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
The consequent of this discourse must needs at least be this; that it
is impossible that the greatest part of mankind should be left in the
eternal bonds of hell by Adam; for then quite contrary to the
discourse of the Apostle, there had been abundance of sin, but a
scarcity of grace.
And yet Jeremy Taylor will not be called a Pelagian. Why? Because
without grace superadded by Christ no man could be saved: that is, all
men must go to hell, and this not for any sin, but from a calamity, the
consequences of another man's sin, of which they were even ignorant. God
would not condemn them the sons of Adam for sin, but only inflicted on
them an evil, the necessary effect of which was that they should all
troop to the devil! And this is Jeremy Taylor's defence of God's
justice! The truth is Taylor was a Pelagian, believed that without
Christ thousands, Jews and heathens, lived wisely and holily, and went
to heaven; but this he did not dare say out, probably not even to
himself; and hence it is that he flounders backward and forward, now
upping and now downing.
In truth, this eloquent Treatise may be compared to a statue of Janus,
with one face fixed on certain opponents, full of life and force, a
witty scorn on the lip, a brow at once bright and weighty with
satisfying reason: the other looking at the something instead of that
which had been confuted, maimed, noseless, and weather-bitten into a
sort of visionary confusion and indistinctness. [14] It looks like
this--aye and very like that--but how like it is, too, such another
thing!
AN ANSWER TO A LETTER WRITTEN BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF
ROCHESTER, CONCERNING THE CHAPTER OF ORIGINAL SIN, IN THE "UNUM
NECESSARIUM."
Ib. p. 367.
And they who are born eunuchs should be less infected by Adam's
pollution, by having less of concupiscence in the great instance of
desires.
The fact happens to be false: and then the vulgarity, most unworthy of
our dear Jeremy Taylor, of taking the mode of the manifestation of the
disobedience of the will to the reason, for the disobedience itself. St.
James would have taught him that he who offendeth against one, offendeth
against all; and that there is some truth in the Stoic paradox that all
crimes are equal. Equal is indeed a false phrase; and therein consists
the paradox, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is the same as
the falsehood. The truth is they are all the same in kind; but unequal
in degree. They are all alike, though not equally, against the
conscience.
Ib. p. 369.
So that there is no necessity of a third place; but it concludes only
that in the state of separation from God's presence there is great
variety of degrees and kinds of evil, and every one is not the
extreme.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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