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The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
2. In process of time, good men and of active minds were shocked at this; but, instead of passing back to the incomprehensible fact, with a vault over the unhappy idol forged for its comprehension, they identified the two in name; and while in truth their arguments applied only to a false theory, they rejected the fact for the sake of the mis-solution, and fell into far worse errors. For the mistaken theorist had built upon a foundation, though but a superstructure of chaff and straw; but the opponents built on nothing. Aghast at the superstructure, these latter ran away from that which is the sole foundation of all human religion.
3. Then came the persecutions of the Arminians in Holland; then the struggle in England against the Arminian Laud and all his party – terrible persecutors in their turn of the Calvinists and systematic divines; then the Civil War and the persecutions of the Church by the Puritans in their turn; and just in this state of heated feelings did Taylor write these Works, which contain dogmas subversive of true Christian faith, namely, his Unum Necessarium, or Doctrine and Practice of Repentance, which reduces the cross of Christ to nothing, especially in the seventh chapter of the same, and the after defences of it in his Letters on Original Sin to a Lady, and to the Bishop of Rochester; and the Liberty of Prophesying, which, putting toleration on a false ground, has left no ground at all for right or wrong in matters of Christian faith.
In the marginal notes, which I have written in these several treatises on Repentance, I appear to myself to have demonstrated that Taylor's system has no one advantage over the Lutheran in respect of God's attributes; that it is bona fide Pelagianism (though he denies it; for let him define that grace which Pelagius would not accept, because incompatible with free will and merit, and profess his belief in it thus defined, and every one of his arguments against absolute decrees tell against himself); and lastly, that its inevitable logical consequences are Socinianism and quæ sequuntur. In Tillotson the face of Arminianism looked out fuller, and Christianity is represented as a mere arbitrary contrivance of God, yet one without reason. Let not the surpassing eloquence of Taylor dazzle you, nor his scholastic retiary versatility of logic illaqueate your good sense. Above all do not dwell too much on the apparent absurdity or horror of the dogma he opposes, but examine what he puts in its place, and receive candidly the few hints which I have admarginated for your assistance, being in the love of truth and of Christ,
Your Brother.
I have omitted one remark, probably from over fullness of intention to have inserted it.
1. The good man and eloquent expresses his conjectural belief that, if Adam had not fallen, Christ would still have been necessary, though not perhaps by Incarnation. Now, in the first place, this is only a play thought of himself, and Scotus, and perhaps two or three others in the Schools; no article of faith or of general presumption; consequently it has little serious effect even on the guessers themselves. In the next place, if it were granted, yet it would be a necessity wholly ex parte Dei, not at all ex parte Hominis: – for what does it amount to but this – that God having destined a creature for two states, the earthly rational, and the heavenly spiritual, and having chosen to give him, in the first instance, faculties sufficient only for the first state, must afterwards superinduce those sufficient for the second state, or else God would at once and the same time destine and not destine. This therefore is a mere fancy, a theory, but not a binding religion; no covenant.
2. But the Incarnation, even after the fall of Adam, he clearly makes to be specifically of no necessity. It was only not to take away peevishly the estate of grace from the poor innocent children, because of the father, – according to the good Bishop, a poor ignorant, who before he ate the apple of knowledge did not know what right and wrong was; and Christ's Incarnation would have been no more necessary then than it was before, according to Taylor's belief. Here again the Incarnation is wholly a contrivance ex parte Dei, and no way resulting from any default of man.
3. Consequently Taylor neither saw nor admitted any a priori necessity of the Incarnation from the nature of man, and which, being felt by man in his own nature, is itself the greatest of proofs for the admission of it, and the strongest pre-disposing cause of the admission of all proof positive. Not having this, he was to seek ab extra for proofs in facts, in historical evidence in the world of sense. The same causes produce the same effects. Hence Grotius, Taylor, and Baxter (then, as appears in his Life, in a state of uneasy doubt), were the first three writers of evidences of the Christian religion, such as have been since followed up by hundreds, – nine-tenths of them Socinians or Semi-Socinians, and which, taking head and tail, I call the Grotio-Paleyan way.
4. Hence the good man was ever craving for some morsel out of the almsbasket of all external events, in order to prove to himself his own immortality; and, with grief and shame I tell it, became evidence and authority in Irish stories of ghosts, and apparitions, and witches. Let those who are astonished refer to Glanville on Witches, and they will be more astonished still. The fact now stated at once explains and justifies my anxiety in detecting the errors of this great and excellent genius at their fountain head, – the question of Original Sin: for how important must that error be which ended in bringing Bishop Jeremy Taylor forward as an examiner, judge, and witness in an Irish apparition case!
