Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“ So will it be with the disputes between good men of the present day; and if you have no other reason to doubt your opponent's goodness than the point in dispute, think of Baxter and Hammond, of Milton and Taylor, and let it be no reason at all. It will secure you from the idolatry of the present times and fashions, and create the noblest kind of imaginative power in your soul, that of living in past ages; wholly devoid of which power, a man can neither anticipate the future, nor even live a truly human life, a life of reason in the present. ”

“ This Barrister for ever forgets that the whole point in dispute is not concerning the possibility of an immoral Christian being saved, which the Methodist would deny as strenuously as himself, and perhaps give an austerer sense to the word immoral; but whether morality, or as the Methodists would call it, sanctification, be the price which we pay for the purchase of our salvation with our own money, or a part of the same free gift. God knows, I am no advocate for Methodism; but for fair statement I am, and most zealously—even for the love of logic, putting honesty out of sight. ”

“ Our experience unresistibly convinceth us that a continued prayer doth more to help most of the people, and carry on their desires, than turning almost every petition into a distinct prayer; and making prefaces and conclusions to be near half the prayers.
This now is the very point I most admire in our excellent Liturgy. To any particular petition offered to the Omniscient, there may be a sinking of faith, a sense of its superfluity; but to the lifting up of the soul to the Invisible and there fixing it on his attributes, there can be no scruple. ”

“ I could wish (said Luther) that the Princes and States of the Empire would make an assembly, and hold a council and a union both in doctrine and ceremonies, so that every one might not break in and run on with such insolency and presumption according to his own brains, as already is begun, whereby many good hearts are offended.
Strange heart of man! Would Luther have given up the doctrine of justification by faith alone, had the majority of the Council decided in favor of the Arminian scheme? ”

“ 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. ”

“ If a dozen different individuals, all men of known sense and integrity, should each independently of the other pledge their everlasting weal on the truth, that they saw a man beheaded and quartered, and that on a certain person's prayer or bidding, the quarters reunited, and then a new head grew on and from out of the stump of the neck: and should the man himself assure you of the same, shew you the junctures, and identify himself to you by some indelible mark, with which you had been previously acquainted,—could you withstand this evidence? ”

“ This is a point, on which I have never been able to satisfy myself.—The only safe conclusion I have been able to draw, being the folly, mischief, and immorality of all oaths but judicial ones,—and those no farther excepted than as they are means of securing a deliberate consciousness of the presence of the Omniscient Judge. The inclination of my mind is at this moment, to the principle that an oath may deepen the guilt of an act sinful in itself, but cannot be detached from the act; it being understood that a perfectly voluntary and self-imposed oath is itself a sin. ”

“ In this and no other, that the objects of the Christian Redemption will be perfected on this earth;—that the kingdom of God and his Word, the latter as the Son of Man, in which the divine will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven, will come;—and that the whole march of nature and history, from the first impregnation of Chaos by the Spirit, converges toward this kingdom as the final cause of the world. Life begins in detachment from Nature, and ends in union with God. ”

“ Thence flows in upon and fills the soul that peace which passeth understanding, a state affronted and degraded by the name of pleasure, injured and mis-represented even by that of happiness, the very corner stone of that morality which cannot even in thought be distinguished from religion, and which seems to mean religion as long as the instinctive craving, dim and dark though it may be, of the moral sense after this unknown state (known only by the bitterness where it is not) shall remain in human nature! ”

“ Frequent are the instances in which it is suspended, and as it were drowned, in the inundation of the appetites, passions and imaginations, to which I have resigned myself, making use of my will in order to abandon my free-will; and there are not, I fear, examples wanting of the conscience being utterly destroyed, or of the passage of wickedness into madness;—that species of madness, namely, in which the reason is lost. For so long as the reason continues, so long must the conscience exist either as a good conscience, or as a bad conscience. ”

“ 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 God known by the light of reason? ”

“ Merely read
that unless they are sick they are precluded from the offered remedies of the Gospel
; and is not this the dictate of common sense, as well as of Methodism? But does not Methodism cry aloud that all men are sick—sick to the very heart?
If we say we are without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
This shallow-pated Barrister makes me downright piggish, and without the stratagem of that famed philosopher in pig-nature almost drives me into the Charon's hoy of Methodism by his rude and stupid tail-hauling me back from it. ”

“ 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? ”

“ For the truths are unique, and may have shadows and types, but no analogies. At this moment I have no intuition, no intellectual diagram, of this article of the commission of all judgment to the Son, and therefore a multitude of plausible objections present themselves, which I cannot solve —nor do I expect to solve them till by faith I see the thing itself.—Is not mercy an attribute of the Deity, as Deity, and not exclusively of the Person of the Son? And is not the authorizing another to judge by equity and mercy the same as judging so ourselves? ”

“ He who seeks for more, knows not what he is talking of; he who will not seek even this is either indifferent to the truth of what he professes to believe, or he mistakes a general determination not to disbelieve for a positive and especial faith, which is only our faith as far as we can assign a reason for it. O! how impossible it is to move an inch to the right or the left in any point of spiritual and moral concernment, without seeing the damage caused by the confusion of reason with the understanding. ”

“ The Deist, as a Deist, believes,
implicite
at least, so many and stupendous miracles as to render his disbelief of lesser miracles, simply because they are miraculous, gross inconsistencies. To have the battle fairly fought out, Spinoza, or a Bhuddist, or a Burmese Gymnosoph, should be challenged. Then, I am deeply persuaded, would the truth appear in full evidence, that no Christ, no God,—and, conversely, if the Father, then the Son. I can never too often repeat, that revealed religion is a pleonasm.—Religion is revelation, and revelation the only religion. ”

