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
Quoere-spiritualiter papaveratorurn?
Ib.
His next onset was by Julian, and 'occidere presbyterium,' that was
his province. To shut up public schools, to force Christians to
ignorance, to impoverish and disgrace the clergy, to make them vile
and dishonorable, these are his arts; and he did the devil more
service in this fineness of undermining, than all the open battery of
ten great rams of persecution.
What felicity, what vivacity of expression! Many years ago Mr.
Mackintosh gave it as an instance of my perverted taste, that I had
seriously contended that in order to form a style worthy of Englishmen,
Milton and Taylor must be studied instead of Johnson, Gibbon, and
Junius; and now I see by his introductory Lecture given at Lincoln's
Inn, and just published, he is himself imitating Jeremy Taylor, or
rather copying his semi-colon punctuation, as closely as he can. Amusing
it is to observe, how by the time the modern imitators are at the
half-way of the long breathed period, the asthmatic thoughts drop down,
and the rest is,--words! I have always been an obstinate hoper: and even
this is a 'datum' and a symptom of hope to me, that a better, an
ancestral, spirit is forming and will appear in the rising generation.
Ib. p. 5.
First, because here is a concourse of times; for now after that these
times have been called the last times for 1600 years together, our
expectation of the great revelation is very near accomplishing.
Rather a whimsical consequence, that because a certain party had been
deceiving themselves for sixteen centuries they were likely to be in the
right at the beginning of the seventeenth. But indeed I question whether
in all Taylor's voluminous writings there are to be found three other
paragraphs so vague and misty-magnific as this is. It almost reminds me
of the "very cloudy and mighty alarming" in Foote.
S. i. p. 4.
If there be such a thing as the power of the keys, by Christ
concredited to his Church, for the binding and loosing delinquents and
penitents respectively on earth, then there is clearly a court erected
by Christ in his Church.
We may, without any heretical division of person, economically
distinguish our Lord's character as Jesus, and as Christ, so far that
during his sojourn on earth, from his baptism at least to his
crucifixion, he was in some respects his own Elias, bringing back the
then existing Church to the point at which the Prophets had placed it;
that is, distinguishing the 'ethica' from the 'politica,' what was
binding on the Jews as descendants of Abraham and inheritors of the
patriarchal faith from the statutes obligatory on them as members of the
Jewish state.
Jesus fulfilled the Law, which culminated in a pure religious morality
in principles, affections, and acts; and this he consolidated and
levelled into the ground-stead on which the new temple 'not made with
hands,' wherein Himself, even Christ the Lord, is the Shechinah, was to
rise and be raised.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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