The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 4
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
And the Notary might ask in his turn: "Do you believe that the
Christians either of the Greek or of the Western Church will be damned,
according as the truth may be respecting the procession of the Holy
Ghost? or that either the Sacramentary or the Lutheran? or again, the
Consubstantiationist, or the Transubstantiationist? If not, why do you
stop here? Whence this sudden palsy in the limbs of your charity? Again,
does this eternal damnation of the individual depend on the supposed
importance of the article denied? Or on the moral state of the
individual, on the inward source of this denial? And lastly, who
authorized either you, or the pseudo-Athanasius, to interpret Catholic
faith by belief, arising out of the apparent predominance of the grounds
for, over those against, the truth of the positions asserted; much more,
by belief as a mere passive acquiescence of the understanding? Were all
damned who died during the period when 'totus fere mundus factus est
Arianus', as one of the Fathers admits? Alas! alas! how long will it be
ere Christians take the plain middle road between intolerance and
indifference, by adopting the literal sense and Scriptural import of
heresy, that is, wilful error, or belief originating in some perversion
of the will; and of heretics, (for such there are, nay, even orthodox
heretics), that is, men wilfully unconscious of their own wilfulness, in
their limpet-like adhesion to a favourite tenet?"
Ib. p. 26.
All Christians must confess, that there is no other name given under
heaven whereby men can be saved, but only the name of Christ.
Now this is a most awful question, on which depends whether Christ was
more than Socrates; for to bring God from heaven to reproclaim the Ten
Commandments, is 'too too' ridiculous. Need I say I incline to Sherlock?
But yet I cannot give to faith the meaning he does, though I give it
all, and more than all, the power. But if that Name, as power, saved the
Jewish Church before they knew the Name, as name, how much more now, if
only the will be not guiltily averse? Any miracle does in kind as truly
bring God from heaven as the Incarnation, which the Socinians wholly
forget, as in other points. They receive without scruple what they have
learned without examination, and then transfer to the first article
which they do look into, all the difficulties that belong equally to the
former: as the Simonidean doubts concerning God to the Trinity, and the
like.
Ib. p. 27.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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