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CONCESSIONS 
 
 AN INQUIBIKG SPIRIT. 
 
CONFESSIONS 
 
 
 AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 
 
 SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE. 
 
 EDITED EROM THE AUTHOR'S MS. 
 
 By HENRY KELSON COLERIDGE, M.A. 
 
 THIftD EDTTION, 
 
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BRADBURY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, WUITEFRt ARS. 
 
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 C & 9 3 <L^ 
 
 ADYEETISEMENT TO THE FIEST 
 EDITION. 
 
 The following Letters on the Inspiration of the 
 Scriptures were left by Mr. Coleridge in MS. at 
 his death. The Eeader will find in them a key to 
 most of the Biblical criticism scattered throughout 
 the Author's own writings, and an affectionate, 
 pious, and, as the Editor humbly believes, a pro- 
 foundly wise attempt to place the study of the 
 Written Word on its only sure foundation, — a 
 deep sense of God's holiness and truth, and a 
 consequent reverence for that Light — the image 
 of Himself — which He has kindled in every one 
 of his rational creatures. — H. N. C. 
 
 Lincoln's Inn, September 22, 1840. 
 
 269418 
 
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE SECOND 
 EDITION. 
 
 The following Introduction was composed by 
 Mr. Green in consequence of my consulting him on 
 the subject of my Father's obligations to Lessing 
 in the "Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit;" 
 and was intended by him to be used as materials 
 for a preface to this new edition of the work. 
 As it appears however to require no remodelling, 
 either by omission or addition, I present it just 
 as it came from the author's pen. — S. C. 
 
 1849. 
 
ADVERTISEMENT TO THE PRESENT 
 EDITION. 
 
 The present edition of the " Confessions of 
 an Inquiring Spirit" differs from the last, only 
 by the removal of some miscellaneous pieces, 
 which appeared to take from the unity without 
 adding to the completeness of the work. These 
 will appear in their proper places in a forthcoming 
 volume. The introduction by Mr, Green, and the 
 defence of the author's views by his lamented 
 daughter, will still be read with interest. — D. C, 
 
 St. Mark's College, Chelsea, 
 April, 1853. 
 
 69416 
 
CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING 
 SPIRIT. 
 
Faith subsists in the synthesis of the Reason and the 
 individual Will. By virtue of the latter it must be an 
 energy, and, inasmuch as it relates to the whole moral 
 man, it must be exerted in each and all of his con- 
 stituents or incidents, faculties and tendencies : — it 
 must be a total, not a partial — a continuous, not a 
 desultory or occasional — energy. And by virtue of the 
 former, that is, Eeason, "Faith must be a Light, a form 
 of knowing, a beholding of Truth. In the incomparable 
 words of the Evangelist, therefore, — Faith must be a 
 Light originating in the Logos, or the substantial Reason, 
 which is coeternal and one with the Holy Will, and which 
 Light is at the same time the Life of men. Now as Life is 
 here the sum or collective of all moral and spiritual acts, 
 in suffering, doing, and being, so is Faith the source and 
 the sum, the energy and the principle of the fidelity of 
 Man to God, by the subordination of his human Will, in 
 all provinces of his nature, to his Reason, as the sum of 
 spiritual Truth, representing and manifesting the Will 
 Divine. — Literary Remains, vol. iv. page 437. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 BY JOSEPH HENEY GREEN. ESQ. 
 
 In preparing a new edition of this work, it is 
 scarcely less than a duty to its revered Author to 
 draw the attention of the reader to the theological 
 writings of Lessiug, in order to obviate any 
 mistake, similar to that which has been already 
 made, with regard to the Author's originality, or 
 at all events to exhibit, without reserve, the grounds 
 upon which a charge of plagiarism might possibly 
 be founded. It will be discovered, namely, on a 
 comparison of this essay with certain works of the 
 G-erman writer, that there exists so marked a 
 similarity of opinion on some points of doctrine, 
 that the reader might be inclined to adopt, as the 
 most obvious explanation of the resemblance, the 
 supposition that Coleridge had not only derived 
 the advantage, which every writer is likely to do 
 from the acumen and labours of a predecessor, but 
 
 B 2 
 
4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 that he had transferred without acknowledgment 
 Lessing's thoughts to his own pages ; nor will the 
 supposition want the support derived from the capa- 
 bility of tracing here and there similar language, 
 if not identical phrases. Nay, it cannot be denied 
 that Coleridge was a student of Lessing's writings; 
 since, in a fly-leaf of one of the volumes of a copy 
 of his works, which belonged to Coleridge, the 
 latter says : " Tear after year I have made a point 
 of re-perusing the Kleine Schriften as masterpieces 
 of style and argument." 
 
 Notwithstanding these admissions, it may be 
 reasonably doubted, however, that any candid 
 person, after the perusal of Lessing's works here 
 in question, and a careful collation of them with 
 the " Confessions," would venture to assume that 
 Coleridge had forfeited his claim to originality in 
 the view which he has here taken of " the bounds 
 between the right and the superstitious use and 
 estimation of the Sacred Canon :" and it may far 
 rather be anticipated that the result of such com- 
 parison would be the conviction that, whatever 
 portions of the " Confessions " may be justly 
 ascribed to Lessing, they were no less the growths 
 and natural educts of the different and deeper 
 principle out of which Coleridge's scheme of 
 theology had shaped itself. It is indeed highly 
 probable that Coleridge had received a lasting 
 
INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 impression from the perusal of the Kleine Schrif- 
 ten, and that when engaged in producing a work, 
 the tendency of which was in some respects similar, 
 the recollections of those writings would blend 
 with his own thoughts, and lead him to adopt 
 similar arguments, and even in some instances the 
 same expressions. It is true that no reference is 
 anywhere made to the German author ; but when 
 we consider that the " Confessions " were written 
 with an object, which can scarcely be said to have 
 anything in common with Lessing's controversial 
 essays, and were the result of a different process of 
 reasoning, which presented only insulated points 
 of contact with Lessing's arguments, it will not 
 surprise us if the reminiscences in question did not 
 become objects of conscious remembrance. For 
 Coleridge, truth «was impersonal ; and if he adopted 
 from others, it was because it was alien to the 
 habit of his mind to consider the perception or 
 discovery of truth as any thing which belonged 
 exclusively and appropriately to the individual. 
 He was ever ready to assist others in the elabora- 
 tion of their thoughts, and ever reckoned as little 
 of the rights of his own intellectual proprietorship 
 as if truth and knowledge were the same common 
 property as light and air. 
 
 That the correspondences and resemblances, to 
 which we have above adverted, and which after all 
 
6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 do not amount to much, afford any just ground for 
 impugning the originality of Coleridge may be 
 safely denied. In the case of a work, which is an 
 aggregate and not a growth, in which by eclectic 
 ingenuity 
 
 " Purpureas, late qui splendeat, unus et alter 
 Assuitur pannus ; " — Horace, A. P. 1. 15. 
 
 it would be as just to reclaim, as it would be easy 
 to detach, the borrowed fragments : but where the 
 work is the result of a formative principle which 
 gives it unity and totality, where the thoughts and 
 reasonings are the development of a living principle 
 to an organic whole, it may be safely assumed that 
 the author who interweaves with his own the 
 kindred products of other men's minds, is impelled 
 only by the sense and pleasurable sympathy of a 
 common intellectual activity, and that he would, 
 or might have arrived at the same or similar 
 results, where these are potentially contained in 
 the principle, which gave birth to his reasonings. 
 That Coleridge's theology was the growth of his own 
 mind, and inseparably united with his philosophy, 
 it is not here the place to exhibit. Nor indeed 
 is it necessary for our present purpose, that of con- 
 sidering any supposed, or hitherto unacknowledged 
 intellectual debts to Lessing. And it may be preli- 
 minarily observed that if the reader, conversant 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 with German, after reading Lessing's theological 
 writings, including his philosophical essay on the 
 Trinity, and the fragment entitled Erziehung des 
 IfenschengescTileclits, will thoughtfully peruse the 
 "Confessions," especially the statement on the 
 nature of Faith and the "Pentad of operative 
 Christianity" prefixed to the work, and Coleridge's 
 Confession of Faith in the first letter, — he will not 
 fail to acknowledge that whatever coincidences, or 
 seeming plagiarisms, there may be, in respect to 
 the relation of the Scriptures to Christianity, yet 
 that the work of Coleridge, independently of his 
 other writings, bears indubitable evidence of its 
 being an integral part of a digested scheme of 
 Christian philosophy and theology, and that the 
 writings of Lessing, though undoubtedly possessing 
 merits of a high character, are fragmentary, critical, 
 controversial, and tentative. 
 
