Read Ebook: The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Volume 4 by Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge Henry Nelson Editor

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1634 lines and 114889 words, and 33 pages

Too true.

Ib. p. 54.

That out of the best comes the worst.

Out of the Patriarchs and holy Fathers came the Jews that crucified Christ; out of the Apostles came Judas the traitor; out of the city Alexandria , came Arius and Origenes.

Poor Origen! Surely Luther was put to it for an instance, and had never read the works of that very best of the old Fathers, and eminently upright and godly learned man.

Ib.

The sparrows are the least birds, and yet they are very hurtful, and have the best nourishment.

'Ergo digni sunt omni persecutione'. Poor little Philip Sparrows! Luther did not know that they more than earn their good wages by destroying grubs and other small vermin.

Ib. p. 61.

To know God as God we must assume his personality: otherwise what were it but an ether, a gravitation? --but to assume his personality, we must begin with his humanity, and this is impossible but in history; for man is an historical--not an eternal being. 'Ergo'. Christianity is of necessity historical and not philosophical only.

Ib. p. 62.

'What is that to thee'? said Christ to Peter. 'Follow thou me'--me, follow me, and not thy questions, or cogitations.

Lord! keep us looking to, and humbly following, thee!

The philosophers and learned heathen have described God, that he is as a circle, the point whereof in the midst is every where; but the circumference, which on the outside goeth round about, is no where: herewith they would shew that God is all, and yet is nothing.

What a huge difference the absence of a blank space, which is nothing, or next to nothing, may make! The words here should have been printed, "God is all, and yet is no thing;" For what does 'thing' mean? Itself, that is, the 'ing', or inclosure, that which is contained within an outline, or circumscribed. So likewise to 'think' is to inclose, to determine, confine and define. To think an infinite is a contradiction in terms equal to a boundless bound. So in German 'Ding, denken'; in Latin 'res, reor'.

Helvidius alleged the mother of Christ was not a virgin; so that according to his wicked allegation, Christ was born in original sin.

O, what a tangle of impure whimsies has this notion of an immaculate conception, an Ebionite tradition, as I think, brought into the Christian Church! I have sometimes suspected that the Apostle John had a particular view to this point, in the first half of the first chapter of his Gospel. Not that I suppose our present Matthew then in existence, or that, if John had seen the Gospel according to Luke, the 'Christopaedia' had been already prefixed to it. But the rumor might have been whispered about, and as the purport was to give a psilanthropic explanation and solution of the phrases, Son of God and Son of Man,--so Saint John met it by the true solution, namely, the eternal Filiation of the Word.

Ib. p. 120. Of Christ's riding into Jerusalem.

But I hold that Christ himself did not mention that prophecy of Zechariah, but rather, that the Apostles and Evangelists did use it for a witness.

Worth remembering for the purpose of applying it to the text in which our Lord is represented in the first Gospel, and by that alone, as citing Daniel by name. It was this text that so sorely, but I think very unnecessarily, perplexed and gravelled Bentley, who was too profound a scholar and too acute a critic to admit the genuineness of the whole of that book.

Ib.

The Prophets did set, speak, and preach of the second coming of Christ in manner as we now do.

The whole passage in which our Lord describes his coming is so evidently, and so intentionally expressed in the diction and images of the Prophets, that nothing but the carnal literality common to the Jews at that time and most strongly marked in the disciples, who were among the least educated of their countrymen, could have prevented the symbolic import and character of the words from being seen. The whole Gospel and the Epistles of John, are a virtual confutation of this reigning error--and no less is the Apocalypse whether written by, or under the authority of, the Evangelist.

The unhappy effect which St. Paul's incautious language respecting Christ's return produced on the Thessalonians, led him to reflect on the subject, and he instantly in the second epistle to them qualified the doctrine, and never afterwards resumed it; but on the contrary, in the first Epistle to the Corinthians, c. 15, substitutes the doctrine of immortality in a celestial state and a spiritual body. On the nature of our Lord's future epiphany or phenomenal person, I am not ashamed to acknowledge, that my views approach very nearly to those of Emanuel Swedenborg.

Ib. p. 121.

Doctor Jacob Schenck never preacheth out of his book, but I do, , though not of necessity, but I do it for example's sake to others.

As many notes, 'memoranda', cues of connection and transition as the preacher may find expedient or serviceable to him; well and good. But to read in a manuscript book, as our Clergy now do, is not to preach at all. Preach out of a book, if you must; but do not read in it, or even from it. A read sermon of twenty minutes will seem longer to the hearers than a free discourse of an hour.

