The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated Edition). Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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not act wisely, if, feeling like a good citizen, he use these arguments which favour the enemy. God forbid, that an opposition in opinion among ourselves should make us forget the high and absolute duty of opposition to the enemies of our country. Sir, in the present times, it is more than ever the bounden duty of every wise and good man to use more than ordinary caution in abstaining from all arguments that appeal to passions, not facts; above all, from arguments that tend to excite popular irritation on a subject and on an occasion, on which the people can with difficulty be reasoned with, but are irritated most easily. To speak incautiously on such subjects, is an offence of no venial order; but deliberately and wilfully to connect the words, war and scarcity, were infamous, a treachery to our country, and in a peculiar degree cruel to those whom alone it can delude, the lower uneducated classes. I will not enlarge upon that subject, but retire with a firm conviction that no new facts have occurred which can have altered the opinion of this House on the necessity of the war, or the suitableness of similar measures to the present to the effectual carrying of it on, and that the opinion of the House will not be altered but by experience and the evidence of facts.”
The following paragraph is extracted from private memoranda, and was intended for publication ten years afterwards, in the Courier Newspaper, in which he wrote a series of Essays to Judge Fletcher, which were at that time acknowledged by the most able judges to be prophetic. But it must be remembered he never wrote for party purposes. His views were grounded on Platonic principles keeping the balance of the powers, and throwing his weight into the scale that needed assistance.
OF THE PROFANATION OF THE SACRED WORD “THE PEOPLE.”
“Every brutal mob, assembled on some drunken St. Monday of faction, is ‘the People’ forsooth, and now each leprous ragamuffin, like a circle in geometry, is at once one and all, and calls his own brutal self ‘us the People.’ And who are the friends of the People? Not those who would wish to elevate each of them, or at least, the child who is to take his place in the flux of life and death, into something worthy of esteem, and capable of freedom, but those who flatter and infuriate them as they do. A contradiction in the very thought. For if really they are good and wise, virtuous and well-informed, how weak must be the motives of discontent to a truly moral being! — but if the contrary, and the motives for discontent proportionally strong, how without guilt and absurdity appeal to them as judges and arbiters! He alone is entitled to a share in the government of all, who has learnt to govern himself — there is but one possible ground of a right to freedom, viz. to understand and revere its duties.”
As specimens of his political writings I select the following, and leave party men to criticise them — Coleridge being of no party, but guided, as will sufficiently appear to those who have read his works with attention, solely by philosophical principles, from which he never swerved. Nor did he desire the praise of men, merely because they were in power; still less that of the multitude. For this reason, I repeat, these fragments are given, as illustrative of Coleridge’s political views, and to shew how easily the harmony of the constitutional balance may be disturbed by party zeal. His opinions were often misunderstood even sometimes by kindly-disposed individuals, when ‘theirs’ were not founded on certain data, because their principles were not derived from permanent sources. The doctrine of expediency was one he highly censured, and it had existed long enough to prove to him that it was worthless. What one set of well-intentioned men may effect, and which for a time may have produced good, another set of men by the same doctrine, ‘i.e.’ of expediency may effect, and then produce incalculable mischief, and, therefore, Coleridge thought there was neither guide nor safety, but in the permanent and uncontrovertible truths of the sacred writings, so that the extent of this utility will depend on faith in these truths, and with these truths, his name must ‘live or perish’. But some part of Coleridge’s writings requiring too much effort of thought to be at once thoroughly understood, may therefore have been found distasteful, and consequently have exposed his name to ridicule, in some cases even to contempt; but the application Coleridge has made of these truths to the duties and various circumstances of life will surely be found an inestimable blessing. They were truly his rock of support, and formed the basis of the building he was endeavouring to raise.
In the year 1807, he wrote those weekly Essays of the Friend, which were published about this time, and thus gave to the world some of his rich intellectual stores. The following letter, which he addressed to Mr. Cottle, will shew the progress of his mind from Socinian to Trinitarian belief at that period of his life:
“Bristol, 1807.
DEAR COTTLE,
To pursue our last conversation. Christians expect no outward or sensible miracles from prayer. Its effects, and its fruitions are spiritual, and accompanied, says that true Divine, Archbishop Leighton, ‘not by reasons and arguments but by an inexpressible kind of evidence, which they only know who have it.’
To this I would add, that even those who, like me I fear, have not attained it, may yet presume it. First, because reason itself, or rather mere human nature, in any dispassionate moment, feels the necessity of religion, but if this be not true there is no religion, no religation, or binding over again; nothing added to reason, and therefore Socinianism (misnamed Unitarianism) is not only not Christianity, it is not even ‘religion’, it does not religate; does not bind anew. The first outward and sensible result of prayer, is, a penitent resolution, joined with a consciousness of weakness in effecting it, yea even a dread, too well grounded, lest by breaking and falsifying it, the soul should add guilt to guilt; by the very means it has taken to escape from guilt; so pitiable is the state of unregenerate man.
Are you familiar with Leighton’s Works? He resigned his archbishoprick, and retired to voluntary poverty on account of the persecution of the Presbyterians, saying, ‘I should not dare to introduce Christianity itself with such cruelties, how much less for a surplice, and the name of a bishop.’ If there could be an intermediate space between inspired, and uninspired writings, that space would be occupied by Leighton. No show of learning, no appearance, or ostentatious display of eloquence; and yet both may be shown in him, conspicuously and holily. There is in him something that must be felt, even as the scriptures must be felt.
You ask me my views of the ‘Trinity’. I accept the doctrine, not as deduced from human reason, in its grovelling capacity for comprehending spiritual things, but as the clear revelation of Scripture. But perhaps it may be said, the ‘Socinians’ do not admit this doctrine as being taught in the Bible. I know enough of their shifts and quibbles, with their dexterity at explaining away all they dislike, (and that is not a little) but though beguiled once by them, I happily, for my own peace of mind, escaped from their sophistries, and now, hesitate not to affirm, that Socinians would lose all character for honesty, if they were to explain their neighbour’s will with the same latitude of interpretation, which they do the Scriptures.
I have in my head some floating ideas on the ‘Logos’, which I hope, hereafter, to mould into a consistent form; but it is a gross perversion of the truth, in ‘Socinians’, to declare that we believe in ‘Three Gods’, and they know it to be false. They might, with equal justice, affirm that we believe in ‘three suns’. The meanest peasant, who has acquired the first rudiments of Christianity, would shrink back from a thought so monstrous. Still the Trinity has its difficulties. It would be strange if otherwise. A ‘Revelation’ that revealed nothing, not within the grasp of human reason! — no religation, no binding over again, as before said: but these difficulties are shadows, contrasted with the substantive, and insurmountable obstacles with which they contend who admit the ‘Divine authority of Scripture’, with the ‘superlative excellence of Christ’, and yet undertake to prove that these Scriptures teach, and that Christ taught, his own ‘pure humanity!’
If Jesus Christ was merely a Man, — if he was not God as well as Man, be it considered, he could not have been even a ‘good man’. There is no medium. The SAVIOUR ‘in that case’ was absolutely ‘a deceiver!’ one, transcendently ‘unrighteous!’ in advancing pretensions to miracles, by the ‘Finger of God,’ which he never performed; and by asserting claims, (as a man) in the most aggravated sense, blasphemous!
These consequences, Socinians, to be consistent, must allow, and which impious arrogation of Divinity in Christ, (according