Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“ Neither doth Calvin carry those emphatical words which are so often cited for a proof of the last resurrection, — that he knows his Redeemer lives, that he knows he shall stand the last man upon earth, that though his body be destroyed, yet in his flesh and with his eyes shall he see God — to any higher sense than so, that how low soever he be brought, to what desperate state soever he be reduced in the eyes of the world, yet he assures himself of a resurrection, a reparation, a restitution to his former bodily health, and worldly fortune which he had before. ”

“ Eternal misery and the immitigable wrath of God, and the inextinguishable fire of hell amid devils, parricides, and haters of God and all goodness — this is the verdict which a Protestant divine passes against the man, who though sincerely believing the whole Nicene creed and every doctrine and precept taught in the New Testament, and living accordingly, should yet have convinced himself that the first chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke were not parts of the original Gospels! ”

“ O, thou who hast revealed thyself in thy holy word as a God that hearest prayer; before whose infinitude all differences cease of great and small; who like a tender parent foreknowest all our wants, yet listenest well-pleased to the humble petitions of thy children; who hast not alone permitted, but taught us, to call on thee in all our needs, — earnestly I implore the continuance of thy free mercy, of thy protecting providence, through the coming night. Thou hearest every prayer offered to thee believingly with a penitent and sincere heart. ”

“ I do not say that we, by that sin (original) deserved that death, neither can death be properly a punishment of us, till we superadd some evil of our own; yet Adam's sin deserved it, so that it was justly left to fall upon us, we, as a consequent and punishment of his sin, being reduced to our natural portion.
How? What is this but flying to the old Supra-lapsarian blasphemy of a right of property in God over all his creatures, and destroying that sacred distinction between person and thing which is the light and the life of all law human and divine? ”

“ The paralogism of Vega as to this perplexing question seems to lurk in the position that God gives a law which it is impossible we should obey collectively. But the truth is, that the law which God gave, and which from the essential holiness of his nature it is impossible he should not have given, man deprived himself of the ability to obey. And was the law of God therefore to be annulled? Must the sun cease to shine because the earth has become a morass, so that even that very glory of the sun hath become a new cause of its steaming up clouds and vapors that strangle the rays? ”

“ Yet on the other hand, it is unfair as well as unwise to censure the men of an age for want of that which was above their age. The true principle, much more the practicable rules, of toleration were in James's time obscure to the wisest; but by the many, laity no less than clergy, would have been denounced as soul-murder and disguised atheism. In fact — and a melancholy fact it is, — toleration then first becomes practicable when indifference has deprived it of all merit. In the same spirit I excuse the opposite party, the Puritans and Papaphobists. ”

“ Morality is the outward cloth, faith the lining; both together form the wedding-garment given to the true believer in Christ, even his own garment of righteousness, which, like the loaves and fishes, he mysteriously multiplies. The images of the sun in the earthly dew-drops are unsubstantial phantoms; but God's thoughts are things: the images of God, of the Sun of Righteousness, in the spiritual dew-drops are substances, imperishable substances. ”

“ It is surely some proof of the moral effect which Christianity has produced, that in all Protestant countries, at least, a writer would be ashamed to assign this as a ground of panegyric; as if promiscuous intercourse with those of the other sex had been a natural good, a privilege, which there was a great merit in foregoing! O! what do not women owe to Christianity! As Christians only it is that they do, or ordinarily can, cease to be things for men, instead of co-persons in one spiritual union. ”

“ If not, you will look on this precious book as a romance or history, which no way concerns you; you can no more understand the meaning of it than if it were wrote in an unknown tongue, for you are yet carnal, dead in your sins, lying in the arms of the wicked one in false security. But this book is spiritual; it can only be understood by spiritually quickened souls who have experienced that salvation in the heart, which begins with a sight of sin, a sense of sin, a fear of destruction and dread of damnation. ”

