The Literary Remains Of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (page 6)

In truth, this eloquent Treatise may be compared to a statue of Janus, with one face fixed on certain opponents, full of life and force, a witty scorn on the lip, a brow at once bright and weighty with satisfying reason: the other looking at the something instead of that which had been confuted, maimed, noseless, and weather-bitten into a sort of visionary confusion and indistinctness. [14] It looks like this–aye and very like that–but how like it is, too, such another thing!

AN ANSWER TO A LETTER WRITTEN BY THE RIGHT REV. THE LORD BISHOP OF ROCHESTER, CONCERNING THE CHAPTER OF ORIGINAL SIN, IN THE “UNUM NECESSARIUM.”

Ib. p. 367.

And they who are born eunuchs should be less infected by Adam’s pollution, by having less of concupiscence in the great instance of desires.

The fact happens to be false: and then the vulgarity, most unworthy of our dear Jeremy Taylor, of taking the mode of the manifestation of the disobedience of the will to the reason, for the disobedience itself. St. James would have taught him that he who offendeth against one, offendeth against all; and that there is some truth in the Stoic paradox that all crimes are equal. Equal is indeed a false phrase; and therein consists the paradox, which in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is the same as the falsehood. The truth is they are all the same in kind; but unequal in degree. They are all alike, though not equally, against the conscience.

Ib. p. 369.

So that there is no necessity of a third place; but it concludes only that in the state of separation from God’s presence there is great variety of degrees and kinds of evil, and every one is not the extreme.

What is this? If hell be a state, and not a mere place, and a particular state, its meaning must in common sense be a state of the worst sort. If then there be a mere ‘paena damni’, that is, the not being so blest as some others may be; this is a different state ‘in genere’ from the ‘paena sensus’: ‘ergo’, not hell; ‘ergo’ rather a third state; or else heaven. For every angel must be in it, than whom another angel is happier; that is negatively damned, though positively very happy.

Ib. p. 370-1.

Just so it is in infants: hell was not made for man, but for devils; and therefore it must be something besides mere nature that can bear any man thither: mere nature goes neither to heaven or hell.

And how came the devils there? If it be hard to explain how Adam fell; how much more hard to solve how purely spiritual beings could fall? And nature! What? so much of nature, and no kind of attempt at a definition of the word? Pray what is nature?

Ib. p. 371.

I do not say that we, by that sin (original) deserved that death, neither can death be properly a punishment of us, till we superadd some evil of our own; yet Adam’s sin deserved it, so that it was justly left to fall upon us, we, as a consequent and punishment of his sin, being reduced to our natural portion.

How? What is this but flying to the old Supra-lapsarian blasphemy of a right of property in God over all his creatures, and destroying that sacred distinction between person and thing which is the light and the life of all law human and divine? Mercy on us! Is not agony, is not the stone, is not blindness, is not ignorance, are not headstrong, inherent, innate, and connate, passions driving us to sin when reason is least able to withhold us,–are not all these punishments, grievous punishments, and are they not inflicted on the innocent babe? Is not this the result infused into the ‘milk not mingled’ of St. Peter; [15] spotting the immaculate begotten, souring and curdling the innocence ‘without sin or malice’? [16] And if this be just, and compatible with God’s goodness, why all this outcry against St. Austin and the Calvinists and the Lutherans, whose whole addition is a lame attempt to believe guilt, where they cannot find it, in order to justify a punishment which they do find?

Ib. p. 379.

But then for the evil of punishment, that may pass further than the action. If it passes upon the innocent, it is not a punishment to them, but an evil inflicted by right of dominion; but yet by reason of the relation of the afflicted to him that sinned, to him it is a punishment.

Here the snake peeps out, and now takes its tail into its mouth. Right of dominion! Nonsense! Things are not objects of right or wrong. Power of dominion I understand, and right of judgment I understand; but right of dominion can have no immediate, but only a relative, sense. I have a right of dominion over this estate, that is, relatively to all other persons. But if there be a ‘jus dominandi’ over rational and free agents, then why blame Calvin? For all attributes are then merged in blind power: and God and fate are the same:

[Greek: Zeus kai Moira kai aeerophoitis Erinnus]

Strange Trinity! God, Necessity, and the Devil. But Taylor’s scheme has far worse consequences than Calvin’s: for it makes the whole scheme of Redemption a theatrical scenery. Just restore our bodies and corporeal passions to a perfect ‘equilibrium’ and fortunate instinct, and, there being no guilt or defect in the soul, the Son of God, the Logos, and Supreme Reason, might have remained unincarnate, uncrucified. In short, Socinianism is as inevitable a deduction from Taylor’s scheme as Deism or Atheism is from Socinianism.

‘In fine’.

The whole of Taylor’s confusion originated in this;–first, that he and his adversaries confound original with hereditary sin; but chiefly that neither he nor his adversaries had considered that guilt must be a ‘noumenon’; but that our images, remembrances, and consciousnesses of our actions are ‘phaenomena’. Now the ‘phaenomenon’ is in time, and an effect: but the ‘noumenon’ is not in time any more than it is in space. The guilt has been before we are even conscious of the action; therefore an original sin (that is, a sin universal and essential to man as man, and yet guilt, and yet choice, and yet amenable to punishment), may be at once true and yet in direct contradiction to all our reasonings derived from ‘phaenomena’, that is, facts of time and space. But we ought not to apply the categories of appearance to the [Greek: ontos onta] of the intelligible or causative world. This (I should say of Original Sin) is mystery! We do not so properly believe it, as we know it. What is actual must be possible. But if we will confound actuals with reals, and apply the rules of the latter to cases of the former, we must blame ourselves for the clouds and darkness and storms of opposing winds, which the error will not fail to raise. By the same process an Atheist may demonstrate the contradictory nature of eternity, of a being at once infinite and of resistless causality, and yet intelligent. Jeremy Taylor additionally puzzled himself with Adam, instead of looking into the fact in himself.

How came it that Taylor did not apply the same process to the congeneric question of the freedom of the will? In half a dozen syllogisms he must have gyved and hand-cuffed himself into blank necessity and mechanic motions. All hangs together. Deny Original Sin, and you will soon deny free will;–then virtue and vice;–and God becomes ‘Abracadabra’; a sound, nothing else.

SECOND LETTER TO THE BISHOP OF ROCHESTER.

Ib. p. 390-1.

To this it is answered as you see, there is a double guilt; a guilt of person, and of nature. That is taken away, this is not: for sacraments are given to persons, not to natures.

I need no other passage but this to convince me that Jeremy Taylor, the angle in which the two ‘apices’ of logic and rhetoric meet, consummate in both, was yet no metaphysician. Learning, fancy, discursive intellect, ‘tria juncta in uno’, and of each enough to have alone immortalized a man, he had; but yet [Greek: ouden meta physin]. Images, conceptions, notions, such as leave him but one rival, Shakspeare, there were; but no ideas. Taylor was a Gassendist. O! that he had but meditated in the silence of his spirit on the mystery of an ‘I AM’! He would have seen that a person, ‘quoad’ person, can have nothing common or generic; and that where this finds place, the person is corrupted by introsusception of a nature, which becomes evil thereby, and on this relation only is an evil nature. The nature itself, like all other works of God, is good, and so is the person in a yet higher sense of the word, good, like all offsprings of the Most High. But the combination is evil, and this not the work of God; and one of the main ends and results of the doctrine of Original Sin is to silence and confute the blasphemy that makes God the author of sin, without avoiding it by fleeing to the almost equal blasphemy against the conscience, that sin in the sense of guilt does not exist.

THE REAL PRESENCE AND SPIRITUAL OF CHRIST IN THE BLESSED SACRAMENT, PROVED AGAINST THE DOCTRINE OF TRANSUBSTANTIATION.

Perhaps the most wonderful of all Taylor’s works. He seems, if I may so say, to have transubstantiated his vast imagination and fancy into subtlety not to be evaded, acuteness to which nothing remains unpierceable, and indefatigable agility of argumentation. Add to these an exhaustive erudition, and that all these are employed in the service of reason and common sense; whereas in some of his Tracts he seems to wield all sorts of wisdom and wit in defence of all sorts of folly and stupidity. But these were ‘ad popellum’, and by virtue of the ‘falsitas dispensativa’, which he allowed himself.

Epist. dedicatory.

The question of transubstantiation.

I have no doubt that if the Pythagorean bond had successfully established itself, and become a powerful secular hierarchy, there would have been no lack of furious partizans to assert, yea, and to damn and burn such as dared deny, that one was the same as two; two being two in the same sense as one is one; that consequently 2+2=2 and 1+1=4. But I should most vehemently doubt that this was the intention of Pythagoras, or the sense in which the mysterious dogma was understood by the thinking part of his disciples, who nevertheless were its professed believers. I should be prepared to find that the true import and purport of the article was no more than this;–that the one in order to its manifestation must appear in and as two; that the act of re-union was simultaneous with that of the self-production, (in the geometrical use of the word ‘produce,’ as when a point produces, or evolves, itself on each side into a bipolar line), and that the Triad is therefore the necessary form of the Monad.

Even so is the dispute concerning Transubstantiation. I can easily believe that a thousand monks and friars would pretend, as Taylor says, to ‘disbelieve their eyes and ears, and defy their own reason,’ and to receive the dogma in the sense, or rather in the nonsense, here ascribed to it by him, namely, that the phenomenal bread and wine were the phenomenal flesh and blood. But I likewise know that the respectable Roman Catholic theologians state the article free from a contradiction in terms at least; namely, that in the consecrated elements the ‘noumena’ of the phenomenal bread and wine are the same with that which was the ‘noumenon’ of the phenomenal flesh and blood of Christ when on earth.

Let M represent a slab or plane of mahogany, and m its ordinary supporter or under-prop; and let S represent a slab or plane of silver, and s its supporter.