 In order, however, to put the reader, unac- 
 quainted with the history of German literature, 
 in possession of the data, which may enable him 
 to form a correct judgment on the point at issue, 
 it may be necessary to explain — and the account is 
 not without its own instructive interest — that 
 G-otthold Ephraim Lessing, one of the most dis- 
 tinguished writers which Germany has produced, 
 mainly contributed by his critical sagacity, his 
 forcible reasoning, and by his lucid, pointed, and 
 
8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 nervous style, to awaken a new spirit in almost 
 every branch of literature. It was in 1774, that, 
 feeling the rigidity on the one hand, and the laxity 
 on the other, and the utter shallowness on all sides, 
 of the prevailing theology, he began to publish, in 
 his Beitrage zur Geschichte und Litteratur aus den 
 Bchatzen der Herzoglichen BibliotTieh zu Wolfen- 
 hiittel, the notorious essays, commonly called the 
 "Wolfenbuttel Fragments, now known to have been 
 the work of the elder Eeimarus, but which were 
 long attributed to Lessing himself. These papers 
 contain a bitter and factious attack on all revealed 
 religion, though it cannot be denied that they 
 proceed from a man, who was nevertheless sincere 
 and earnest in the search for truth. At the con- 
 clusion of these fragments, which are five in 
 number, and in addition to remarks appended to 
 each, Lessing expresses himself to the following 
 effect : — 
 
 " And now enough of these Fragments ! — He, 
 among my readers, who would rather have had me 
 spare them altogether, is assuredly more timid than 
 well-informed. He may be a very devout Christian, 
 but a very enlightened one he certainly is not. 
 He may be a sincere well-wisher to his religion, 
 but he ought also to have more confidence 
 in it. 
 
 " For in how many ways may not these objections 
 
INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 and difficulties be met ! And suppose that abso- 
 lutely no answer can be given ? — "What then ? 
 The learned theologian might indeed be at length 
 embarrassed: but the Christian likewise! He 
 certainly not. To the former it might be a source 
 of perplexity to see the props, which he designed 
 for the support of religion thus shaken ; to find the 
 buttresses thrown down, by which, Grod willing, 
 he would have secured it. But how do this man's 
 hypotheses and explanations and proofs concern 
 the Christian ? .For him it is already a fact — that 
 Christianity, which he feels to be so true, in which 
 he feels so blessed. — "When the paralytic patient 
 feels the beneficial shocks of the electric spark, 
 what does he care whether Nollett or Franklin, 
 or whether neither the one nor the other, is 
 right ? — 
 
 " In short, the Letter is not the Spirit, and the 
 Bible is not Religion. Consequently objections to 
 the letter and the Bible are not objections to the 
 Spirit and Religion. 
 
 " For the Bible manifestly contains more than 
 belongs essentially to Religion, and it is a mere 
 hypothesis that the Bible must be equally infallible 
 in that which is superadded. Besides the Religion 
 was there before a Bible existed. Christianity 
 existed before Evangelists and Apostles had 
 written. There elapsed a long period before the 
 
10 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 first of them wrote, and a very considerable one 
 before the whole Canon was completed. Much, 
 therefore, as may depend upon these writings, yet 
 it is impossible that the whole truth of the Religion 
 can rest upon them. If there was a period, in 
 which the Christian religion was already thus 
 spread, in which it had already possessed itself of 
 so many souls, and in which as yet not a letter of 
 that which has come down to us had been penned, 
 then it is possible also that all, which Evangelists 
 and Apostles have written, might have been lost, 
 and yet that the religion taught by them might 
 have remained. The Christian religion is not true 
 because the Evangelists and Apostles taught it, but 
 they taught it because it is true. Written traditions 
 must be interpreted by their internal truth, and all 
 the written traditions can give Religion no internal 
 truth, if it have none. 
 
 " This, then, would be "the general answer to a 
 large portion of these Eragments — as before said, 
 in the worst case." — Lessing's Schriften, vol. v. 
 pp. 17-20. 
 
 It is principally in this remarkable passage, and 
 in the papers, which arose out of them in the cele- 
 brated controversy with the Haupt Pastor G-oze of 
 Hamburg, that the reader will find the evidence 
 that he stands in need of for arriving at a satis- 
 factory solution of the question, which is here 
 
INTRODUCTION". 11 
 
 submitted to his decision : and in order to facilitate 
 the comparison, which he may be expected to 
 institute, the passages in Lessing, and those in the 
 " Confessions," which either in thought or language 
 may be supposed to have been derived from them, 
 have been brought under review in the following 
 paragraphs. 
 
 Thus it will be seen that one of Lessing' s main 
 propositions is the essential difference between 
 Religion, that is the Christian, as inward and 
 spiritual truth and as an historical fact. He 
 says : " The Letter is not the Spirit, and the Bible 
 is not Religion ; " and he adds : " Written 
 traditions must be interpreted by their internal 
 truth, and all the written traditions can give 
 Religion no internal truth, if it have none." 
 The meaning of Lessing appears to be that 
 Religion implies the inward evidence of spiritual 
 truths, which the history of their revelation cannot 
 supply. 
 
 In thus requiring an internal evidence for 
 Christianity, we are reminded of the position in 
 the "Confessions," at p. 86, in Letter IV: "The 
 truth revealed through Christ has its evidence in 
 itself, and the proof of its divine authority in its 
 fitness to our nature and needs." Now it may be 
 admitted that Coleridge herein adopts a similar 
 view to that expressed by Lessing, derived from the 
 
12 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 principle, common to both, that the evidence, which 
 is the chief and primary in importance, for the 
 truths of Christianity, is not to be sought in the 
 historical documents connected with their revela- 
 tion, but is of an internal character. But it will 
 not be denied that Lessing has nowhere clearly 
 explained what he means by the internal truth 
 (innere WahrTieit) which he requires for the inter- 
 pretation of the written traditions, and that the 
 attempts, which he made to solve philosophically 
 the problems of religion are imperfect and unsatis- 
 factory. He saw indeed that the faith of a 
 Christian, as the vital principle of his spiritual 
 life, is a somewhat very different to the belief, 
 which consists in the mere assent of the under- 
 standing to the facts narrated in the Scriptures, 
 even when these facts are the records of the 
 publications of truths, and, as we have seen above, 
 he hesitated not to say that Christianity might have 
 been operative had the Scriptures been lost : — he, 
 in short, maintains that the Scriptures are not 
 essentially the Christian religion itself, but simply 
 the history of its foundation. But though he 
 distinguishes the letter and the spirit, he nowhere 
 tells us what the letter and what the spirit respec- 
 tively are, and we are left in doubt as to what the 
 Eible contains, and what the Christian religion 
 truly is. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 On the other hand, if Coleridge was indebted to 
 his predecessor, it was not assuredly for inforcing 
 the necessity of internal evidence so understood as 
 implying that religion requires the conviction and 
 devotion of the individual, his fealty, head and 
 heart, to the truth in Christ ; for this, it may be 
 presumed, is the principle avowed by every sincere 
 believer in the truth of Christianity. Neither 
 could Lessing have first taught him the value of 
 ascertaining the reasonableness of Christianity, 
 independently of its divine institution ; for attempts 
 to rationalise the doctrines of Christian faith have 
 been exhibited from the times of the earliest 
 Heathen converts down to the present age, called 
 forth especially by the attacks of infidels. Lessing 
 might indeed have suggested to him the fallacy of 
 considering the Scriptures as the revelation itself 
 and the sole criterion of truth, to which the human 
 reason is to bow as to an infallible oracle forbidding 
 all further questioning, and of mistaking a past 
 fact for an ever-present operative principle and 
 agency, But it is evident that, in claiming for the 
 truth through Christ an "evidence in itself, and 
 the proof of its divine authority in its fitness to our 
 nature and needs," Coleridge appealed to a higher 
 and more comprehensive principle than any to be 
 found in Lessing' s writings, namely the influence 
 of the indwelling Eeason, " the true Light, which 
 
14 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ligliteth every man that cometh into the world." ' 
 It will be seen too, if the reader will take the 
 trouble of perusing attentively the remainder of the 
 letter, from the above quotation taken from p. 86 
 of the " Confessions," that Coleridge's argument 
 differs from anything which is to be found in 
 Lessing, and that Coleridge, in finding and affirming 
 the truth of Christianity by its fitness to our 
 nature and deeds, derives from this consonance a 
 proof of the authenticity and divine inspiration of 
 the Scriptures. Nor ought it to be forgotten that 
 Coleridge ever inculcated that Religion must be 
 both Fact and Idea ; — that the truths of Reason, 
 which are implied in Christianity, would constitute 
 only a system of speculative philosophy, and would 
 cease to be practical, were they not equally the 
 living principles of the moral world, and had they 
 not become organic constituents of the history of 
 man and abiding realities for every man not 
 conscience-proof. 
 
 The reader, then, can scarcely doubt that the 
 obligations of Coleridge to Lessing were slight, if 
 any, in the passage, which we have above noticed ; 
 and probably, if no other connection between the 
 two writers could have been traced, the comparison 
 
 * Or, The light that cometh into the toorld, — which liyhteth 
 every man : the Word that was made flesh, the sole source of 
 spiritual light to all mankind. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 would have been deemed superfluous. But there 
 yet remain certain other parts in the " Confessions" 
 which, in conformity with our design, may not be 
 passed over. 
 
 Lessing, it will be seen in the foregoing trans- 
 lation says : " The Christian religion is not true 
 because the Evangelists and Apostles taught it, but 
 they taught it because it is true." In the YIth 
 Letter of the " Confessions," p. 93, Coleridge 
 asks : " Is it safer for the individual and more 
 conducive to the interests of the Church of Christ, 
 in its twofold character of pastoral and militant, to 
 conclude thus : — The Bible is the Word of God, 
 and therefore true, holy, and in all parts unques- 
 tionable ; — or thus, — The Bible, considered in 
 reference to its declared ends and purposes, is true 
 and holy, and for all who seek truth with humble 
 spirits an unquestionable guide and therefore it is 
 the Word of Grod ? " — He then proceeds to show 
 that the latter is the safer conclusion. 
 
