The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3

Worthy almost of Shakspeare!

Serm. XVII. Matt. xix. 17. p. 163.

Ib. E.

The words are part of a dialogue, of a conference, between Christ and a man who proposed a question to him; to whom Christ makes an answer by way of another question, Why callest thou me good? &c. In the words, and by occasion of them, we consider the text, the context, and the pretext; not as three equal parts of the building; but the context, as the situation and prospect of the house, the pretext, as the access and entrance into the house, and then the text itself, as the house itself, as the body of the building: in a word, in the text the words; in the context the occasion of the words; in the pretext the purpose, the disposition of him who gave the occasion.

What a happy example of elegant division of a subject! And so also the compendium of Christianity in the preceding paragraph (D). Our great divines were not ashamed of the learned discipline to which they had submitted their minds under Aristotle and Tully, but brought the purified products as sacrificial gifts to Christ. They baptized the logic and manly rhetoric of ancient Greece.

Ib. p. 164. A. B.

Excellent illustration of fragmentary morality, in which each man takes his choice of his virtues and vices.

Ib. D.

Men perish with whispering sins, nay, with silent sins, sins that never tell the conscience they are sins, as often as with crying sins.

Yea, I almost doubt whether the truth here so boldly asserted is not of more general necessity for ordinary congregations, than the denunciation of the large sins that cannot remain in incognito.

Ib. p. 165. A.

Venit procurrens, he came running. Nicodemus came not so, Nicodemus durst not avow his coming, and therefore he came creeping, and he came softly, and he came seldom, and he came by night.

Ah! but we trust in God that he did in fact come. The adhesion, the thankfulness, the love which arise and live after the having come, whether from spontaneous liking, or from a beckoning hope, or from a compelling good, are the truest criteria of the man's Christianity.

Ib. B.

When I have just reason to think my superiors would have it thus, this is music to my soul; when I hear them say they would have it thus, this is rhetoric to my soul; when I see their laws enjoin it to be thus, this is logic to my soul; but when I see them actually, really, clearly, constantly do thus, this is a demonstration to my soul, and demonstration is the powerfullest proof. The eloquence of inferiors is in words, the eloquence of superiors is in action.

A just representation, I doubt not, of the general feeling and principle at the time Donne wrote. Men regarded the gradations of society as God's ordinances, and had the elevation of a self-approving conscience in every feeling and exhibition of respect for those of ranks superior to their own. What a contrast with the present times! Is not the last sentence beautiful? "The eloquence of inferiors is in words, the eloquence of superiors is in action."

Ib. B. and C.

He came to Christ, he ran to him; and when he was come, as St. Mark relates it, he fell upon his knees to Christ. He stood not then Pharisaically upon his own legs, his own merits, though he had been a diligent observer of the commandments before, &c.

All this paragraph is an independent truth; but I doubt whether in his desire to make every particle exemplary, to draw some Christian moral from it, Donne has not injudiciously attributed, quasi per prolepsin, merits inconsistent with the finale of a wealthy would-be proselyte. At all events, a more natural and, perhaps, not less instructive interpretation might be made of the sundry movements of this religiously earnest and zealous admirer of Christ, and worshipper of Mammon. O, I have myself known such!

Ib. D.

He was no ignorant man, and yet he acknowledged that he had somewhat more to learn of Christ than he knew yet. Blessed are they that inanimate all their knowledge, consummate all in Christ Jesus, &c.

The whole paragraph is pure gold. Without being aware of this passage in Donne, I expressed the same conviction, or rather declared the same experience, in the appendix44 to the Statesman's Manual. O! if only one day in a week, Christians would consent to have the Bible as the only book, and their minister's labour to make them find all substantial good of all other books in their Bibles!

Ib. E.

I remember one of the Panegyrics celebrates and magnifies one of the Roman emperors for this, that he would marry when he was young; that he would so soon confine and limit his pleasures, so soon determine his affections in one person.