“ It is amusing to see the use which the Christian divines make of the very facts in favour of their own religion, with which they triumphantly battered that of the heathens; namely, the gross and sinful anthropomorphitism of their representations of the Deity; and yet the heathen philosophers and priests — Plutarch for instance — tell us as plainly as Donne or Aquinas can do, that these are only accommodations to human modes of conception, — the divine nature being in itself impassible; — how otherwise could it be the prime agent?
Paganism needs a true philosophical judge. ”

“ How quickly would Taylor have detected in an adversary the absurd realization contained in this and the following passages of the abstract notion, sin, from the sinner: as if sin were any thing but a man sinning, or a man who has sinned! As well might a sin committed in Sirius or the planet Saturn justify the infliction of conflagration on the earth and hell-fire on all its rational inhabitants. Sin! the word sin! for abstracted from the sinner it is no more: and if not abstracted from him, it remains separate from all others. ”

“ That there is a Redeemer: That the redemption relatively to each individual captive is, if not effected under certain conditions, yet manifestable as far as is fitting for the soul by certain signs and consequents: — and That these signs are in myself; that the conditions under which the redemption offered to all men is promised to the individual, are fulfilled in myself;
these are the four great points of faith, in which the humble Christian finds and feels a gradation from trembling hope to full assurance; yet the will, the act of trust, is the same in all. ”

“ I remember no passages of the Fathers nearer to inspired Scripture than this and similar ones of Jeremy Taylor, in which, quitting the acute logician, he combines his heart with his head, and utters general, and inclusive, and reconciling truths of charity and of common sense. All amounts but to this: — what is binding on all must be possible to all. But conformity of intellectual conclusions is not possible. Faith therefore cannot reside totally in the understanding. But to do what we believe we ought to do is possible to all, therefore binding on all ”

“ Origen's words ought to have prevented all mistake, for he plainly enough overthrows the phantom of hereditary guilt; and as to guilt from a corruption of nature, it is just such guilt as the carnivorous appetites of a weaned lion, or the instinct of a brood of ducklings to run to water. What then is it? It is an evil, and therefore seated in the will; common to all men, the beginning of which no man can determine in himself or in others. ”

“ No where out of the Holy Scripture have I found the root and pith of Christian faith so clearly and purely propounded as in this section. God, whose thoughts are eternal, beholdeth the end, and in the completed work seeth and accepteth every stage of the process. I dislike only the word 'purchased;' — not that it is not Scriptural, but because a metaphor well and wisely used in the enforcement and varied elucidation of a truth, is not therefore properly employed in its exact enunciation. ”

“ Till this great truth be mastered, and with the sight that is insight, other truths may casually take possession of the mind, but the mind cannot possess them. If you know not this, you know nothing; for if you know not the diversity of reason from the understanding, you know not reason; and reason alone is knowledge. ”

“ If by metaphysics we mean those truths of the pure reason which always transcend, and not seldom appear to contradict, the understanding, or (in the words of the great Apostle) spiritual verities which can only be spiritually discerned — and this is the true and legitimate meaning of metaphysics, [Greek: metà tà physikà] — then I affirm, that this very controversy between the Arminians and the Calvinists, in which both are partially right in what they affirm, and both wholly wrong in what they deny, is a proof that without metaphysics there can be no light of faith. ”

“ Now that reason in man must have been first actuated by a direct revelation from God, I have myself proved, and do not therefore deny that faith as the means of salvation was first made known by revelation; but that reason is incapable of seeing into the fitness and superiority of these means, or that it is a mystery in any other sense than as all spiritual truths are mysterious, I do deny and deem it both a false and a dangerous doctrine. ”

“ Will not this argument justify all idolaters? For surely they believe themselves worshippers either of the Supreme Being under a permitted form, or of some son of God (as Apollo) to whom he has delegated such and such powers. If this be the case, there is no such crime as idolatry: yet the second commandment expressly makes the worshipping of God in or before a visual image of him not only idolatry, but the most hateful species of it. Now do they not worship God in the visible form of bread, and prostrate themselves before pictures of the Trinity? ”