Now to affirm that M = S is a contradiction, or that m = s;

but it is no contradiction to say, that on certain occasions (S having been removed)
s is substituted for m,
and that what was M/m,
is by the command of the common master changed into M/s.

It may be false in fact, but it is not a self-contradiction in the terms.

The mode in which s subsists in M/s may be inconceivable, but not more so than the mode in which m subsists in M/m, or that in which s subsisted in S/s.

I honestly confess that I should confine my grounds of opposition to the article thus stated to its unnecessariness, to the want of sufficient proofs from Scripture that I am bound to believe or trouble my head with it. I am sure that Bishop Bull, who really did believe the Trinity, without either Tritheism or Sabellianism, could not consistently have used the argument of Taylor or of Tillotson in proof of the absurdity of Transubstantiation.

Ib. p. ccccxvi.

But for our dear afflicted mother, she is under the portion of a child in the state of discipline, her government indeed hindered, but her worshippings the same, the articles as true, and those of the church of Rome as false as ever.

O how much there is in these few words,–the sweet and comely sophistry, not of Taylor, but of human nature. Mother! child! state of discipline! government hindered! that is to say, in how many instances, scourgings hindered, dungeoning in dens foul as those of hell, mutilation of ears and noses, and flattering the King mad with assertions of his divine right to govern without a Parliament, hindered. The best apology for Laud, Sheldon, and their fellows will ever be that those whom they persecuted were as great persecutors as themselves, and much less excusable.

Ib. s. ii. p. 422.

‘In Synaxi Transubstantiationem sero definivit Ecclesia; diu satis erat credere, sive sub pane consecrate, sive quocunque modo adesse verum corpus Christi;’ so said the great Erasmus.

‘Verum corpus,’ that is, ‘res ipsissima,’ or the thing in its actual self, opposed [Greek: to phainomen’o].

Ib. s. vi. p. 425.

Now that the spiritual is also a real presence, and that they are hugely consistent, is easily credible to them that believe the gifts of the Holy Ghost are real graces, and a spirit is a proper substance.

But how the body of Christ, as opposed to his Spirit and to his Godhead, can be taken spiritually, ‘hic labor, hoc opus est.’ Plotinus says, [Greek: kai hae hylae as’omatos]; so we must say here [Greek: kai to s’oma as’omaton].

Ib. s. vii. p. 426.

So we may say of the blessed Sacrament; Christ is more truly and really present in spiritual presence than in corporal; in the heavenly effect than in the natural being.

But the presence of Christ is not in question, but the presence of Christ’s body and blood. Now that Christ effected much for us by coming in the body, which could not or would not have been effected had he not assumed the body, we all, Socinians excepted, believe; but that his body effected it, other than as Christ in the body, where shall we find? how can we understand?

Ib. p. 427.

So when it is said, ‘Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of God,’ that is, corruption shall not inherit; and in the resurrection, our bodies are said to be spiritual, that is, not in substance, but in effect and operation.

This is, in the first place, a wilful interpretation, and secondly, it is absurd; for what sort of flesh and blood would incorruptible flesh and blood be? As well might we speak of marble flesh and blood. But in Taylor’s mind, as seen throughout, the logician was predominant over the philosopher, and the fancy outbustled the pure intuitive imagination. In the sense of St. Paul, as of Plato and all other dynamic philosophers, flesh and blood is ‘ipso facto’ corruption, that is, the spirit of life in the mid or balancing state between fixation and reviviscence. ‘Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?’ is a Hebraism for ‘this death which the body is.’ For matter itself is but ‘spiritus in coagulo,’ and organized matter the coagulum in the act of being restored; it is then repotentiating. Stop its self-destruction as matter, and you stop its self-reproduction as a vital organ. In short, Taylor seems to fall into the very fault he reproves in Bellarmine, and with this additional evil, that his reasoning looks more like tricking or explaining away a mystery. For wherein does the Sacrament of the Eucharist differ from that of Baptism, nay, even of grace before meat, when performed fervently and in faith? Here too Christ is present in the hearts of the faithful by blessing and grace. I see at present no other way of interpreting the text so as not to make the Sacrament a mere arbitrary ‘memento,’ but by an implied negative. In propriety, the word is confined to no portion of corporality in particular. “This (the bread and wine) are as truly my flesh and blood as the ‘phaenomena’ which you now behold and name as such.”

Ib. s. ix. p. 429.

From this paragraph I conclude, though not without some perplexity, that by ‘the body and blood verily and indeed taken,’ we are not to understand body and blood in their limited sense, as contradistinguished from the soul or Godhead of Christ, but as a ‘periphrasis’ for Christ himself, or at least Christ’s humanity. Taylor, however, has misconstrued Phavorinus’ meaning though not his words. ‘Spiritualia eterna quoad spiritum.’ But this is the very depth of the purified Platonic philosophy.

Ib. s. x. p. 430.

But because the words do perfectly declare our sense, and are owned publicly in our doctrine and manner of speaking, it will be in vain to object against us those words of the Fathers, which use the same expressions: for if by virtue of those words ‘really,’ ‘substantially,’ ‘corporally,’ ‘verily and indeed,’ and ‘Christ’s body and blood,’ the Fathers shall be supposed to speak for Transubstantiation, they may as well suppose it to be our doctrine too; for we use the same words, and therefore those authorities must signify nothing against us, unless these words can he proved in them to signify more than our sense of them does import; and by this truth, many, very many of their pretences are evacuated.

A sophism, dearest Jeremy. We use the words because these early Fathers used them, and have forced our own definitions on them. But should we have chosen these words to express our opinion by, if there had been no controversy on the subject? But the Fathers chose and selected these words as the most obvious and natural.

Ib. s. xi. p. 431.

It is much insisted upou that it be inquired whether, when we say we believe Christ’s body to be really in the Sacrament, we mean ‘that body, that flesh, that was born of the Virgin Mary, that was crucified, dead, and buried?’ I answer, that I know none else that he had or hath: there is but one body of Christ natural and glorified.

This may be true, or at least intelligible, of Christ’s humanity or personal identity as [Greek: noaeton ti], but applied to the phenomenal flesh and blood, it is nonsense. For if every atom of the human frame be changed by succession in eleven or twelve years, the body born of the Virgin could not be the body crucified, much less the body crucified be the body glorified, spiritual and incorruptible. I construe the words of Clement of Alexandria, quoted by Taylor below, [17] literally, and they perfectly express my opinion; namely, that Christ, both in the institution of the Eucharist and in the sixth chapter of John, spoke of his humanity as a ‘noumenon,’ not of the specific flesh and blood which were its ‘phaenomena’ at the last supper and on the cross. But Jeremy Taylor was a semi-materialist, and though no man better managed the logic of substance and accidents, he seems to have formed no clear metaphysical notion of their actual meaning. Taken notionally, they are mere interchangeable relations, as in concentric circles the outmost circumference is the substance, the other circles its accidents; but if I begin with the second and exclude the first from my thoughts, then this is substance and the interior ones accidents, and so on; but taken really, we mean the complex action of co-agents on our senses, and accident as only an agent acting on us. Thus we say, the beer has turned sour: sour is the accident of the substance beer. But, in fact, a new agent, oxygen, has united itself with other agents in the joint composition, the essence of which new comer is to be sour: at all events, Taylor’s construction is a mere assertion, meaning no more than ‘in this sense only can I subscribe to the words of Bertram, Jerome, and Clement.’

If a re-union of the Lutheran and English Churches with the Roman were desirable and practicable, the best way, [Greek: h_os emoige dokei,] would be, that any remarkable number should offer union on a given profession of faith chiefly negative, as we protest against the authority of the Church in temporals; that the words agreed to by Beza and Espencoeus, on the part of the Reformers and Romanists respectively, at Poissy, used with implicit faith, shall suffice. ‘Credimus in usu coentae Dominicae vere, reipsa, substantialiter, seu in substantia, verum corpus et sanguinem Christi spirituali et ineffabili modo esse, exhiberi, sumi a fidelibus communicantibus.’

Ib. s. in. p. 434.

The other Schoolman I am to reckon in this account, is Gabriel Biel.

Taylor should have informed the reader that Gabriel Biel is but the echo of Occam, and that both were ante-Lutheran Protestants in heart, and as far as they dared, in word likewise.

Ib. s. vi. p. 436.

So that if, according to the Casuists, especially of the Jesuits’ order, it be lawful to follow the opinion of any one probable doctor, here we have five good men and true, besides Occam, Bassolis, and Mechior Camus, to acquit us from our search after this question in Scripture.

Taylor might have added Erasmus, who, in one of his letters, speaking of Oecolampadius’s writings on the Eucharist, says ‘”ut seduci posse videantur etiam electi,”‘ and adds, that he should have embraced his interpretations, ‘”nisi obstaret consensus Ecclesiae;”‘ that is, Oecolampadius has convinced me, and I should avow my conviction, but for motives of personal prudence and regard for the public peace.

OF THE SIXTH CHAPTER OF ST. JOHN’S GOSPEL.

Ib. p. 436.

I cannot but think that the same mysterious truth, whatever it be, is referred to in the Eucharist and in this chapter of St. John; and I wonder that Taylor, who makes the Eucharist a spiritual sumption of Christ, should object to it. A = C and B = C, therefore A = B. [18]

Ib. s. iv. p. 440.

The error on both sides, Roman and Protestant, originates in the confusion of sign or figure with symbol, which latter is always an essential part of that, of the whole of which it is the representative. Not seeing this, and therefore seeing no ‘medium’ between the whole thing and the mere metaphor of the thing, the Romanists took the former or positive pole of the error, the Protestants the latter or negative pole. The Eucharist is a symbolic, or solemnizing and ‘totum in parte’ acting of an act, which in a true member of Christ’s body is supposed to be perpetual. Thus the husband and wife exercise the duties of their marriage contract of love, protection, obedience, and the like, all the year long, and yet solemnize it by a more deliberate and reflecting act of the same love on the anniversary of their marriage.

