The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume Iv Part 14

Or if they would not yield to this at all, we might have communion with them as Christians, without acknowledging them for Pastors.

Observe the inconsistency of Baxter. No Pastor, no Church; no Church, no Christ; and yet he will receive them as Christians: much to his honor as a Christian, but not much to his credit as a logician.

Ib. p. 189.

We are agreed that as some discovery of consent on both parts (the pastors and people) is necessary to the being of the members of a political particular Church: so that the most express declaration of that consent is the most plain and satisfactory dealing, and most obliging, and likest to attain the ends.

In our Churches, especially in good livings, there is such an overflowing fullness of consent on the part of the Pastor as supplies that of the people altogether; nay, to nullify their declared dissent.

Ib. p. 194.

By the establishment of what is contained in these twelve propositions or articles following, the Churches in these nations may have a holy communion, peace and concord, without any wrong to the consciences or liberties of Presbyterians, Congregational, Episcopal, or any other Christians.

Painfully instructive are these proposals from so wise and peaceable a divine as Baxter. How mighty must be the force of an old prejudice when so generally acute a logician was blinded by it to such palpable inconsistencies! On what ground of right could a magistrate inflict a penalty, whereby to compel a man to hear what he might believe dangerous to his soul, on which the right of burning the refractory individual might not be defended as well?

Ib. p. 198.

To which ends * * I think that this is all that should be required of any Church or member ordinarily to be professed: In general I do believe all that is contained in the sacred canonical Scriptures, and particularly I believe all explicitly contained in the ancient Creed, &c.

To a man of sense, but unstudied in the context of human nature, and from having confined his reading to the writers of the present and the last generation unused to live in former ages, it must seem strange that Baxter should not have seen that this test is either all or nothing. And the Creed! Is it certain that the so called Apostles' Creed was more than the mere catechism of the Catechumens? Was it the Baptismal Creed of the Eastern or Western Church, especially the former? The only test really necessary, in my opinion, is an established Liturgy.

Ib. p. 201.

As reverend Bishop Ussher hath manifested that the Western Creed, now called the Apostles' (wanting two or three clauses that now are in it) was not only before the Nicene Creed, but of much further antiquity, that no beginning of it below the Apostles' days can be found.

Remove these two or three clauses, and doubtless the substance of the remainder must have been little short of the Apostolic age. But so is one at least of the writings of Clement. The great question is: Was this the Baptismal Symbol, the 'Regula Fidei', which it was forbidden to put in writing;--or was it not the Christian A. B. C. of the 'Catechumeni'

previously to their Baptismal initiation into the higher mysteries, to the 'strong meat' which was not for babes'? [2]

Ib. p. 203.

Not so much for my own sake as others; lest it should offend the Parliament, and open the mouths of our adversaries, that we cannot ourselves agree in fundamentals; and lest it prove an occasion for others to sue for a universal toleration.

That this apprehension so constantly haunted, so powerfully actuated, even the mild and really tolerant Baxter, is a strong proof of my old opinion,--that the dogma of the right and duty of the civil magistrate to restrain and punish religious avowals by him deemed heretical, universal among the Presbyterians and Parliamentary Churchmen, joined with the persecuting spirit of the Presbyterians,--was the main cause of Cromwell's despair and consequent unfaithfulness concerning a Parliamentary Commonwealth.

Ib. p. 222.

I tried, when I was last with you, to revive your reason by proposing to you the infallibility of the common senses of all the world; and I could not prevail though you had nothing to answer that was not against common sense. And it is impossible any thing controverted can be brought nearer you, or made plainer than to be brought to your eyes and taste and feeling; and not yours only, but all men's else. Sense goes before faith. Faith is no faith but upon supposition of sense and understanding: if therefore common sense be fallible, faith must needs be so.

This is one of those two-edged arguments, which not indeed began, but began to be fas.h.i.+onable, just before and after the Restoration. I was half converted to Transubstantiation by Tillotson's common senses against it; seeing clearly that the same grounds 'totidem verbis et syllabis' would serve the Socinian against all the mysteries of Christianity. If the Roman Catholics had pretended that the phenomenal bread and wine were changed into the phenomenal flesh and blood, this objection would have been legitimate and irresistible; but as it is, it is mere sensual babble. The whole of Popery lies in the a.s.sumption of a Church, as a numerical unit, infallible in the highest degree, inasmuch as both which is Scripture, and what Scripture teaches, is infallible by derivation only from an infallible decision of the Church. Fairly undermine or blow up this: and all the remaining peculiar tenets of Romanism fall with it, or stand by their own right as opinions of individual Doctors.

An antagonist of a complex bad system,--a system, however, notwithstanding--and such is Popery,--should take heed above all things not to disperse himself. Let him keep to the sticking place. But the majority of our Protestant polemics seem to have taken for granted that they could not attack Romanism in too many places, or on too many points;--forgetting that in some they will be less strong than in others, and that if in any one or two they are repelled from the a.s.sault, the feeling of this will extend itself over the whole. Besides, what is the use of alleging thirteen reasons for a witness's not appearing in Court, when the first is that the man had died since his 'subpoena'? It is as if a party employed to root up a tree were to set one or two at that work, while others were hacking the branches, and others sawing the trunk at different heights from the ground.

N. B. The point of attack suggested above in disputes with the Romanists is of special expediency in the present day: because a number of pious and reasonable Roman Catholics are not aware of the dependency of their other tenets on this of the infallibility of their Church decisions, as they call them, but are themselves shaken and disposed to explain it away. This once fixed, the Scriptures rise uppermost, and the man is already a Protestant, rather a genuine Catholic, though his opinions should remain nearer to the Roman than the Reformed Church.

