Did Bunyan refer to the Quakers as rejecting the outward Sacraments of
Baptism and the Lord's Supper?
If so, it is the only unspiritual passage in the whole beautiful
allegory, the only trait of sectarian narrow-mindedness, and, in
Bunyan's own language, of legality.
But I do not think that this was Bunyan's intention. I rather suppose
that he refers to the Arminians and other Pelagians, who rely on the
coincidence of their actions with the Gospel precepts for their
salvation, whatever the ground or root of their conduct may be; who
place, in short, the saving virtue in the stream, with little or no
reference to the source.
But it is the faith acting in our poor imperfect deeds that alone saves
us; and even this faith is not ours, but the faith of the Son of God in
us.
I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live
by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Gal. ii. 20.
Illustrate this by a simile. Labouring under chronic
bronchitis
, I am
told to inhale chlorine as a specific remedy; but I can do this only by
dissolving a saturated solution of the gas in warm water, and then
breathing the vapour. Now what the aqueous vapour or steam is to the
chlorine, that our deeds, our outward life,
Greek: bíos
is to faith.
Ib.
p. 55.
And the other took directly up the way to Destruction, which led him
into a wide field, full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell,
and rose no more.
This requires a comment. A wide field full of mountains and of dark
mountains, where Hypocrite stumbled and fell! The images here are
unusually obscure.
Ib.
p. 70.
They showed him Moses' rod, the hammer and nail with which Jael slew
Sisera.
I question whether it would be possible to instance more strikingly the
power of a predominant idea (that true mental kaleidoscope with
richly-coloured glass) on every object brought before the eye of the
mind through its medium, than this conjunction of Moses' rod with the
hammer of the treacherous assassin Jael, and similar encomiastic
references to the same detestable murder, by Bunyan and men like Bunyan,
good, pious, purely-affectioned disciples of the meek and holy Jesus;
yet the erroneous preconception that whatever is uttered by a Scripture
personage is, in fact, uttered by the infallible Spirit of God, makes
Deborahs of them all.
But what besides ought we to infer from this and similar facts? Surely,
that the faith in the heart overpowers and renders innocent the errors
of the understanding and the delusions of the imagination, and that
sincerely pious men purchase, by inconsistency, exemption from the
practical consequences of particular errors.
Ib.
p. 76.
All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out, &c. This is
the best way; to own Satan's charges, if they be true; yea, to
exaggerate them also, to exalt the riches of the grace of Christ above
all, in pardoning all of them freely.
Note in Edwards
.
That is, to say what we do not believe to be true!
Will ye speak
wickedly for God, and talk deceitfully for him?
said righteous Job.
Ib.
p. 83.
One thing I would not let slip: I took notice that now poor Christian
was so confounded, that he did not know his own voice; and thus I
perceived it: just when he was come over against the mouth of the
burning pit, one of the wicked ones got behind him, and stepped up
softly to him, and whisperingly suggested many grievous blasphemies to
him, which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind.
is a very beautiful letter of Archbishop Leighton's to a lady
under a similar distemperature of the imagination
. In fact, it can
scarcely not happen under any weakness and consequent irritability of
the nerves to persons continually occupied with spiritual
self-examination. No part of the pastoral duties requires more
discretion, a greater practical psychological science. In this, as in
what not?
Luther is the great model; ever reminding the individual that not he,
but Christ, is to redeem him; and that the way to be redeemed is to
think with will, mind, and affections on Christ, and not on himself. I
am a sin-laden being, and Christ has promised to loose the whole burden
if I but entirely trust in him.
To torment myself with the detail of the noisome contents of the fardel
will but make it stick the closer, first to my imagination and then to
my unwilling will.
Ib.
For that he perceived God was with them, though in that dark and
dismal state; and why not, thought he, with me, though by reason of
the impediment that attends this place, I cannot perceive it? But it
may be asked, Why doth the Lord suffer his children to walk in such
darkness? 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.
But though he slay me, yet will I cling to him.
Ib.
p. 85.
And as for the other (Pope), though he be yet alive, he is, by reason
of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his
younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now
do little more than sit in his cave's mouth, grinning at pilgrims as
they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them.
O that Blanco White would write in Spanish the progress of a pilgrim
from the Pope's cave to the Evangelist's wicket-gate and the
Interpreter's house!
