Coleridge's 'Literary Remains', vol. 4

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 assault, 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 hell; your prudent, pious mother to be void of the love of God, and in a state of damnation, &c.

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 Titus and the Antonini, are in the flames of Hell, the accursed objects of the divine hatred? Now whatever you dare hope of these as heathens, we dare hope of you as heretics."

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.

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.

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 fashion 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 assert 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 assumed contrast

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 passion for law Court evidence began with Grotius.

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.

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 God! can self-will more plainly put on the cracked mask of tender conscience than by refusal of obedience? What intolerable presumption, to disqualify as ungodly and reduce to null the majority of the country, who preferred the Liturgy, in order to force the long winded vanities of bustling God-orators on those who would fain hear prayers, not spouting!

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.

Had not the Governors had bitter proofs that there are other and more cruel vices than swearing and careless living;—and that these were predominant chiefly among such as made their religion their business?

Ib.

And whereas you speak of opening a gap to Sectaries for private conventicles, and the evil consequents to the state, we only desire you to avoid also the cherishing of ignorance and profaneness, and suppress all Sectaries, and spare not, in a way that will not suppress the means of knowledge and godliness.

The present company, that is, our own dear selves, always excepted.

Otherwise the poor undone Churches of Christ will no more believe you in such professions than we believed that those men intended the King's just power and greatness, who took away his life.

Or who, like Baxter, joined the armies that were showering cannon balls and bullets around his inviolable person! Whenever by reading the Prelatical writings and histories, I have had an over dose of anti-Prelatism in my feelings, I then correct it by dipping into the works of the Presbyterians, and their fellows, and so bring myself to more charitable thoughts respecting the Prelatists, and fully subscribe to Milton's assertion, that "Presbyter was but Old Priest writ large."

The apocryphal matter of your lessons in Tobit, Judith, Bel and the Dragon, &c., is scarce agreeable to the word of God.

Does not Jude refer to an apocryphal book?

Ib.

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.

The not abating of the impositions is the carting off of many hundreds of your brethren out of the ministry, and of many thousand Christians out of your communion; but the abating of the impositions will so offend you as to silence or excommunicate none of you at all. For example, we think it a sin to subscribe, or swear canonical obedience, or use the transient image of the Cross in Baptism, and therefore these must cast us out, &c.

As long as independent single Churches, or voluntarily synodical were forbidden and punishable by penal law, this argument remained irrefragable. The imposition of such trifles under such fearful threats was the very bitterness of spiritual pride and vindictiveness;—after the law passed by which things became as they now are, it was a mere question of expediency for the National Church to determine in relation to its own comparative interests. If the Church chose unluckily, the injury has been to itself alone.

It seems strange that such men as Baxter should not see that the use of the ring, the surplice and the like, are indifferent according to his own confession, yea, mere trifles, in comparison with the peace of the Church; but that it is no trifle, that men should refuse obedience to lawful authority in matters indifferent, and prefer the sin of schism to offending their taste and fancy. The Church did not, upon the whole, contend for a trifle, nor for an indifferent matter, but for a principle on which all order in society must depend. Still this is true only, provided the Church enacts no ordinances that are not necessary or at least plainly conducive to order or (generally) to the ends for which it is a Church. Besides, the point which the King had required them to consider was not what ordinances it was right to obey, but what it was expedient to enact or not to enact.

That the Pastors of the respective parishes may be allowed not only publicly to preach, but personally to catechize or otherwise instruct the several families, admitting none to the Lord's Table that have not personally owned their Baptismal covenant by a credible profession of faith and obedience; and to admonish and exhort the scandalous, in order to their repentance: to hear the witnesses and the accused party, and to appoint fit times and places for these things, and to deny such persons the communion of the Church in the holy Eucharist, that remain impenitent, or that wilfully refuse to come to their Pastors to be instructed, or to answer such probable accusations; and to continue such exclusion of them till they have made a credible profession of repentance, and then to receive them again to the communion of the Church;—provided there be place for due appeals to superior power.

Suppose only such men Pastors as are now most improperly, whether as boast or as sneer, called Evangelical, what an insufferable tyranny would this introduce! Who would not rather live in Algiers? This alone would make this minute history of the ecclesiastic factions invaluable, that it must convince all sober lovers of independence and moral self-government, how dearly we ought to prize our present Church Establishment with all its faults.

Therefore we humbly crave that your Majesty will here declare, that it is your Majesty's pleasure that none be punished or troubled for not using the Book of Common Prayer, till it be effectually reformed by divines of both persuasions equally deputed thereunto.