“ Faith, that is, fidelity — the fealty of the finite will and understanding to the reason,
the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world
, as one with, and representative of, the absolute will, and to the ideas or truths of the pure reason, the supersensuous truths, which in relation to the finite will, and as meant to determine the will, are moral laws, the voice and dictates of the conscience; — this faith is properly a state and disposition of the will, or rather of the whole man, the I, or finite will, self-affirmed. ”

“ It is not testimony, as testimony, that necessitates us to conclude that there is such a city as Rome — but a reasoning, that forms a branch of mathematical science. So far is our conviction from being grounded on our confidence in human testimony that it proceeds on our knowledge of its fallible character, and therefore can find no sufficient reason for its coincidence on so vast a scale, but in the real existence of the object. ”

“ It is for his glory: it tries their faith in him, and excites prayer to him: but his love abates not in the least towards them, since he lovingly inquires after them, Who is there among you that feareth the Lord and walketh in darkness, and hath no light? Then he gives most precious advice to them: Let him trust in the Lord, and stay himself upon his God.
Yes! even in the sincerest believers, being men of reflecting and inquiring minds, there will sometimes come a wintry season, when the vital sap of faith retires to the root, that is, to atheism of the will. ”

“ They that will have heaven, they must run for it, because the devil, the law, sin, death and hell, follow them. There is never a poor soul that is going to heaven, but the devil, the law, sin, death and hell make after that soul. The devil, your adversary, as a roaring lion, goeth about seeking whom he may devour. And I will assure you the devil is nimble; he can run apace; he is light of foot; he hath overtaken many; he hath turned up their heels, and hath given them an everlasting fall. ”

“ The miracles that God wrought in times past by them made many to attribute more to them than was fit, as if they had a generality of presence, knowledge, and working; but the wisest and best advised never durst attribute any such thing unto them.
To a truly pious mind awfully impressed with the surpassing excellency of God's ineffable love to fallen man, in the revelation of himself to the inner man through the reason and conscience by the spiritual light and substantiality — (for the conscience is to the spirit or reason what the understanding is to the sense, a substantiative power) ”

“ Yea, it is most affecting to see the struggles of so great a mind to preserve its inborn fealty to the reason under the servitude to an accepted article of belief, which was, alas! confounded with the high obligations of faith; — faith the co-adunation of the finite individual will with the universal reason, by the submission of the former to the latter. To reconcile redemption by the material blood of Jesus with the mind of the spirit, he seeks to spiritualize the material blood itself in all men! ”

“ But how will this help me to believe that I received this Spirit through the Bishop's hands laid on my head at Confirmation: when perhaps I am distinctly conscious, that I loved my Saviour, freely forgave, nay, tenderly yearned for the weal of, them that hated me before my Confirmation, — when, indeed, I must have been the most uncharitable of men if I did not admit instances of the most exemplary faith, charity, and devotion in Christians who do not practise the imposition of hands in their Churches. ”

“ In great passion, the crust opake of present and existing weakness and boundedness is, as it were, fused and vitrified for the moment, and through the transparency the soul, catching a gleam of the infinity of the potential in the will of man, reads the future for the present. Percy is wrapt in the contemplation of the physical might inherent in the concentrated will ”

“ I have had too frequent experience of professional divines, and how they identify themselves with the theological scheme to which they have been articled, and I understand too well the nature and the power, the effect and the consequences, of a wilful faith, — where the sensation of positiveness is substituted for the sense of certainty, and the stubborn clutch for quiet insight, — to wonder at any degree of hardihood in matters of belief. ”

“ I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of His spiritual body, the Church.
Years must pass before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write; but I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who, by his only begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) ”

“ It is most dangerous, and, in its distant consequences, subversive of all Christianity to admit, as Taylor does, that the doctrine of the Trinity is at all against, or even above, human reason in any other sense, than as eternity and Deity itself are above it. ”