Ib. s. ix p. 447-8.

That which neither can feel or be felt, see or be seen, move or be moved, change or be changed, neither do or suffer corporally, cannot certainly be eaten corporally; but so they affirm concerning the body of our blessed Lord; it cannot do or suffer corporally in the Sacrament, therefore it cannot be eaten corporally, any more than a man can chew a spirit, or eat a meditation, or swallow a syllogism into his belly.

Absurd as the doctrine of Transubstantiation may thus be made, yet Taylor here evidently confounds a spirit, ‘ens realissimum,’ with a mere notion or ‘ens logicum.’ On this ground of the spirituality of all powers [Greek: donameis], it would not be difficult to evade many of Taylor’s most plausible arguments. Enough, however, and more than enough would be left in their full force.

Ib. p. 448.

Besides this, I say this corporal union of our bodies to the body of God incarnate, which these great and witty dreamers dream of, would make man to be God.

But yet not God, nor absolutely. ‘I am in my Father, even so ye are in me.’

Ib. s. xxii. p. 456.

By this time I hope I may conclude, that Transubstantiation is not taught by our blessed Lord in the sixth chapter of St. John: ‘Johannes de tertia et Eucharistica caena nihil quidem scribit, eo quod caeteri tres Evangelistae ante ilium eam plene descripsissent.’ They are the words of Stapleton and are good evidence against them.

I cannot satisfy my mind with this reason, though the one commonly assigned both before and since Stapleton: and yet ignorant, when, why, and for whom John wrote his Gospel, I cannot substitute a better or more probable one. That John believed the command of the Eucharist to have ceased with the destruction of the Jewish state, and the obligation of the cup of blessing among the Jews,–or that he wrote it for the Greeks, unacquainted with the Jewish custom,–would be not improbable, did we not know that the Eastern Church, that of Ephesus included, not only continued this Sacrament, but rivalled the Western Church in the superstition thereof.

Ib. s. i. p. 503.

Now I argue thus: if we eat Christ’s natural body, we eat it either naturally or spiritually: if it be eaten only spiritually, then it is spiritually digested, &c.

What an absurdity in the word ‘it’ in this passage and throughout!

Vol. X. s. iii. p. 3.

The accidents, proper to a substance, are for the manifestation, a notice of the substance, not of themselves; for as the man feels, but the means by which he feels is the sensitive faculty, so that which is felt, is the substance, and the means by which it is felt is the accident.

This is the language of common sense, rightly so called, that is, truth without regard or reference to error; thus only differing from the language of genuine philosophy, which is truth intentionally guarded against error. But then in order to have supported it against an acute antagonist, Taylor must, I suspect, have renounced his Gassendis and other Christian ‘Epicuri.’ His antagonist would tell him; when a man strikes me with a stick, I feel the stick, and infer the man; but ‘pari ratione,’ I feel the blow, and infer the stick; and this is tantamount to,–I feel, and by a mechanism of my thinking organ attribute causation to precedent or co-existent images; and this no less in states in which you call the images unreal, that is, in dreams, than when they are asserted by you to have an outward reality.

Ib. p. 4.

But when a man, by the ministry of the senses, is led into the apprehension of a wrong object, or the belief of a false proposition, then he is made to believe a lie, &c.

There are no means by which a man without chemical knowledge could distinguish two similarly shaped lumps, one of sugar and another of sugar of lead. Well! a lump of sugar of lead lies among other artefacts on the shelf of a collector; and with it a label, “Take care! this is not sugar, though it looks so, but crystallized oxide of lead, and it is a deadly poison.” A man reads this label, and yet takes and swallows the lump. Would Taylor assert that the man was made to swallow a poison? Now this (would the Romanist say) is precisely the case of the consecrated elements, only putting food and antidote for poison; that is, as far as this argument of Jeremy Taylor is concerned.

Ib. p. 5.

Just upon this account it is, that St. John’s argument had been just nothing in behalf of the whole religion: for that God was incarnate, that Jesus Christ did such miracles, that he was crucified, that he arose again, and ascended into heaven, that he preached these sermons, that he gave such commandments, he was made to believe by sounds, by shapes, by figures, by motions, by likenesses, and appearances, of all the proper accidents.

A Socinian might turn this argument with equal force at least, but I think with far greater, against the Incarnation. But it is a sophism, that actually did lead, to Socinianism: for surely bread and wine are less disparate from flesh and blood, than a human body from the Omnipresent Spirit. The disciples would, according to Taylor, Tillotson, and the other Latitudinarian common sense divines, have been justified in answering: “All our senses tell us you are only a man: how should, we believe you when you say the contrary? If we are not to believe all our senses, much less can we believe that we actually hear you.”

And Taylor in my humble judgment gives a force and extension to the words of St. John, quoted before,–‘That which was from the beginning, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have beheld, and our hands have handled of the word of life’ (1 Ep.1.),–far greater than they either can, or were meant to, bear. It is beyond all doubt, that the words refer to, and were intended to confute, the heresy which was soon after a prominent doctrine of the Gnostics; namely, that the body of Christ was a phantom. To this St. John replies: I have myself had every proof to the contrary: first, the proof of the senses; secondly, Christ’s own assurance. Now this was unanswerable by the Gnostics, without one or the other of two pretences; either that St. John and the other known and appointed Apostles and delegates of the Word were liars; or that the Epistle was spurious. The first was too intolerable: therefore they adopted the second. Observe, the heretics, whom St. John confutes, did not deny the actual presence of the Word with the appearance of a human body, much less the truth of the wonders performed by the Word in this super-human and unearthly ‘vice-corpus,’ or ‘quasi corpus:’ least of all, would they assert either that the assurances of the Word were false in themselves, or that the sense of hearing might have been permitted to deceive the beloved Apostle, (which would have been virtual falsehood and a subornation of falsehood), however liable to deception the senses might be generally, and as sole and primary proofs unsupported by antecedent grounds, ‘praecognitis vel preconcessis.’ And that St. John never thought of advancing the senses to any such dignity and self-sufficiency as proofs, it would be easy to shew from twenty passages of his Gospel. I say, again and again, that I myself greatly prefer the general doctrine of our own Church respecting the Eucharist,–‘rem credimus, modum nescimus,’–to either Tran- (or Con-) substantiation, on the one hand, or to the mere ‘signum memoriae causa’ of the Sacramentaries. But nevertheless, I think that the Protestant divines laid too much stress on the abjuration of the metaphysical part of the Roman article; as if, even with the admission of Transubstantiation, the adoration was not forbidden and made idolatrous by the second commandment.

Ib. s. vi. p. 9.

And yet no sense can be deceived in that which it always perceives alike: ‘The touch can never he deceived.’

Every common juggler falsifies this assertion when he makes the pressure from a shilling seem the shilling itself. “Are you sure you feel it?” “Yes.” “Then open your hand. Presto! ‘Tis gone.” From this I gather that neither Taylor nor Aristotle ever had the nightmare.

Ib. p.10.

The purpose of which discourse is this: that no notices are more evident and more certain than the notices of sense; but if we conclude contrary to the true dictate of senses, the fault is in the understanding, collecting false conclusions from right premises. It follows, therefore, that in the matter of the Eucharist we ought to judge that which our senses tell us.

Very unusually lax reasoning for Jeremy Taylor, whose logic is commonly legitimate even where his metaphysic is unsatisfactory. What Romanist ever asserted that a communicant’s palate deceived him, when it reported the taste of bread or of wine in the elements?

Ib. s. i. p. 16.

When we discourse of mysteries of faith and articles of religion, it is certain that the greatest reason in the world, to which all other reasons must yield, is this–‘God hath said it, therefore it is true.’

Doubtless: it is a syllogism demonstrative. All that God says is truth, is necessarily true. But God hath said this; ‘ergo,’ &c. But how is the ‘minor’ to be proved, that God hath said this? By reason? But it is against reason. By the senses? But it is against the senses.

Ib. s. xii. p. 27.

First; for Christ’s body, his natural body, is changed into a spiritual body, and it is not now a natural body, but a spiritual, and therefore cannot be now in the Sacrament after a natural manner, because it is so no where, and therefore not there: ‘It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.’

But mercy on me! was this said of the resurgent body of Jesus? a spiritual body, of which Jesus said it was not a spirit. If tangible by Thomas’s fingers, why not by his teeth, that is, manducable?

Ib. s. xxviii. p. 44.

So that if there were a plain revelation of Transubstantiation, then this argument were good … when there are so many seeming impossibilities brought against the Holy Trinity … And therefore we have found difficulties, and shall for ever, till, in this article, the Church returns to her ancient simplicity of expression.

Taylor should have said, it would have very greatly increased the difficulty of proving that it was really revealed, but supposing that certain, then doubtless it must be believed as far as nonsense can be believed, that is, negatively. From the Apostles’ Creed it may be possible to deduce the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity; but assuredly it is not fully expressed therein: and what can Taylor mean by the Church returning to her first simplicity in this article? What less could she say if she taught the doctrine at all, than that the Word and the Spirit are spoken of every where in Scripture as individuals, each distinct from the other, and both from the Father: that of both all the divine attributes are predicated, except self-origination; that the Spirit is God, and the Word is God, and that they with the Father are the one God? And what more does she say now? But Taylor, like Swift, had a strong tendency to Sabellianism.

It is most dangerous, and, in its distant consequences, subversive of all Christianity to admit, as Taylor does, that the doctrine of the Trinity is at all against, or even above, human reason in any other sense, than as eternity and Deity itself are above it. In the former, as well as the latter, we can prove that so it must be, and form clear notions by negatives and oppositions.

Ib. s. xxix. p. 45.

Now concerning this, it is certain it implies a contradiction, that two bodies should be in one place, or possess the place of another, till that be cast forth.

