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

There is, I confess, a shade of doubt on my mind as to this position of Hooker's. Yet I do not deny that it expresses a truth. The question in my mind is, only, whether it adequately expresses the whole truth. The ground of my doubt lies in my inability to compare two things that differ in kind. It is impossible that any conviction of the reason, even where no act of the will advenes as a co-efficient, should possess the vividness of an immediate object of the senses; for the vividness is given by sensation. Equally impossible is it that any truth of the super-sensuous reason should possess the evidence of the pure sense. Even the mathematician does not find the same evidence in the results of transcendental algebra as in the demonstrations of simple geometry. But has he less assurance? In answer to Hooker's argument I say, – that God refers to our sensible experience to aid our will by the vividness of sensible impressions, and also to aid our understanding of the truths revealed, – not to increase the conviction of their certainty where they have been understood.

Walton's Appendix

Ib. p. 116.

It is a strange blind story this of the last three books, and of Hooker's live relict, the Beast without Beauty. But Saravia? – If honest Isaac's account of the tender, confidential, even confessional, friendship of Hooker and Saravia be accurate, how chanced it that Hooker did not entrust the manuscripts to his friend who stood beside him in his last moments? At all events, Saravia must have known whether they had or had not received the author's last hand. Why were not Mr. Charke and the other Canterbury parson called to account, or questioned at least as to the truth of Mrs. Joan's story? Verily, I cannot help suspecting that the doubt cast on the authenticity of the latter books by the high church party originated in their dislike of portions of the contents. – In short, it is a blind story, a true Canterbury tale, dear Isaac! 6 6 But see Mr. Keble's statement (Pref. xxix.), and the argument founded on discoveries and collation of MSS. since the note in the text was written. – Ed.

Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity

Pref. c. iii. 7. p. 182.

The next thing hereunto is, to impute all faults and corruptions, wherewith the world aboundeth, unto the kind of ecclesiastical government established.

How readily would this, and indeed all the disputes respecting the powers and constitution of Church government have been settled, or perhaps prevented, had there been an insight into the distinct nature and origin of the National Church and the Church under Christ! 7 7 See Mr. Coleridge's work On the constitution of the Church and State according to the idea of each. – Ed. To the ignorance of this, all the fierce contentions between the Puritans and the Episcopalians under Elizabeth and the Stuarts, all the errors and exorbitant pretensions of the Church of Scotland, and the heats and antipathies of our present Dissenters, may be demonstrably traced.

Ib. 9. p. 183.

Pythagoras, by bringing up his scholars in the speculative knowledge of numbers, made their conceits therein so strong, that when they came to the contemplation of things natural, they imagined that in every particular thing they even beheld as it were with their eyes, how the elements of number gave essence and being to the works of nature: a thing in reason impossible; which notwithstanding, through their mis-fashioned pre-conceit, appeared unto them no less certain, than if nature had written it in the very foreheads of all the creatures of God.

I am not so conversant with the volumes of Duns Scotus as to be able to pronounce positively whether he is an exception, but I can think of no other instance of high metaphysical genius in an Englishman. Judgment, solid sense, invention in specialties, fortunate anticipations and instructive foretact of truth, – in these we can shew giants. It is evident from this example from the Pythagorean school that not even our incomparable Hooker could raise himself to the idea, so rich in truth, which is contained in the words

numero, pondere, et mensura generantur cœli et terra.

O, that Hooker had ever asked himself concerning will, absolute will,

,

numerus omues numeros ponens, nunquam positus! 8 8 See E. P. I. ii. 3. p. 252. – Ed.

Ib. p. 183.

When they of the 'Family of Love' have it once in their heads, that Christ doth not signify any one person, but a quality whereof many are partakers, &c.

If the Familists thought of Christ as a quality, it was a grievous error indeed. But I have my doubts whether this was not rather an inference drawn by their persecutors.

Ib. 15. p. 191.

When instruction doth them no good, let them feel but the least degree of most mercifully-tempered severity, they fasten on the head of the Lord's vicegerents here on earth, whatsoever they any where find uttered against the cruelty of blood-thirsty men, and to themselves they draw all the sentences which Scripture hath in favor of innocency persecuted for the truth.

How great the influence of the age on the strongest minds, when so eminently wise a man as Richard Hooker could overlook the obvious impolicy of inflicting punishments which the sufferer himself will regard as merits, and all who have any need to be deterred will extol as martyrdom! Even where the necessity could be plausibly pretended, it is war, not punitive law; – and then Augustine's argument for Sarah!

Ib. c. iv. 1. p. 194.

We require you to find out but one church upon the face of the whole earth, that hath been ordered by your discipline, or hath not been ordered by ours, that is to say, by episcopal regiment, sithence the time that the blessed apostles were here conversant.

Hooker was so good a man that it would be wicked to suspect him of knowingly playing the sophist. And yet strange it is, that he should not have been aware that it was prelacy, not primitive episcopacy, the thing, not the name, that the reformers contended against, and, if the Catholic Church and the national Clerisy were (as both parties unhappily took for granted) one and the same, contended against with good reason. Knox's ecclesiastical polity (worthy of Lycurgus), adopted bishops under a different name, or rather under a translation instead of corruption of the name He would have had superintendents.

Ib. c. v. 2. p. 204.

A law is the deed of the whole body politic, whereof if ye judge yourselves to be any part, then is the law even your deed also.

This is a fiction of law for the purpose of giving to that, which is necessarily empirical, the form and consequence of a science, to the reality of which a code of laws can only approximate by compressing all liberty and individuality into a despotism. As Justinian to Alfred, and Constantinople, the Consuls and Senate of Rome to the Lord Mayor, Aldermen, and Common Council of London; so is the imperial Roman code to the common and statute law of England. The advocates of the discipline would, according to our present notions of civil rights, have been justified in putting fact against fiction, and might have challenged Hooker to shew, first, that the constitution of the Church in Christ was a congruous subject of parliamentary legislation; that the legislators were bona fide determined by spiritual views, and that the jealousy and arbitrary principles of the Queen, aided by motives of worldly state policy, – for example, the desire of conciliating the Roman Catholic potentates by retaining all she could of the exterior of the Romish Church, its hierarchy, its ornaments, and its ceremonies, – were not the substitutes for the Holy Spirit in influencing the majorities in the two Houses of Parliament. It is my own belief that the Puritans and the Prelatists divided the truth between them; and, as half-truths are whole errors, were both equally in the wrong; – the Prelatists in contending for that as incident to the Church in Christ, that is, the collective number or ecclesia , which only belonged, but which rightfully did belong, to the National Church as a component estate of the realm, the enclesia ; – the Puritans in requiring of the enclesia what was only requisite or possible for the ecclesia 9 9 See the Church and State, in which the ecclesia or Church in Christ, is distinguished from the enclesia , or national Church. – Ed. . Archbishop Grindal is an illustrious exception. He saw the whole truth, and that the functions of the enclesiastic and those of the ecclesiastic were not the less distinct, because both were capable of being exercised by the same person; and vice versa , not the less compatible in the same subject because distinct in themselves. The Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench is a Fellow of the Royal Society.