 Now, though it be at once admitted, that the 
 propositions of the two writers are different, yet on 
 reflection it will be found that they have this 
 thought in common: Christian teaching does not 
 derive its truth from authority, but derives its 
 authority from its truth. The passage in Lessing 
 may have suggested, therefore, that in the " Con- 
 fessions:" but it is equally clear that it contains 
 
16 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 only a renewal of the same argument, which we 
 have discussed in the preceding paragraphs on the 
 primary importance of ascertaining the eternal 
 truths on which Christianity is founded, in pre- 
 ference to resting its truth on historical evidence ; 
 and if the reader has been convinced that Coleridge's 
 principle had a deeper source than appears, or is 
 implied, in Lessing's theological essays, it can 
 matter little, if at all, whether the passage quoted 
 from Lessing suggested the query and its answer, 
 which we find in the " Confessions." 
 
 But in a note on the opposite opinions, which 
 the query involves, (namely, The Bible is true and 
 holy, because it is the word of God ; or the Bible 
 is the word of God because it is true and holy) — 
 Coleridge says : " It is remarkable that both parties 
 might appeal to the same text of St. Paul, — irao-a 
 ypa(pf] 6eo7rvev(rTos kcli a><pe\ifios 7rpbs didaaKaXiaVj k. t. X. 
 (2 Tim. iii. 16), which favours the one or other 
 opinion accordingly as the words are construed ; 
 and which, again, is the more probable construction, 
 depends in great measure on the preference given to 
 one or other of two different readings, the one having, 
 and the other omitting, the conjunction copulative 
 mi."* In one of the controversial tracts, which arose 
 
 * The English version is: "All scripture is given by- 
 inspiration of God, and is profitable, &c." By adopting the 
 reading with the omission of the conjunction Kal it might 
 
INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 out of the passage translated to precede these re- 
 marks, Lessing says : " And the iraaa ypacfrr) of Paul ! 
 — Another construction gives the words of Paul so 
 different a meaning ; and this construction being 
 just as grammatical, as consonant with the connec- 
 tion, and having as many ancient and modern 
 biblical scholars in its favour, as the construction 
 which has been approved of in the commonest 
 Lutheran Dogmatica, I do not at all see why 
 the reading adopted in the latter should be 
 unconditionally retained. Luther himself in his 
 translation has preferred the former: he did not 
 read Km ; and evil enough, if by a various reading, 
 consisting in the insertion or omission of a xal, the 
 capital passage on the principium cognoscendi of 
 the whole of theology, is rendered so extremely 
 equivocal." — Lessing' s Schriften, vol. vi. p. 92. 
 
 Again, in Lessing's observations on the Wolfen- 
 biittel Fragments, the following passage will be 
 found : " For the Bible manifestly contains more 
 than belongs essentially to religion, and it is a 
 mere hypothesis that the Bible must be equally 
 infalhble in that which is superadded." On turning 
 to the " Confessions," Letter IV. p. 80, we find : 
 — " I, who hold that the Bible contains the religion 
 
 have been rendered as in some foreign versions of the Bible 
 is the case : "All scripture, given by inspiration of God, is 
 profitable, &c." See the note by the late editor, p. 93. 
 
 c 
 
18 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of Christians, but who dare not say that whatever 
 is contained in the Bible is the Christian reli- 
 gion," &c. ; and at p. 73 in the same letter : " But 
 let a man be once fully persuaded that there is no 
 difference between the two positions — l The Bible 
 contains the Eeligion revealed by Grod' — and — 
 ' Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, 
 and was revealed by Grod ; ' and that whatever can 
 be said of the Bible, collectively taken, may and 
 must be said of each and every sentence of the 
 Bible, taken for and by itself; and I no longer 
 wonder at these paradoxes." 
 
 Subsequently in a controversial tract, written in 
 reply to an attack by Pastor Grdze on the position : 
 " The Bible manifestly contains more than belongs 
 essentially to Religion," — Lessing thus expresses 
 himself (XI, Schrift. v. vi. p. 85) : — "lam shocked! 
 I deny that the Bible contains Religion ? I ? 
 Where ? In that which immediately goes before ? 
 Hardly in saying that the Bible is not Eeligion 
 itself? Or is it in saying this? Is it thus, my 
 dear Pastor, that you treat all your opponents ? 
 Do the words 'to be' and 'to contain' mean the 
 same ? Are these identical positions : ' The Bible 
 contains Eeligion ;' and ' The Bible is Eeligion ? '" 
 —At p. 86, ibid, he thus proceeds : " As if there 
 were not a little in the Bible, which absolutely 
 neither serves the purpose of explanation nor of 
 
INTRODUCTION. 19 
 
 confirmation even of the most insignificant tenet of 
 religion! What other sound Lutheran Theologians 
 have maintained with regard to whole books of the 
 Bible, I may surely affirm of particular notices in 
 this or that book. At the least a man must be a 
 Eabbi or a Homilist in order to puzzle out a possi- 
 bility or a play on words, by which the Hajiemim 
 of Ana, the Crethi and Plethi of David, the mantle 
 which Paul forgot at Troas, and a hundred other 
 such things, can be brought into any connection 
 with religion." 
 
 The similarity in thought and language to the 
 quotation in the preceding paragraph needs no 
 comment ; but the circumstance is rendered more 
 striking by finding in the " Confessions," at p. 71, 
 the following: — "But every word and syllable 
 existing in the original text of the Canonical Books 
 from the Cherethi and JPhelethi of David, &c." — 
 and at p. 116, "St. Paul's cloak left at Troas." 
 
 In the controversial tract of Lessing's, from 
 which the quotation above given is translated, the 
 Author immediately afterwards proceeds to say, 
 p. 87 ibid. : " Therefore the position — The Bible 
 contains more than essentially belongs to Eeligion 
 — is without limitation true. It may likewise be 
 infinitely more serviceable to Eeligion by its due 
 use, than it can be prejudicial by its misuse. 
 Misuse is especially to be apprehended; and I 
 
 c 2 
 
20 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 should have no objection to a provision beforehand 
 against it." The mischiefs accruing to Religion 
 from the opposite opinion, namely (to use Cole- 
 ridge's words) " that the Bible not only contains, 
 but constitutes, the Christian Religion," are forcibly 
 and eloquently urged in the IVth Letter of the 
 " Confessions," especially in the passage, too long 
 for quotation, which begins (p. 76) at the words — 
 " when in my third letter," and terminates (p. 77) 
 with the words — "you will have no difficulty in 
 determining the quality and character of a dogma, 
 which could engraft such fruits on such a tree," 
 But though the substance of this paragraph, and of 
 the ensuing, beginning with the sentence — " The 
 Bible is the appointed conservatory, an indispen- 
 sable criterion, and continual source and support of 
 true Belief," is a glorious explication of the posi- 
 tion advanced by Lessing, yet it will scarcely be 
 doubted that the reasoning is based upon the same 
 principle, and it would be at least difficult to say 
 how far the train of thought had not been suggested 
 by the pregnant words of the German author. 
 Though it might be added that, where a principle 
 has been so unfolded and expanded, as has been 
 achieved in the present instance, the probability of 
 a primal suggestion may be safely admitted without 
 impugning the originality of the author, who has 
 given incontestable proofs of his ability to make 
 
INTRODUCTION. 21 
 
 the thought-germ essentially his own, and in trans- 
 planting it to cause it to fructify by the inherent 
 fertility of his own mind. 
 
 Further, it will be recollected that Lessing, in 
 the summary reply to the Wolfenbiittel [Fragments, 
 says : — " It is possible also that all which Apostles 
 and Evangelists have written might have been 
 lost, and yet that the religion taught by them 
 might have remained." It appears that this drew 
 upon him not only the attacks of Pastor Groze, but 
 of other theologians, averse to the deference which 
 it appeared to imply to the Eomish doctrine of 
 Tradition : and in reply to Doctor "Walch, in the 
 Briefe an verschiedene Gottesgelehrten, vol. xvii. of 
 his "Works, p. 124, he says — " Because the Apostles 
 have left writings behind them, is it therefore not 
 necessary to take any heed of Tradition? And 
 was this the true meaning of Irenaeus ? Not at 
 all; and your Eeverence should have assuredly 
 allowed his question to stand: Quid autem, si 
 neque Apostoli quidem Scripturas reliquissent, nonne 
 oportebat ordinem sequi Traditionis ? " He then 
 goes on to show that what Irenaeus meant by 
 Veritatis Traditionem, or Veterem Traditionem, is 
 only the Confession of faith, Creed or baptismal 
 formulary ; and after speaking of St. Augustine's 
 Sermones in Traditione Symboli, he adds : " And 
 Irenseus, who uses the same words, is it to be 
 
22 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 supposed that he did not mean the same thing, 
 when in speaking of the faithful among the Bar- 
 barian tribes, who could not read the writings of 
 the Apostles, he says — " sine charta et atramento 
 scriptam Jidbent per Spiritum in cordibus suis 
 salutem?" Or as we read the quotation, also 
 used in the Kl. Schrift., vol. vi. p. 121 — " Cm assen- 
 tiunt multcd gentes barbarorum, eorum qui in Christum 
 credunt, sine charta et atramento scriptam habentes 
 per 8piritum in cordibus suis salutem." Now if 
 we turn to the " Confessions " the same quotation 
 will be found from IrenaBus in Letter VI., at p. 104 ; 
 but though the additional references show that 
 they were not copied from Lessing, it will not 
 remove the suspicion of the reader that Coleridge 
 was induced to consult the authors in consequence 
 of his study of Lessing's writings. It is true, 
 however, that Coleridge seems to have attached a 
 larger meaning and higher importance to the 
 regula jidei or sacramentum symboli than Lessing 
 did, namely, as "the universals of Christian Faith." 
 See the " Confessions," p. 103. 
 