The dispensing power of the Crown not only acknowledged, but earnestly invoked! Cruel as the conduct of Laud and that of Sheldon to the Dissentients was, yet God's justice stands clear towards them; for they demanded that from others, which they themselves would not grant. They were to be allowed at their own fancies to denounce the ring in marriage, and yet impowered to endungeon, through the magistrate, the honest and peaceable Quaker for rejecting the outward ceremony of water in Baptism, as seducing men to take it as a substitute for the spiritual reality;—though the Quakers, no less than themselves, appealed to Scripture authority—the Baptist's own contrast of Christ's with the water Baptism.

We are sure that kneeling in any adoration at all, in any worship, on any Lord's Day in the year, or any week day between Easter and Pentecost, was not only disused, but forbidden by General Councils, &c.—and therefore that kneeling in the act of receiving is a novelty contrary to the decrees and practice of the Church for many hundred years after the Apostles.

Was not this because kneeling was the agreed sign of sorrow and personal contrition, which was not to be introduced into the public worship on the great day and the solemn seasons of the Church's joy and thanksgiving? If so, Baxter's appeal to this usage is a gross sophism, a mere pun.

Baxter's Exceptions to the Common Prayer Book.
Order requireth that we begin with reverent prayer to God for his acceptance and assistance, which is not done.

Enunciation of God's invitations, and promises in God's own words, as in the Common Prayer Book, much better.

That the Creed and Decalogue containing the faith, in which we profess to assemble for God's worship, and the law which we have broken by our sins, should go before the confession and Absolution; or at least before the praises of the Church; which they do not.

Might have deserved consideration, if the people or the larger number consisted of uninstructed

, or mere candidates for Church-membership. But the object being, not the first teaching of the Creed and Decalogue, but the lively reimpressing of the same, it is much better as it is.

The Confession omitteth not only original sin, but all actual sin as specified by the particular commandments violated, and almost all the aggravations of those sins.... Whereas confession, being the expression of repentance, should be more particular, as repentance itself should be.

Grounded, on one of the grand errors of the whole Dissenting party, namely, the confusion of public common prayer, praise, and instruction, with domestic and even with private devotion. Our Confession is a perfect model for Christian communities.

When we have craved help for God's prayers, before we come to them, we abruptly put in the petition for speedy deliverance—(O God, make speed to save us: O Lord make haste to help us,) without any intimation of the danger that we desire deliverance from, and without any other petition conjoined.

It is disorderly in the manner, to sing the Scripture in a plain tune after the manner of reading.

(The Lord be with you. And with thy spirit,) being petitions for divine assistance, come in abruptly in the midst or near the end of morning prayer: And (Let us pray.) is adjoined when we were before in prayer.

Mouse-like squeak and nibble.

(Lord have mercy upon us: Christ have mercy upon us: Lord have mercy upon us.) seemeth an affected tautology without any special cause or order here; and the Lord's Prayer is annexed that was before recited, and yet the next words are again but a repetition of the aforesaid oft repeated general (O Lord, shew thy mercy upon us.)

Still worse. 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.

The prayer for the King (O Lord, save the King.) is without any order put between the foresaid petition and another general request only for audience. (And mercifully hear us when we call upon thee).

A trifle, but just.

The second Collect is intituled (For Peace.) and hath not a word in it of petition for peace, but only for defence in assaults of enemies, and that we may not fear their power. And the prefaces (in knowledge of whom standeth, &c. and whose service, &c.) have no more evident respect to a petition for peace than to any other. And the prayer itself comes in disorderly, while many prayers or petitions are omitted, which according both to the method of the Lord's Prayer, and the nature of the things, should go before.

The third Collect intituled {For Grace.) is disorderly, &c.... And thus the main parts of prayer, according to the rule of the Lord's Prayer and our common necessities, are omitted.

Not wholly unfounded: but the objection proceeds on an arbitrary and (I think) false assumption, that the Lord's Prayer was universally prescriptive in form and arrangement.

The Litany ... omitteth very many particulars, ... and it is exceeding disorderly, following no just rules of method. Having begged pardon of our sins, and deprecated vengeance, it proceedeth to evil in general, and some few sins in particular, and thence to a more particular enumeration of judgments; and thence to a recitation of the parts of that work of our redemption, and thence to the deprecation of judgments again, and thence to prayers for the King and magistrates, and then for all nations, and then for love and obedience, &c.

