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 cannot express how much it grieves me, that our Clergy should still
think it fit and expedient to defend the measures of the High Churchmen
from Laud to Sheldon, and to speak of the ejected ministers, Calamy,
Baxter, Gouge, Howe, and others, as schismatics, factionists, fanatics,
or Pharisees:--thus to flatter some half-dozen dead Bishops, wantonly
depriving our present Church of the authority of perhaps the largest
collective number of learned and zealous, discreet and holy, ministers
that one age and one Church was ever blest with; and whose authority in
every considerable point is in favor of our Church, and against the
present Dissenters from it. And this seems the more impolitic, when it
must be clear to every student of the history of these times, that the
unmanly cruelties inflicted on Baxter and others were, as Bishops Ward,
Stillingfleet, and others saw at the time, part of the Popish scheme of
the Cabal, to trick the Bishops and dignified Clergy into rendering
themselves and the established Church odious to the public by laws, the
execution of which the King, the Duke, Arlington, and the Popish priests
directed towards the very last man that the Bishops themselves (the
great majority at least) would have molested.
Appendix II. p. 37.
If I can prove that it hath been the universal practice of the Church
'in nudum apertum caput manus imponere', doth it follow that this is
essential, and the contrary null?
How likewise can it be proved that the imposition of hands in Ordination
did not stand on the same ground as the imposition of hands in sickness;
that is, the miraculous gifts of the first preachers of the Gospel? All
Protestants admit that the Church retained several forms so originated,
after the cessation of the originating powers, which were the substance
of these forms.
Ib.
If you think not only imposition to be essential, but also that
nothing else is essential, or that all are true ministers that are
ordained by a lawful Bishop per 'manuum impositionem', then do you
egregiously 'tibi ipsi imponere'.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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