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
Is it not intolerable to take up three bulky pamphlets against a recent
Sect, denounced as most dangerous, and which we all know to be most
powerful and of rapid increase, and to find little more than a weak
declamatory abuse of certain metaphysical dogmas concerning free will,
or free will forfeited, 'de libero vel servo arbitrio'--of grace,
predestination, and the like;--dogmas on which, according to Milton, God
and the Logos conversed, as soon as man was in existence, they in
heaven, and Adam in paradise, and the devils in hell;--dogmas common to
all religions, and to all ages and sects of the Christian
religion;--concerning which Brahmin disputes with Brahmin, Mahometan
with Mahometan, and Priestley with Price;--and all this to be laid on
the shoulders of the Methodists collectively: though it is a notorious
fact, that a radical difference on this abstruse subject is the ground
of the schism between the Whitfieldite and Wesleyan Methodists; and that
the latter coincide in opinion with Erasmus and Arminius, by which
latter name they distinguish themselves; and the former with Luther,
Calvin, and their great guide, St. Augustine? This I say is
intolerable,--yea, a crime against sense, candour, and white paper.
Ib. p. 50.
"For so very peculiarly directed to the sinner, and to him only (says
the evangelical preacher) is the blessed Gospel of the Lord Jesus,
that unless you are a sinner, you are not interested in its saving
truths."
Does not Christ himself say the same in the plainest and most
unmistakable words? 'I come not to call the righteous, but sinners to
repentance. They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are
sick'. Can he, who has no share in the danger, be interested in the
saving? Pleased from benevolence he may be; but interested he cannot be.
'Estne aliquid inter salvum et salutem; inter liberum et libertatem?
Salus est pereuntis, vel saltem periditantis: redemptio, quasi pons
divinus, inter servum et libertatem,--amissam, ideoque optatam'.
Ib. p. 52.
It was reserved for these days of 'new discovery' to announce to
mankind that, unless they are sinners, they are excluded from the
promised blessings of the Gospel.
Merely read 'that unless they are sick they are precluded from the
offered remedies of the Gospel;' and is not this the dictate of common
sense, as well as of Methodism? But does not Methodism cry aloud that
all men are sick--sick to the very heart? 'If we say we are without sin,
we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us'. This shallow-pated
Barrister makes me downright piggish, and without the stratagem of that
famed philosopher in pig-nature almost drives me into the Charon's hoy
of Methodism by his rude and stupid tail-hauling me back from it.
Ib. p. 53.
I can assure these gentlemen that I regard with a reverence as pure
and awful as can enter into the human mind, that blood which was shed
upon the Cross.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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