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
to my conviction, the Scriptures must be read and tried, is no other
than the earnest, 'What shall I do to be saved?' with the inward
consciousness,--the gleam or flash let into the inner man through the
rent or cranny of the prison of sense, however produced by earthquake,
or by decay,--as the ground and antecedent of the question; and with a
predisposition towards, and an insight into, the 'a priori' probability
of the Christian dispensation as the necessary consequents. This is the
holy spirit in us praying to the Spirit, without which 'no man can say
that Jesus is the Lord:' a text which of itself seems to me sufficient
to cover the whole scheme of modern Unitarianism with confusion, when
compared with that other,--'I am the Lord (Jehovah): that is my name;
and my glory will I not give to another'. But in the Unitarian's sense
of 'Lord,' and on his scheme of evidence, it might with equal justice be
affirmed, that no man can say that Tiberius was the Emperor but by the
Holy Ghost.
Ib. s. xxix. p. 331.
And that this is for this reason called 'a gift and grace,' or issue
of the Spirit, is so evident and notorious, that the speaking of an
ordinary revealed truth, is called in Scripture, 'a speaking by the
spirit', 1 Cor. xii. 8. 'No man can say that Jesus is the Lord but by
the Holy Ghost'. For, though the world could not acknowledge Jesus for
the Lord without a revelation, yet now that we are taught this truth
by Scripture, and by the preaching of the Apostles, to which they were
enabled by the Holy Ghost, we need no revelation or enthusiasm to
confess this truth, which we are taught in our creeds and catechisms,
&c.
I do not, nay I dare not, hesitate to denounce this assertion as false
in fact and the paralysis of all effective Christianity. A greater
violence offered to Scripture words is scarcely conceivable. St. Paul
asserts that 'no man can.' Nay, says Taylor, every man that knows his
catechism can; but unless some six or seven individuals had said it by
the Holy Ghost some seventeen or eighteen hundred years ago, no man
could say so.
Ib. s. xxxii. p. 334.
And yet, because the Holy Ghost renewed their memory, improved their
understanding, supplied to some their want of human learning, and so
assisted them that they should not commit an error in fact or opinion,
neither in the narrative nor dogmatical parts, therefore they wrote by
the spirit.
And where is the proof?--and to what purpose, unless a distinct and
plain diagnostic were given of the divinities and the humanities which
Taylor himself expressly admits in the text of the Scriptures?
And even then what would it avail unless the interpreters and
translators, not to speak of the copyists in the first and second
centuries, were likewise assisted by inspiration?
As to the larger part of the Prophetic books, and the whole of the
Apocalypse, we must receive them as inspired truths, or reject them as
simple inventions or enthusiastic delusions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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