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
This is something; and true as far as it goes; that is, however, but a
very little way. The great power of both spiritual and physical
mountebanks rests on that irremovable property of human nature, in force
of which indefinite instincts and sufferings find no echo, no
resting-place, in the definite and comprehensible. Ignorance
unnecessarily enlarges the sphere of these: but a sphere there
is,--facts of mind and cravings of the soul there are,--in which the
wisest man seeks help from the indefinite, because it is nearer and more
like the infinite, of which he is made the image:--for even we are
infinite, even in our finiteness infinite, as the Father in his
infinity. In many caterpillars there is a large empty space in the head,
the destined room for the pushing forth of the 'antennæ' of its next
state of being.
Ib. p. 12.
But the anti-moralists aver * * that they are quoted unfairly;--that
although they disavow, it is true, the necessity, and deny the value,
of practical morality and personal holiness, and declare them to be
totally irrelevant to our future salvation, yet that * * I might have
found occasional recommendations of moral duty which I have neglected
to notice.
The same 'crambe bis decies cocta' of one self-same charge grounded on
one gross and stupid misconception and mis-statement: and to which there
needs no other answer than this simple fact. Let the Barrister name any
one gross offence against the moral law, for which he would shun a man's
acquaintance, and for that same vice the Methodist would inevitably be
excluded publicly from their society; and I am inclined to think that a
fair list of the Barrister's friends and acquaintances would prove that
the Calvinistic Methodists are the austerer and more watchful censors of
the two. If this be the truth, as it notoriously is, what but the
cataract of stupidity uncouched, or the thickest film of bigot-slime,
can prevent a man from seeing that this tenet of justification by faith
alone is exclusively a matter between the Calvinist's own heart and his
Maker, who alone knows the true source of his words and actions; but
that to his neighbours and fellow-creedsmen, his spotless life and good
works are demanded, not, indeed, as the prime efficient causes of his
salvation, but as the necessary and only possible signs of that faith,
which is the means of that salvation of which Christ's free grace is the
cause, and the sanctifying Spirit the perfecter. But I fall into the
same fault I am arraigning, by so often exposing and confuting the same
blunder, which has no claim even at its first enunciation to the
compliment of a philosophical answer. But why, in the name of common
sense, all this endless whoop and hubbub against the Calvinistic
Methodists? I had understood that the Arminian Methodists, or Wesleyans,
are the more numerous body by far. Has there been any union lately? Have
the followers of Wesley abjured the doctrines of their founder on this
head?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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