So far from it that I believe the contrary; and it would puzzle Taylor to explain a thousand ‘phaenomena’ in chemistry on his certainty. But Taylor assumed matter to be wholly quantitative, which granted, his opinion would become certain.

Ib. s. xxxii. p. 49.

The door might be made to yield to his Creator as easily as water, which is fluid, be made firm under his feet; for consistence or lability are not essential to wood and water.

Here the common basis of water, ice, vapour, steam, ‘aqua crystallina’, and (possibly) water-gas is called water, and confounded with the species water, that is, the common base ‘plus’ a given proportion of caloric. To the species water continuity and lability are essential.

Ib. p. 50.

The words in the text are [Greek: kekleismen_on t_on thyr_on] in the past tense, the gates or doors having been shut; but that they were shut in the instant of Christ’s entry, it says not: they might of course, if Christ had so pleased, have been insensibly opened, and shut in like manner again; and, if the words be observed, it will appear that St. John mentioned the shutting the doors in relation to the Apostles’ fear, not to Christ’s entering: he intended not (so far as appears) to declare a miracle.

Thank God! Here comes common sense.

Ib. ss. xvi-xvii. pp. 71-73.

All most excellent; but O! that Taylor’s stupendous wit, subtlety, acuteness, learning and inexhaustible copiousness of argumentation would but tell us what he himself, Dr. Jeremy Taylor, means by eating Christ’s body by faith: his body, not his soul or Godhead. Eat a body by faith!

A DISSUASIVE FROM POPERY.

Part I.

Ib. s. ii. p. 137.

The sentence of the Fathers in the third general Council, that at Ephesus;–‘that it should not be lawful for any man to publish or compose another faith or creed than that which was defined by the Nicene Council.’

Upon what ground then does the Church of England reconcile with this decree its reception of the so called Athanasian creed?

Ib. s. iv. p. 145.

We consider that the doctrines upon which it (Purgatory) is pretended reasonable, are all dubious, and disputable at the very best. Such are … that the taking away the guilt of sins does not suppose the taking away the obligation to punishment; that is, that when a man’s sin is pardoned, he may be punished without the guilt of that sin as justly as with it.

The taking away the guilt does not, however, imply of necessity the natural removal of the consequences of sin. And in this sense, I suppose, the subtler Romanists would defend this accursed doctrine. A man may have bitterly repented and thoroughly reformed the sin of drunkenness, and by this genuine ‘metanoia’ and faith in Christ crucified have obtained forgiveness of the guilt, and yet continue to suffer a heavy punishment in a schirrous liver or incurable dyspepsy. But who authorized the Popes to extend this to the soul?

Ib. p. 153.

St. Ambrose saith that ‘death is a haven of rest.’

Consider the strange and oftentimes awful dreams accompanying the presence of irritating matter in the lower abdomen, and the seeming appropriation of particular sorts of dream images and incidents to affections of particular organs and ‘viscera.’ Do the material causes act positively, so that with the removal of the body by death the total cause is removed, and of course the effects? Or only negatively and indirectly, by lessening and suspending that continuous texture of organic sensation, which, by drawing outward the attention of the soul, sheaths her from her own state and its corresponding activities?–A fearful question, which I too often agitate, and which agitates me even in my dreams, when most commonly I am in one of Swedenborg’s hells, doubtful whether I am once more to be awaked, and thinking our dreams to be the true state of the soul disembodied when not united with Christ. On awaking from such dreams, I never fail to find some local pain, ‘circa-‘ or ‘infra-‘umbilical, with kidney affections, and at the base of the bladder.

PART II.–INTRODUCTION.

P. 227.

But yet because I will humour J.S. for this once; even here also ‘The Dissuasive’ relies upon a first and self-evident principle as any is in Christianity, and that is, ‘Quod primum verum.’

I am surprised to meet such an assertion in so acute a logician and so prudent an advocate as Jeremy Taylor. If the ‘quod primum verum’ mean the first preaching or first institution of Christianity by its divine Founder, it is doubtless an evident inference from the assumed truth of Christianity, or, if you please, evidently implied therein; but surely the truth of the Christian system, composed of historical narrations, doctrines, precepts, and arguments, is no self-evident position, still less, if there be any tenable distinction between the words, a primary truth. How then can an inference from a particular, a variously proveable and proof-requiring, position be itself a universal and self-evident one?

But if ‘quod primum verum’ means ‘quod prius verius,’ this again is far from being of universal application, much less self-evident. Astrology was prior to astronomy; the Ptolemaic to the Newtonian scheme. It must therefore be confined to history: yet even thus, it is not for any practicable purpose necessarily or always true. Increase in other knowledge, physical, anthropological, and psychological, may enable an historian of A.D. 1800 to give a much truer account of certain events and characters than the contemporary chroniclers had given, who lived in an age of ignorance and superstition.

But confine the position within yet narrower bounds, namely, to Christian antiquity. In addition to all other objections, it has this great defect; that it takes for granted the very point in dispute, whether Christianity was an ‘opus simul et in toto perfectum,’ or whether the great foundations only were laid by Christ while on earth, and by the Apostles, and the superstructure or progression of the work entrusted to the successors of the Apostles; and whether for that purpose Christ had not promised that his Spirit should be always with the Church.

Now this growth of truth, not only in each individual Christian who is indeed a Christian, but likewise in the Church of Christ, from age to age, has been affirmed and defended by sundry Latitudinarian, Grotian and Sociman divines even among Protestants: the contrary, therefore, and an inference from the supposition of the contrary, can never be pronounced self-evident or primary.

Jeremy Taylor had nothing to do with these mock axioms, but to ridicule them, as in other instances he has so effectually done. It was sufficient and easy to shew, that, true or false, the position was utterly inapplicable to the facts of the Roman Church; that, instead of passing, like the science of the material heaven, from dim to clear, from guess to demonstration, from mischievous fancies to guiding, profitable and powerful truths, it had overbuilt the divinest truths by the silliest and not seldom wicked forgeries, usurpations and superstitions. J.S.’s very notion of proving a mass of histories by simple logic, he would have found exposed to his hand with exquisite truth and humour by Lucian.

1810.

In the preceding note I think I took Taylor’s words in too literal a sense; the remarks, however, on the common maxim, ‘In rebus fidei, quod prius verius,’ seem to me just and valuable. 2. March, 1824.

Ib. p. 297.

When he talks of being infallible, if the notion be applied to his Church, then he means an infallibility antecedent, absolute, unconditionate, such as will not permit the Church ever to err.

Taylor himself was infected with the spirit of casuistry, by which saving faith is placed in the understanding, and the moral act in the outward deed. How infinitely safer the true Lutheran doctrine: God cannot be mocked; neither will truth, as a mere conviction of the understanding, save, nor error condemn;–to love truth sincerely is spiritually to have truth; and an error becomes a personal error, not by its aberration from logic or history, but so far as the causes of such error are in the heart, or may be traced back to some antecedent un-Christian wish or habit;–to watch over the secret movements of the heart, remembering ever how deceitful a thing it is, and that God cannot be mocked, though we may easily dupe ourselves: these, as the ground-work with prayer, study of the Scriptures, and tenderness to all around us, as the consequents, are the Christian’s rule, and supersede all books of casuistry, which latter serve only to harden our feelings and pollute the imagination. To judge from the Roman casuists, nay, I ought to say, from Taylor’s own ‘Ductor Dubitantium,’ one would suppose that a man’s points of belief and smallest determinations of outward conduct,–however pure and charitable his intentions, and however holy or blameless the inward source of those intentions or convictions in his past and present state of moral being,–were like the performance of an electrical experiment, and would blow a man’s salvation into atoms from a mere unconscious mistake in the arrangement and management of the apparatus.

See Livy’s account of Tullus Hostilius’s unfortunate experiment with one of Numa’s sacrificial ceremonies. The trick not being performed ‘secundum artem,’ Jupiter enraged shot him dead.[A] Before God our deeds, which for him can have no value, gain acceptance in proportion as they are evolutions of our spiritual life. He beholds our deeds in our principles. For men our deeds have value as efficient causes, worth as symptoms. They infer our principles from our deeds. Now, as religion or the love of God cannot subsist apart from charity or the love of our neighbour, our conduct must be conformable to both.

Ib. p. 305.

Only for their comfort this they might have also observed in that book,–that there is not half so much excuse for the Papists as there is for the Anabaptists; and yet it was but an excuse at the best, as appears in those full answers I have given to all their arguments, in the last edition of that book, among the polemical discourses in folio.

Nay, dear Bishop! but such an excuse, as compared with your after attempt to evacuate it, resembles a coat of mail of your own forging, which you boil, in order to melt it away into invisibility. You only hide it by foam and bubbles, by wavelets and steam-clouds, of ebullient rhetoric: I speak of the Anabaptists as Anti-paedobaptists.

Ib. s. i. p. 337.

‘Henceforth I call you not servants, for the servant knoweth not what his Lord doth; but I have called you friends, for all things I have heard from the Father I have made known to you.’

I never thought of this text before, but it seems to me a stronger passage in favour of Psilanthropism, or modern Socinianism,–a doctrine which of all heresies I deem the most fundamental and the worst (the impurities of madmen out of the question),–than I have ever seen, and far stronger than that concerning the day of judgment, which in its apparent sense is clearly high Arianism, or teaching the super-angelical, yet infra-divine, nature of Christ. We must interpret it [Greek: kat’ analogian piste_os], not as ‘all things’ absolutely, but as ‘all things’ concerning your interests, ‘all things’ that it behoves you to know. Else it would contradict Christ’s words, ‘None knoweth the Father but the Son,’ that is, truly and totally. For Christ does not promise in this life to give us the same degree of knowledge as he himself possessed, but only a ‘quantum sufficit’ of the kind. This is clear by St. John’s ‘all things,’ which assuredly did not include either the discoveries of Newton or of Davy.

14 August, 1811.

Ib. s. iii. p. 348.

