The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iii Part 36

Ib. s. iv.

Such as makes no invasion upon their great reputation, which I desire should be preserved as sacred as it ought.

The vision of the mitre dawned on Taylor; and his recollection of Laud came to the a.s.sistance of the Fathers; of many of whom in his heart Taylor, I think, entertained a very mean opinion. How could such a man do otherwise? I could forgive them their nonsense and even their economical falsehoods; but their insatiable appet.i.te for making heresies, and thus occasioning the neglect or destruction of so many valuable works, Origen's for instance, this I cannot forgive or forget.

Ib. s. i. p. 88.

Of the incompetency of the Church, in its diffusive capacity, to be judge of controversies; and the impertinency of that pretence of the Spirit.

Now here begin my serious differences with Jeremy Taylor, which may be characterized in one sentence; ideas 'versus' conceptions and images. I contend that the Church in the Christian sense is an idea;--not therefore a chimera, or a fancy, but a real being and a most powerful reality. Suppose the present state of science in this country, with this only difference that the Royal and other scientific societies were not founded: might I not speak of a scientific public, and its influence on the community at large? Or should I be talking of a chimera, a shadow, or a non-ent.i.ty? Or when we speak with honest pride of the public spirit of this country as the power which supported the nation through the gigantic conflict with France, do we speak of nothing, because we cannot say,--"It is in this place or in that catalogue of names?" At the same time I most readily admit that no rule can be grounded formally on the supposed a.s.sent of this ideal Church, the members of which are recorded only in the book of life at any one moment. In Taylor's use and application of the term, Church, the visible Christendom, and in reply to the Romish divines, his arguments are irrefragable.

Ib. s. ii. p. 93,

So that if they read, study, pray, search records, and use all the means of art and industry in the pursuit of truth, it is not with a resolution to follow that which shall seem truth to them, but to confirm what before they did believe.

Alas, if Protestant and Papist were named by individuals answering or not answering to this description, what a vast accession would not the Pope's muster-roll receive! In the instance of the Council of Trent, the iniquity of the Emperor and the Kings of France and Spain consisted in their knowledge that the a.s.sembly at Trent had no pretence to be a general Council, that is, a body representative of the Catholic or even of the Latin Church. It may be, and in fact it is, very questionable whether any Council, however large and fairly chosen, is not an absurdity except under the universal faith that the Holy Ghost miraculously dictates all the decrees: and this is irrational, where the same superseding Spirit does not afford evidence of its presence by producing unanimity. I know nothing, if I may so say, more ludicrous than the supposition of the Holy Ghost contenting himself with a majority, in questions respecting faith, or decrees binding men to inward belief, which again binds a Christian to outward profession.

Matters of discipline and ceremony, having peace and temporal order for their objects, are proper enough for a Council; but these do not need any miraculous interference. Still if any Council is admitted in matters of doctrine, those who have appealed to it must abide by the determination of the majority, however they might prefer the opinion of the minority, just as in acts of Parliament.

Ib. s. xi. p. 98.

Of some causes of error in the exercise of reason, which are inculpate in themselves.

It is a lamentable misuse of the term, reason,--thus to call by that name the mere faculty of guessing and babbling. The making reason a faculty, instead of a light, and using the term as a mere synonyme of the understanding, and the consequent ignorance of the true nature of ideas, and that none but ideas are objects of faith--are the grounds of all Jeremy Taylor's important errors.

Ib.

But men may understand what they please, especially when they are to expound oracles.

If this sentence had occurred in Hume or Voltaire!

Ib. s. iii. p. 103.

And then if ever truth be afflicted, she shall also be destroyed.

