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
For the offices of prose we find but small mention of them in the very
first time, save only in general terms, and that such there were, and
that St. James, St. Mark, St. Peter, and others of the Apostles and
Apostolical men, made Liturgies; and if these which we have at this
day were not theirs, yet they make probation that these Apostles left
others, or else they were impudent people that prefixed their names so
early, and the Churches were very incurious to swallow such a bole, if
no pretension could have been reasonably made for their justification.
A rash and dangerous argument. 1810.
A many-edged weapon, which might too readily be turned against the
common faith by the common enemy. For if these Liturgies were rightly
attributed to St. James, St. Mark, St. Peter, and others of the Apostles
and Apostolical men, how could they have been superseded? How could the
Church have excluded them from the Canon?
But if falsely, and yet for a time and at so early an age generally
believed to have been composed by St. James and the rest, it is to be
feared that the difference will not stop at the point to which Paul of
Samosata carried it;--a fearful consideration for a Christian of the
Grotian and Paleyan school. It would not, however, shake my nerves, I
confess.
The Epistles of St. Paul, and the Gospel, Epistles, and Apocalypse of
St. John, contain an evidence of their authenticity, which no
uncertainty of ecclesiastic history, no proof of the frequency and
success of forgery or ornamental titles (as the Wisdom of Solomon)
mistaken for matter of fact, can wrest from me; and with these for my
guides and sanctions, what one article of Christian faith could be taken
from me, or even unsettled?
It seems to me, as it did to Luther, incomparably more probable that the
eloquent treatise, entitled an Epistle to the Hebrews, was written by
Apollos than by Paul; and what though it was written by neither? It is
demonstrable that it was composed before the siege of Jerusalem and the
destruction of the Temple; and scarcely less satisfactory is the
internal evidence that it was composed by an Alexandrian.
These two 'data' are sufficient to establish the fact, that the Pauline
doctrine at large was common to all Christians at that early period, and
therefore the faith delivered by Christ. And this is all I want; nor
this for my own assurance, but as arming me with irrefragable arguments
against those psilanthropists who as falsely, as arrogantly, call
themselves Unitarians, on the one hand; and against the infidel fiction,
that Christianity owes its present shape to the genius and rabbinical
'cabala' of Paul on the other: while at the same time it weakens the
more important half of the objection to, or doubt concerning, the
authenticity of St. Peter's Epistles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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