It is surely some proof of the moral effect which Christianity has produced, that in all Protestant countries, at least, a writer would be ashamed to assign this as a ground of panegyric; as if promiscuous intercourse with those of the other sex had been a natural good, a privilege, which there was a great merit in foregoing! O! what do not women owe to Christianity! As Christians only it is that they do, or ordinarily can, cease to be things for men, instead of co-persons in one spiritual union.

Ib. p. 166. A.

But such is often the corrupt inordinateness of greatness, that it only carries them so much beyond other men, but not so much nearer to God.

Like a balloon, away from earth, but not a whit nearer the arch of heaven. There is a praiseworthy relativeness and life in the morality of our best old divines. It is not a cold law in brass or stone; but "this I may and should think of my neighbour, this of a great man," &c.

Ib. p. 167. A.

Christ was pleased to redeem this man from this error, and bring him to know truly what he was, that he was God. Christ therefore doth not rebuke this man, by any denying that he himself was good; for Christ doth assume that addition to himself, I am the good shepherd. Neither doth God forbid that those good parts which are in men should be celebrated with condign praise. We see that God, as soon as he saw that any thing was good, he said so, he uttered it, he declared it, first of the light, and then of other creatures. God would be no author, no example of smothering the due praise of good actions. For surely that man hath no zeal to goodness in himself, that affords no praise to goodness in other men.

Very fine. But I think another – not, however, a different – view might be taken respecting our Lord's intention in these words. The young noble, who came to him, had many praiseworthy traits of character; but he failed in the ultimate end and aim. What ought only to have been valued by him as means, was loved, and had a worth given to it, as an end in itself. Our Lord, who knew the hearts of men, instantly in the first words applies himself to this, and takes the occasion of an ordinary phrase of courtesy addressed to himself, to make the young man aware of the difference between a mere relative good and that which is absolutely good; that which may be called good, when regarded as a mean to good, but which must not be mistaken for, or confounded with, that which is good, and itself the end.

Ib. B. C. D.

All excellent, and D. most so. Thus, thus our old divines showed the depth of their love and appreciation of the Scriptures, and thus led their congregations to feel and see the same. Here is Donne's authority (Deus non est ens, &c.) for what I have so earnestly endeavored to show, that Deus est ens super ens, the ground of all being, but therein likewise absolute Being, in that he is the eternal self-affirmant, the I Am in that I Am; and that the key of this mystery is given to us in the pure idea of the will, as the alone Causa Sui.

O! compare this manhood of our Church divinity with the feeble dotage of the Paleyan school, the 'natural' theology, or watchmaking scheme, that knows nothing of the maker but what can be proved out of the watch, the unknown nominative case of the verb impersonal fit – et natura est; the 'it,' in short, in 'it rains,' 'it snows,' 'it is cold,' and the like. When, after reading the biographies of Walton and his contemporaries, I reflect on the crowded congregations, on the thousands, who with intense interest came to their hour and two hour long sermons, I cannot but doubt the fact of any true progression, moral or intellectual, in the mind of the many. The tone, the matter, the anticipated sympathies in the sermons of an age form the best moral criterion of the character of that age.

Ib. E.

His name of Jehova we admire with a reverence.

Say, rather, Jehova, his name. It is not so properly a name of God, as God the Name, – God's name and God.

Ib. p. 169. A.

Land, and money, and honour must be called goods, though but of fortune, &c.

We should distinguish between the conditions of our possessing goods and the goods themselves. Health, for instance, is ordinarily a condition of that working and rejoicing for and in God, which are goods in the end, and of themselves. Health, competent fortune, and the like are good as the negations of the preventives of good; as clear glass is good in relation to the light, which it does not exclude. Health and ease without the love of God are plate glass in the darkness.

Ib. p. 170.