The Churches have troubled themselves with infinite variety of questions, and divided their precious unity, and destroyed charity, and instead of contending against the devil and all his crafty methods, they have contended against one another, and excommunicated one another, and anathematized and damned one another; and no man is the better after all, but most men are very much the worse; and the Churches are in the world still divided about questions that commenced twelve or thirteen ages since, and they are like to be so for ever, till Elias come, &c.

I remember no passages of the Fathers nearer to inspired Scripture than this and similar ones of Jeremy Taylor, in which, quitting the acute logician, he combines his heart with his head, and utters general, and inclusive, and reconciling truths of charity and of common sense. All amounts but to this:–what is binding on all must be possible to all. But conformity of intellectual conclusions is not possible. Faith therefore cannot reside totally in the understanding. But to do what we believe we ought to do is possible to all, therefore binding on all; therefore the ‘unum necessarium’ of Christian faith. Talk not of bad conscience; it is like bad sense, that is, no sense; and we all know that we may wilfully lie till we involuntarily believe the lie as truth; but ‘causa causae est causa vera causati.’

Ib. p. 347.

But if you mean the Catholic Church, then, if you mean her, an abstracted separate being from all particulars, you pursue a cloud, and fall in love with an idea and a child of fancy.

Here Taylor uses ‘idea’ as opposed to image or distinct phantasm; and this is with few exceptions his general sense, and even the exceptions are only metaphors from the general sense, that is, images so faint, indefinite and fluctuating as to be almost no images, that is, ideas; as we say of a very thin body, it is a ghost or spirit, the lowest degree of one kind being expressed by the opposite kind.

Ib. p. 380.

‘Miracles’ were, in the beginning of Christianity, a note of true believers: Christ told us so. And he also taught us that Anti-Christ should be revealed in lying signs and wonders, and commanded us, by that token, to take heed of them.

An excellent distinction between a note or mark by which a thing already proved may be known, and the proofs of the thing. Thus the poisonous qualities of the nightshade are established by the proper proofs, and the marks by which a plant may be known to be the nightshade, are the number, position, colour, and so on, of its filaments, petals, and the rest.

Ib.

The ‘spirit of prophecy’ is also a pretty sure note of the true Church, and yet…I deny not but there have been some prophets in the Church of Rome: Johannes de Rupe Scissa, Anselmus, Marsicanus, Robert Grosthead, Bishop of Lincoln, St. Hildegardis, Abbot Joachim, whose prophecies and pictures prophetical were published by Theophrastus Paracelsus, and John Adrasder, and by Paschalinus Regiselmus, at Venice, 1589; but (as Ahab said concerning Micaiah) these do not prophesy good concerning Rome, but evil, &c.

This paragraph is an exquisite specimen of grave and dignified irony, ‘telum quod cedere simulat retorquentis’. In contrast with this stands the paragraph on note 15, (p. 381.) which is a coarse though not unmerited sneer, or, as a German would have expressed himself, ‘an of-Jeremy-Taylor-unworthy,though a-not-of-the-Roman-Catholic-Papicolar- polemics-unmerited, sneer.’

Ib. p. 381.

… excepting only some Popes have been remarked by their own histories for funest and direful deaths.

In the adoption of this word ‘funest’ into the English language by ‘apocope’ of the final ‘us’, Taylor is supported by ‘honest’ and ‘modest;’ but then the necessity of pronouncing funest should have excluded it, the superlative final being an objection to all of them, though outweighed in the others. A common reader would pronounce it ‘funest,’ and perhaps mistake it for ‘funniest.’

Ib. p. 382.

… sacraments, ‘which to be seven’, is with them an article of faith.

The fastidious exclusion of this and similar idioms in modern writing occasions unnecessary embarrassment for the writer, both in narration and argumenting, and contributes to the monotony of our style.

Ib.

The Fathers and Schoolmen differ greatly in the definition of a Sacrament.

Had it been in other respects advisable, it would, I think, have been theologically convenient, if our Reformers had contra-distinguished Baptism and the Lord’s Supper by the term Mysteries, and allowed the name of Sacrament to Ordination, Confirmation, and Marriage.

Ib. s. iii. p. 388.

And he did so to the Jews … tradition was not relied upon; it was not trusted with any law of faith or manners.

This all the later Jews deny, affirming an oral communication from Moses to the Seventy, on as lame pretences as the Roman Catholics, and for the same vile purposes as reproved by Christ, who, if he had believed the story, would not have condemned traditions of men generally without exception, and would not have proved the immortality of the Patriarchs by a text which seems to have had no such primary intention, though it may contain the deduction ‘potentialiter’.

But Taylor’s 1st and 7th arguments following are, the former weak and incorrect, the latter ‘dictum et vulgatum, sed non probatum, ne dicam improbatum’. Who doubts that all that is indispensable to the salvation of each and every one is contained in the New Testament?

But is it not contained in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel? Is it not contained in the eleventh of the Acts, and in a score other separable portions? Necessary, indispensable, and the like, are multivocal terms. Dogs have survived (and without any noticeable injury) the excision of the spleen.

Dare we conclude from this fact that the spleen is not necessary to the continuance of the canine race? What is not indispensable for even the majority of individual believers may be necessary for the Church.

Instead, therefore, of these terms, put ‘true,’ ‘important,’ and ‘constitutive,’ that is, appertaining to the chain (‘ad catenam auream’) of truths interdependent and rendered mutually intelligible, which constitute the system of the Christian religion, including not alone the faith and morals of individuals, but the ‘organismus’ likewise of the Church, as a body spiritual, yet outward and historical; and this again not as an aggregate or sum total, like a corn-sheaf, but a unity.

Let the question, I say, be thus restated, and then let the cause come to trial between the Romish and the Protestant divines.

N. B. As a running comment on all these marginal notes, let it be understood that I hold the far greater part–the only not all of what our great Author urges, to apply with irrefutable force against the doctrine and practice of the Romish Church, as it in fact exists, and no less against the Familists and ‘istius farinae enthusiastas’.

I contend only, that he himself, in several assertions, lies open to attack from the supporters of a scheme of faith, as unlike either the Romish or the Fanatical, as Taylor’s own, and which scheme, namely, the co-ordinate authority of the Word, the Spirit and the Church, I believe to be the true Apostolic and Catholic doctrine, and that to this scheme his objections do not apply.

When I can bring myself to believe that from the mere perusal of the New Testament a man might have sketched out by anticipation the constitution, discipline, creeds, and sacramental ritual of the Episcopal Reformed Church of England; or that it is not a true and orthodox Church, because this is incredible; then I may perhaps be inclined to echo Chillingworth.

As I cannot think that it detracts from a dial that in order to tell the time the sun must shine upon it; so neither does it detract from the Scriptures, that though the best and holiest they are yet Scripture, and require a pure heart and the consequent assistances of God’s enlightening grace in order to understand them to edification.

1812.

I still agree with the preceding note, and add that Jeremy Taylor should have cited the Arians and Socinians on the other side. But the Romish Papal hierarchy cannot for shame say, or only from want of shame can pretend to say, what a Catholic would be entitled to urge on the triple link of the Scripture, the Spirit, and the Church.

27 April, 1826.

Ib. s. vi. p. 392.

From this principle, as it is promoted by the Fanatics, they derive a wandering, unsettled, and a dissolute religion, &c.

The evils of the Fanatic persuasion here so powerfully, so exquisitely, stated and enforced by our all-eloquent Bishop, supply no proof or even presumption against the tenet of the Spirit rightly expressed. For catholicity is the distinctive mark, the ‘conditio sine qua non’, of a spiritual teaching; and if men that dream with their eyes open mistake for this the very contrary, that is, their own particular fancies, or perhaps sensations, who can help it?

Ib. s. vii. p. 394.

They affirm that the Scriptures are full, that they are a perfect rule, that they contain all things necessary to salvation; and from hence they confuted all heresies.

Yes, the heretics were so confuted, I grant; because these would not acknowledge any other authority but that of the Scriptures, and these too forged or corrupted by themselves; but by the Scriptures that remained unaltered the early Fathers of the Church both demonstrated the omissions and interpolations of the heretical canons and the false doctrines of the heresy itself. But so far from following the same rule to the members of the true Church, they made the applicability of this way of proof the criterion of a heretic.

Ib. p. 394.

‘Which truly they then preached, but afterwards by the will of God delivered to us in the Scriptures, which was to be the pillar and ground to our faith.’

Lessing has shown this to be a false and even ungrammatical rendering of Irenaeus’s words. The ‘columen et fundamentum fidei’, are the Creed, or economy of salvation.

Ib. vii. p. 395. Extracts from Clement’s ‘Stromata’.

It would require a volume to shew the qualifications with which these ‘excerpta’ must be read. There is no one source of error and endless controversy more fruitful than this custom of quoting detached sentences. I would pledge myself in the course of a single morning to bring an equal number of passages from the same (Ante-Nicene) Fathers in proof of the Roman Catholic theory. One palpable cheat in these transcripts is the neglect of appreciating the words, ‘inspired,’ ‘a ‘Spiritu dicta”, and the like, in the Patristic use; as if the Fathers did not frequently apply the same terms to the discourses of the Bishops, their contemporaries, and to writings not canonical. It is wonderful how so acute and learned a man as Taylor could have read Tertullian, Irenaeus and Clemens Alexandrinus, and not have seen that the passages are all against him so far as they all make the Scriptures subsidiary only to the Spirit in the Church and the Baptismal creed, the [Greek: kan_on piste_os], ‘regula fidei’, or ‘aeconomia salutis’.

Ib. p. 396.

… that the tradition ecclesiastical, that is, the whole doctrine taught by the Church of God, and preached to all men, is in the Scripture.

It is only by the whole context and purpose of the work, and this too interpreted by the known doctrine of the age, that the intent of the sentences here quoted can be determined, relatively to the point in question. But even as they stand here, they do not assert that the ‘Traditio Ecclesiastica’ was grounded on, or had been deduced from, the Scriptures; nor that by Scripture Clemens meant principally the New Testament; and that the Scriptures contain the Tradition Ecclesiastical or Catholic Faith the Romish divines admit and contend.