1836.
Ib.
p. 104.
And let us assure ourselves that, at the day of doom, men shall be
judged according to their fruit. It will not be said then, "Did you
believe?" but "Were you doers or talkers only?" and accordingly shall
be judged.
All the doctors of the Sorbonne could not have better stated the Gospel
medium
between Pelagianism and Antinomian-Solifidianism, more
properly named Sterilifidianism. It is, indeed, faith alone that saves
us; but it is such a faith as cannot be alone. Purity and beneficence
are the
epidermis,
faith and love the
cutis vera
of
Christianity. 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.
Ib.
p. 154.
Fine-spun speculations and curious reasonings lead men from simple
truth and implicit faith into many dangerous and destructive errors.
The Word records many instances of such for our caution. Be warned to
study simplicity and godly sincerity.
Note in Edwards on Doubting Castle.
And pray what does implicit faith lead men into? Transubstantiation and
all the abominations of priest-worship. And where is the Scriptural
authority for this implicit faith? Assuredly not in St. John, who tells
us that Christ's life is and manifests itself in us as the light of man;
that he came to bring light as well as immortality. Assuredly not in St.
Paul, who declares all faith imperfect and perilous without insight and
understanding; who prays for us that we may comprehend the deep things
even of God himself. For the Spirit discerned, and the Spirit by which
we discern, are both God; the Spirit of truth through and in Christ from
the Father.
Mournful are the errors into which the zealous but unlearned preachers
among the dissenting Calvinists have fallen respecting absolute
election, and discriminative, yet reasonless, grace: — fearful this
divorcement of the Holy Will, the one only Absolute Good, that,
eternally affirming itself as the I AM, eternally generateth the Word,
the absolute Being, the Supreme Reason, the Being of all Truth, the
Truth of all Being: — fearful the divorcement from the reason; fearful
the doctrine which maketh God a power of darkness, instead of the God of
light, the Father of the light which lighteth every man that cometh into
the world!
This we know and this we are taught by the holy Apostle Paul; that
without will there is no ground or base of sin; that without the law
this ground or base cannot become sin; (hence we do not impute sin to
the wolf or the tiger, as being without or below the law;) but that with
the law cometh light into the will; and by this light the will becometh
a free, and therefore a responsible, will.
Yea! the law is itself light, and the divine light becomes law by its
relation and opposition to the darkness; the will of God revealed in its
opposition to the dark and alien will of the fallen Spirit. This
freedom, then, is the free gift of God; but does it therefore cease to
be freedom?
All the sophistry of the Predestinarians rests on the false notion of
eternity as a sort of time antecedent to time. It is timeless, present
with and in all times.
is an excellent discourse of the great Hooker's, affixed with two
or three others to his
Ecclesiastical Polity
, on the final perseverance
of Saints
; but yet I am very desirous to meet with some judicious
experimental treatise, in which the doctrine, with the Scriptures on
which it is grounded, is set forth more at large; as likewise the rules
by which it may be applied to the purposes of support and comfort,
without danger of causing presumption and without diminishing the dread
of sin.
Above all, I am anxious to see the subject treated with as little
reference as possible to the divine predestination and foresight; the
argument from the latter being a mere identical proposition followed by
an assertion of God's prescience.
Those who will persevere, will persevere, and God foresees; and as to
the proof from predestination, that is, that he who predestines the end
necessarily predestines the adequate means, I can more readily imagine
logical consequences adverse to the sense of responsibility than
Christian consequences, such as an individual may apply for his own
edification.
And I am persuaded that the doctrine does not need these supports,
according, I mean, to the ordinary notion of predestination. The
predestinative force of a free agent's own will in certain absolute
acts, determinations, or elections, and in respect of which acts it is
one either with the divine or the devilish will; and if the former, the
conclusions to be drawn from God's goodness, faithfulness, and spiritual
presence; these supply grounds of argument of a very different
character, especially where the mind has been prepared by an insight
into the error and hollowness of the antithesis between liberty and
necessity.
Ib.
p. 178.
But how contrary to this is the walk and conduct of some who profess
to be pilgrims, and yet can wilfully and deliberately go upon the
Devil's ground, and indulge themselves in carnal pleasures and sinful
diversions.
Note in Edwards on the Enchanted Ground.
But what pleasures are carnal, — what are sinful diversions, — so I mean
as that I may be able to determine what are not? Shew us the criterion,
the general principle; at least explain whether each individual case is
to be decided for the individual by his own experience of the effects of
the pleasure or the diversion, in dulling or distracting his religious
feelings; or can a list, a complete list, of all such pleasures be made
beforehand?
index p. 3
In initio
.
I strongly suspect that this third part, which ought not to have been
thus conjoined with Bunyan's work, was written by a Roman Catholic
priest, for the very purpose of counteracting the doctrine of faith so
strongly enforced in the genuine Progress.
Ib.
p. 443, in Edwards.
Against all which evils fasting is the proper remedy.
It would have been well if the writer had explained exactly what he
meant by the fasting, here so strongly recommended; during what period
of time abstinence from food is to continue and so on. The effects, I
imagine, must in good measure depend on the health of the individual. In
some constitutions, fasting so disorders the stomach as to produce the
very contrary of good; — confusion of mind, loose imaginations against
the man's own will, and the like.
In fine
.
One of the most influential arguments, one of those the force of which I
feel even more than I see, for the divinity of the New Testament, and
with especial weight in the writings of John and Paul, is the
unspeakable difference between them and all other the earliest extant
writings of the Christian Church, even those of the same age (as, for
example, the Epistle of Barnabas,) or of the next following, — a
difference that transcends all degree, and is truly a difference in
kind. Nay, the catalogue of the works written by the Reformers and in
the two centuries after the Reformation, contain many many volumes far
superior in Christian light and unction to the best of the Fathers. How
poor and unevangelic is Hermas in comparison with our Pilgrim's
Progress!
P. 98, &c. of the edition by Murray and Major, 1830 Ed.
See
ante
. Ed.
Prefixed to an edition of the
Pilgrim's Progress
, by R.
Edwards, 1820. — Ed.
The second of two 'Letters written to persons under trouble
of mind.' Ed.
Sermon of the certainty and perpetuity of faith in the
elect. Vol. iii. p. 583. Keale's edit. — Ed.
Notes on Select Discourses by John Smith1
It would make a delightful and instructive essay, to draw up a critical
and (where possible) biographical account of the Latitudinarian party at
Cambridge, from the close of the reign of James I to the latter half of
Charles II.
The greater number were Platonists, so called at least, and such they
believed themselves to be, but more truly Plotinists. Thus Cudworth, Dr.
Jackson (chaplain of Charles I, and vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne), Henry
More, this John Smith, and some others. Taylor was a Gassendist, or
inter Epicureos evangelizantes
, and, as far as I know, he is the
only exception.
They were all alike admirers of Grotius, which in Jeremy Taylor was
consistent with the tone of his philosophy. The whole party, however,
and a more amiable never existed, were scared and disgusted into this by
the catachrestic language and skeleton half-truths of the systematic
divines of the Synod of Dort on the one hand, and by the sickly
broodings of the Pietists and Solomon's-Song preachers on the other.
What they all wanted was a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part organ,
part constituent, of all knowledge, an examination of the scales,
weights and measures themselves abstracted from the objects to be
weighed or measured by them; in short, a transcendental æsthetic, logic,
and noetic. Lord Herbert was at the entrance of, nay, already some paces
within, the shaft and adit of the mine, but he turned abruptly back, and
the honour of establishing a complete
Greek: propaideía
of philosophy
was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards.
From the confounding of Plotinism with Platonism, the Latitudinarian
divines fell into the mistake of finding in the Greek philosophy many
anticipations of the Christian Faith, which in fact were but its echoes.
The inference is as perilous as inevitable, namely, that even the
mysteries of Christianity needed no revelation, having been previously
discovered and set forth by unaided reason.
...
The argument from the mere universality of the belief, appears to me far
stronger in favour of a surviving soul and a state after death, than for
the existence of the Supreme Being. In the former, it is one doctrine in
the Englishman and in the Hottentot; the differences are accidents not
affecting the subject, otherwise than as different seals would affect
the same wax, though Molly, the maid, used her thimble, and Lady
Virtuosa
an
intaglio
of the most exquisite workmanship.
Far otherwise in the latter.