 It may be also observed that Coleridge differed 
 from Lessing in the view which the latter took of 
 the use of the writings of the Apostles by the early 
 Church. In the letter to Dr. Walch, above referred 
 to, Lessing says : " The words of Irenseus are — 
 Non enim per alios dispositionem nostrce salutis 
 
INTRODUCTION. 23 
 
 cognovimus, quam per eos, per quos Evangelium 
 pervenit ad nos, quod quidem tunc prceconaverunt, 
 postea vero per Dei voluntatem in Scripturis nobis 
 tradiderunt, fundamentum et columnam Jidei nostrce 
 futurum. Are these words intended to say that 
 the Scriptures have become the foundation and 
 support of our faith ? Certainly not ! "Were this 
 the meaning, assuredly futures must have been 
 substituted for futurum ; and as the syntax would 
 not have permitted fundamentum et columnam 
 futuris, the alteration must at least have extended 
 to the substitution of fundament et columns 
 futuris — that is, if Irenaeus had not chosen a differ- 
 ent turn of the period, supposing that he intended 
 to say what those with Lutheran spectacles pretend 
 so plainly to discern. Futurum stands in relation 
 to Evangelium ; and that this, prceconatum, as well 
 as scripturis traditum, has become the foundation 
 and support of our faith, is the proper meaning of 
 Irenaeus." Upon this passage Coleridge makes 
 this comment, in a note pencilled on the margin : 
 " Lessing's logic forsook him here. Surely Irenaeus 
 positively asserts that the Christians had no other 
 stable foundation of their faith than the preaching 
 of the Grospels in the lifetime of the Apostles, and 
 their written Sermons (as we should say, their 
 published Histories and Discourses,) after their 
 death. But in the age of Irenaeus the Apostles 
 
24 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 were dead ; ergo, the Apostolic writings were then 
 the sole foundation of Christian knowledge and 
 belief. This clearly contradicts, as far as his 
 opinion weighs, Lessing's assertion that the Chris- 
 tians were to learn it from the Bishops immediately, 
 who again derived its sense from the Holy Ghost. 
 Besides, take Evangelium in Lessing's sense, and 
 the passage amounts to this, that we learn that 
 system of faith which the Apostles preached by the 
 system of faith preached by the Apostles ; i. e., it 
 amounts to that species of nonsense called a truism, 
 or identical proposition in a duplicate." 
 
 In a fly-leaf of the same volume, Coleridge adds : 
 " I cannot discover any weakening of my confuta- 
 tion in the note, in Lessing's after observations. 
 It does not follow that Irenseus and the Catholic 
 Church did not hold the Evangelivm (= Gospel 
 Doctrine) which the Apostles first preached, and 
 then, in obedience to the Divine Will, committed 
 to writing in order to supply the preaching after 
 their death, fundamentum et columnam Jidei; 
 because in controversies with Heretics, Irenams 
 prudently began with proving the regular descent 
 of the dogma from Bishop to Bishop through the 
 Catholic Church ; and then proceeded to show the 
 very same doctrine in the Scriptures. Had he 
 begun with the latter, the Heretics might have 
 either quoted another passage seemingly as favour- 
 
INTRODUCTION. 25 
 
 able to their side as Irenaeus's to his, or given a 
 different interpretation. But by always giving two 
 arguments, both of undoubted strength, where the 
 Heretics could give only one, he was sure of 
 mastering them. It makes no difference in the 
 sense of the passage whether it be futurum or 
 futuris', — in the former it would agree with the 
 wine, in the latter with the vessels containing it — 
 emngelium in scripturis or scripturas evangelium 
 nobis tradentes. 
 
 " Lessing appears to me to have mistaken pre- 
 cepts of the Fathers {plus justo sacerdotalia) 
 addressed to the mass of Catholic believers (ideotis) 
 for declarations concerning the grounds, the exist- 
 ing grounds and pillars of the Faith of the 
 Church itself. Now these were first, the Universal 
 Tradition of the Churches ; and second, Ostensio e 
 Scripturis, in other words the Scriptures interpreted 
 according to the consonant belief of the Church in 
 all ages. Even such is the doctrine of the Church 
 of England : herein honourably distinguished both 
 from the Roman Catholics, who placed their pre- 
 tended Traditions and the Power of the existing 
 Church Hierarchs above the Scriptures, and 
 from the Anti-episcopal Protestants, who reject 
 Tradition and Church authority altogether. 
 
 " S. T. Coleridge." 
 
 The only remark which suggests itself in reading 
 
26 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 the above interesting extracts is, that in aiding the 
 reader to form a correct opinion on Coleridge's 
 theological views, they warn him not to take for 
 granted that the similarity, or coincidence, of his 
 judgment with that of Lessing on certain points 
 leads justly to the conclusion that Coleridge derived 
 or adopted his opinions from Lessing, and still 
 less that he deemed the latter a safe guide on the 
 whole to a sound and satisfactory theology. 
 
 Another reminiscence of Lessing is supplied by 
 Coleridge's adoption of the term " Bibliolatry," 
 which will be found at p. 76 of the " Confessions." 
 It seems to have been invented by Lessing, and 
 those, who have any curiosity on the subject, may 
 consider what he himself has to say in vol. xvii. 
 p. 61 of his Sammtliche Schriften, Berlin, 1793. 
 
 On the attempts to harmonise Scripture history, 
 our authors again seem to hold nearly the same 
 opinion. Lessing, vol. v. p. 149, says : " I granted 
 the premiss (namely, the discrepancies in the 
 Gospel narrative of the Eesurrection urged in the 
 "Wolfenbiittel Fragments) because, after manifold 
 sincere attempts not to permit myself to grant it, 
 I convinced myself of the sorry resources of all 
 Gospel Harmonies. For, to speak of them in 
 general, I would confidently undertake, according 
 to the same rules precisely, which they take as 
 their grounds, to bring unconditionally all and 
 
INTRODUCTION. 27 
 
 every relation of the same event without exception 
 into no less accordance. "Where historians agree 
 only in the main point, the method of onr Gospel 
 Harmonists bids defiance to all other difficulties. 
 They cannot be imagined so extravagant but that 
 I will have them presently in order ; and in each 
 case I will authenticate my procedure with them by 
 the procedure of some celebrated Harmonist." — 
 
 Coleridge in the " Confessions," Letter IV. p. 69, 
 says : " For on what other ground can I account for 
 the whimsical subintelligiturs of our numerous 
 Harmonists, — for the curiously inferred facts, the 
 inventive circumstantial detail, the complemental 
 and supplemental history, which, in the utter 
 silence of all historians and absence of all 
 historical documents, they bring to light by mere 
 force of logic?" — And in the same paragraph he 
 adds : " Allow me to create chasms ad libitum, and 
 ad libitum to fill them up with imagined facts and 
 incidents, and I would almost undertake to har- 
 monise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buckram 
 into a coherent and consistent narrative." 
 
 The last, and perhaps only other point, which 
 may require notice, is the agreement of these two 
 eminent men on the services of the Scriptures in 
 aid of the intellectual and moral progress of man- 
 kind. In Lessing's tract on the Education of the 
 Human Eace, Works, vol. v. p. 91, we find the 
 
28 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 following passage : " They (the Scriptures) for 
 seventeen hundred years have occupied the human 
 understanding more than all other books; have 
 enlightened it more than all other books, even if it 
 be only by means of the light, which the human 
 understanding has itself brought in." In the 
 " Confessions" it is said, p. 96 : " For more than a 
 thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has 
 gone hand in hand with civilisation, science, law, — 
 in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation 
 of the species, always supporting, and often leading, 
 the way." 
 
 The Editor has thus exhibited faithfully, as far 
 as his knowledge extends, the parallel passages 
 which are to be found in the present work and in 
 the theological writings of Lessing, and the reader 
 has therefore the requisite means of forming his 
 own judgment on the obligations, which Coleridge 
 was under to his predecessor. It would be 
 perhaps as idle as it would be dishonest to deny 
 that the agreements of the two authors are more 
 than accidental ; and yet it cannot but be apparent 
 that the most striking parallelisms are in passages, 
 which a plagiarist would have avoided as most 
 easily exposing him to detection, and which he 
 might have dispensed with as a worthless portion 
 of the spoil, namely, as merely collateral to, and 
 illustrative of, the main subject. On the other 
 
INTRODUCTION. 29 
 
 hand, it can scarcely be doubted that in those parts 
 of Coleridge's work, which involve leading principles 
 of vital import to theology and spiritual religion, 
 such as the essential difference between the Letter 
 and the Spirit, and the primary importance of the 
 internal evidence of Christianity — the only proof 
 of his debt to Lessing is the occasional resemblance 
 in language, whilst the principles themselves might 
 have been derived from other sources ; though we 
 have every reason to believe they were virtually the 
 offspring of his own mind, and included in the idea, 
 out of which his theology was evolved as a coherent 
 whole. It is indeed highly probable that in 
 developing this scheme and during the process of 
 mental growth, the salient points of the German 
 author, whom he confessedly studied and admired, 
 became so impropriated by, and amalgamated with, 
 his own mind, that they were no longer remembered, 
 or thought of, as outward and alien, and were 
 indeed as little such as the light, the air, and the 
 warmth, which have become incorporated in the 
 growing plant. And if it may be admitted that to 
 Coleridge's mind Lessing's spirit was seminative, 
 excitant, and nutrient, it must also be borne in 
 mind that these, or similar terms, can have no 
 meaning, except as denoting an action upon that 
 which has inward life and energy, and in respect of 
 Coleridge imply the originality, for which every 
 
30 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 one, acquainted with the individual character of his 
 religious views, would contend. 
 