Ib. p. 399. Extract from Origen.

As our Saviour imposed silence upon the Sadducees by the word of his doctrine, and faithfully convinced that false opinion which they thought to be truth; so also shall the followers of Christ do, by the examples of Scripture, by which according to sound doctrine every voice of Pharaoh ought to be silent.

Does not this prove too much; namely, that nothing exists in the New which does not likewise exist in the Old Testament?

One objection to Jeremy Taylor’s argument here must, I think, strike every reflecting mind; namely, that in order to a fair and full view of the sentiments of the Fathers of the first four centuries, all they declare of the Church, and her powers and prerogatives, ought to have been likewise given.

As soon as I receive any writing as inspired by the Spirit of Truth, of course I must believe it on its own authority. But how am I assured that it is an inspired work? Now do not these Fathers reply, By the Church? To the Church it belongs to declare what books are Holy Scriptures, and to interpret their right sense. Is not this the common doctrine among the Fathers? And how was the Church to judge?

First, by the same spirit surviving in her; and secondly by the accordance of the Book itself with the canon of faith, that is the Baptismal Creed. And what was this? ‘Traditio Ecclesiastica’. As to myself, I agree with Taylor against the Romanists, that the Bible is for us the only rule of faith; but I do not adopt his mode of proving it.

In the earliest period of Christianity the Scriptures of the New Testament and the Ecclesiastical Tradition were reciprocally tests of each other; but for the Christians of the second century the Scriptures were tried by the Ecclesiastical Tradition, while for us the order is reversed, and we must try the Ecclesiastical Tradition by the Scriptures. Therefore I do not expect to find the proofs of the supremacy of Scripture in the early Fathers, nor do we need their authority. Our proofs are stronger without it.

Ib. p. 403.

Which words I the rather remark, because this article of the consubstantiality of Christ with the Father is brought as an instance (by the Romanists) of the necessity of tradition, to make up the insufficiency of Scripture.

How shall I make this rhyme to Taylor’s own assertion, in the last paragraph of sect. xix. of his Episcopacy Asserted, [20] in which he clearly refers to this very question as relying on tradition for its clearness? Jeremy Taylor was a true Father of the Church, and would furnish as fine a subject for a ‘concordantia discordantiarum’ as St. Austin himself. For the exoteric and esoteric he was a very Pythagoras.

Ib. p. 406.

… for one or two of them say, Theophilus spake against Origen, for broaching fopperies of his own, and particularly, that Christ’s flesh was consubstantial with the Godhead.

Origen doubtless meant the ‘caro noumenon’, and was quite right. But never was a great man so misunderstood as Origen.

Ib. p. 408. n.

‘Sed et alia, quoe absque auctoritate et testimoniis Scripturarum, quasi traditione Apostolica, sponte reperiunt atque contingunt, percutit gladius Dei’.

“Those things which they make and find, as it were, by Apostolical tradition, without the authority and testimonies of Scripture, the word of God smites.”

Is it clear that ‘Scripturarum’ depends on ‘auctoritate’? It may well mean they who without the authority of the Church, or Scriptural testimony pretend to an Apostolical Tradition.

Ib. p. 411.

But lastly, if in the plain words of Scripture be contained all that is simply necessary to all, then it is clear, by Bellarmine’s confession, that St. Austin affirmed that the plain places of Scripture are sufficient to all laics and all idiots, or private persons, and then it is very ill done to keep them from the knowledge and use of the Scriptures, which contain all their duty both of faith and good life; so it is very unnecessary to trouble them with any thing else, there being in the world no such treasure and repository of faith and manners, and that so plain, that it was intended for all men, and for all such men is sufficient. “Read the Holy Scriptures wherein you shall find some things to be holden, and some to be avoided.”

And yet in the preface to his Apology for authorized and set forms of Liturgy, [21] Taylor regrets that the Church of England was not able to confine the laity to such selections of Holy Writ as are in her Liturgy. But Laud was then alive: and Taylor partook of his ‘trepidatiunculae’ towards the Church of Rome.

Ib. p. 412.

And all these are nothing else, but a full subscription to, and an excellent commentary upon, those words of St. Paul, ‘Let no man pretend to be wise above what is written.’

Had St. Paul anything beyond the Law and the Prophets in his mind?

Ib. p. 416.

St. Paul’s way of teaching us to expound Scripture is, that he that prophesies should do it [Greek: kat’ analogian piste_os], according to the analogy of faith.

Yet in his Liberty of Prophesying [22] Taylor turns this way into mere ridicule. I love thee, Jeremy! but an arrant theological barrister that thou wast, though thy only fees were thy desires of doing good in ‘questionibus singulis’.

Ib. s. iii. p. 419.

Only, because we are sure there was some false dealing in this matter, and we know there might be much more than we have discovered, we have no reason to rely upon any tradition for any part of our faith, any more than we could do upon Scripture, if one book or chapter of it should be detected to be imposture.

What says Jeremy Taylor then to the story of the woman taken in adultery, (‘John, c. viii. 3-11’.) which Chrysostom disdains to comment on? If true, how could it be omitted in so many, and these the most authentic, copies? And if this for fear of scandal, why not others? And who does not know that falsehood may be effected as well by omissions as by interpolations? But if false,–then–but Taylor draws the consequence himself.

Ib. p. 427.

So that the tradition concerning the Scriptures being extrinsical to Scripture is also extrinsical to the question: this tradition cannot be an objection against the sufficiency of Scripture to salvation, but must go before this question. For no man inquires whether the Scriptures contain all things necessary to salvation, unless he believe that there are Scriptures, that these are they, and that they are the word of God. All this comes to us by tradition, that is, by universal undeniable testimony.

Very just, and yet this idle argument is the favourite, both shield and sword, of the Romanists: as if I should pretend to learn the Roman history from tradition, because by tradition I know such histories to have been written by Livy, Sallust, and Tacitus!

Ib. p. 435.

The more natural consequence is that their proposition is either mistaken or uncertain, or not an article of faith (which is rather to be hoped, lest we condemn all the Greek Churches as infidels or perverse heretics), or else that it can be derived from Scripture, which last is indeed the most probable, and pursuant to the doctrine of those wiser Latins who examined things by reason and not by prejudice.

It is remarkable that both Stillingfleet and Taylor favoured the Greek opinion. But Bull’s ‘Defensio Fidei Nicaenae’ was not yet published. It is to me evident that if the Holy Ghost does not proceed through and from the Son as well as from the Father, then the Son is not the adequate substantial idea of the Father. But according to St. Paul, he is–‘ergo, &c’. N.B. These “‘ergos, &c’.” in legitimate syllogisms, where the ‘major’ and ‘minor’ have been conceded, are binding on all human beings, with the single anomaly of the Quakers. For with them nothing is more common than to admit both ‘major’ and ‘minor’, and, when you add the inevitable consequence, to say “Nay! I do not think so, Friend! Thou art worldly wise, Friend!” For example: ‘major’, it is agreed on both sides that we ought not to withhold from a man what he has a just right to: ‘minor’, property in land being the creature of law, a just right in respect of landed property is determined by the law of the land:–“agreed, such is the fact:” ‘ergo:’ the clergyman has a just right to the tithe. “Nay, nay; this is vanity, and tithes an abomination of Judaism!”

Ib. s. v. p. 492.

And since that villain of a man, Pope Hildebrand, as Cardinal Beno relates in his Life, could, by shaking of his sleeve make sparks of fire fly from it.

If this was fact, was it an idiosyncrasy, as I have known those who by combing their hair can elicit sparks with a crackling as from a cat’s back rubbed. It is very possible that the sleeve might be silk, tightened either on a very hairy arm, or else on woollen, and by shaking it might be meant stripping the silk suddenly off, which would doubtless produce flashes and sparks.

Vol. XI. s. x. p. 1.

As a general remark suggested indeed by this section, but applicable to very many parts of Taylor’s controversial writings, both against the anti-Prelatic and the Romish divines, especially to those in which our incomparable Church-aspist attempts, not always successfully, to demonstrate the difference between the dogmas and discipline of the ancient Church, and those which the Romish doctors vindicate by them,–I would say once for all, that it was the fashion of the Arminian court divines of Taylor’s age, that is, of the High Church party, headed by Archbishop Laud, to extol, and (in my humble judgment) egregiously to overrate, the example and authority of the first four, nay, of the first six centuries; and at all events to take for granted the Evangelical and Apostolical character of the Church to the death of Athanasius.

Now so far am I from conceding this, that before the first Council of Nicaea, I believe myself to find the seeds and seedlings of all the worst corruptions of the Latin Church of the thirteenth century, and not a few of these even before the close of the second.

One pernicious error of the primitive Church was the conversion of the ethical ideas, indispensable to the science of morals and religion, into fixed practical laws and rules for all Christians, in all stages of spiritual growth, and under all circumstances; and with this the degradation of free and individual acts into corporate Church obligations.

Another not less pernicious was the gradual concentration of the Church into a priesthood, and the consequent rendering of the reciprocal functions of love and redemption and counsel between Christian and Christian exclusively official, and between disparates, namely, the priest and the layman.

Ib. B. II. s. ii. p. 58.

Often have I welcomed, and often have I wrestled with, the thought of writing an essay on the day of judgment. Are the passages in St. Peter’s Epistle respecting the circumstances of the last day and the final conflagration, and even St. Paul’s, to be regarded as apocalyptic and a part of the revelation by Christ, or are they, like the dogma of a personal Satan, accommodations of the current popular creed which they continued to believe?

Ib. s. iii. p. 105.

And therefore St. Paul left an excellent precept to the Church to avoid ‘profanas vocum novitates’, ‘the prophane newness of words;’ that is, it is fit that the mysteries revealed in Scripture should be preached and taught in the words of the Scripture, and with that simplicity, openness, easiness, and candor, and not with new and unhallowed words, such as that of Transubstantiation.

Are not then Trinity, Tri-unity, ‘hypostasis, perichoresis, diphysis’, and others, excluded? Yet Waterland very ingeniously, nay more, very honestly and sensibly, shews the necessity of these terms ‘per accidens’. The ‘profanum’ fell back on the heretics who had occasioned the necessity.

Ib. p. 106.

“The oblation of a cake was a figure of the Eucharistical bread which the Lord commanded to do in remembrance of his passion.” These are Justin’s words in that place.

Justin Martyr could have meant no more, and the Greek construction means no more, than that the cake we offer is the representative, substitute, and ‘fac-simile’ of the bread which Christ broke and delivered.

I find no necessary absurdity in Transubstantiation. For substance is but a notion ‘thought on’ to the aggregate of accidents–‘hinzugedacht’ –conceived, not perceived, and conceived always in universals, never in ‘concreto’.

Therefore, X. Y. Z. being unknown quantities, Y. may be as well annexed by the choice of the mind as the imagined ‘substratum’ as X. For we cannot distinguish substance from substance any more than X. from X.

The substrate or ‘causa invisibilis’ may be the ‘noumenon’ or actuality, ‘das Ding in sich’, of Christ’s humanity, as well as the ‘Ding in sich’ of which the sensation, bread, is the appearance.

But then, on the other hand, there is not a word of sense possible to prove that it is really so; and from the not impossible to the real is a strange ‘ultra’-Rhodian leap.

And it is opposite both to the simplicity of Evangelical meaning, and anomalous from the interpretation of all analogous phrases which all men expound as figures,–‘I am the gate, I am the way, I am the vine’, and the like,–and to Christ’s own declarations that his words were to be understood spiritually, that is, figuratively.

Ib. s. vi. p. 164.

However, if you will not commit downright idolatry, as some of their saints teach you, then you must be careful to observe these plain distinctions; and first be sure to remember that when you worship an image, you do it not materially but formally; not as it is of such a substance, but as it is a sign; next take care that you observe what sort of image it is, and then proportion your right kind to it, that you do not give ‘latria’ to that where ‘hyperdulia’ is only due; and be careful that if ‘dulia’ only be due, that your worship be not ‘hyperdulical’, &c.

A masterly specimen of grave dignified irony. Indeed, Jeremy Taylor’s ‘Works’ would be of more service to an English barrister than those of Demosthenes, AEschines, and Cicero taken together.

Ib. s. vii. p. 168.

A man cannot well understand an essence, and hath no idea of it in his mind, much less can a painter’s pencil do it.

Noticeable, that this is the only instance I have met in any English classic before the Revolution of the word ‘idea’ used as synonymous with a mental image. Taylor himself has repeatedly placed the two in opposition; and even here I doubt whether he has done otherwise. I rather think he meant by the word ‘idea’ a notion under an indefinite and confused form, such as Kant calls a ‘schema’or vague outline, an imperfect embryo of a concrete, to the individuation of which the mind gives no conscious attention; just as when I say–“any thing,” I may imagine a poker or a plate; but I pay no attention to its being this rather than that; and the very image itself is so wandering and unstable that at this moment it may be a dim shadow of the one, and in the next of some other thing. In this sense, idea is opposed to image in degree instead of kind; yet still contra-distinguished, as is evident by the sequel, “much less can a painter’s pencil do it:” for were it an image, ‘individui et concreti’, then the painter’s pencil could do it as well as his fancy or better.

A DISCOURSE OF CONFIRMATION.

Of all Taylor’s works, the Discourse of Confirmation seems to me the least judicious; and yet that is not the right word either. I mean, however, that one is puzzled to know for what class of readers or auditors it was intended.

He announces his subject as one of such lofty claims; he begins with positions taken on such high ground, no less than the superior dignity and spiritual importance of Confirmation above Baptism itself–whether considered as a sacramental rite and mystery distinct from Baptism, or as its completory and crowning part (the ‘finis coronans opus’)–that we are eager to hear the proof.

But proofs differ in their value according to our previous valuation of authorities. What would pass for a very sufficient proof, because grounded on a reverend authority, with a Romanist, would be a mere fancy-medal and of no currency with a Bible Protestant.

And yet for Protestants, and those too laymen (for we can hardly suppose that Taylor thought his Episcopal brethren in need of it), must this Discourse have been intended; and in this point of view, surely never did so wise a man adopt means so unsuitable to his end, or frame a discourse so inappropriate to his audience.

The authorities of the Fathers are, indeed, as strong and decisive in favour of the Bishop’s position as the warmest advocate of Confirmation could wish; but this very circumstance was calculated to create a prejudice against the doctrine in the mind of a zealous Protestant, from the contrast in which the unequivocal and explicit declarations of the Fathers stand with the remote, arbitrary, and fine-drawn inferences from the few passages of the New Testament which can be forced into an implied sanction of a rite no where mentioned, and as a distinct and separate ministration, utterly, as I conceive, unknown in the Apostolic age.

How much more rational and convincing (as to me it seems) would it have been to have shewn, that when from various causes the practice of Infant Baptism became general in the Church, Confirmation or the acknowledgment ‘in propria persona’ of the obligations that had been incurred by proxy was introduced; and needed no other justification than its own evident necessity, as substantiating the preceding form as to the intended effects of Baptism on the believer himself, and then to have shewn the great uses and spiritual benefits of the institution.

But this would not do. Such was the spirit of the age that nothing less than the assertion of a divine origin,–of a formal and positive institution by Christ himself, or by the Apostles in their Apostolic capacity as legislators for the universal Church in all ages, could serve; and accordingly Bishops, liturgies, tithes, monarchy, and what not, were, ‘de jure divino’, with celestial patents, wrapped up in the womb of this or that text of Scripture to be exforcipated by the logico-obstetric skill of High Church doctors and ultra-loyal court chaplains.

THE EPISTLE DEDICATORY TO THE DUKE OF ORMONDE.

Ib. p. ccxvii.

This very poor church.

With the exception of Spain, the Church establishment in Ireland is now, I conceive, the richest in Europe; though by the most iniquitous measure of the Irish Parliament, most iniquitously permitted to acquire the force of law at the Union, the Irish Church was robbed of the tithes from all pasture lands. What occasioned so great a change in its favour since the time of Charles II?

1810.

Ib. p. ccxviii.

And amidst these and very many more inconveniences it was greatly necessary that God should send us such a king.

Such a king! O sorrow and shame! Why, why, O Genius! didst thou suffer thy darling son to crush the fairest flower of thy garland beneath a mitre of Charles’s putting on!

Ib. p. ccxix.

For besides that the great usefulness of this ministry will greatly endear the Episcopal order, to which (that I may use St. Hierom’s words) “if there be not attributed a more than common power and authority, there will be as many schisms as priests,” &c.

On this ground the Romish divines justify the Papacy. The fact of the Scottish Church is the sufficient answer to both. Episcopacy needs not rash assertions for its support.

Ib. p. ccxx.

For it is a sure rule in our religion, and is of an eternal truth, that “they who keep not the unity of the Church, have not the Spirit of God.”

Contrast with this our xixth and xxth Articles on the Church. The Irish Roman Catholic Bishops, methinks, must have read this with delight. What an over hasty simpleton that James II. was! Had he waited and caressed the Bishops, they would have taken the work off his hands.

Ib. p. 229. Introduction.

It has been my conviction that in respect of the theory of the Faith, (though God be praised! not in the practical result,) the Papal and the Protestant communions are equi-distant from the true idea of the Gospel Institute, though erring from opposite directions.

The Romanists sacrifice the Scripture to the Church virtually annulling the former: the Protestants reversed this practically, and even in theory, (see the above-mentioned Articles,) annulling the latter.

The consequence has been, as might have been predicted, the extinction of the Spirit (the indifference or ‘mesothesis’) in both considered as bodies: for I doubt not that numerous individuals in both Churches live in communion with the Spirit.

Towards the close of the reign of our first James, and during the period from the accession of Charles I to the restoration of his profligate son, there arose a party of divines, Arminians (and many of them Latitudinarians) in their creed, but devotees of the throne and the altar, soaring High Churchmen and ultra royalists.

Much as I dislike their scheme of doctrine and detest their principles of government both in Church and State, I cannot but allow that they formed a galaxy of learning and talent, and that among them the Church of England finds her stars of the first magnitude.

Instead of regarding the Reformation established under Edward VI as imperfect, they accused the Reformers, some of them openly, but all in their private opinions, of having gone too far; and while they were willing to keep down (and if they could not reduce him to a primacy of honor to keep out) the Pope, and to prune away the innovations in doctrine brought in under the Papal domination, they were zealous to restore the hierarchy, and to substitute the authority of the Fathers, Canonists and Councils of the first six or seven centuries, and the least Papistic of the later Doctors and Schoolmen, for the names of Luther, Melancthon, Bucer, Calvin and the systematic theologians who rejected all testimony but that of their Bible.

As far as the principle, on which Archbishop Laud and his followers acted, went to re-actuate the idea of the Church, as a co-ordinate and living Power by right of Christ’s institution and express promise, I go along with them; but I soon discover that by the Church they meant the Clergy, the hierarchy exclusively, and then I fly off from them in a tangent.

For it is this very interpretation of the Church that, according to my conviction, constituted the first and fundamental apostasy; and I hold it for one of the greatest mistakes of our polemic divines in their controversies with the Romanists, that they trace all the corruptions of the Gospel faith to the Papacy.

Meantime can we be surprised that our forefathers under the Stuarts were alarmed, and imagined that the Bishops and court preachers were marching in quick time with their faces towards Rome, when, to take one instance of a thousand, a great and famous divine, like Bishop Taylor, asserts the inferiority, in rank and efficacy, of Baptism to Confirmation, and grounds this assertion so strange to all Scriptural Protestants on a text of Cabasilas–a saying of Rupertus–a phrase of St. Denis–and a sentence of Saint Bernard in a Life of Saint Malachias!–for no Benedictine can be more liberal in his attribution of saintship than Jeremy Taylor, or more reverently observant of the beatifications and canonizations of the Old Lady of the scarlet petticoat.

P. S. If the reader need other illustrations, I refer him to Bishop Hackett’s ‘Sermons on the Advent and Nativity’, which might almost pass for the orations of a Franciscan brother, whose reading had been confined to the ‘Aurea Legenda’. It would be uncandid not to add that this indiscreet traffickery with Romish wares was in part owing to the immense reading of these divines.

Ib. s. i. p. 247. Acts viii. 14-17.

This is an argument indeed, and one that of itself would suffice to decide the question, if only it could be proved, or even made probable, that by the Holy Ghost in this place was meant that receiving of the Spirit to which Confirmation is by our Church declared to be the means and vehicle.

But this I suspect cannot be done. The whole passage to which sundry chapters in St. Paul’s Epistles seem to supply the comment, inclines and almost compels me to understand by the Holy Ghost in this narrative the miraculous gifts, [Greek: tas dynameis], collectively.

And in no other sense can I understand the sentence ‘the Holy Ghost was not yet fallen upon any of them’. But the subject is beset with difficulties from the paucity of particular instances recorded by the inspired historian, and from the multitude and character of these instances found in the Fathers and Ecclesiastical historians.

Ib. s. ii. p. 254.

Still they are all [Greek: dynameis], exhibitable powers, faculties. Were it otherwise what strange and fearful consequences would follow from the assertion, ‘the Holy Spirit was not yet fallen upon any of them’.

That we misunderstand the gift of tongues, and that it did not mean the power of speaking foreign languages unlearnt, I am strongly persuaded.

Yea, but this is not the question. If my heart, bears me witness that I love my brother, that I love my merciful Saviour, and call Jesus Lord and the Anointed of God with joy of heart, I am encouraged by Scripture to infer that the Spirit abideth in me; besides that I know that of myself, and estranged from the Holy Spirit, I cannot even think a thought acceptable before God.

But how will this help me to believe that I received this Spirit through the Bishop’s hands laid on my head at Confirmation: when perhaps I am distinctly conscious, that I loved my Saviour, freely forgave, nay, tenderly yearned for the weal of, them that hated me before my Confirmation,–when, indeed, I must have been the most uncharitable of men if I did not admit instances of the most exemplary faith, charity, and devotion in Christians who do not practise the imposition of hands in their Churches. What! did those Christians, of whom St. Luke speaks, not love their brethren?

‘In fine’.

I have had too frequent experience of professional divines, and how they identify themselves with the theological scheme to which they have been articled, and I understand too well the nature and the power, the effect and the consequences, of a wilful faith,–where the sensation of positiveness is substituted for the sense of certainty, and the stubborn clutch for quiet insight,–to wonder at any degree of hardihood in matters of belief.

Therefore the instant and deep-toned affirmative to the question

“And do you actually believe the presence of the material water in the baptizing of infants or adults is essential to their salvation, so indispensably so that the omission of the water in the Baptism of an infant who should die the day after would exclude that infant from the kingdom of heaven, and whatever else is implied in the loss of salvation?”

I should not be surprised, I say, to hear this question answered with an emphatic,

“Yes, Sir! I do actually believe this, for thus I find it written, and herein begins my right to the name of a Christian, that I have exchanged my reason for the Holy Scriptures: I acknowledge no reason but the Bible.”

But as this intrepid respondent, though he may dispense with reason, cannot quite so easily free himself from the obligations of common sense and the canons of logic,–both of which demand consistency, and like consequences from like premisses ‘in rebus ejusdem generis’, in subjects of the same class,–I do find myself tempted to wonder, some small deal, at the unscrupulous substitution of a few drops of water sprinkled on the face for the Baptism, that is, immersion or dipping, of the whole person, even if the rivers or running waters had been thought non-essential.

And yet where every word in any and in all the four narratives is so placed under the logical press as it is in this Discourse by Jeremy Taylor, and each and every incident pronounced exemplary, and for the purpose of being imitated, I should hold even this hazardous.

But I must wonder a very great deal, and in downright earnest, at the contemptuous language which the same men employ in their controversies with the Romish Church, respecting the corporal presence in the consecrated bread and wine, and the efficacy of extreme unction.

For my own part, the assertion that what is phenomenally bread and wine is substantially the Body and Blood of Christ, does not shock my common sense more than that a few drops of water sprinkled on the face should produce a momentous change, even a regeneration, in the soul; and does not outrage my moral feelings half as much.

P. S. There is one error of very ill consequence to the reputation of the Christian community, which Taylor shares with the Romish divines, namely, the quoting of opinions, and even of rhetorical flights, from the writings of this and that individual, with ‘Saint’ prefixed to his name, as expressing the faith of the Church during the first five or six centuries.

Whereas it would not, perhaps, be very difficult to convince an unprejudiced man and a sincere Christian of the impossibility that even the decrees of the General Councils should represent the Catholic faith, that is, the belief essential to, or necessarily consequent on, the faith in Christ common to all the elect.

[Footnote 1: The references are here given to Heber’s edition, 1822. Ed.]

[Footnote 2: The page however remains a blank. But a little essay on punctuation by the Author is in the Editor’s possession, and will be published hereafter.–Ed.]

[Footnote 3: See Euseb. ‘Hist.’ iii. 27.–Ed.]

[Footnote 4: ‘Vindication, &c. Quer.’ 13, 14, 15.–Ed.]

[Footnote 5: See the form previously exhibited in this volume, p. 93. –Ed.]

[Footnote 6: ‘Mark’ viii. 29. ‘Luke’ ix. 20.–Ed.]

[Footnote 7: 1 ‘Pet’. v. 13.–Ed.]

[Footnote 8: Lightfoot and Wall use this strong argument for the lawfulness and implied duty of Infant Baptism in the Christian Church. It was the universal practice of the Jews to baptize the infant children of proselytes as well as their parents. Instead, therefore, of Christ’s silence as to infants by name in his commission to baptize all nations being an argument that he meant to exclude them, it is a sign that he meant to include them. For it was natural that the precedent custom should prevail, unless it were expressly forbidden. The force of this, however, is limited to the ceremony;–its character and efficacy are not established by it.–Ed.]

[Footnote 9: The Author’s views of Baptism are stated more fully and methodically in the ‘Aids to Reflection’; but even that statement is imperfect, and consequently open to objection, as was frequently admitted by Mr. C. himself. The Editor is unable to say what precise spiritual efficacy the Author ultimately ascribed to Infant Baptism; but he was certainly an advocate for the practice, and appeared as sponsor at the font for more than one of his friends’ children. See his ‘Letter to a Godchild’, printed, for this purpose, at the end of this volume; his ‘Sonnet on his Baptismal Birthday’, (‘Poet. Works’, ii. p. 151.) in the tenth line of which, in many copies, there was a misprint of ‘heart’ for ‘front;’ and the ‘Table Talk’, 2nd edit. p. 183. Ed.]

[Footnote 10: ‘Deut.’ xiii. 1-5. xviii. 22.–Ed.]

[Footnote 11: ‘Galat.’ i. 8, 9.–Ed.]

[Footnote 12: Pp. 206-227. Ed.]

[Footnote 13: With reference to all these notes on Original Sin, see ‘Aids to Reflection’, p. 250-286.–Ed.]

[Footnote 14: ‘Aids to Reflection’, p. 274.–Ed.]

[Footnote 15: Ante. ‘Vindication, &c.’ p. 357-8.]

[Footnote 16: Ibid.]

[Footnote 17:

‘Dupliciter vero sanguis Christi et caro intelligitur, spiritualis ilia atque divina, de qua ipse dixit, Caro mea vere est cibus, &c., vel caro et sanguis, quae crucifixa est, et qui militis effusus est lancea.’

In ‘Epist. Ephes.’ c.i.]

[Footnote 18: See ‘Table Talk’, p. 72, second edit. Ed.]

[Footnote 19:

‘Ipsum regem tradunt, volventem commentaries Numae, quum ibi occulta solennia sacrificia Jovi Elicio facta invenisset, operatum his sacris se abdidisse; sed non rite initum aut curatum id sacrum esse; nee solum nullam ei oblatam Caelestium speciem, sed ira Jovis, sollicitati prava religione, fulmine ictum cum domo conflagrasse.’

L. i. c. xxxi.–Ed.]

[Footnote 20:

“This also rests upon the practice apostolical and traditive interpretation of holy Church, and yet cannot be denied that so it ought to be, by any man that would not have his Christendom suspected. To these I add the communion of women, the distinction of books apocryphal from canonical, that such books were written by such Evangelists and Apostles, the whole tradition of Scripture itself, the Apostles’ Creed, &c. … These and divers others of greater consequence, (which I dare not specify for fear of being misunderstood,) rely but upon equal faith with this of Episcopacy,”

&c.–Ed.]

[Footnote 21: S. xxvi.]

[Footnote 22: S. iv. 4.–Ed.]

NOTES ON THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS.

I know of no book, the Bible excepted, as above all comparison, which I, according to my judgment and experience, could so safely recommend as teaching and enforcing the whole saving truth according to the mind that was in Christ Jesus, as the Pilgrim’s Progress. It is, in my conviction, incomparably the best ‘Summa Theologiae Evangelicae’ ever produced by a writer not miraculously inspired.

June 14, 1830.

It disappointed, nay surprised me, to find Robert Southey express himself so coldly respecting the style and diction of the Pilgrim’s Progress. I can find nothing homely in it but a few phrases and single words. The conversation between Faithful and Talkative [1] is a model of unaffected dignity and rhythmical flow.