Much of this page consists of play on words; as, that which is useful as rain, and that which is of use as rain on a garden after drouth. There is also much sophistry in it. Pain is not necessarily an ultimate evil. As the mean of ultimate good, it may be a relative good; but surely that which makes pain, anguish, heaviness necessary in order to good, must be evil. And so the Scripture determines. They are the wages of sin; but God's infinite mercy raises them into sacraments, means of grace. Sin is the only absolute evil; God the only absolute good. But as myriads of things are good relatively through participation of God, so are many things evil as the fruits of evil. What is the apostasy, or fall of spirits? That that which from the essential perfection of the Absolute Good could not but be possible, that is, have a potential being, but never ought to have been actual, did nevertheless strive to be actual? – But this involved an impossibility; and it actualized only its own potentiality.

What is the consequence of the apostasy? That no philosophy is possible of man and nature but by assuming at once a zenith and a nadir, God and Hades; and an ascension from the one through and with a condescension from the other; that is, redemption by prevenient and then auxiliary grace.

Ib. p. 171. B.

So says St. Augustine, Audeo dicere, though it be boldly said, yet I must say it, utile esse cadere in aliquod manifestum peccatum, &c.

No doubt, a sound sense may be forced into these words: but why use words, into which a sound sense must be forced? Besides, the subject is too deep and too subtle for a sermon. In the two following paragraphs, especially, Dr. Donne is too deep, and not deep enough. He treads waters, and dangerous waters. N.B. The Familists.

Serm. XVIII. Acts, ii. 36. p. 175.

Ib. B.

I would paraphrase, or rather lead the way to this text, something as follows:

Truth is a common interest; it is every man's duty to convey it to his brother, if only it be a truth that concerns or may profit him, and he be competent to receive it. For we are not bound to say the truth, where we know that we cannot convey it, but very probably may impart a falsehood instead; no falsehoods being more dangerous than truths misunderstood, nay, the most mischievous errors on record having been half-truths taken as the whole.

But let it be supposed that the matter to be communicated is a fact of general concernment, a truth of deep and universal interest, a momentous truth involved in a most awe-striking fact, which all responsible creatures are competent to understand, and of which no man can safely remain in ignorance. Now this is the case with the matter, on which I am about to speak; therefore let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ!

Ib. p. 176. A. B. C.

True Christian love not only permits, but enjoins, courtesy. God himself, says Donne, gave us the example.

Ib. p. 177. A. C. E.

All excellent, and E. of deeper worth. All that is wanting here is to determine the true sense of 'knowing God,' – that sense in which it is revealed that to know God is life ever-lasting.

Ib p. 178. A.

Now the universality of this mercy hath God enlarged and extended very far, in that he proposes it even to our knowledge; sciant, let all know it. It is not only credant, let all believe it; for the infusing of faith is not in our power; but God hath put it in our power to satisfy their reason, &c.

A question is here affirmatively started of highest importance and of deepest interest, that is, faith so distinguished from reason, credat from sciat, that the former is an infused grace 'not in our power;' the latter an inherent quality or faculty, on which we are able to calculate as man with man. I know not what to say to this. Faith seems to me the coadunation of the individual will with the reason, enforcing adherence alike of thought, act, and affection to the Universal Will, whether revealed in the conscience, or by the light of reason, however the same may contravene, or apparently contradict, the will and mind of the flesh, the presumed experience of the senses and of the understanding, as the faculty, or intelligential yet animal instinct, by which we generalize the notices of the senses, and substantiate their spectra or phænomena. In this sense, therefore, and in this only, I agree with Donne. No man cometh to Christ unless the Father lead him. The corrupt will cannot, without prevenient as well as auxiliary grace, be unitively subordinated to the reason, and again, without this union of the moral will, the reason itself is latent. Nevertheless, I see no advantage in not saying the 'will,' or in substituting the term 'faith' for it. But the sad non-distinction of the reason and the understanding throughout Donne, and the confusion of ideas and conceptions under the same term, painfully inturbidates his theology. Till this distinction of the

and the

be seen, nothing can be seen aright. Till this great truth be mastered, and with the sight that is insight, other truths may casually take possession of the mind, but the mind cannot possess them. If you know not this, you know nothing; for if you know not the diversity of reason from the understanding, you know not reason; and reason alone is knowledge.