 Let the final judgment of the reader be, how- 
 ever, what it may, he must not forget, in summing 
 up the evidence, that the passages, above collated, 
 with the arguments which they embody, form but 
 a small portion of the writings of either author, 
 from which they have been extracted ; and no less 
 that they are incidental to works of these authors, 
 which have respectively very different objects. The 
 purpose of Lessing was that of impugning the 
 hostile attempts of an infidel to overthrow the 
 bulwarks of revealed religion, and of defending 
 himself against the attacks of a zealot, who by his 
 intolerant bigotry was injuring the cause which he 
 professed to support: that of Coleridge was the 
 calm investigation of the difference between the 
 right and the superstitious use of the Scriptures. 
 
 It entered into the plan of both to determine 
 the true relation of the Scriptures to Christianity, 
 and in this they both agree that the Letter and the 
 Spirit are essentially different, and that whatever 
 importance is otherwise to be attached to the 
 Scriptures, the truth and vital operance of Christ- 
 ianity must depend primarily on its internal evi- 
 dence. But if it were granted that Lessing was 
 the guide and predecessor of Coleridge in this view, 
 and up to this point, henceforward, whatever may 
 
INTRODUCTION. 31 
 
 have been the force of the original suggestion, the 
 means of comparison are merged and vanish in 
 the altered and enlarged proportions and in the 
 surpassing growth of Coleridge's work. 
 
 He begins by exhibiting the vital and genetic 
 principle, out of which the life of a Christian is to 
 proceed and develop itself. He tells us in the intro- 
 ductory paragraph, p. 2, that Faith is the actuation 
 of the individual "Will by the Logos, the living Truth 
 or substantial Eeason ; — the same of whom St. John 
 says : " In him was life ; and the life was the light 
 of men." Thus, according to Coleridge, Faith is 
 the exponent of the inward light or revelation, co- 
 extensive with the humanity, which is one and the 
 same with Reason, and is the " principle of the 
 fidelity of man to God, by the subordination of his 
 human will, in all provinces of his nature, to his 
 Eeason, as the sum of spiritual Truth, representing 
 and manifesting the Will Divine." 
 
 Next in his Confession of Faith, Letter I. p. 40, 
 he sets forth the " Credenda common to all the 
 Fathers of the Reformation," distributed into five 
 classes. In these, that is in the four first, are 
 included the sum of spiritual truth, or the Truths 
 of Eeason, which are the downshine of the True 
 
 Light, to (j)5>s to akrjdivbp, 6 (pcoTi£ei navra avBpanrov 
 epxofievov ds top Koafiov. It is not here the fitting 
 place to enter at large upon a subject which requires 
 
32 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 for its adequate explication and discussion an 
 appropriate investigation and separate work: but 
 in thus stating the essentials of faith or the funda- 
 mental principles of Christianity to be Truths of 
 Eeason, the reader is warned against confounding 
 the light of divine Eeason with " natural reason," 
 or with aught that may be regarded as the exercise 
 of mere human powers of intelligence and more 
 fitly called " human understanding." The source 
 here affirmed is unequivocally divine. How these 
 truths are awakened, developed and perfected, is 
 another, though doubtless important, question. The 
 position of Coleridge, it cannot be doubted, is that 
 the evidence, origination, and acceptance of these 
 truths imply, in order to their spiritual influence, 
 that the will of the individual is enlightened and 
 enlivened thereto by the light and power of one and 
 the same Universal Eeason, indwelling in each and 
 every man. As in all other cases the degree of 
 light and power will be in proportion to the capa- 
 city of the recipients ; and where the light of 
 Eeason exists in that degree, which confers on the 
 individual the conscious possession of its powers, it 
 can only be a wilful fault which deprives him of 
 the insight into those eternal verities, which are 
 already inseparably united with his spiritual being. 
 But, according to the Author of the " Confessions 
 of an Inquiring Spirit," man is not only inwardly 
 
INTRODUCTION. 33 
 
 gifted, but he is outwardly aided. Eevelation has 
 a twofold character : — if on the one hand, Eeason 
 is an inward revelation of those eternal truths 
 which are the stuff of the spiritual being of the 
 individual ; so, on the other hand, the revelation of 
 God to his creatures is the manifestation of the 
 same Living Truth as the Providence of the world, 
 acting from the beginning of time in the moral 
 development of the human race, and written 
 imperishably in the facts of history. The leading 
 fact of the divine operance in the history of the 
 world is the existence of the Church, the perpetual 
 revelation of the divine Idea working to the resto- 
 ration of man to his own divine image, and visibly 
 presented in the Community of individuals in 
 whom by divine Grace this idea or power is opera- 
 tive, and more or less effectual ; — it is the institution 
 for the development of the Humanity, of that, in 
 every man, which man is intended to be morally 
 and spiritually; — it is the organic living Body, 
 which continually is assimilating to itself all, who 
 are under the conditions of spiritual growth, and 
 of which the invisible spirit and vital principle is 
 the Logos, the divine Humanity, " the Light, the 
 Truth, and the Way." 
 
 The documents which attest Eevelation, and to 
 the truth of which the divine spirit, even Eternal 
 Living Truth, bears witness, inwardly in every man, 
 
34 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 are the Scriptures. These exhibit the working of 
 Providence through a succession of ages to the 
 building up of the Christian Church, in the living 
 fact of which, as the final intention contemplated 
 from the beginning, the lineaments and proportions 
 of the various parts of the plan acquire their signi- 
 ficance and evidence : and they are for every human 
 being the needful helps, "which are able to make 
 him wise unto salvation." 
 
Being persuaded of nothing more than of this, 
 that whether it be in matter of speculation or of 
 practice, no untruth can possibly avail the patron 
 and defender long, and that things most truly are 
 likewise most behovefully spoken. — Hooker. 
 
 Any thing will be pretended rather than admit 
 the necessity of internal evidence, or acknowledge, 
 among the external proofs, the convictions and 
 experiences of Believers, though they should be 
 common to all the faithful in every age of the 
 Church. But in all superstition there is a heart 
 of unbelief ; and, vice versa, where a man's belief 
 is but a superficial acquiescence, credulity is the 
 natural result and accompaniment, if only he 
 be not required to sink into the depths of his 
 being, where the sensual man can no longer draw 
 breath. — Literary Remains. 
 
 d 2 
 
THE PENTAD OF OPERATIVE CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Prothesis 
 Christ, the Word. 
 
 or the Antithesis 
 Indifference, 
 
 The Scriptures. The Holy Spirit. The Church. 
 
 The Preacher. 
 
 The Scriptures, the Spirit, and the Church, are 
 co-ordinate ; the indispensable conditions and the 
 working causes of the perpetuity, and continued 
 renascence and spiritual life of Christ still militant. 
 The Eternal Word, Christ from everlasting, is the 
 Prothesis, or identity; — the Scriptures and the 
 Church are the two poles, or Thesis and Antithesis, 
 and the Preacher in direct line under the Spirit 
 but likewise the point of junction of the Written 
 Word and the Church, is the Synthesis. 
 
 This is God's Hand in the World. 
 
LETTERS ON THE INSPIRATION OF 
 THE SCRIPTURES. 
 
Seven Letters to a friend concerning the bounds 
 between the right, and the superstitious, use and esti- 
 mation of the Sacred Canon ; in which the Writer 
 submissively discloses his own private judgment on the 
 following Questions : — 
 
 I. Is it necessary, or expedient, to insist on the 
 belief of the divine origin and authority of all, and 
 every part of the Canonical Books as the condition, or 
 first principle, of Christian Faith ? 
 
 II. Or, may not the due appreciation of the Scriptures 
 collectively be more safely relied on as the result and 
 consequence of the belief in Christ ; the gradual 
 increase — in respect of particular passages — of our 
 spiritual discernment of their truth and authority sup- 
 plying a test and measure of our own growth and pro- 
 gress as individual believers, without the servile fear 
 that prevents or overclouds the free honour which 
 cometh from love ? 1 John, iv. 18. 
 
LETTER I. 
 