Ib. s. xxxviii. p. 278.
Although God exacts not an impossible law under eternal and insufferable pains, yet he imposes great holiness in unlimited and indefinite measures, with a design to give excellent proportions of reward answerable to the greatness of our endeavour. Hell is not the end of them that fail in the greatest measures of perfection; but great degrees of heaven shall be their portion who do all that they can always, and offend in the fewest instances.
It is not to be denied that one if not more of the parables appears to sanction this, but the same parables would by consequence seem to favour a state of Purgatory. From John, Paul, and the philosophy of the doctrine, I should gather a different faith, and find a sanction for this too in one of the parables, namely, that of the labourer at the eleventh hour. Heaven, bliss, union with God through Christ, do not seem to me comparative terms, or conceptions susceptible of degree. But it is a difficult question. The first Fathers of the Reformation, and the early Fathers of the primitive Church, present different systems, and in a very different spirit.
Ib. p. 324-328.
Descriptions of repentance taken from the Holy Scriptures.
This is a beautiful collection of texts. Still the pious but unconverted Jew (a Moses Mendelsohn, for instance), has a right to ask, What then did Christ teach or do, such and of such additional moment as to be rightfully entitled the founder of a new law, instead of being, like Isaiah and others, an enforcer and explainer of the old? If Christianity, or the opus operans of Redemption, was synchronous with the Fall of man, then the same answer must be returned to the passages here given from the Old Testament as to those from the New; namely, that Sanctification is the result of Redemption, not its efficient cause or previous condition. Assuredly
Ib. p. 330.
Who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace.
By this passage we must interpret the words "sin wilfully," in reference to an unpardonable sin, in the preceding sentence.
Of the moral capacity of sinful habits.
Ib. s. ii. p. 432. Probably from the holiness of his own life, Taylor has but just fluttered about a bad habit, not fully described it. He has omitted, or rather described contradictorily, the case of those with whom the objections to sin are all strengthened, the dismal consequences more glaring and always present to them as an avenging fury, the sin loathed, detested, hated; and yet, spite of all this, nay, the more for all this, perpetrated. Both lust and intemperance would furnish too many instances of these most miserable victims.
Ib. s. xxxix. p. 456.
For every vicious habit being radicated in the will, and being a strong love, inclination and adhesion to sin, unless the natural being of this love be taken off, the enmity against God remains.
But the most important question is as to those vicious habits in which there is no love to sin, but only a dread and recoiling from intolerable pain, as in the case of the miserable drunkard! I trust that these epileptic agonies are rather the punishments than the augumenters of his guilt. The annihilation of the wicked is a fearful thought, yet it would solve many difficulties both in natural religion and in Scripture. And Taylor in his Arminian dread of Calvinism is always too shy of this "grace of God:" he never denies, yet never admits, it any separate operancy per se. And this, I fancy, is the true distinction of Arminianisrn and Calvinism in their moral effects. Arminianism is cruel to individuals, for fear of damaging the race by false hopes and improper confidences; while Calvinism is horrible for the race, but full of consolation to the suffering individual.
The next section is, taken together, one of the many instances that confirm my opinion that Calvinism (Archbishop Leighton's for example), compared with Taylor's Arminianism, is as the lamb in the wolf's skin to the wolf in the lamb's skin: the one is cruel in the phrases, the other in the doctrine.
Ib. s. lvi. p. 469.
But if a single act of contrition cannot procure pardon of sins that are habitual, then a wicked man that returns not till it be too late to root out vicious habits, must despair of salvation. I answer, &c.
Would not Taylor's purposes have been sufficiently attained by pressing the contrast between attrition and contrition with faith, and the utter improbability that the latter (which alone can be efficient), shall be vouchsafed to a sinner who has continued in his sins in the flattery of a death-bed repentance; a blasphemy that seems too near that against the Holy Ghost? My objection to Taylor is, that he seems to reduce the death of Christ almost to a cypher; a contrivance rather to reconcile the attributes of God, than an act of infinite love to save sinners. But the truth is, that this is the peccant part of Arminianism, and Tillotson is yet more open than Taylor. Forbid me, common goodness, that I should think Tillotson conscious of Socinianism! but that his tenets involved it, I more than suspect. See his Discourses on Transubstantiation, and those near it in the same volume.
Ib. lxiv. p. 478.
