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
Without touching on the question whether St. Paul in this celebrated
chapter (1 'Cor'. xv.) speaks of a partial or of the general
resurrection, or even conceding to Lacunza that the former opinion is
the more probable; I must still vehemently object to this Jesuitical
interpretation of corruption, as used in a moral sense, and distinctive
of the wicked souls. St. Paul nowhere speaks dogmatically or
preceptively (not popularly and incidentally,) of a soul as the proper
'I'. It is always 'we', or the man. How could a regenerate saint put off
corruption at the sound of the trump, if up to that hour it did not in
some sense or other appertain to him? But what need of many words? It
flashes on every reader whose imagination supplies an unpreoccupied,
unrefracting, 'medium' to the Apostolic assertion, that corruption in
this passage is a descriptive synonyme of the material sensuous organism
common to saint and sinner,--standing in precisely the same relation to
the man that the testaceous offensive and defensive armour does to the
crab and tortoise. These slightly combined and easily decomponible
stuffs are as incapable of subsisting under the altered conditions of
the earth as an hydatid in the blaze of a tropical sun. They would be no
longer 'media' of communion between the man and his circumstances.
A heavy difficulty presses, as it appears to me, on Lacunza's system, as
soon as we come to consider the general resurrection. Our Lord (in books
of indubitable and never doubted catholicity) speaks of some who rise to
bliss and glory, others who at the same time rise to shame and
condemnation. Now if the former class live not during the whole interval
from their death to the general resurrection, including the Millennium,
or 'Dies Messiæ',--how should they, whose imperfect or insufficient
merits excluded them from the kingdom of the Messiah on earth, be all at
once fitted for the kingdom of heaven?
Ib. ch. vii. p. 118.
It appears to me that this sentence, being looked to attentively,
means in good language this only, that the word 'quick', which the
Apostles, full of the Holy Spirit, set down, is a word altogether
useless, which might without loss have been omitted, and that it were
enough to have set down the word 'dead': for by that word alone is the
whole expressed, and with much more clearness and brevity.
The narrow outline within which the Jesuits confined the theological
reading of their 'alumni' is strongly marked in this (in so many
respects) excellent work: for example, the "most believing mind," with
which Lacunza takes for granted the exploded fable of the Catechumens'
('vulgo' Apostles') Creed having been the quotient of an Apostolic
'pic-nic', to which each of the twelve contributed his several
'symbolum'.
Ib. ch. ix. p. 127.
The Apostle, St. Peter, speaking of the day of the Lord, says, that
that day will come suddenly, &c. (2 Pet. iii. 10.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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