'"

Luke x. 25-28.

So would Bunyan, and so would Calvin have preached;--would both of them in the name of Christ have made this a.s.surance to the Barrister--'This do, and thou shalt live.' But what if he has not done it, but the very contrary? And what if the Querist should be a staunch disciple of Dr.

Paley: and hold himself "morally obliged" not to hate or injure his fellow-man, not because he is compelled by conscience to see the exceeding sinfulness of sin, and to abhor sin as sin, even as he eschews pain as pain,--no, not even because G.o.d has forbidden it;--but ultimately because the great Legislator is able and has threatened to put him to unspeakable torture if he disobeys, and to give him all kind of pleasure if he does not? [5] Why, verily, in this case, I do foresee that both the Tinker and the Divine would wax warm, and rebuke the said Querist for vile hypocrisy, and a most nefarious abuse of G.o.d's good gift, intelligible language. What! do you call this 'loving the Lord your G.o.d with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and all your mind,--and your neighbour as yourself'? Whereas in truth you love nothing, not even your own soul; but only set a superlative value on whatever will gratify your selfish l.u.s.t of enjoyment, and insure you from h.e.l.l-fire at a thousand times the true value of the dirty property. If you have the impudence to persevere in mis-naming this "love," supply any one instance in which you use the word in this sense? If your son did not spit in your face, because he believed that you would disinherit him if he did, and this were his main moral obligation, would you allow that your son loved you--and with all his heart, and mind, and strength, and soul?--Shame! Shame!

Now the power of loving G.o.d, of willing good as good, (not of desiring the agreeable, and of preferring a larger though distant delight to an infinitely smaller immediate qualification, which is mere selfish prudence,) Bunyan considers supernatural, and seeks its source in the free grace of the Creator through Christ the Redeemer:--this the Kantean also avers to be supersensual indeed, but not supernatural, but in the original and essence of human nature, and forming its grand and awful characteristic. Hence he calls it 'die Menschheit'--the principle of humanity;--but yet no less than Calvin or the Tinker declares it a principle most mysterious, the undoubted object of religious awe, a perpetual witness of that G.o.d, whose image ([Greek: eikon]) it is; a principle utterly incomprehensible by the discursive intellect;--and moreover teaches us, that the surest plan for stifling and paralyzing this divine birth in the soul (a phrase of Plato's as well as of the Tinker's) is by attempting to evoke it by, or to subst.i.tute for it, the hopes and fears, the motives and calculations, of prudence; which is an excellent and in truth indispensable servant, but considered as master and primate of the moral diocese precludes the possibility of virtue (in Bunyan's phrase, holiness of spirit) by introducing legality; which is no cant phrase of Methodism, but of authenticated standing in the ethics of the profoundest philosophers--even those who rejected Christianity, as a miraculous event, and revelation itself as far as anything supernatural is implied in it. I must not mention Plato, I suppose,--he was a mystic; nor Zeno,--he and his were visionaries:--but Aristotle, the cold and dry Aristotle, has in a very remarkable pa.s.sage in his lesser tract of Ethics a.s.serted the same thing; and called it "a divine principle, lying deeper than those things which can be explained or enunciated discursively."

Ib. p. 45, 46.

Sure I am that no father of a family that can at all estimate the importance of keeping from the infant mind whatever might raise impure ideas or excite improper inquiries will ever commend the Pilgrim's Progress to their perusal.

And in the same spirit and for the same cogent reasons that the holy monk Lewis prohibited the Bible in all decent families;--or if they must have something of that kind, would propose in preference Tirante the White! O how I abhor this abominable heart-haunting impurity in the envelope of modesty! Merciful Heaven! is it not a direct consequence from this system, that we all purchase our existence at the price of our mother's purity of mind? See what Milton has written on this subject in the pa.s.sage quoted in the Friend in the essays on the communication of truth. [6]

Ib. p. 47.

Let us ask whether the female mind is likely to be trained to purity by studying this manual of piety, and by expressing its devotional desires after the following example. "Mercy being a _young_ and _breeding_ woman _longed_ for something," &c.

Out upon the fellow! I could find it in my heart to suspect him of any vice that the worst of men could commit!

Ib. pp. 55, 56.

'As by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous'. The interpretation of this text is simply this:--As by following the fatal example of one man's disobedience many were made sinners; so by that pattern of perfect obedience which Christ has set before us shall many be made righteous.

