The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
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. [1]
Vol. vii. p. ix.
And the breath of the people is like the voice of an exterminating
angel, not so killing but so secret.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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