All that follows in B. is admirable, worthy of a divine of the Church of England, the National and the Christian, and indeed proves that Donne was at least possessed by the truth which I have always labored to enforce, namely, that faith is the apotheosis of the reason in man, the complement of reason, the will in the form of the reason. As the basin-water to the fountain shaft, such is will to reason in faith. The whole will shapes itself in the image of God wherein it had been created, and shoots on high toward, and in the glories of, Heaven!

Ib. D.

If we could have been in Paradise, and seen God take a clod of red earth, and make that wretched clod of contemptible earth such a body as should be fit to receive his breath, &c.

A sort of pun on the Hebrew word Adam or red earth, common in Donne's age, but unworthy of Donne, who was worthy to have seen deeper into the Scriptural sense of the 'ground,' the Hades, the multeity, the many absque numero el infra numerum, that which is below, as God is that which transcends, intellect.

Ib. p. 179. B.

We place in the School, for the most part, the infinite merit of Christ Jesus … rather in pacto than in persona, rather that this contract was thus made between the Father and the Son, than that whatsoever that person, thus consisting of God and Man, should do, should, only in respect of the person, be of an infinite value and extension to that purpose, &c.

O, this is sad misty divinity! far too scholastical for the pulpit, far too vague and unphilosophic for the study.

Ib. p. 180. A.

Quis nisi infidelis negaverit apud inferos fuisse Christum? says St. Augustine.

Where?45 Pearson expressly asserts and proves that the clause was in none of the ancient creeds or confessions. And even now the sense of these words, He descended into hell, is in no Reformed Church determined as an article of faith.

Ib.p.182. D.

Audacter dicam, says St. Hierome, cum omnia posset Deus, suscitare virginem post ruinam non potest.

One instance among hundreds of the wantonness of phrase and fancy in the Fathers. What did Jerome mean? quod Deus membranam hymenis luniformem reproducere nequit? No; that were too absurd. What then? – that God cannot make what has been not to have been? Well then, why not say that, since that is all you can mean?

Serm. XIX. Rev. xx.6.p.183.

The exposition of the text in this sermon is a lively instance how much excellent good sense a wise man, like Donne, can bring forth on a passage which he does not understand. For to say that it may mean either X, or Y, or Z, is to confess he knows not what it means; but that if it be X. then, &c.; if Y. then, &c.; and lastly if it be Z. then, &c.; that is to say, that he understands X, Y, and Z; but does not understand the text itself.

Ib. p. 185. B.

Seas of blood and yet but brooks, tuns of blood and yet but basons, compared with the sacrifices, the sacrifices of the blood of men, in the persecutions of the primitive Church. For every ox of the Jew, the Christian spent a man; and for every sheep and lamb, a mother and her child, &c.

Whoo! Had the other nine so called persecutions been equal to the tenth, that of Diocletian, Donne's assertion here would be extravagant.

Serra. XXXIV. Rom. viii.16.p.332.

Ib. p. 335. A.

But by what manner comes He from them? By proceeding.

If this mystery be considered as words, or rather sounds vibrating on some certain ears, to which the belief of the hearers assigned a supernatural cause, well and good! What else can be said? Such were the sounds: what their meaning is, we know not; but such sounds not being in the ordinary course of nature, we of course attribute them to something extra-natural. But if God made man in his own image, therein as in a mirror, misty no doubt at best, and now cracked by peculiar and in-herited defects – yet still our only mirror – to contemplate all we can of God, this word 'proceeding' may admit of an easy sense.

For if a man first used it to express as well as he could a notion found in himself as man in genere, we have to look into ourselves, and there we shall find that two facts of vital intelligence may be conceived; the first, a necessary and eternal outgoing of intelligence (

) from being

, with the will as an accompaniment, but not from it as a cause, – in order, though not necessarily in time, precedent. This is true filiation. The second is an act of the will and the reason, in their purity strict identities, and therefore not begotten or filiated, but proceeding from intelligent essence and essential intelligence combining in the act, necessarily and coeternally.