 My deab Eeiend, 
 
 I employed the compelled and most un- 
 welcome leisure of severe indisposition in reading 
 The Confessions of a fair Saint in Mr. Carlyle's 
 recent translation of the Wilhelm Meister, which 
 might, I think, have been better rendered literally 
 The Confessions of a Beautiful Soul* This, acting 
 in conjunction with the concluding sentences of 
 your Letter, threw my thoughts inward on my own 
 religious experience, and gave the immediate occa- 
 sion to the following Confessions of one, who is 
 neither fair nor saintly, but who — groaning under 
 a deep sense of infirmity and manifold imperfection 
 — feels the want, the necessity, of religious support ; 
 — who cannot afford to lose any the smallest 
 buttress, but who not only loves Truth even for 
 itself, and when it reveals itself aloof from all 
 interest, but who loves it with an indescribable 
 awe, which too often withdraws the genial sap of 
 
 * Bekenntnisse einer schonen Seek. — Ed. 
 
40 LETTER I. 
 
 his activity from the columnar trunk, the shelter- 
 ing leaves, the bright and fragrant flower, and the 
 foodful or medicinal fruitage, to the deep root 
 ramifying in obscurity and labyrinthine way- 
 winning — 
 
 In darkness there to house unknown, 
 
 Far underground, 
 
 Pierc'd by no sound 
 
 Save such as live in Fancy's ear alone, 
 
 That listens for the uptorn mandrake's parting groan ! 
 
 I should, perhaps, be a happier — at all events a 
 more useful — man if my mind were otherwise 
 constituted. But so it is : and even with regard 
 to Christianity itself, like certain plants, I creep 
 towards the light, even though it draw me away 
 from the more nourishing warmth. Tea, I should 
 do so, even if the light had made its way through a 
 rent in the wall of the Temple. Grlad, indeed, and 
 grateful am I, that not in the Temple itself, but 
 only in one or two of the side chapels — not essen- 
 tial to the edifice, and probably not coeval with it 
 — have I found the light absent, and that the rent 
 in the wall has but admitted the free light of the 
 Temple itself. 
 
 I shall best communicate the state of my faith 
 by taking the creed, or system of credenda, common 
 to all the Fathers of the Reformation — overlooking, 
 
LETTER I. 41 
 
 as non-essential, the differences between the several 
 Eeformed Churches — according to the five main 
 classes or sections into which the aggregate distri- 
 butes itself to my apprehension. I have then only 
 to state the effect produced on my mind by each of 
 these, or the quantum of recipiency and coincidence 
 in myself relatively thereto, in order to complete 
 my Confession of Faith. 
 
 I. The Absolute ; the innominable AvToirdTap et 
 Causa Sui, in whose transcendant I Am, as the 
 Ground, is whatever verily is : — the Triune God, 
 by whose "Word and Spirit, as the transcendant 
 Cause, exists whatever substantially exists : — God 
 Almighty — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, undi- 
 vided, unconfounded, co-eternal. This class I 
 designate by the word, Zrao-is. 
 
 II. The Eternal Possibilities; the actuality of 
 which hath not its origin in God : Chaos spirituale : 
 
 h.TTO(TTa(TlS. 
 
 III. The Creation and Formation of the heaven 
 and earth by the Eedemptive Word : — The Apos- 
 tasy of Man : — the Eedemption of Man : — the 
 Incarnation of the Word in the Son of Man : — the 
 Crucifixion and Eesurrection of the Son of Man : the 
 Descent of the Comforter : — Eepentance (/xcraj/om) : 
 — Eegeneration : — Faith : — Prayer : — Grace : Com- 
 munion with the Spirit : Conflict: Self-abasement: 
 Assurance through the righteousness of Christ : 
 
42 LETTER I. 
 
 Spiritual Growth: Love: Discipline: — Perseverance: 
 Hope in death : — Meracrrao-is — 'Avdarao-is. 
 
 IV. But these offers, gifts, and graces are not for 
 one, or for a few. They are offered to all. Even 
 when the Grospel is preached to a single individual, 
 it is offered to him as to one of a great Household. 
 Not only Man, but, says St. Paul, the whole 
 Creation is included in the consequences of the 
 Pall — rrjs dnoo-Tao-ecds ; so also in those of the Change 
 
 at the Redemption — rrjs fierac-rao-eas, Kal rrjs dvcHTTa- 
 
 o-eoos. "We too shall be raised in the Body. Chris- 
 tianity is fact no less than truth. It is spiritual, 
 yet so as to be historical ; and between these two 
 poles there must likewise be a midpoint, in which 
 the historical and spiritual meet. Christianity 
 must have its history — a history of itself, and like- 
 wise the history of its introduction, its spread, and 
 its outward becoming ; and, as the midpoint above- 
 mentioned, a portion of these facts must be mira- 
 culous, that is, pJicenomena in nature that are 
 beyond nature. Furthermore, the history of all 
 historical nations must in some sense be its history; 
 — in other words, all history must be providential, 
 and this a providence, a preparation, and a looking 
 forward to Christ. 
 
 Here, then, we have four out of the five classes. 
 And in all these the sky of my belief is serene, 
 unclouded by a doubt. Would to Grod that my 
 
LETTER I. 43 
 
 faith, that faith which works on the whole man, 
 confirming and conforming, were but in just pro- 
 portion to my belief, to the full acquiescence of my 
 intellect, and the deep consent of my conscience ! 
 The very difficulties argue the truth of the whole 
 scheme and system for my understanding, since I 
 see plainly that so must the truth appear, if it be 
 the truth. 
 
 Y . But there is a Book, of two parts, — each part 
 consisting of several books. The first part — (I 
 speak in the character of an uninterested critic or 
 philologist)— contains the reliques of the literature 
 of the Hebrew people, while the Hebrew was still 
 the living language. The second part comprises 
 the writings, and, with one or two inconsiderable 
 and doubtful exceptions, all the writings of the 
 followers of Christ within the space of ninety 
 years from the date of the Resurrection. I do not 
 myself think that any of these writings were 
 composed as late as a.d. 120; but I wish to 
 preclude all dispute. This Book I resume, as read, 
 and yet unread, — read and familiar to my mind in 
 all parts, but which is yet to be perused as a whole ; 
 or rather, a work, cujus particulas et sententiolas 
 omnes et singulas recogniturus sum, but the com- 
 ponent integers of which, and their conspiration, 
 I have yet to study. I take up this work with the 
 purpose to read it for the first time as I should 
 
44 LETTER I. 
 
 read any other work, — as far at least as I can or 
 dare. For I neither can, nor dare, throw off a 
 strong and awful prepossession in its favour — 
 certain as I am that a large part of the light and 
 life, in and by which I see, love, and embrace the 
 truths and the strengths co-organised into a living 
 body of faith and knowledge in the four preceding 
 classes, has been directly, or indirectly derived to 
 me from this sacred volume, — and unable to 
 determine what I do not owe to its influences. But 
 even on this account, and because it has these 
 inalienable claims on my reverence and gratitude, I 
 will not leave it in the power of unbelievers to say 
 that the Bible is for me only what the Koran is for 
 the deaf Turk, and the Yedas for the feeble and 
 acquiescent Hindoo. No ; I will retire up into the 
 mountain, and hold secret commune with my Bible 
 above the contagious blastments of prejudice, and 
 the fog-blight of selfish superstition. For fear 
 hath torment. And what though my reason be to 
 the power and splendour of the Scriptures but as 
 the reflected and secondary shine of the moon 
 compared with the solar radiance; — yet the sun 
 endures the occasional co-presence of the unsteady 
 orb, and leaving it visible seems to sanction the 
 comparison. There is a Light higher than all, 
 even the Word that was in the heginning ; — the 
 Light, of which light itself is but the shechinah 
 
LETTER I. 45 
 
 and cloudy tabernacle ; the "Word that is light for 
 every man, and life for as many as give heed to it. 
 If between this Word and the written Letter I 
 shall anywhere seem to myself to find a discrepance, 
 I will not conclude that such there actually is; 
 nor on the other hand will I fall under the con- 
 demnation of them that would lie for God, but 
 seek as I may, be thankful for what I have — and 
 wait. 
 
 "With such purposes, with such feelings, have I 
 perused the books of the Old and New Testaments, 
 — each book as a whole, and also as an integral part. 
 And need I say that I have met everywhere more 
 or less copious sources of truth, and power, and 
 purifying impulses ; — that I have found words for 
 my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances 
 for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame 
 and my feebleness ? In short whatever finds me, 
 bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from 
 a Holy Spirit, even from the same Spirit, which 
 remaining in itself, yet regenerateth all other powers, 
 and in all ages entering into holy souls maheth them 
 friends of God, and prophets. (Wisd. vii.) And 
 here, perhaps, I might have been content to 
 rest if I had not learned that, as a Christian, I 
 cannot, — must not — stand alone ; or if I had not 
 known that more than this was holden and required 
 by the Fathers of the Reformation, and by the 
 
46 LETTER I. 
 
 Churches collectively, since the Council of Nice at 
 latest ; the only exceptions being that doubtful one 
 of the corrupt Eomish Church implied, though not 
 avowed, in its equalisation of the Apocryphal 
 Books with those of the Hebrew Canon, * and the 
 irrelevant one of the few and obscure Sects who 
 acknowledge no historical Christianity. This some- 
 what more, in which Jerome, Augustine, Luther, 
 and Hooker, were of one and the same judgment, 
 and less than which not one of them would have 
 tolerated — would it fall within the scope of my 
 present doubts and objections ? I hope it would 
 not. Let only their general expressions be inter- 
 preted by their treatment of the Scriptures in 
 detail, and I dare confidently trust that it would 
 not. For I can no more reconcile the Doctrine 
 which startles my belief with the practice and 
 particular declarations of these great men, than 
 with the convictions of my own understanding and 
 conscience. At all events — and I cannot too early 
 or too earnestly guard against any misapprehension 
 of my meaning and purpose — let it be distinctly 
 understood that my arguments and objections apply 
 exclusively to the following Doctrine or Dogma. 
 To the opinions which individual divines have 
 
 * Si quis — (Esdrce primum et secundum, Tobiam, Judith, 
 Esther, ike.)— pro sacris et canonicis non susceperit, . . . 
 anathema sit. Cone. Trid. Deer. Sess. iv. — Ed. 
 