Now there is no peradventure, but new-converted persons, heathens newly giving up their names to Christ and being baptized, if they die in an hour, and were baptized half an hour after they believe in Christ, are heirs of salvation.
This granted, I should little doubt of confuting all the foregoing, as far as I object to it. I would rather be durus pater infantum, like Austin, than durus pater ægrotantium. Taylor considers all Christians who are so called.
Ib. s. lxvi. p. 481.
All this paragraph is as just as it is fine and lively, but far from confirming Taylor's doctrine. The case is as between one individual and a general rule. I know God's mercy and Christ's merits; but whether your heart has true faith in them, I cannot know. Be it unto thee according to thy faith, said Christ: so should his ministers say. All these passages, however, are utterly irreconcilable with the Roman doctrine, that the priest's absolution is operant, and not simply declarative. As to the decisions of Paulinus and Asterius, it is to be feared that they had the mortmain bequests and compensations in view more than the words of St. Paul, or the manifest purposes of redemption by faith. Yea, Taylor himself has his redime peccata eleemosynis.
By the by, I know of few subjects that have been more handled and less rationally treated than this of alms-giving. Every thing a rich man purchases beyond absolute necessaries, ought to be purchased in the spirit of alms, that is, as the most truly beneficial way of disparsing that wealth, of which he is the steward, not owner.
Ib.
St. Paul taught us this secret, that sins are properly made habitual upon the stock of impunity. Sin taking occasion by the law wrought in me all concupiscence;
This is a very ingenious and very plausible exposition of St. Paul's words; but surely, surely, it is not the right one. I find both the meaning and the truth of the Apostle's words in the vividness and consequently attractive and ad-(or in-)sorbent power given to an image or thought by the sense of its danger, by the consciousness of its being forbidden, – which, in an unregenerate and unassisted will, struggling with, or even exciting, the ever ready inclination of corrupted nature, produces a perplexity and confusion which again increase the person's susceptibility of the soliciting image or fancy so intensified. Guilt and despair add a stimulus and sting to lust. See Iago in Shakspeare.
Ib. s. xi. p. 500. It was not well with thee when thou didst first enter into the suburbs of hell by single actions of sin, &c. Aye! this is excellent indeed, and worthy of a guardian angel of the Church. When Jeremy Taylor escapes from the Mononomian Romaism, which netted him in his too eager recoil from the Antinomian boar, brought forth and foddered (as he imagined) in Calvin's stye; when from this wiry net he escapes into the devotional and the dietetic, as into a green meadow-land, with springs, and rivulets, and sheltering groves, where he leads his flock like a shepherd; – then it is that he is most himself, – then only he is all himself, the whole Jeremy Taylor; or if there be one other subject graced by the same total heautophany, it is in the pouring forth of his profound common sense on the ways and weaknesses of men and conflicting sects, as for instance, in the admirable birth, parentage, growth, and consummation of a religious controversy in his Dissuasive from Popery.
Ib. s. xiii. p. 502.
Let every old man that repents of the sins of his evil life be very diligent in the search of the particulars; that by drawing them into a heap, and spreading them before his eyes, he may be mightily ashamed at their number and burthen.
I dare not condemn, but I am doubtful of this as a universal rule. If there be a true hatred of sin, the precious time and the spiritual nisus will, I think, be more profitably employed in enkindling meditation on holiness, and thirstings after the mind of Christ.
Ib. ss. xxxi-xxxv. pp..517, 518.
Scarce a word in all this but for form's sake concerning the merits and sacrifice of the Incarnate God! Surely Luther would not have given this advice to a dying penitent, but have directed him rather to employ his little time in agony of prayer to Christ, or in earnest meditations on the astounding mystery of his death. In Taylor man is to do every thing.
Vol. IX. s. xi. p. 5.
For God was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue that punishment even to the lesser sins and sinners, which he only had first threatened to Adam; and so Adam brought it upon them.
And such a phrase as this used by a man in a refutation of Original Sin, on the ground of its incompatibility with God's attributes! "Exasperated" with those whom Taylor declares to have been innocent and most unfortunate, the two things that most conciliate love and pity!
Ib. p. 6.
If the sequel of the paragraph, comparing God to David in one of his worst actions, be not blasphemy, the reason is that the good man meant it not as such. In facto est, sed non in agents.
Ib. ss. xvi. xvii. pp. 8, 9.
For the further explication of which it is observable that the word 'sinner' and 'sin' in Scripture is used for any person, that hath a fault or a legal impurky, a debt, a vitiosity, defect, or imposition, &c.