Here and in many other pa.s.sages of his other works Jeremy Taylor very unfairly states this argument of the anti-prelatic party. It was not that the Church of England was afflicted (the Puritans themselves had been much more afflicted by the prelates); but that having appealed to the decision of the sword, the cause was determined against it. But in fact it is false that the Puritans ever did argue as Taylor represents them. Laud and his confederates had begun by incarcerating, scourging, and inhumanly mutilating their fellow Christians for not acceding to their fancies, and proceeded to goad and drive the King to levy or at least maintain war against his Parliament: and the Parliamentary party very naturally cited their defeat and the overthrow of the prelacy as a judgment on their blood-thirstiness, not as a proof of their error in questions of theology.

Ib. s. iv. p. 105.

All that I shall say, &c. 'ad finem'.

An admirable paragraph. Taylor is never more himself, never appears greater, or wiser, than when he enters on this topic, namely, the many and various causes beside truth which occasion men to hold an opinion for truth.

Ib. s. vii. p. 111.

Of such men as these it was said by St. Austin: 'Caeteram turbam non intelligendi vivacitas, sed credendi simplicitas tutissimam facit.'

Such charity is indeed notable policy: salvation made easy for the benefit of obedient dupes.

Ib. s. ii. p. 119.

I deny not but certain and known idolatry, or any other sort of practical impiety with its principiant doctrine, may be punished corporally, because it is no other but matter of fact.

In the Jewish theocracy, I admit; because the fact of idolatry was a crime, namely, 'crimen laesae majestatis', an overt act subversive of the fundamental law of the state, and breaking asunder the 'vinculum et copulam unitatis et cohaesionis'. But in making the position general, Taylor commits the 'sophisma omissi essentialis'; he omits the essential of the predicate, namely, criminal;--not its being a fact rendering it punishable, but its being a criminal fact.

Ib. s. iii.

Oh that this great and good man, who saw and has expressed so large a portion of the truth,--(if by the Creed I might understand the true Apostles', that is, the Baptismal Creed, free from the additions of the first five centuries, I might indeed say the whole truth),--had but brought it back to the great original end and purpose of historical Christianity, and of the Church visible, as its exponent, not as a 'hortus siccus' of past revelations,--but an ever enlarging inclosed 'area' of the opportunity of individual conversion to, and reception of, the spirit of truth! Then, instead of using this one truth to inspire a despair of all truth, a reckless scepticism within, and a boundless compliance without, he would have directed the believer to seek for light where there was a certainty of finding it, as far as it was profitable for him, that is, as far as it actually was light for him.

The visible Church would be a walled Academy, a pleasure garden, in which the intrants having presented their 'symbolum portae', or admission-contract, walk at large, each seeking private audience of the invisible teacher,--alone now, now in groups,--meditating or conversing,--gladly listening to some elder disciple, through whom (as ascertained by his intelligibility to me) I feel that the common Master is speaking to me,--or lovingly communing with a cla.s.s-fellow, who, I have discovered, has received the same lesson from the inward teaching with myself,--while the only public concerns in which all, as a common weal, exercised control and vigilance over each, are order, peace, mutual courtesy and reverence, kindness, charity, love, and the fealty and devotion of all and each to the common Master and Benefactor!

Ib. s. viii. p. 124.

It is characteristic of the man and the age, Taylor's high-strained reverential epithets to the names of the Fathers, and as rare and naked mention of Luther, Melancthon, Calvin--the least of whom was not inferior to St. Augustin, and worth a brigade of the Cyprians, Firmilians, and the like. And observe, always 'Saint' Cyprian!

Ib. s. xii. p. 128-9.

Gibbon's enumeration of the causes, not miraculous, of the spread of Christianity during the first three centuries is far from complete.

This, however, is not the greatest defect of this celebrated chapter.