For the coexistence of absolute spontaneity with absolute necessity is involved in the very idea of God, one of whose intellectual definitions is, the synthesis, generative ad extra, et annihilative, etsi inclusive, quoad se, of all conceivable antitheses; even as the best moral definition – (and, O! how much more godlike to us in this state of antithetic intellect is the moral beyond the intellectual!) – is, God is love. This is to us the high prerogative of the moral, that all its dictates immediately reveal the truths of intelligence, whereas the strictly intellectual only by more distant and cold deductions carries us towards the moral. For what is love? Union with the desire of union. God therefore is the cohesion and the oneness of all things; and dark and dim is that system of ethics, which does not take oneness as the root of all virtue. Being, Mind, Love in action, are ideas distinguishable though not divisible; but Will is incapable of distinction or division: it is equally implied in vital action, in essential intelligence, and in effluent love or holy action.

Now will is the true principle of identity, of selfness, even in our common language. The will, therefore, being indistinguishably one, but the possessive powers triply distinguishable, do perforce involve the notion expressed by a Trinity of three Persons and one God. There are three Persons eternally coexisting, in whom the one Will is totally all in each; the truth of which mystery we may know in our own minds, but can understand by no analogy. For "the wind ministrant to divers at the same moment" – thence, to aid the fancy – borrows or rather steals from the mind the idea of 'total in omni parte,' which alone furnishes the analogy; but that both it and by it a myriad of other material images do enwrap themselves in hac veste non sua, and would be even no objects of conception if they did not; yea, that even the very words, 'conception,' 'comprehension,' and all in all languages that answer to them, suppose this trans-impression from the mind, is an argument better than all analogy.

Serm. XXXV. Mat. xii. 31. p. 341.

Ib. p. 342. B.

First then, for the first term, sin, we use to ask in the school, whether any action of man's can have rationem demeriti; whether it can be said to offend God, or to deserve ill of God? for whatsoever does so, must have some proportion with God.

This appears to me to furnish an interesting example of the bad consequences in reasoning, as well as in morals, of the cui bono? cui malo? system of ethics, – that system which places the good and evil of actions in their painful or pleasurable effects on the sensuous or passive nature of sentient beings, not in the will, the pure act itself. For, according to this system, God must be either a passible and dependent being, – that is, not God, – or else he must have no interest, arid therefore no motive or impulse, to reward virtue or punish vice. The veil which the Epicureans threw over their atheism was itself an implicit atheism. Nay, the world itself could not have existed; and as it does exist, the origin of evil (for if evil means no more than pain in genere, evil has a true being in the order of things) is not only a difficulty of impossible solution, but is a fact necessarily implying the non-existence of an omnipotent and infinite goodness, – that is, of God. For to say that I believe in a God, but not that he is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good, is as mere a contradiction in terms as to say, I believe in a circle, but not that all the rays from its centre to its circumference are equal.

I cannot read the profound truth so clearly expressed by Donne in the next paragraph – "it does not only want that rectitude, but it should have that rectitude, and therefore hath a sinful want" – without an uneasy wonder at its incongruity with the preceding dogmas.

Serm. LXXI. Mat. iv. 18, 19, 20. p. 717.

Ib. p.725. A.

But still consider, that they did but leave their nets, they did not burn them. And consider, too, that they left but nets, those things which might entangle them, and retard them in their following of Christ, &c.

An excellent paragraph grounded on a mere pun. Such was the taste of the age; and it is an awful joy to observe, that not great learning, great wit, great talent, not even (as far as without great virtue that can be) great genius, were effectual to preserve the man from the contagion, but only the deep and wise enthusiasm of moral feeling. Compare in this light Donne's theological prose even with that of the honest Knox; and, above all, compare Cowley with Milton.