The very points here objected to as faults I should have selected as excellencies. For do not the duties and temptations occur in real life even so intermingled? The imperfection of thought much more of language, so singly successive, allows no better representation of the close neighbourhood, nay the co-inherence of duty in duty, desire in desire. Every want of the heart pointing Godward is a chili agon that touches at a thousand points. From these remarks I except the last paragraph of s. 12:

(As to the prayer for Bishops and Curates and the position of the General Thanksgiving, &c.)

which are defects so palpable and so easily removed, that nothing but antipathy to the objectors could have retained them.

The like defectiveness and disorder is in the Communion Collects for the day.... There is no more reason why it should be appropriate to that day than another, or rather be a common petition for all days, &c.

I do not see how these supposed improprieties, for want of appropriateness to the day, could be avoided without risk of the far greater evil of too great appropriation to particular Saints and days as in Popery. I am so far a Puritan that I think nothing would have been lost, if Christmas day and Good Friday had been the only week days made holy days, and Easter the only Lord's day especially distinguished. I should also have added Whitsunday; but that it has become unmeaning since our Clergy have, as I grieve to think, become generally Arminian, and interpreting the descent of the Spirit as the gift of miracles and of miraculous infallibility by inspiration have rendered it of course of little or no application to Christians at present. Yet how can Arminians pray our Church prayers collectively on any day? Answer. See a

boa constrictor

with an ox or deer. What they do swallow, proves so astounding a dilatability of gullet, that it would be unconscionable strictness to complain of the horns, antlers, or other indigestible non-essentials being suffered to rot off at the confines,

Greek: hérkos hodóntôn

. But to write seriously on so serious a subject, it is mournful to reflect that the influence of the systematic theology then in fashion with the anti-Prelatic divines, whether Episcopalians or Presbyterians, had quenched all fineness of mind, all flow of heart, all grandeur of imagination in them; while the victorious party, the Prelatic Arminians, enriched as they were with all learning and highly gifted with taste and judgment, had emptied revelation of all the doctrines that can properly be said to have been revealed, and thus equally caused the extinction of the imagination, and quenched the life in the light by withholding the appropriate fuel and the supporters of the sacred flame. So that, between both parties, our transcendant Liturgy remains like an ancient Greek temple, a monumental proof of the architectural genius of an age long departed, when there were giants in the land.

As I was proceeding, Bishop Morley interrupted me according to his manner, with vehemency crying out * * The Bishop interrupted me again * * I attempted to speak, and still he interrupted me * * Bishop Morley went on, talking louder than I, &c.

The Bishops appear to have behaved insolently enough. Safe in their knowledge of Charles's inclinations, they laughed in their sleeves at his commission. Their best answer would have been to have pressed the anti-impositionists with their utter forgetfulness of the possible, nay, very probable differences of opinion between the ministers and their congregations. A vain minister might disgust a sober congregation with his

prayers, or his open contempt of their kneeling at the Sacrament, and the like. Yet by what right if he acts only as an individual? And then what an endless source of disputes and preferences of this minister or of that!

The paper offered by Bishop Cosins.
That the question may be put to the managers of the division, Whether there be anything in the doctrine, or discipline, or the Common Prayer, or ceremonies, contrary to the word of God; and if they can make any such appear; let them be satisfied.

If not, let them propose what they desire in point of expediency, and acknowledge it to be no more.

This was proposed, doubtless, by one of your sensible men; it is so plain, so plausible, shallow,

nihili, nauci, pili, flocci-cal

. Why, the very phrase "contrary to the word of God" would take a month to define, and neither party agree at last. One party says:

The Church has power from God's word to order all matters of order so as shall appear to them to conduce to decency and edification: but ceremonies respect the orderly performance of divine service: ergo, the Church has power to ordain ceremonies: but the Cross in baptizing is a ceremony; ergo, the Church has power to prescribe the crossing in Baptism. What is rightfully ordered cannot be rightfully withstood:—but the crossing, &c., is rightfully ordered:—

, the crossing cannot be rightfully omitted.