The proportions of importance are not truly a.s.signed; nay, the most effective causes are only not omitted--mentioned, indeed, but 'quasi in transitu', not developed or distinctly brought out: for example, the zealous despotism of the Caesars, with the consequent exclusion of men of all ranks from the great interests of the public weal, otherwise than as servile instruments; in short, the direct contrary of that state and character of men's minds, feelings, hopes and fancies, which elections, Parliaments, Parliamentary reports, and newspapers produce in England; and this extinction of patriotism aided by the melting down of states and nations in the one vast yet heterogeneous Empire;--the number and variety of the parts acting only to make each insignificant in its own eyes, and yet sufficient to preclude all living interest in the peculiar inst.i.tutions and religious forms of Rome; which beginning in a petty district, had, no less than the Greek republics, its mythology and [Greek: thraeskeia] intimately connected with localities and local events. The mere habit of staring or laughing at nine religions must necessarily end in laughing at the tenth, that is, the religion of the man's own birth-place. The first of these causes, that is, the detachment of all love and hope from the things of the visible world, and from temporal objects not merely selfish, must have produced in thousands a tendency to, and a craving after, an internal religion, while the latter occasioned an absolute necessity of a mundane as opposed to a national or local religion. I am far from denying or doubting the influence of the excellence of the Christian faith in the propagation of the Christian Church or the power of its evidences; but still I am persuaded that the necessity of some religion, and the untenable nature and obsolete superannuated character of all the others, occasioned the conversion of the largest though not the worthiest part of the new-made Christians. Here, though exploded in physics, we have recourse to the 'horror vacui' as an efficient cause. This view of the subject can offend or startle those only who, in their pa.s.sion for wonderment, virtually exclude the agency of Providence from any share in the realizing of its own benignant scheme; as if the disposition of events by which the whole world of human history, from north and south, east and west, directed their march to one central point, the establishment of Christendom, were not the most stupendous of miracles!

It is a yet sadder consideration, that the same men who can find G.o.d's presence and agency only in sensuous miracles, wholly misconceive the characteristic purpose and proper objects of historic Christianity and of the outward and visible Church, of which historic Christianity is the ground and the indispensable condition; but this is a subject delicate and dangerous, at all events requiring a less scanty s.p.a.ce than the margins of these honestly printed pages.

Ib. s. iv. p. 133.

The death of Ananias and Sapphira, and the blindness of Elymas the sorcerer, amount not to this, for they were miraculous inflictions.

One great difficulty respecting, not the historic truth (of which there can be no rational doubt), but the miraculous nature, of the sudden deaths of Ananias and Sapphira is derived from the measure which gave occasion to it, namely, the sale of their property by the new converts of Palestine, in order to establish that community of goods, which, according to a Rabbinical tradition, existed before the Deluge, and was to be restored by the children of Seth (one of the names which the Jewish Christians a.s.sumed) before the coming of the Son of Man. Now this was a very gross and carnal, not to say fanatical, misunderstanding of our Lord's words, and had the effect of reducing the Churches of the Circ.u.mcision to beggary, and of making them an unnecessary burthen on the new Churches in Greece and elsewhere. See Rhenferd as to this.

The fact of Elymas, however, concludes the miraculous nature of the deaths of Ananias and Sapphira, which, taken of themselves, would indeed have always been supposed, but could scarcely have been proved, the result of a miraculous or superhuman power. There are for me, I confess, great difficulties in this incident, especially when it is compared with our Lord's reply to the Apostles' proposal of calling down fire from heaven. 'The Son of Man is not come to destroy', &c. At all events it is a subject that demands and deserves deep consideration.

Ib. s. i. p. 141.

The religion of Jesus Christ is 'the form of sound doctrine and wholesome words', which is set down in Scripture indefinitely, actually conveyed to us by plain places, and separated as for the question of necessary or not necessary by the Symbol of the Apostles.

I cannot refrain from again expressing my surprise at the frequency and the undoubting positiveness of this a.s.sertion in so great a scholar, so profound a Patrician, as Jeremy Taylor was. He appears 'bona fide' to have believed the absurd fable of this Creed having been a pic-nic to which each of the twelve Apostles contributed his 'symbolum'. Had Jeremy Taylor taken it for granted so completely and at so early an age, that he read without attending to the various pa.s.sages in the Fathers and ecclesiastical historians, which shew the gradual formation of this Creed? It is certainly possible, and I see no other solution of the problem.