LETTER II. 47 
 
 advanced in lieu of this doctrine, my only objection, 
 as far as I object, is — that I do not understand 
 them. The precise enunciation of this doctrine I 
 defer to the commencement of the next Letter. 
 
 Farewell. 
 
 LETTER II. 
 My Dear Ebiekd, 
 
 In my last Letter I said that in the Bible 
 there is more th&tjinds me than I have experienced 
 in all other books put together ; that the words of 
 the Bible find me at greater depths of my being ; 
 and that whatever finds me brings with it an 
 irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from 
 the Holy Spirit. But the doctrine in question 
 requires me to believe, that not only what finds me, 
 but that all that exists in the sacred volume, and 
 which I am bound to find therein, was — not alone 
 inspired by, that is, composed by men under the 
 actuating influence of the Holy Spirit, but likewise 
 — dictated by an Infallible Intelligence ; — that the 
 writers, each and all, were divinely informed as 
 well as inspired. Now here all evasion, all excuse, 
 is cut off. An Infallible Intelligence extends to 
 
48 LETTER II. 
 
 all things, physical no less than spiritual. It may 
 convey the truth in any one of the three possible 
 languages, — that of Sense, as objects appear to the 
 beholder on this earth ; or that of Science, which 
 supposes the beholder placed in the centre ; — or 
 that of Philosophy, which resolves both into a 
 supersensual reality. But whichever be chosen — 
 and it is obvious that the incompatibility exists 
 only between the first and second, both of them 
 being indifferent and of equal value to the third — 
 it must be employed consistently ; for an Infallible 
 Intelligence must intend to be intelligible, and not 
 to deceive. And, moreover, whichever of these 
 three languages be chosen, it must be translatable 
 into Truth. For this is the very essence of the 
 Doctrine, that one and the same intelligence is 
 speaking in the unity of a Person ; which unity is 
 no more broken by the diversity of the pipes 
 through which it makes itself audible, than is a 
 tune by the different instruments on which it is 
 played by a consummate musician, equally perfect 
 in all. One instrument may be more capacious 
 than another, but as far as its compass extends, 
 and in what it sounds forth, it will be true to the 
 conception of the master. I can conceive no 
 softenings here which would not nullify the 
 Doctrine, and convert it to a cloud for each man's 
 fancy to shift and shape at will. And this Doctrine, 
 
LETTEft II. 49 
 
 I confess, plants the vineyard of the "Word with 
 thorns for me, and places snares in its pathways. 
 These may be delusions of an evil spirit ; but ere I 
 so harshly question the seeming angel of light — 
 my reason, I mean, and moral sense in conjunction 
 with my clearest knowledge — I must inquire on 
 what authority this Doctrine rests. And what 
 other authority dares a truly catholic Christian 
 admit as coercive in the final decision, but the 
 declarations of the Book itself, — though I should 
 not, without struggles and a trembling reluctance, 
 gainsay even a universal tradition ? 
 
 I return to the Book. "With a full persuasion of 
 soul respecting all the articles of the Christian 
 Faith, as contained in the first four Classes, I 
 receive willingly also the truth of the history, 
 namely, that the "Word of the Lord did come to 
 Samuel, to Isaiah, to others ; and that the words 
 which gave utterance to the same are faithfully 
 recorded. But though the origin of the words, 
 even as of the miraculous acts, be supernatural — 
 yet the former once uttered — the latter once having 
 taken their place among the phenomena of the 
 senses, the faithful recording of the same does not 
 of itself imply, or seem to require, any supernatural 
 working, other than as all truth and goodness are 
 such. In the books of Moses, and once or twice in 
 the prophecy of Jeremiah, I find it indeed asserted 
 
50 LETTEK II. 
 
 that not only the words were given, but the re- 
 cording of the same enjoined by the special com- 
 mand of Grod, and doubtless executed under the 
 special guidance of the Divine Spirit. As to all 
 such passages, therefore, there can be no dispute ; 
 and all others in which the words are by the sacred 
 historian declared to have been the "Word of the 
 Lord supernaturally communicated, I receive as 
 such with a degree of confidence proportioned to 
 the confidence required of me by the writer him- 
 self, and to the claims he himself makes on my 
 belief. 
 
 Let us, therefore, remove all such passages, and 
 take each Book by itself; and I repeat that I 
 believe the writer in whatever he himself relates of 
 his own authority, and of its origin. But I cannot 
 find any such claim, as the Doctrine in question 
 supposes, made by these writers, explicitly or by 
 implication. On the contrary, they refer to other 
 documents, and in all points express themselves 
 as sober minded and veracious writers under 
 ordinary circumstances are known to do. But, 
 perhaps, they bear testimony, the successor to his 
 predecessor ? — Or some one of the number has left 
 it on record, that by especial inspiration he was 
 commanded to declare the plenary inspiration of all 
 the rest? — The passages, which can without 
 violence be appealed to as substantiating the latter 
 
LETTER II. 51 
 
 position, are so few, and these so incidental,* — the 
 conclusion drawn from them involving likewise so 
 obviously a petitio jprincipii, namely, the super- 
 natural dictation, word by word, of the book in 
 which the question is found ; (for until this is 
 established, the utmost that such a text can prove, 
 is the current belief of the writer's age and country 
 concerning the character of the books, then called 
 the Scriptures ;) — that it cannot but seem strange, 
 and assuredly is against all analogy of G-ospel Reve- 
 lation, that such a Doctrine, which, if true, must be 
 an article of faith, and a most important, yea, essen- 
 tial article of faith, — should be left thus faintly, 
 thus obscurely, and, if I may so say, obitaneousty, 
 declared and enjoined. The time of the formation 
 and closing of the Canon unknown, the selectors 
 and compilers unknown, or recorded by known 
 fabulists : and (more perplexing still,) the belief of 
 the Jewish Church — the belief, I mean, common to 
 the Jews of Palestine and their more cultivated 
 brethren in Alexandria, (no reprehension of which 
 is to be found in the New Testament) — concerning 
 the nature and import of the Oeoirvevcrria attributed 
 
 * With only one seeming exception, the texts in question 
 refer to the Old Testament alone. That exception is 
 2 Peter, iii. 16. The word Konras (ypacpds) is, perhaps, not 
 necessarily so to be interpreted ; and this very text formed 
 one of the objections to the Apostolic antiquity of the 
 Epistle itself. 
 
 E 2 
 
52 LETTER II. 
 
 to the precious remains of their Temple Library ; — 
 these circumstances are such, especially the last, as 
 in effect to evacuate the Tenet, of which I am speak- 
 ing, of the only meaning in which it practically 
 means any thing at all, tangible, stedfast, or obliga- 
 tory. In infallibility there are no degrees. The 
 power of the High and Holy One is one and the 
 same, whether the sphere, which it fills, be larger or 
 smaller; — the area traversed by a comet, or the 
 oracle of the house, the holy place beneath the 
 wings of the Cherubim ; — the Pentateuch of the 
 Legislator, who drew near to the thick darkness 
 where God was, and who spake in the cloud 
 whence the thunderings and lightnings came, and 
 whom God answered by a voice ; — or but a- Letter 
 of thirteen verses from the affectionate Elder to 
 the elect lady and her children, whom he loved in the 
 truth. But at no period was this the judgment of 
 the Jewish Church respecting all the canonical 
 books. To Moses alone — to Moses in the record- 
 ing no less than in the receiving of the Law — and 
 to all and every part of the five books, called the 
 Books of Moses, the Jewish Doctors of the genera- 
 tion before, and coeval with, the Apostles assigned 
 that unmodified and absolute theopneusty, which 
 our divines, in words at least, attribute to the 
 Canon collectively. In fact it was from the Jewish 
 Eabbis, — who, in opposition to the Christian 
 
LETTER II. 53 
 
 scheme, contended for a perfection in the Revela- 
 tion by Moses, which neither required nor endured 
 any addition, and who strained their fancies in 
 expressing the transcendancy of the books of 
 Moses in aid of their opinion, — that the founders 
 of the Doctrine borrowed their notions and phrases 
 respecting the Bible throughout. Remove the 
 metaphorical drapery from the doctrine of the 
 Cabbalists, and it will be found to contain the 
 only intelligible and consistent idea of that plenary 
 inspiration, which later divines extend to all the 
 canonical books; as thus: — "The Pentateuch is 
 but one Word, even the Word of G-od ; and the 
 letters and articulate sounds, by which this Word 
 is communicated to our human apprehensions, are 
 likewise divinely communicated." 
 
