The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Illustrated Edition). Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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to disguise from itself the unequivocal ‘fact’ of its own shame and remorse, and this once felt and distinctly acknowledged, Spinozism is blown up as by a mine.”
Coleridge had a great abhorrence of vice, and Spinoza having, in his writings, strongly marked its debasing effects, he was from sympathy on these points led to study his philosophy: but when on further research, he discovered that his ethics led to Pantheism and ended in the denial of the Deity — he abandoned these views, and gave up the study of Spinoza. Perhaps the contemplation of such writers led him to compose the following lines:
But some there are who deem themselves most free,
When they within this gross and visible sphere
Chain down the winged thought, scoffing ascent,
Proud in their meanness: and themselves they cheat
With noisy emptiness of learned phrase,
Their subtle fluids, impacts, essences,
Self-working tools, uncaused effects, and all
Those blind Omniscients, those Almighty slaves,
Untenanting creation of its GOD.
SIBYLLINE LEAVES — (‘Destiny of Nations’.)
The errors of this writer, however, as before observed, produced this great advantage; he recommenced his studies with greater care and increased ardour, and in the Gospel of St. John, discovered the truth — the truth, as Wordsworth powerfully sings,
”That flashed upon that inward eye,
Which is the bliss of solitude.”
Having now discovered in the Scriptures this truth, to him at that time new and important, he pursued his philosophical researches — continually finding what he sought for in the one, borne out and elucidated by the other.
After he had corrected the proof sheets of the ‘Christabel’, the
‘Sibylline Leaves’, and the ‘Biographia Literaria’; they were brought to
London, and published by Rest Fenner, Paternoster Row.
One of those periodical distresses, which usually visit this country about once in nine years, took place about this time, 1816, — and he was in consequence requested by his publisher to write on the subject. He therefore composed two Lay Sermons, addressed to the higher and to the middle classes of society, and had the intention of addressing a third to the lower classes. The first sermon he named “the Statesman’s Manual, or the Bible the best guide to political skill and foresight.” The pamphlet was as might have been expected, “cut up.” He was an unpopular writer on an unpopular subject. Time was, when reviews directed the taste of the reading public, now, on the contrary, they judge it expedient to follow it.
But it may be well to place before the reader the expression of Coleridge’s own feelings, written after these several attacks, it may also serve to show the persecution to which he was liable:
“I published a work a large portion of which was professedly metaphysical. (First Lay Sermon.)
A delay,” said he, “occurred between its first annunciation and its appearance; and it was reviewed by anticipation with a malignity, so avowedly and so exclusively personal, as is, I believe, unprecedented even in the present contempt of all common humanity that disgraces and endangers the liberty of the press. ‘After’ its appearance the author of this lampoon was chosen to review it in the Edinburgh Review: and under the single condition, that he should have written what he himself really thought, and have criticised the work as he would have done had its author been indifferent to him, I should have chosen that man myself, both from the vigour and the originality of his mind, and from his particular acuteness in speculative reasoning, before all others. But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this rhapsody of predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and sole object: and that the indignant contempt which it excited in me was as exclusively confined to his employer and suborner. I refer to this Review at present, in consequence of information having been given me, that the innuendo of my ‘potential infidelity,’ grounded on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and propagated with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the originator of the calumny. I give the sentences as they stand in the Sermon, premising only that I was speaking exclusively of miracles worked for the outward senses of men. It was only to overthrow the usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE. The natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual: Ere he is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night season, and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its interception. Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances coexist with the same moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous: and if we neglect to apply truths in the expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the cessation of the latter, we tempt God and merit the same reply which our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion.’
In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the necessity of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. ‘The testimony of books of history (namely, relatively to the signs and wonders with which Christ came,) is one of the strong and stately ‘pillars’ of the church; but it is not the ‘foundation’.’ Instead, therefore, of defending myself, which I could easily effect by a series of passages, expressing the same opinion, from the fathers and the most eminent protestant divines, from the Reformation to the Revolution, I shall merely state what my belief is, concerning the true evidences of Christianity.
1st. Its consistency with right reason, I consider as the outer court of the temple, the common area within which it stands.
2ndly. The miracles, with and through which the religion was first revealed and attested, I regard as the steps, the vestibule, the portal of the temple.
3rdly. The sense, the inward feeling, in the soul of each believer, of its exceeding ‘desirableness’ — the experience, that he ‘needs’ something, joined with the strong foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to us in Christ are ‘what’ he needs — this I hold to be the true foundation of the spiritual edifice.
With the strong ‘a priori’ probability that flows in from 1 and 3, on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But,
4thly, it is the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions of the gospel — it is the opening eye; the dawning light; the terrors and the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises up from beneath, and the consolation that meets it from above; the bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare, and the exceeding faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninterested ally; — in a word, it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the completing keystone. In order to an efficient belief in Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual truths, to every subject not presentable under the forms of time and space, as long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the understanding, what we can only ‘know’ by the act of ‘becoming’. ‘Do the will of my Father, and ye shall know whether I am of God.’
These four evidences I believe to have been, and still to be, for the world, for the whole church, all necessary, all equally necessary; but that at present, and for the majority of Christians born in Christian countries, I believe the third and the fourth evidences to be the most operative, not as superseding, but as involving a glad undoubting faith in the two former. Credidi, ideóque intellexi, appears to me the dictate equally of philosophy and religion, even as I believe redemption to be the antecedent of sanctification, and not its consequent. All spiritual predicates may be construed indifferently as modes of action, or as states of being.