Ib.

_But methinks yet I should have hope of reviving your charity. You cannot be a Papist indeed, but you must believe that out of their Church (that is out of the Pope's dominions) there is no salvation; and consequently no justification and charity, or saving grace. And is it possible you can so easily believe your religious father to be in h.e.l.l; your prudent, pious mother to be void of the love of G.o.d, and in a state of d.a.m.nation, &c._

This argument 'ad affectum' is beautifully and forcibly stated; but yet defective by the omission of the point;--not for unbelief or misbelief of any article of faith, but simply for not being a member of this particular part of the Church of Christ. For it is possible that a Christian might agree in all the articles of faith with the Roman doctors against those of the Reformation, and yet if he did not acknowledge the Pope as Christ's vicar, and held salvation possible in any other Church, he is himself excluded from salvation! Without this great distinction Lady Ann Lindsey might have replied to Baxter:--"So might a Pagan orator have said to a convert from Paganism in the first ages of Christianity; so indeed the advocates of the old religion did argue. What! can you bear to believe that Numa, Camillus, Fabricius, the Scipios, the Catos, that Cicero, Seneca, that t.i.tus and the Antonini, are in the flames of h.e.l.l, the accursed objects of the divine hatred?

Now whatever you dare hope of these as heathens, we dare hope of you as heretics."

Ib. p. 224.

_But this is not the worst. You consequently anathematize_ all Papists by your sentence: for heresies by your own sentence cut off men from heaven: but Popery is a bundle of heresies: therefore it cuts off men from heaven. The minor I prove, &c.

This introduction of syllogistic form in a letter to a young Lady is whimsically characteristic.

Ib. p. 225.

You say, the Scripture admits of no private interpretation. But you abuse yourself and the text with a false interpretation of it in these words. An interpretation is called private either as to the subject person, or as to the interpreter. You take the text to speak of the latter, when the context plainly sheweth you that it speaks of the former. The Apostle directing them to understand the prophecies of the Old Testament, gives them this caution;--that none of these Scriptures that are spoken of Christ the public person must be interpreted as spoken of David or other private person only, of whom they were mentioned but as types of Christ, &c.

It is strange that this sound and irrefragable argument has not been enforced by the Church divines in their controversies with the modern Unitarians, as Capp, Belsham and others, who refer all the prophetic texts of the Old Testament to historical personages of their time, exclusively of all double sense.

Ib. p. 226.

As to what you say of Apostles still placed in the Church:--when any shew us an immediate mission by their communion, and by miracles, 'tongues', and a spirit of revelation and infallibility prove themselves Apostles, we shall believe them.

This is another of those two-edged arguments which Baxter and Jeremy Taylor imported from Grotius, and which have since become the universal fas.h.i.+on among Protestants. I fear, however, that it will do us more hurt by exposing a weak part to the learned Infidels than service in our combat with the Romanists. I venture to a.s.sert most unequivocally that the New Testament contains not the least proof of the 'linguipotence' of the Apostles, but the clearest proofs of the contrary: and I doubt whether we have even as decisive a victory over the Romanists in our Middletonian, Farmerian, and Douglasian dispute concerning the miracles of the first two centuries and their a.s.sumed contrast 'in genere' with those of the Apostles and the Apostolic age, as we have in most other of our Protestant controversies.

N.B. These opinions of Middleton and his more cautious followers are no part of our real Church doctrine. This pa.s.sion for law Court evidence began with Grotius.

Ib. p. 246.

We conceived there needs no more to be said for justifying the imposition of the ceremonies by law established than what is contained in the beginning--of this Section.... Inasmuch as lawful authority hath already determined the ceremonies in question to be decent and orderly, and to serve to edification: and consequently to be agreeable to the general rules of the Word.

To a self-convinced and disinterested lover of the Church of England, it gives an indescribable horror to observe the frequency, with which the Prelatic party after the Restoration appeal to the laws as of equal authority with the express words of Scripture;--as if the laws, by them appealed to, were other than the vindictive determinations of their own furious partizans;--as if the same appeals might not have been made by Bonner and Gardiner under Philip and Mary! Why should I speak of the inhuman sophism that, because it is silly in my neighbour to break his egg at the broad end when the Squire and the Vicar have declared their predilection for the narrow end, therefore it is right for the Squire and the Vicar to hang and quarter him for his silliness:--for it comes to that.

Ib. p. 248.

To you it is indifferent before your imposition: and therefore you may without any regret of your own consciences forbear the imposition, or persuade the law makers to forbear it. But to many of those that dissent from you, they are sinful, &c.

But what is all this, good worthy Baxter, but saying and unsaying? If they are not indifferent, why did you previously concede them to be such? In short nothing can be more pitiably weak than the conduct of the Presbyterian party from the first capture of Charles I. Common sense required, either a bold denial that the Church had power in ceremonies more than in doctrines, or that the Parliament was the Church, since it is the Parliament that enacts all these things;--or if they admitted the authority lawful and the ceremonies only, in their mind, inexpedient, good G.o.d! can self-will more plainly put on the cracked mask of tender conscience than by refusal of obedience? What intolerable presumption, to disqualify as unG.o.dly and reduce to null the majority of the country, who preferred the Liturgy, in order to force the long winded vanities of bustling G.o.d-orators on those who would fain hear prayers, not spouting!

Ib. p. 249.

The great controversies between the hypocrite and the true Christian, whether we should be serious in the practice of the religion which we commonly profess, hath troubled England more than any other;--none being more hated and divided as Puritans than those that will make religion their business, &c.