Ib.

My simple opinion is and I do believe that Christ for us descended into hell, to the end he might break and destroy the same, as in Psalm xvi, and Acts ii, is shewed and proved.

Could Luther have been ignorant, that this clause was not inserted into the Apostle's Creed till the sixth century after Christ? I believe the original intention of the clause was no more than 'vere mortuus est'--in contradiction to the hypothesis of a trance or state of suspended animation.

When Christ forbiddeth to spread abroad or to make known his works of wonder; there he speaketh as being sent from the Father, and doth well and right therein in forbidding them, to the end that thereby he might leave us an example, not to seek our own praise and honor in that wherein we do good; but we ought to seek only and alone the honor of God.

Not satisfactory. Doubtless, the command was in connection with the silence enjoined respecting his Messiahship.

Doctor Hennage said to Luther, Sir, where you say that the Holy Spirit is the certainty in the word towards God, that is, that a man is certain of his own mind and opinion; then it must needs follow that all sects have the Holy Ghost, for they will needs be most certain of their doctrine and religion.

Luther might have answered, "positive, you mean, not certain."

But who hath power to forgive or to detain sins? Answer; the Apostles and all Church servants, and every Christian. Christ giveth them not power over money, wealth, kingdoms, &c; but over sins and the consciences of human creatures, over the power of the Devil, and the throat of Hell.

Few passages in the Sacred Writings have occasioned so much mischief, abject slavishness, bloated pride, tyrannous usurpation, bloody persecution, with kings even against their will the drudges, false soul-destroying quiet of conscience, as this text, 'John' xx. 23. misinterpreted. It is really a tremendous proof of what the misunderstanding of a few words can do. That even Luther partook of the delusion, this paragraph gives proof. But that a delusion it is; that the commission given to the Seventy whom Christ sent out to proclaim and offer the kingdom of God, and afterwards to the Apostles, refers either to the power of making rules and ordinances in the Church, or otherwise to the gifts of miraculous healing, which our Lord at that time conferred on them; and that 'per figuram causce pro effecto', 'sins' here mean diseases, seems to me more than probable. At all events, the text surely does not mean that the salvation of a repentant and believing Christian depends upon the will of a priest in absolution.

Ib. p. 161.

And again, they are able to absolve and make a human creature free and loose from all his sins, if in case he repenteth and believeth in Christ; and on the contrary, they are able to detain all his sina, if he doth not repent and believeth not in Christ.

Ib. p. 163.

Adam was created of God in such sort righteous, as that he became of a righteous an unrighteous person; as Paul himself argueth, and withall instructeth himself, where he saith, The law is not given for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient.

This follows from the very definition or idea of righteousness;-it is itself the law;--

Ib.

The Scripture saith, God maketh the ungodly righteous; there he calleth us all, one with another, despairing and wicked wretches; for what will an ungodly creature not dare to accomplish, if he may but have occasion, place, and opportunity?

That is with a lust within correspondent to the temptation from without.

A Christian's conscience, methinks, ought to be a 'Janus bifrons',--a Gospel-face retrospective, and smiling through penitent tears on the sins of the past, and a Moses-face looking forward in frown and menace, frightening the harlot will into a holy abortion of sins conceived but not yet born, perchance not yet quickened. The fanatic Antinomian reverses this; for the past he requires all the horrors of remorse and despair, till the moment of assurance; thenceforward, he may do what he likes, for he cannot sin.

Ib. p. 165.

All natural inclinations are either against or without God; therefore none are good. We see that no man is so honest as to marry a wife, only thereby to have children, to love and to bring them up in the fear of God.

This is a very weak instance. If a man had been commanded to marry by God, being so formed as that no sensual delight accompanied, and refused to do so, unless this appetite and gratification were added,--then indeed!

Luther confounds free-will with efficient power, which neither does nor can exist save where the finite will is one with the absolute Will. That Luther was practically on the right side in this famous controversy, and that he was driving at the truth, I see abundant reason to believe. But it is no less evident that he saw it in a mist, or rather as a mist with dissolving outline; and as he saw the thing as a mist, so he ever and anon mistakes a mist for the thing. But Erasmus and Saavedra were equally indistinct; and shallow and unsubstantial to boot. In fact, till the appearance of Kant's 'Kritiques' of the pure and of the practical Reason the problem had never been accurately or adequately stated, much less solved.

Ib. p. 174.

Loving friends, our doctrine that free-will is dead and nothing at all is grounded powerfully in Holy Scripture.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet