The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3

Ib. s. 104.

It was scarcely to be expected that the passions of James's age would allow of this wise distinction between Papists, the intriguing restless partizans of a foreign potentate, and simple Roman-Catholics, who preferred the mumpsimus of their grandsires to the corrected sumpsimus of the Reformation. But that in our age this distinction should have been neglected in the Roman-Catholic Emancipation Bill!

Ib. s. 105.

But this invisible consistory shall be confusedly diffused over all the kingdom, that many of the subjects shall, to the intolerable exhausting of the wealth of the realm, pay double tithes, double offerings, double fees, in regard of their double consistory. And if Ireland be so poor as it is suggested, I hold, under correction, that this invisible consistory is the principal cause of the exhausting thereof.

A memorable remark on the evil of the double priesthood in Ireland.

Ib.

Dr. Bishop, the new Bishop of Chalcedon, is to come to London privately, and I am much troubled at it, not knowing what to advise his majesty as things stand at this present. If you were shipped with the Infanta, the only counsel were to let the judges proceed with him presently; hang him out of the way, and the King to blame my lord of Canterbury or myself for it.

Striking instance and illustration of the tricksy policy which in the seventeenth century passed for state wisdom even with the comparatively wise. But there must be a Ulysses before there can be an Aristides and Phocion.

Poor King James's main errors arose out of his superstitious notions of a sovereignty inherent in the person of the king. Hence he would be a sacred person, though in all other respects he might be a very devil. Hence his yearning for the Spanish match; and the ill effects of his toleration became rightly attributed by his subjects to foreign influence, as being against his own acknowledged principle, not on a principle.

Ib. s. 107.

I have at times played with the thought, that our bishoprics, like most of our college fellowships, might advantageously be confined to single men, if only it were openly declared to be on ground of public expediency, and on no supposed moral superiority of the single state.

Ib. s. 108.

That a rector or vicar had not only an office in the church, but a freehold for life, by the common law, in his benefice.

O! if Archbishop Williams had but seen in a clear point of view what he indistinctly aims at, – the essential distinction between the nationalty and its trustees and holders, and the Christian Church and its ministers55.

Ib. s. 111.

I will represent him (the archbishop of Spalato) in a line or two, that he was as indifferent, or rather dissolute, in practice as in opinion. For in the same chapter, art. 35, this is his Nicolaitan doctrine: – A pluralitate uxorum natura humana non abhorret, imo fortasse neque ab earum communitate.

How so? The words mean only that the human animal is not withholden by any natural instinct from plurality or even community of females. It is not asserted, that reason and revelation do not forbid both the one and the other, or that man unwithholden would not be a Yahoo, morally inferior to the swallow. The emphasis is to be laid on natura, not on humana. Humanity forbids plural and promiscuous intercourse, not however by the animal nature of man, but by the reason and religion that constitute his moral and spiritual nature.

Ib. s. 112.

But being thrown out into banishment, and hunted to be destroyed as a partridge in the mountain, he subscribed against his own hand, which yet did not prejudice Athanasius his innocency: –

I have ever said this of Sir John Cheke. I regret his recantation as one of the cruelties suffered by him, and always see the guilt flying off from him and settling on his persecutors.

Ib. s. 151.

I conclude, therefore, that his Highness having admitted nothing in these oaths or articles, either to the prejudice of the true, or the equalizing or authorizing of the other, religion, but contained himself wholly within the limits of penal statutes and connivances, wherein the state hath ever challenged and usurped a directing power, &c.

Three points seem wanting to render the Lord Keeper's argument air-tight; —

1. the proof that a king of England even then had a right to dispense, not with the execution in individual cases of the laws, but with the laws themselves in omne futurum; that is, to repeal laws by his own act;

2. the proof that such a tooth-and-talon drawing of the laws did not endanger the equalizing and final mastery of the unlawful religion;

3. the utter want of all reciprocity on the part of the Spanish monarch.

In short, it is pardonable in Hacket, but would be contemptible in any other person, not to see this advice of the Lord Keeper's as a black blotch in his character, both as a Protestant Bishop and as a councillor of state in a free and Protestant country.

Ib. s. 152.

Yet opinions were so various, that some spread it for a fame, that, &c.

Was it not required of – at all events usual for – all present at a Council to subscribe their names to the act of the majority? There is a modern case in point, I think, that of Sir Arthur Wellesley's signature to the Convention of Cintra.

Ib. s. 164.

For to forbid judges against their oath, and justices of peace (sworn likewise), not to execute the law of the land, is a thing unprecedented in this kingdom. Durus sermo, a harsh and bitter pill to be digested upon a sudden, and without some preparation.

What a fine India-rubber conscience Hacket, as well as his patron, must have had! Policy with innocency,' 'cunning with conscience,' lead up the dance to the tune of 'Tantara rogues all!'

Upon my word, I can scarcely conceive a greater difficulty than for an honest, warm-hearted man of principle of the present day so to discipline his mind by reflection on the circumstances and received moral system of the Stuarts' age (from Elizabeth to the death of Charles I), and its proper place in the spiral line of ascension, as to be able to regard the Duke of Buckingham as not a villain, and to resolve many of the acts of those Princes into passions, conscience-warped and hardened by half-truths and the secular creed of prudence, as being itself virtue instead of one of her handmaids, when interpreted by minds constitutionally and by their accidental circumstances imprudent and rash, yet fearful and suspicious; and with casuists and codes of casuistry as their conscience-leaders! One of the favorite works of Charles I was Sanderson de Juramento.

Ib. s. 200.

Wherefore he waives the strong and full defence he had made upon stopping of an original writ, and deprecates all offence by that maxim of the law which admits of a mischief rather than an inconvenience: which was as much as to say, that he thought it a far less evil to do the lady the probability of an injury (in her own name) than to suffer those two courts to clash together again.

All this is a tangle of sophisms. The assumption is, it is better to inflict a private wrong than a public one: we ought to wrong one rather than many. But even then, it is badly stated. The principle is true only where the tolerating of the private wrong is the only means of preventing a greater public wrong. But in this case it was the certainty of the wrong of one to avoid the chance of an inconvenience that might perchance be the occasion of wrong to many, and which inconvenience both easily might and should have been remedied by rightful measures, by mutual agreement between the Bishop and Chancellor, and by the King, or by an act of Parliament.

Ib. s. 203.

'Truly, Sir, this is my dark lantern, and I am not ashamed to inquire of a Dalilah to resolve a riddle; for in my studies of divinity I have gleaned up this maxim, licet uti alieno peccato; – though the Devil make her a sinner, I may make good use of her sin.' Prince, merrily, 'Do you deal in such ware?' 'In good faith, Sir,' says the Keeper, 'I never saw her face.'

And Hacket's evident admiration, and not merely approbation, of this base Jesuitry, – this divinity which had taught the Archbishop licere uti alieno peccato! But Charles himself was a student of such divinity, and yet (as rogues of higher rank comfort the pride of their conscience by despising inferior knaves) I suspect that the 'merrily' was the Sardonic mirth of bitter contempt; only, however, because he disliked Williams, who was simply a man of his age, his baseness being for us, not for his contemporaries, or even for his own mind. But the worst of all is the Archbishop's heartless disingenuousness and moon-like nodes towards his kind old master the King. How much of truth was there in the Spaniard's information respecting the intrigues of the Prince and the Duke of Buckingham? If none, if they were mere slanders, if the Prince had acted the filial part toward his father and King, and the Duke the faithful part towards his master and only too fond and affectionate benefactor, what more was needed than to expose the falsehoods? But if Williams knew that there was too great a mixture of truth in the charges, what a cowardly ingrate to his old friend to have thus curried favor with the rising sun by this base jugglery!

Ib. s. 209.

He was the topsail of the nobility, and in power and trust of offices far above all the nobility.

James I was no fool, and though through weakness of character an unwise master, yet not an unthinking statesman; and I still want a satisfactory solution of the accumulation of offices on Buckingham.

Ib. s. 212.

Prudent men will continue the oblations of their forefathers' piety.

The danger and mischief of going far back, and yet not half far enough! Thus Hacket refers to the piety of individuals our forefathers as the origin of Church property. Had he gone further back, and traced to the source, he would have found these partial benefactions to have been mere restitutions of rights co-original with their own property, and as a national reserve for the purposes of national existence – the condition sine qua non of the equity of their proprieties; for without civilization a people cannot be, or continue to be, a nation. But, alas! the ignorance of the essential distinction of a national clerisy, the Ecclesia, from the Christian Church. The Ecclesia has been an eclipse to the intellect of both Churchmen and Sectarians, even from Elizabeth to the present day, 1833.

Ib. s. 214.

And being threatened, his best mitigation was, that perhaps it was not safe for him to deny so great a lord; yet it was safest for his lordship to be denied. … The king heard the noise of these crashes, and was so pleased, that he thanked God, before many witnesses, that he had put the Keeper into that place: 'For,' says he, 'he that will not wrest justice for Buckingham's sake, whom I know he loves, will never be corrupted with money, which he never loved.'

Strange it must seem to us; yet it is evident that Hacket thought it necessary to make a mid something, half apology and half eulogy, for the Lord Keeper's timid half resistance to the insolence and iniquitous interference of the minion Duke. What a portrait of the times! But the dotage of the King in the maintenance of the man, whose insolence in wresting justice he himself admits! Yet how many points, both of the times and of the King's personal character, must be brought together before we can fairly solve the intensity of James's minionism, his kingly egotism, his weak kindheartedness, his vulgar coarseness of temper, his systematic jealousy of the ancient nobles, his timidity, and the like!

Ib.

'Sir,' says the Lord Keeper, 'will you be pleased to listen to me, taking in the Prince's consent, of which I make no doubt, and I will shew how you shall furnish the second and third brothers with preferments sufficient to maintain them, that shall cost you nothing. … If they fall to their studies, design them to the bishoprics of Durham and Winchester, when they become void. If that happen in their nonage, which is probable, appoint commendatories to discharge the duty for them for a laudable allowance, but gathering the fruits for the support of your grandchildren, till they come to virility to be consecrated,' &c.

Williams could not have been in earnest in this villanous counsel, but he knew his man. This conceit of dignifying dignities by the Simoniacal prostitution of them to blood-royal was just suited to James's fool-cunningness.

Part II. s. 74.

… To yield not only passive obedience (which is due) but active also, &c.

'Which is due.' What in the name of common sense can this mean, that is, speculatively? Practically, the meaning is clear enough, namely, that we should do what we can to escape hanging; but the distinction is for decorum, and so let it pass.

Ib. s. 75.

This is the venom of this new doctrine, that by making us the King's creatures, and in the state of minors or children, to take away all our property; which would leave us nothing of our own, and lead us (but that God hath given us just and gracious Princes) into slavery.

And yet this just and gracious Prince prompts, sanctions, supports, and openly rewards this envenomer, in flat contempt of both Houses of Parliament, – protects and prefers him and others of the same principles and professions on account of these professions! And the Parliament and nation were inexcusable, forsooth, in not trusting to Charles's assurances, or rather the assurances put in his mouth by Hyde, Falkland, and others, that he had always abhorred these principles.

Ib. s. 136.

When they saw he was not selfish (it is a word of their own new mint), &c.

Singular! From this passage it would seem that our so very common word 'selfish' is no older than the latter part of the reign of Charles I.

Ib. s. 137.

Their political aphorisms are far more dangerous, that His Majesty is not the highest power in his realms; that he hath not absolute sovereignty; and that a Parliament sitting is co-ordinate with him in it.

Hacket himself repeatedly implies as much; for would he deny that the King with the Lords and Commons is not more than the King without them? or that an act of Parliament is not more than a proclamation?

Ib. s.154.

What a venomous spirit is in that serpent Milton, that black-mouthed Zoilus, that blows his viper's breath upon those immortal devotions from the beginning to the end! This is he that wrote with all irreverence against the Fathers of our Church, and showed as little duty to the father that begat him: the same that wrote for the Pharisees, that it was lawful for a man to put away his wife for every cause, – and against Christ, for not allowing divorces: the same, O horrid! that defended the lawfulness of the greatest crime that ever was committed, to put our thrice-excellent King to death: a petty schoolboy scribbler, that durst grapple in such a cause with the prince of the learned men of his age, Salmasius,

, as Eunapius says of Ammonius, Plutarch's scholar in Egypt, the delight, the music of all knowledge, who would have scorned to drop a pen-full of ink against so base an adversary, but to maintain the honor of so good a King … Get thee behind me, Milton! Thou savourest not the things that be of truth and loyalty, but of pride, bitterness, and falsehood. There will be a time, though such a Shimei, a dead dog in Abishai's phrase, escape for a while … It is no marvel if this canker-worm Milton, &c.

A contemporary of Bishop Racket's designates Milton as the author of a profane and lascivious poem entitled Paradise Lost. The biographer of our divine bard ought to have made a collection of all such passages. A German writer of a Life of Salmasius acknowledges that Milton had the better in the conflict in these words: 'Hans (Jack) von Milton – not to be compared in learning and genius with the incomparable Salmasius, yet a shrewd and cunning lawyer,' &c. O sana posteritas!

Ib. s. 178.

Dare they not trust him that never broke with them? And I have heard his nearest servants say, that no man could ever challenge him of the least lie.

What! this after the publication of Charles's letters to the Queen! Did he not within a few months before his death enter into correspondence with, and sign contradictory offers to, three different parties, not meaning to keep any one of them; and at length did he not die with something very like a falsehood in his mouth in allowing himself to be represented as the author of the Icon Basilike?

Ib. s. 180.

If an under-sheriff had arrested Harry Martin for debt, and pleaded that he did not imprison his membership, but his Martinship, would the Committee for privileges be fobbed off with that distinction?

To make this good in analogy, we must suppose that Harry Martin had notoriously neglected all the duties, while he perverted and abused all the privileges, of membership: and then I answer, that the Committee of privileges would have done well and wisely in accepting the under-sheriff's distinction, and, out of respect for the membership, consigning the Martinship to the due course of law.

Ib.

That every soul should be subject to the higher powers. The higher power under which they lived was the mere power and will of Cæsar, bridled in by no law.

False, if meant de jure; and if de facto, the plural powers would apply to the Parliament far better than to the King, and to Cromwell as well as to Nero. Every even decently good Emperor professed himself the servant of the Roman Senate. The very term Imperator, as Gravina observes, implies it; for it expresses a delegated and instrumental power. Before the assumption of the Tribunitial character by Augustus, by which he became the representative of the majority of the people, – majestatem indutus est, – Senatus consulit, Populus jubet, imperent Consules, was the constitutional language.

Ib. s. 190.

Yet so much dissonancy there was between his tongue and his heart, that he triumphed in the murder of Cæsar, the only Roman that exceeded all their race in nobleness, and was next to Tully in eloquence.

There is something so shameless in this self-contradiction as of itself almost to extinguish the belief that the prelatic royalists were conscientious in their conclusions. For if the Senate of Rome were not a lawful power, what could be? And if Cæsar, the thrice perjured traitor, was neither perjured nor traitor, only because he by his Gaulish troops turned a republic into a monarchy, – with what face, under what pretext, could Hacket abuse 'Sultan Cromwell?'

Notes on Jeremy Taylor

I have not seen the late Bishop Heber's edition of Jeremy Taylor's Works; but I have been informed that he did little more than contribute the Life, and that in all else it is a mere London booksellers' job. This, if true, is greatly to be regretted. I know no writer whose works more require, I need not say deserve, the annotations, aye, and occasional animadversions, of a sound and learned divine. One thing is especially desirable in reference to that most important, because (with the exception perhaps of the Holy Living and Dying) the most popular, of Taylor's works, The Liberty of Prophesying; and this is a careful collation of the different editions, particularly of the first printed before the Restoration, and the last published in Taylor's lifetime, and after his promotion to the episcopal bench. Indeed, I regard this as so nearly concerning Taylor's character as a man, that if I find that it has not been done in Heber's edition, and if I find a first edition in the British Museum, or Sion College, or Dr. Williams's library, I will, God permitting, do it myself. There seems something cruel in giving the name, Anabaptist, to the English Anti-pædo-baptists; but still worse in connecting this most innocent opinion with the mad Jacobin ravings of the poor wretches who were called Anabaptists, in Munster, as if the latter had ever formed part of the Baptists' creeds. In short The Liberty of Prophesying is an admirable work, in many respects, and calculated to produce a much greater effect on the many than Milton's treatise on the same subject: on the other hand, Milton's is throughout unmixed truth; and the man who in reading the two does not feel the contrast between the single-mindedness of the one, and the strabismus in the other, is – in the road of preferment.

General Dedication of the Polemical Discourses 56

Vol. vii. p. ix.

And the breath of the people is like the voice of an exterminating angel, not so killing but so secret.

That is, in such wise. It would be well to note, after what time 'as' became the requisite correlative to 'so,' and even, as in this instance, the preferable substitute. We should have written 'as' in both places probably, but at all events in the latter, transplacing the sentences 'as secret though not so killing;' or 'not so killing, but quite as secret.' It is not generally true that Taylor's punctuation is arbitrary, or his periods reducible to the post-Revolutionary standard of length by turning some of his colons or semi-colons into full stops. There is a subtle yet just and systematic logic followed in his pointing, as often as it is permitted by the higher principle, because the proper and primary purpose, of our stops, and to which alone from their paucity they are adequate, – that I mean of enabling the reader to prepare and manage the proportions of his voice and breath. But for the true scheme of punctuation,

see the blank page over leaf which I will try to disblank into a prize of more worth than can be got at the E.O.'s and little goes of Lindley Murray57.

Ib. p. xv.

But the most complained that, in my ways to persuade a toleration, I helped some men too far, and that I armed the Anabaptists with swords instead of shields, with a power to offend us, besides the proper defensitives of their own … But wise men understand the thing and are satisfied. But because all men are not of equal strength; I did not only in a discourse on purpose demonstrate the true doctrine in that question, but I have now in this edition of that book answered all their pretensions, &c.

No; in the might of his genius he called up a spirit which he has in vain endeavored to lay, or exorcise from the conviction.

Ib. p. xvii.

For episcopacy relies not upon the authority of Fathers and Councils, but upon Scripture, upon the institution of Christ, or the institution of the Apostles, upon a universal tradition, and a universal practice, not upon the words and opinions of the doctors: it hath as great a testimony as Scripture itself hath, &c.

We must make allowance for the intoxication of recent triumph and final victory over a triumphing and victorious enemy; or who but would start back at the aweless temerity of this assertion? Not to mention the evasion; for who ever denied the historical fact, or the Scriptural occurrence of the word expressing the fact, namely, episcopi, episcopatus?? What was questioned by the opponents was,

1. Who and what these episcopi were; whether essentially different from the presbyter, or a presbyter by kind in his own ecclesia, and a president or chairman by accident in a synod of presbyters:

2. That whatever the episcopi of the Apostolic times were, yet were they prelates, lordly diocesans; were they such as the Bishops of the Church of England? Was there Scripture authority for Archbishops?