“ Reason is super-sensuous, and here its antagonist is the lust of the eye. Reason and its objects are not things of reflection, association, discursion, discourse in the old sense of the word as opposed to intuition; "discursive or intuitive," as Milton has it. Reason does not indeed necessarily exclude the finite, either in time or in space, but it includes them eminenter. Thus the prime mover of the material universe is affirmed to contain all motion as its cause, but not to be, or to suffer, motion in itself.
Reason is not the faculty of the finite. ”

“ Faith * * causes the soul to find all that is spoken of him in the word, and his beauty there represented, to be abundantly true, makes it really taste of his sweetness, and by that possesses the heart more strongly with his love, persuading it of the truth of those things, not by reasons and arguments, but by an inexpressible kind of evidence, that they only know that have it. ”

“ And when too Satan, the tempter, becomes Satan the accuser, saying in thy heart:—"This sickness is the consequence of sin, or sinful infirmity, and thou hast brought thyself into a fearful dilemma; thou canst not hope for salvation as long as thou continuest in any sinful practice, and yet thou canst not abandon thy daily dose of this or that poison without suicide. For the sin of thy soul has become the necessity of thy body, daily tormenting thee, without yielding thee any the least pleasurable sensation, but goading thee on by terror without hope. ”

“ That all punishments work for the good of the whole, and that the good of the whole is included in God's design, I admit: but that this is the sole cause, and the sole justification of divine punishment, I cannot, I dare not, concede;— because I should thus deny the essential evil of guilt, and its inherent incompatibility with the presence of a Being of infinite holiness. Now, exclusion from God implies the sum and utmost of punishment; and this would follow from the very essence of guilt and holiness, independently of example, consequence, or circumstance. ”

“ No! that is not the meaning of faith in the Gospel, nor indeed anywhere else. Were it so, the stronger the testimony, the more adequate the faith. Yet who says, I have faith in the existence of George II., as his present Majesty's antecessor and grandfather?—If testimony, then evidence too;—and who has faith that the two sides of all triangles are greater than the third? In truth, faith, even in common language, always implies some effort, something of evidence which is not universally adequate or communicable at will to others. ”

“ Oxlee that in a scheme which more directly than even the grosser species of Atheism, precludes all moral responsibility and subverts all essential difference of right and wrong, they have found the means of proving and explaining, "the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation," that is, the great and only sufficient antidotes of the right faith against this insidious poison. For Pantheism—trick it up as you will—is but a painted Atheism. A mask of perverted Scriptures may hide its ugly face, but cannot change a single feature. ”

“ Is it worse in a Methodist to oppose Socinianism to Christianity, that is, to the doctrines of Wesley or even Whitfield, which are the same as those of all the Reformed Churches of Christendom, and differ only wherein the most celebrated divines of the same churches have differed with each other,—than for the Barrister to oppose Methodism to Christianity (his Christianity) —that is, to Socinianism, which in every peculiar doctrine of Christianity differs from all divines of all Churches of all ages? ”

“ If it were otherwise, how could it be imputed as righteousness? Can morality exist without choice;—nay, strengthen in proportion as it becomes more independent of the will? "A very meritorious man! he has faith in every proposition of Euclid, which he understands."
Ib. p. 41.
"I could as easily create a world (says Dr. Hawker) as create either faith or repentance in my own heart." Surely this is a most monstrous confession. What! is not the Christian religion a revealed religion, and have we not the most miraculous attestation of its truth? ”

“ But surely if two believers meet at the same goal of faith, it is a very secondary question whether they travelled thither by the same road of argument. In this and other passages of Skelton, I recognize and reverence a vigorous and robust intellect; but I complain of a turbidness in his reasoning, a huddle in his sequence, and here and there a semblance of arguing in a circle—from the miracle to the doctrine, and from the doctrine to the miracle. ”

“ The spirit in which this and similar complaints originated has turned the prayers of Dissenting ministers into irreverent preachments, forgetting that tautology in words and thoughts implies no tautology in the music of the heart to which the words are, as it were, set, and that it is the heart that lifts itself up to God. Our words and thoughts are but parts of the enginery which remains with ourselves; and logic, the rustling dry leaves of the lifeless reflex faculty, does not merit even the name of a pulley or lever of devotion. ”

“ But, humanly considered, this position of Luther's provokes the mind to ask, is there no receptivity of faith, considered as a free gift of God, prerequisite in the individual? Does faith commence by generating the receptivity of itself? If so, there is no difference either in kind or in degree between the receivers and the rejectors of the word, at the moment preceeding this reception or rejection; and a stone is a subject as capable of faith as a man. How can obedience exist, where disobedience was not possible? ”

“ Surely it is not presuming too much of a Clergyman of the Church of England to expect that he would measure the importance of a theological tenet by its bearings on our moral and spiritual duties, by its practical tendencies. What is it to us whether Angels are the spirits of just men made perfect, or a distinct class of moral and rational creatures? Augustine has well and wisely observed that reason recognizes only three essential kinds;—God, man, beast. Try as long as you will, you can never make an Angel anything but a man with wings on his shoulders. ”

“ In the storm of this temptation I questioned awhile whether I were indeed a Christian or an Infidel, and whether faith could consist with such doubts as I was conscious of.
One of the instances of the evils arising from the equivoque between faith and intellectual satisfaction or insight. The root of faith is in the will. Faith is an oak that may be a pollard, and yet live.
Ib.
The being and attributes of God were so clear to me, that he was to my intellect what the sun is to my eye, by which I see itself and all things. ”