Mumbo Jumbo
, or the
cercocheronychous Nick-Senior
, or whatever score or score
thousand invisible huge men fear and fancy engender in the brain of
ignorance to be hatched by the nightmare of defenceless and
self-conscious weakness — these are not the same as, but are
toto
genere
diverse from, the
una et unica substantia
of Spinosa,
or the World-God of the Stoics.
And each of these again is as diverse from the living Lord God, the
creator of heaven and earth. Nay, this equivoque on God is as
mischievous as it is illogical: it is the sword and buckler of Deism.
index p. 3
Besides, when we review our own immortal souls and their dependency
upon some Almighty mind, we know that we neither did nor could produce
ourselves, and withal know that all that power which lies within the
compass of ourselves will serve for no other purpose than to apply
several pre-existent things one to another, from whence all
generations and mutations arise, which are nothing else but the events
of different applications and complications of bodies that were
existent before; and therefore that which produced that substantial
life and mind by which we know ourselves, must be something much more
mighty than we are, and can be no less indeed than omnipotent, and
must also be the first architect and Greek: daemiourgòs of all other
beings, and the perpetual supporter of them.
A Rhodian leap! Where our knowledge of a cause is derived from our
knowledge of the effect, which is falsely (I think) here supposed,
nothing can be logically, that is, apodeictically, inferred, but the
adequacy of the former to the latter. The mistake, common to Smith, with
a hundred other writers, arises out of an equivocal use of the word
'know.' In the scientific sense, as implying insight, and which ought to
be the sense of the word in this place, we might be more truly said to
know the soul by God, than to know God by the soul.
...
So the Sibyl was noted by Heraclitus as Greek: mainomén_o stómati gelastà kaì akall_ópista phtheggoménaesee previous image 'as one speaking ridiculous
and unseemly speeches with her furious mouth.'
This fragment is misquoted and misunderstood: for —
Greek: gelastà
it
should be
Greek: amuristà
unperfumed, inornate lays, not redolent of
art. — Render it thus:
— — — Not her's
To win the sense by words of rhetoric,
Lip-blossoms breathing perishable sweets;
But by the power of the informing Word
Roll sounding onward through a thousand years
Her deep prophetic bodements.
Greek: Stómati mainomén_o
is with ecstatic mouth.
...
If the ascetic virtues, or disciplinary exercises, derived from the
schools of philosophy (Pythagorean, Platonic and Stoic) were carried to
an extreme in the middle ages, it is most certain that they are at
present in a far more grievous disproportion underrated and neglected.
The
regula maxima
of the ancient
Greek: askaesis
was to conquer the
body by abstracting the attention from it. Our maxim is to conciliate
the body by attending to it, and counteracting or precluding one set of
sensations by another, the servile dependence of the mind on the body
remaining the same. Instead of the due subservience of the body to the
mind (the favorite language of our Sidneys and Miltons) we hear nothing
at present but of health, good digestion, pleasurable state of general
feeling, and the like.
Of Queen's College, Cambridge, 1660.
To Adam Steinmetz K
My Dear Godchild
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!) has redeemed you
from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but
into light — out of death, but into life — out of sin, but into
righteousness, even into the
Lord our Righteousness
; I trust that He
will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you
as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind.
My dear Godchild! — You received from Christ's minister at the baptismal
font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your
father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz,
whose fervent aspiration and ever-paramount aim, even from early youth,
was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed — in will, mind, and
affections.
I too, your Godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of
this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and
intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience which more
than threescore years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure,
declare to you (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act
on the conviction) that health is a great blessing, — competence obtained
by honorable industry a great blessing, — and a great blessing it is to
have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the
greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all
privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise,
through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely afflicted
with bodily pains, languors, and bodily infirmities; and, for the last
three or four years, have, with few and brief intervals, been confined
to a sick-room, and at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness,
write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a recovery, yet without prospect of a
speedy recovery; and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly
bear witness to you that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in His
promises to them that truly seek Him, is faithful to perform what He
hath promised, and has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities,
the inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting
assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw His Spirit from me
in the conflict, and in His own time will deliver me from the Evil One!
O, my dear Godchild! eminently blessed are those who begin early to
seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and
mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest,
Jesus Christ!
, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen Godfather and
friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
July 13, 1834