What may not be explained thus? And into what may not any thing be thus explained? It comes out little better than nonsense in any other than the literal sense. For let any man of sincere mind and without any system to support look round on all his Christian neighbours, and will he say or will they say that the origin of their well-doing was an attempt to imitate what they all believe to be inimitable, Christ's perfection in virtue, his absolute sinlessness? No--but yet perhaps some particular virtues; for instance, his patriotism in weeping over Jerusalem, his active benevolence in curing the sick and preaching to the poor, his divine forgiveness in praying for his enemies?--I grant all this. But then how is this peculiar to Christ? Is it not the effect of all ill.u.s.trious examples, of those probably most which we last read of, or which made the deepest impression on our feelings? Were there no good men before Christ, as there were no bad men before Adam? Is it not a notorious fact that those who most frequently refer to Christ's conduct for their own actions, are those who believe him the incarnate Deity--consequently, the best possible guide, but in no strict sense an example;--while those who regard him as a mere man, the chief of the Jewish Prophets, both in the pulpit and from the press ground their moral persuasions chiefly on arguments drawn from the propriety and seemliness--or the contrary--of the action itself, or from the will of G.o.d known by the light of reason? To make St. Paul prophesy that all Christians will owe their holiness to their exclusive and conscious imitation of Christ's actions, is to make St. Paul a false prophet;--and what in such case becomes of the boasted influence of miracles? Even as false would it be to ascribe the vices of the Chinese, or even our own, to the influence of Adam's bad example. As well might we say of a poor scrofulous innocent: "See the effect of the bad example of his father on him!" I blame no man for disbelieving, or for opposing with might and main, the dogma of Original Sin; but I confess that I neither respect the understanding nor have confidence in the sincerity of him, who declares that he has carefully read the writings of St. Paul, and finds in them no consequence attributed to the fall of Adam but that of his bad example, and none to the Cross of Christ but the good example of dying a martyr to a good cause. I would undertake from the writings of the later English Socinians to collect paraphrases on the New Testament texts that could only be paralleled by the spiritual paraphrase on Solomon's Song to be found in the recent volume of "A Dictionary of the Holy Bible, by John Brown, Minister of the Gospel at Haddington:" third edition, in the Article, Song.

Ib. p. 63, 64.

Call forth the robber from his cavern, and the midnight murderer from his den; summon the seducer from his couch, and beckon the adulterer from his embrace; cite the swindler to appear; a.s.semble from every quarter all the various miscreants whose vices deprave, and whose villainies distress, mankind; and when they are thus thronged round in a circle, a.s.sure them--not that there is a G.o.d that judgeth the earth--not that punishment in the great day of retribution will await their crimes, &c. &c.--Let every sinner in the throng be told that they will stand 'justified' before G.o.d; that the 'righteousness' of 'Christ' will be imputed to 'them', &c.

Well, do so.--Nay, nay! it has been done; the effect has been tried; and slander itself cannot deny that the effect has been the conversion of thousands of those very sinners whom the Barrister's fancy thus convokes. O shallow man! not to see that here lies the main strength of the cause he is attacking; that, to repeat my former ill.u.s.tration, he draws the attention to patients in that worst state of disease which perhaps alone requires and justifies the use of the white pill, as a mode of exposing the frantic quack who vends it promiscuously! He fixes on the empiric's cures to prove his murders!--not to forget what ought to conclude every paragraph in answer to the Barrister's Hints; "and were the case as alleged, what does this prove against the present Methodists as Methodists?" Is not the tenet of imputed righteousness the faith of all the Scotch Clergy, who are not false to their declarations at their public a.s.sumption of the ministry? Till within the last sixty or seventy years, was not the tenet preached Sunday after Sunday in every nook of Scotland; and has the Barrister heard that the morals of the Scotch peasants and artizans have been improved within the last thirty or forty years, since the exceptions have become more and more common?--Was it by want of strict morals that the Puritans were distinguished to their disadvantage from the rest of Englishmen during the reigns of Elizabeth, James I. Charles I. and II.? And that very period, which the Barrister affirms to have been distinguished by the moral vigor of the great ma.s.s of Britons,--was it not likewise the period when this very doctrine was preached by the Clergy fifty times for once that it is heard from the same pulpits in the present and preceding generation? Never, never can the Methodists be successfully a.s.sailed, if not honestly, and never honestly or with any chance of success, except as Methodists;--for their practices, their alarming theocracy, their stupid, mad, and mad-driving superst.i.tions. These are their property 'in peculio'; their doctrines are those of the Church of England, with no other difference than that in the Church Liturgy, and Articles, and Homilies, Calvinism and Lutheranism are joined like the two hands of the Union Fire Office:-the Methodists have unclasped them, and one is Whitfield and the other Wesley.

Ib. p. 75.

"For the same reason that a book written in bad language should never be put into the hands of a child that speaks correctly, a book exhibiting instances of vice should never be given to a child that thinks and acts properly." (Practical Education. By Maria and R.L.