Samuel Coleridge - The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3

A false charge grounded on a misconception of the Syriac terms. Nestorius was perfectly justifiable in his rejection of the epithet as applied to the mother of Jesus. The Church was even then only too ripe for the idolatrous hyper-dulia of the Virgin. Not less weak is Field's defence of the propriety of the term. Set aside all reference to this holy mystery, and let me ask, I trust without offence, whether by the same logic a mule's dam might not be called because the horse and ass were united in one and the same subject. The difference in the perfect God and perfect man does not remove the objection: for an epithet, which conceals half of a truth, the power and special concerningness of which, relatively to our redemption by Christ, depends on our knowledge of the whole, is a deceptive and a dangerously deceptive epithet.

Ib. c.20. p.110.

Thus, then, the Fathers did sometimes, when they had particular occasions to remember the Saints, and to speak of them, by way of apostrophe , turn themselves unto them, and use words of doubtful compellation, praying them, if they have any sense of these inferior things, to be remembrancers to God for them.

The distinct gradations of the process, by which commemoration and rhetorical apostrophes passed finally into idolatry, supply an analogy of mighty force against the heretical hypothesis of the modern Unitarians. Were it true, they would have been able to have traced the progress of the Christolatry from the lowest sort of Christodulia with the same historical distinctness against the universal Church, that the Protestants have that of hierolatry against the Romanists. The gentle and soft censures which our divines during the reign of the Stuarts pass on the Roman Saint worship, or hieroduly, as an inconvenient superstition, must needs have alarmed the faithful adherents to the Protestantism of Edward VI and the surviving exiles of bloody Queen Mary's times, and their disciples.

Ib. p.111.

The miracles that God wrought in times past by them made many to attribute more to them than was fit, as if they had a generality of presence, knowledge, and working; but the wisest and best advised never durst attribute any such thing unto them.

To a truly pious mind awfully impressed with the surpassing excellency of God's ineffable love to fallen man, in the revelation of himself to the inner man through the reason and conscience by the spiritual light and substantiality – (for the conscience is to the spirit or reason what the understanding is to the sense, a substantiative power); this consequence of miracles is so fearful, that it cannot but redouble his zeal against that fashion of modern theologists which would convert miracles from a motive to attention and solicitous examination, and at best from a negative condition of revelation, into the positive foundation of Christian faith. Ib. c.22. p.116.

But if this be as vile a slander as ever Satanist devised, the Lord reward them that have been the authors and advisers of it according to their works.

O no! no! this the good man did not utter from his heart, but from his passion. A vile and wicked slander it was and is. O may God have turned the hearts of those who uttered it, or may it be among their unknown sins done in ignorance, for which the infinite merits of Christ may satisfy! I am most assured that if Dr. Field were now alive, or if any one had but said this to him, he would have replied – "I thank thee, brother, for thy Christian admonition. Add thy prayer, and pray God to forgive me my inconsiderate zeal!"

Ib. c. 23. p. 119.

For what rectitude is due to the specifical act of hating God? or what rectitude is it capable of?

Is this a possible act to any man understanding by the word God what we mean by God?

Ib. p. 129.

It is this complicated dispute, as to the origin and permission of evil, which supplies to atheism its most plausible, because its only moral, arguments; but more especially to that species of atheism which existed in Greece in the form of polytheism, admitting moral and intelligent shapers and governors of the world, but denying an intelligent ground, or self-conscious Creator of the universe; their gods being themselves the offspring of chaos and necessity, that is, of matter and its essential laws or properties. The Leibnitzian distinction of the Eternal Reason, or nature of God, (the of Timæus Locrus) from the will or personal attributes of God – – planted the germ of the only possible solution, or rather perhaps, in words less exceptionable and more likely to be endured in the schools of modern theology, brought forward the truth involved in Behmen's too bold distinction of God and the ground of God; – who yet in this is to be excused, not only for his good aim and his ignorance of scholastic terms, but likewise because some of the Fathers expressed themselves no less crudely in the other extreme; though it is not improbable that the meaning was the same in both. At least Behmen constantly makes self-existence a positive act, so as that by an eternal or mysterious intercirculation God wills himself out of the ground ), – indifferentia absoluta realitatis infinitæ et infinitæ potentialitatis ) – and again by his will, as God existing, gives being to the ground, . Solus Deus est; – itaque principium, qui ex seipso dedit sibi ipse principium. Deus ipse sui origo est, suæque causa substantiæ, id quod est, ex se et in se continens. Ex seipso procreatus ipse se fecit , &c., of Synesius, Jerome, Hilary, and Lactantius and others involve the same conception.

Ib. c.27. p.140.

The seventh is the heresy of Sabellius, which he saith was revived by Servetus. So it was indeed, that Servetus revived in our time the damnable heresy of Sabellius, long since condemned in the first ages of the Church. But what is that to us? How little approbation he found amongst us, the just and honourable proceeding against him at Geneva will witness to all posterity.

Shocking as this act must and ought to be to all Christians at present; yet this passage and a hundred still stronger from divines and Church letters contemporary with Calvin, prove Servetus' death not to be Calvin's guilt especially, but the common opprobrium of all European Christendom, – of the Romanists whose laws the Senate of Geneva followed, and from fear of whose reproaches (as if Protestants favoured heresy) they executed them, – and of the Protestant churches who applauded the act and returned thanks to Calvin and the Senate for it. 25 25 See Table Talk , 2d edit. p. 283. Melancthon's words to Calvin are: Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmu etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse, quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, interfecerunt. 14th Oct. 1554. – Ed.

Ib. c. 30. p. 143.

The twelfth heresy imputed to us is the heresy of Jovinian, concerning whom we must observe, that Augustine ascribeth unto him two opinions which Hierome mentioneth not; who yet was not likely to spare him, if he might truly have been charged with them. The first, that Mary ceased to be a virgin when she had borne Christ; the second, that all sins are equal.

Neither this nor that is worthy the name of opinion; it is mere unscriptural, nay, anti-scriptural gossiping. Are we to blame, or not rather to praise, the anxiety manifested by the great divines of the church of England under the Stuarts not to remove further than necessary from the Romish doctrines? Yet one wishes a bolder method; for example, as to Mary's private history after the conception and birth of Christ, we neither know nor care about it.