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
"I could as easily create a world (says Dr. Hawker) as create either
faith or repentance in my own heart." Surely this is a most monstrous
confession. What! is not the Christian religion a 'revealed' religion,
and have we not the most miraculous attestation of its truth?
Just look at the answer of Christ himself to Nicodemus, 'John' iii. 2,
3. Nicodemus professed a full belief in Christ's divine mission. Why? It
was attested by his miracles. What answered Christ? "Well said, O
believer?" No, not a word of this; but the proof of the folly of such a
supposition. 'Verily, verily, I say unto thee; except a man be born
again, he cannot see the kingdom of God',--that is, he cannot have faith
in me.
Ib. p. 42.
How can this evangelical preacher declaim on the necessity of
seriously searching into the truth of revelation, for the purpose
either of producing or confirming our belief of it, when he has
already pronounced it to be just as possible to arrive at conviction
as to create a world?
Did Dr. Hawker say that it was impossible to produce an assent to the
historic credibility of the facts related in the Gospel? Did he say that
it was impossible to become a Socinian by the weighing of outward
evidences? No! but Dr. Hawker says,--and I say,--that this is not,
cannot be, what Christ means by faith, which, to the misfortune of the
Socinians, he always demands as the condition of a miracle, instead of
looking forward to it as the natural effect of a miracle. How came it
that Peter saw miracles countless, and yet was without faith till the
Holy Ghost descended on him? Besides, miracles may or may not be
adequate evidence for Socinianism; but how could miracles prove the
doctrine of Redemption, or the divinity of Christ? But this is the creed
of the Church of England.
It is wearisome to be under the necessity, or at least the constant
temptation, of attacking Socinianism, in reviewing a work professedly
written against Methodism. Surely such a work ought to treat of those
points of doctrine and practice, which are peculiar to Methodism. But to
publish a 'diatribe' against the substance of the Articles and Catechism
of the English Church, nay, of the whole Christian world, excepting the
Socinians, and to call it "Hints concerning the dangerous and abominable
absurdities of Methodism," is too bad.
Ib. p. 43.
But this Calvinistic Evangelist tells us, by way of accounting for the
utter impossibility of producing in himself either faith or
repentance, that both are of divine origin, and like the light, and
the rain, and the dew of heaven, which tarrieth not for man, neither
waiteth for the sons of men, are from above, and come down from the
Father of lights, from whom alone cometh every good and perfect gift!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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