To this, how easily would the other party reply;

That a small number of Bishops could not be called the Church:

That no one Church had power or pretence from God's word to prescribe concerning mere matters of outward decency and convenience to other Churches or assemblies of Christian people:

That the blending an unnecessary and suspicious, if not superstitious, motion of the hand with a necessary and essential act doth in no wise respect order or propriety:

Lastly, that to forbid a man to obey a direct command of God because he will not join with it an admitted mere tradition of men, is contrary to common sense, no less than to God's word, expressly and by breach of charity, which is the great end and purpose of God's word. Besides; might not the Pope and his shavelings have made the same proposition to the Reformers in the reign of Edward VI., in respect to the greater part of the idle superfluities which were rejected by the Reformers, only as idle and superfluous, and for that reason contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, though few, if any, were in the direct teeth of a positive prohibition? Above all, an honest policy dictates that the end in view being fully determined, as here for instance, the preclusion of disturbance and indecorum in Christian assemblies, every addition to means, already adequate to the securing of that end, tends to frustrate the end, and is therefore evidently excluded from the prerogatives of the Church, (however that word may be interpreted) inasmuch as its power is confined to such ceremonies and regulations as conduce to order and general edification. In short it grieves me to think that the Heads of the most Apostolical Church in Christendom should have insisted on three or four trifles, the abolition of which could have given offence to none but such as from the baleful superstition that alone could attach importance to them effectually, it was charity to offend;-when all the rest of Baxter's objections might have been answered so triumphantly.

Answer to the foresaid paper.
That none may be a preacher, that dare not subscribe that there is nothing in the Common Prayer Book, the Book of Ordination, and the 39 Articles, that is contrary to the word of God.

I think this might have been left out as well as the other two articles mentioned by Baxter. For as by the words "contrary to the word of God" in Cosins's paper, it was not meant to declare the Common Prayer Book free from all error, the sense must have been, that there is not anything in it in such a way or degree contrary to God's word, as to oblige us to assign sin to those who have overlooked it, or who think the same compatible with God's word, or who, though individually disapproving the particular thing, yet regard that acquiescence as an allowed sacrifice of individual opinion to modesty, charity, and zeal for the peace of the Church. For observe that this eighth instance is additional to, and therefore not inclusive of, the preceding seven: otherwise it must have been placed as the first, or rather as the whole, the seven following being motives and instances in support and explanation of the point.

Let me mediate here between Baxter and the Bishops: Baxter had taken for granted that the King had a right to promise a revision of the Liturgy, Canons and regiment of the Church, and that the Bishops ought to have met him and his friends as diplomatists on even ground. The Bishops could not with discretion openly avow all they meant; and it would be bigotry to deny that the spirit of compromise had no indwelling in their feelings or intents. But nevertheless it is true that they thought more in the spirit of the English Constitution than Baxter and his friends.—"This," thought they, "is the law of the land,

quam nolumus mutari

; and it must be the King with and by the advice of his Parliament, that can authorize any part of his subjects to take the question of its repeal into consideration. Under other circumstances a King might bring the Bishops and the Heads of the Romish party together to plot against the law of the land. No! we would have no other secret Committees but of Parliamentary appointment. We are but so many individuals. It is in the Legislature that the congregations, the party most interested in this cause, meet collectively by their representatives."—Lastly, let it not be overlooked, that the root of the bitterness was common to both parties,—namely, the conviction of the vital importance of uniformity;—and this admitted, surely an undoubted majority in favor of what is already law must decide whose uniformity it is to be.

We must needs believe that when your Majesty took our consent to a Liturgy to be a foundation that would infer our concord, you meant not that we should have no concord but by consenting to this Liturgy without any considerable alteration.

This is forcible reasoning, but which the Bishops could fairly leave for the King to answer;—the contract tacit or expressed, being between him and the anti-Prelatic Presbytero-Episcopalian party, to which neither the Bishops nor the Legislature had acceded or assented. If Baxter and Calamy were so little imbued with the spirit of the Constitution as to consider Charles II. as the breath of their nostrils, and this dread sovereign Breath in its passage gave a snort or a snuffle, or having led them to expect a snuffle surprised them with a snort, let the reproach be shared between the Breath's fetid conscience and the nostrils' nasoductility. The traitors to the liberty of their country who were swarming and intriguing for favor at Breda when they should have been at their post in Parliament or in the Lobby preparing terms and conditions!—Had all the ministers that were afterwards ejected and the Presbyterian party generally exerted themselves, heart and soul, with Monk's soldiers, and in collecting those whom Monk had displaced, and, instead of carrying on treasons against the Government

by mendicant negociations with Charles, had taken open measures to confer the sceptre on him as the Scotch did,—whose stern and truly loyal conduct has been most unjustly condemned,—the schism in the Church might have been prevented and the Revolution of 1688 superseded.

N. B. In the above I speak of the Bishops as men interested in a litigated estate. God forbid, I should seek to justify them as Christians.