These facts, instead of explaining away Original Sin, are unintelligible, nay, absurd and immoral, except as shadows, types, and symbols of it, and of the Redemption from it. Observe, too, that Taylor never dares explain what he means by "Adam was mortal of himself and we are mortal from him:" he did not dare affirm that soul and body are alike material and perishable, even as the lute and the potentiality of music in the lute. And yet if he believed the contrary, then, in his construction of the doctrine of Original Sin, what has Christ done? St. John died in the same sense as Abel died: and in the sense of the Church of England neither died, but only slept in the Lord.
This same system forced Taylor into the same error which Warburton afterwards dressed up with such trappings and trammels of erudition, in direct contempt of the plain meaning of the Church's article; and he takes it for granted, in many places, that the Jews under Moses knew only of temporal life and the death of the body. Lastly, he greatly degrades the mind of man by causelessly representing death as an evil in itself, which, if it be considered as a crisis, or phenomenal change, incident to a progressive being, ought as little to be thought so, as the casting of the caterpillar's skin to make room for the wings of the butterfly. It is the unveiling of the Psyche.
I do not affirm this as an article of Christian faith; but I say that no candid writer ought to hide himself in double meanings. Either he should have used the term 'death' (ex Adamo) as loss of body, or as change of mode of being and of its circumstances; and again this latter as either evil for all, or as evil or good according to the moral habits of each individual.
Observe, however, once for all, that I do not pretend to account for Original Sin. I declare it to be an unaccountable fact. How can we explain a species, when we are wholly in the dark as to the genus? Now guilt itself, as well as all other immediate facts of free will, is absolutely inexplicable; of course original guilt. If we will perversely confound the intelligible with the sensible world, misapply the logic appropriate to phænomena and the categories, or forms, which are empty except as substantialized in facts of experience, in order to use them as the Procrustes' bed of faith respecting noumena: if in short, we will strive to understand that of which we can only know
Ib. s. xxiii. p. 12.
It could not make us heirs of damnation. This I shall the less need to insist upon, because, of itself, it seems so horrid to impute to the goodness and justice of God to be author of so great calamity to innocents, &c.
Never was there a more hazardous way of reasoning, or rather of placing human ignorance in the judgment seat over God's wisdom. The whole might be closely parodied in support of Atheism: rather, this is but a paraphrase of the old atheistic arguments. Either God could not, or would not, prevent the moral and physical evils of the universe, including the everlasting anguish of myriads of millions: therefore he is either not all-powerful or not all-good: but a being deficient in power or goodness is not God: – Ergo, &c.
Ib. s. xxv. p. 13.
I deny not but all persons naturally are so, that they cannot arrive at heaven; but unless some other principle be put into them, or some great grace done for them, must for ever stand separate from seeing the face of God.
But this is but accidentally occasioned by the sin of Adam. Just so might I say, that without the great grace of air done for them no living beings could live. If it mean more, pray where was the grace in creating a being, who without an especial grace must pass into utter misery? If Taylor reply; but the grace was added in Christ: why so say the Calvinists. According to Taylor there is no fall of man; but only an act and punishment of a man, which punishment consisted in his living in the kitchen garden, instead of the flower garden and orchard: and Cain was as likely to have murdered Abel before, as after, the eating of the forbidden fruit. But the very name of the fruit confutes Taylor. Adam altered his nature by it. Cain did not. What Adam did, I doubt not, we all do. Time is not with things of spirit.
Ib. s. xxvii. p. 14.
Is hell so easy a pain, or are the souls of children of so cheap, so contemptible a price, that God should so easily throw them into hell?
This is an argument against the sine qua non of Baptism, not against Original Sin.
Ib. s. lxvii. p. 49.
Origen said enough to be mistaken in the question.
Origen's words ought to have prevented all mistake, for he plainly enough overthrows the phantom of hereditary guilt; and as to guilt from a corruption of nature, it is just such guilt as the carnivorous appetites of a weaned lion, or the instinct of a brood of ducklings to run to water. What then is it? It is an evil, and therefore seated in the will; common to all men, the beginning of which no man can determine in himself or in others. How comes this? It is a mystery, as the will itself. Deeds are in time and space, therefore have a beginning. Pure action, that is, the will, is a noumenon, and irreferable to time. Thus Origen calls it neither hereditary nor original, but universal sin. The curse of Adam is common to all men, because what Adam did, we all do: and thus of Eve. You may substitute any woman in her place, and the same words apply. This is the true solution of this unfortunate question. The
