Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of LiverpoolMartineau, James
Religion
Unitarianism Defended: A Series of Lectures by Three Protestant Dissenting Ministers of Liverpool
Martineau, James
Unitarianism
of another soil, that fanatics may rant and rage, but the good will
love.—That when this, with such controversies in general, sink into the
common and oblivious grave to which all polemical divinity is doomed,
the good his invention have given to mankind will survive, and the
witness he has left of an upright conscience will be an everlasting
example.
The conviction of his reason, it is true, was so strong against the
pre-existence of Christ, that he would suppose the apostle misunderstood
the Saviour’s words, or the amanuensis mistranscribed the apostle’s
language. This was urged as a mighty accusation, as a most blasphemous
transgression. There are here an opinion and an alternative. The opinion
is the belief in Christ’s simple humanity; the alternative is merely to
suppose the want of memory in an evangelist, or the want of accuracy in
a copyist. Place in contrast to this Coleridge as quoted by our
opponents. He has also an opinion and an alternative—his opinion is,
that Christ was God, and his alternative is, that if _not God_ he was a
_deceiver_. If Dr. Priestley was wrong, he left not only Christ but his
apostles morally blameless—if Coleridge mistook, he attributed directly
and without compromise the want of even common honesty to the Author of
our religion: I leave you to judge between the two cases. I do not wish
to disparage erring and departed genius; but when the name of Coleridge
is called up in my mind in connection with that of Priestley, it is not
in human nature to avoid comparison. The one steeped the best part of
his life in opium, the other spent it in honourable toil; the one
squandered his brilliant and most beautiful genius in discursive efforts
and magical conversations, the other with heroic self denial shut
himself up in dry and laborious studies for the physical good, and the
moral wants of mankind; the one wrote sweet and wild and polished poesy
for their pleasure, the other has left discoveries for their endless
improvement. Yet orthodoxy builds for one the shrine of a saint, but
like those who in other days dug up the bones of Wickliff to be burned,
drags forth the memory of the other from the peaceful and forgiving
past, to inflict an execution of which we might have supposed his
lifetime had a sufficient endurance. Tranquil in the far-off and quiet
grave be the ashes of the Saint and Sage: his soul is beyond the
turmoils and battles of this fighting world. When these who are now in
strife shall be at last in union, his will not be the spirit to whom
that blessed consummation will give least enjoyment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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