 ISTow, for ' Pentateuch ' substitute ' Old and New 
 Testament,' and then I say that this is the doctrine 
 which I reject as superstitious and unscriptural. 
 And yet as long as the conceptions of the Revealing 
 Word and the Inspiring Spirit are identified and 
 confounded, I assert that whatever says less than 
 this, says little more than nothing. For how can 
 absolute infallibility be blended with fallibility ? 
 Where is the infallible criterion ? How can infallible 
 truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible 
 expressions ? The Jewish teachers confined this 
 miraculous character to the Pentateuch. Between 
 
54 LETTER II. 
 
 the Mosaic and the Prophetic inspiration they 
 asserted such a difference as amounts to a diversity ; 
 and between both the one and the other, and the 
 remaining books comprised under the title of 
 Hagiographa, the interval was still wider, and the 
 inferiority in kind, and not only in degree, was 
 unequivocally expressed. If we take into account 
 the habit, universal with the Hebrew Doctors, of 
 referring all excellent or extraordinary things to 
 the great First Cause, without mention of the 
 proximate and instrumental causes, — a striking 
 illustration of which may be obtained by comparing 
 the narratives of the same event in the Psalms and 
 in the Historical Books ; and if we further reflect 
 that the distinction of the Providential and the 
 Miraculous did not enter into their forms of 
 thinking, — at all events not into their mode of 
 conveying their thoughts, — the language of the 
 Jews respecting the Hagiographa will be found to 
 differ little, if at all, from that of religious persons 
 among ourselves, when speaking of an author 
 abounding in gifts, stirred up by the Holy Spirit, 
 writing under the influence of special grace, and 
 the like. 
 
 Eut it forms no part of my present purpose to 
 discuss the point historically, or to speculate on 
 the formation of either Canon. Rather, such 
 inquiries are altogether alien from the great object 
 
LETTER III. 55 
 
 of my pursuits and studies, which is, to convince 
 myself and others, that the Bible and Christianity 
 are their own sufficient evidence. Eut it concerns 
 both my character and my peace of mind to satisfy 
 unprejudiced judges, that if my present convictions 
 should in all other respects be found consistent 
 with the faith and feelings of a Christian, — and if 
 in many and those important points they tend to 
 secure that faith and to deepen those feelings — the 
 words of the Apostle,* rightly interpreted, do not 
 require their condemnation. Enough, if what has 
 been stated above respecting the general doctrine 
 of the Hebrew Masters, under whom the Apostle 
 was bred, shall remove any misconceptions that 
 might prevent the right interpretation of his words. 
 Farewell. 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 My dear Friekd, 
 
 Having in the former two Letters denned 
 the doctrine which I reject, I am now to communi- 
 cate the views that I would propose to substitute 
 in its place. 
 
 Before, however, I attempt to lay down on the 
 theological chart the road-place, to which my bark 
 
 * 2 Tim. iii. 16. 
 
56 LETTER III. 
 
 has drifted, and to mark the spot and circumscribe 
 the space, within which I swing at anchor, let me, 
 first, thank you for, and then attempt to answer, 
 the objections, — or at least the questions, — which 
 you have urged upon me. 
 
 " The present Bible is the Canon, to which 
 Christ and the Apostles referred ? " 
 
 Doubtless. 
 
 " And in terms which a Christian must tremble 
 to tamper with?" 
 
 Tea. The expressions are as direct as strong ; 
 and a true believer will neither attempt to divert 
 or dilute their strength. 
 
 " The doctrine which is considered as the 
 orthodox view seems the obvious and most 
 natural interpretation of the texts in question ? " 
 
 Yea, and Nay. To those whose minds are 
 prepossessed by the Doctrine itself, — who from 
 earliest childhood have always meant this doctrine 
 by the very word, Bible, — the doctrine being but 
 its exposition and paraphrase — Tea. In such 
 minds the words of our Lord and the declarations 
 of St. Paul can awaken no other sense. To those 
 on the other hand, who find the doctrine senseless 
 and self-confuting, and who take up the Bible as 
 they do other books, and apply to it the same 
 rules of interpretation, — Nay. 
 
 And, lastly, he who, like myself, recognises in 
 
LETTER III. 57 
 
 neither of the two the state of his own mind, — who 
 cannot rest in the former, and feels, or fears, a 
 presumptuous spirit in the negative dogmatism of 
 the latter, — he has his answer to seek. But so far 
 I dare hazard a reply to the question, — In what 
 other sense can the words be interpreted? — 
 beseeching you, however, to take what I am about 
 to offer but as an attempt to delineate an arc of 
 oscillation, — that the eulogy of St. Paul is in no 
 wise contravened by the opinion, to which I incline, 
 who fully believe the Old Testament collectively, 
 both in the composition and in its preservation, a 
 great and precious gift of Providence ; — who find in 
 it all that the Apostle describes, and who more 
 than believe that all which the Apostle spoke of 
 was of divine inspiration, and a blessing intended 
 for as many as are in communion with the Spirit 
 through all ages. And I freely confess that my 
 whole heart would turn away with an angry 
 impatience from the cold and captious mortal, who, 
 the moment I had been pouring out the love and 
 gladness of my soul, while book after book, Law, 
 and Truth, and Example, Oracle and lovely Hymn, 
 and choral Song of ten thousand thousands, and 
 accepted Prayers of Saints and Prophets, sent back, 
 as it were, from Heaven, like doves, to be let loose 
 again with a new freight of spiritual joys and 
 griefs and necessities, were passing across my 
 
58 LETTER III. 
 
 memory, — at the first pause of my voice, and whilst 
 my countenance was still speaking — should ask me, 
 whether I was thinking of the Book of Esther, or 
 meant particularly to include the first six chapters 
 of Daniel, or verses 6 — 20 of the 109th Psalm, or 
 the last verse of the 137th Psalm? "Would any 
 conclusion of this sort be drawn in any other 
 analogous case ? In the course of my Lectures on 
 Dramatic Poetry, I, in half a score instances, 
 referred my auditors to the precious volume before 
 me — Shakspeare — and spoke enthusiastically, both 
 in general and with detail of particular beauties, of 
 the plays of Shakspeare, as in all their kinds, and 
 in relation to the purposes of the writer, excellent. 
 "Would it have been fair, or according to the 
 common usage and understanding of men, to have 
 inferred an intention on my part to decide the 
 question respecting Titus Andronicus, or the larger 
 portion of the three parts of Henry VI. ? Would 
 not every genial mind understand by Shakspeare 
 that unity or total impression comprising, and 
 resulting from, the thousandfold several and par- 
 ticular emotions of delight, admiration, gratitude 
 excited by his works ? But if it be answered, 
 * Aye ! but we must not interpret St. Paul as we 
 may and should interpret any other honest and 
 intelligent writer or speaker,' — then, I say, this is 
 the very petitio principii of which I complain. 
 
LETTER III. 59 
 
 Still less do the words of our Lord* apply 
 against my view. Have I not declared — do I not 
 begin by declaring — that whatever is referred by 
 the sacred Penman to a direct communication from 
 God, and wherever it is recorded that the Subject 
 of the history had asserted himself to have received 
 this or that command, this or that information or 
 assurance, from a superhuman Intelligence, or 
 where the writer in his own person, and in the 
 character of an historian, relates that the Word of 
 the Lord came unto priest, prophet, chieftain, or 
 other individual — have I not declared that I receive 
 the same with full belief, and admit its inappellable 
 authority ? "Who more convinced than I am — who 
 more anxious to impress that conviction on the 
 minds of others — that the Law and the Prophets 
 speak throughout of Christ ? That all the interme- 
 diate applications and realisations of the words are 
 but types and repetitions — translations, as it were, 
 from the language of letters and articulate sounds 
 into the language of events and symbolical persons ? 
 
 And here again let me recur to the aid of analogy. 
 Suppose a Life of Sir Thomas More by his son-in- 
 law, or a Life of Lord Bacon by his chaplain ; that 
 a part of the records of the Court of Chancery 
 belonging to these periods were lost; that in 
 Eoper's or in Eawley's biographical work there 
 
 * John v. 39. 
 
60 LETTER III. 
 
 were preserved a series of dicta and judgments 
 attributed to these illustrious Chancellors, many 
 and important specimens of their table discourses, 
 with large extracts from works written by them, 
 and from some that are no longer extant. Let it 
 be supposed, too, that there are no grounds, 
 internal or external, to doubt either the moral, 
 intellectual, or circumstantial competence of the 
 biographers. Suppose, moreover, that wherever 
 the opportunity existed of collating their docu- 
 ments and quotations with the records and works 
 still preserved, the former were found substantially 
 correct and faithful, the few differences in no wise 
 altering or disturbing the spirit and purpose of the 
 paragraphs in which they were found, and that of 
 what was not collatable, and to which no test db 
 extra could be applied, the far larger part bore 
 witness in itself of the same spirit and origin ; and 
 that not only by its characteristic features, but by 
 its surpassing excellence, it rendered the chances of 
 its having had any other author than the giant- 
 mind, to whom the biographer ascribes it, small 
 indeed ! Now, from the nature and objects of my 
 pursuits, I have, we will suppose, frequent occasion 
 to refer to one or other of these works ; for example, 
 to Bawley's Dicta et Facta Francisci de Verulam. 
 At one time I might refer to the work in some 
 such words as, — "Remember what Erancis of 
 
 
LETTER III. 61 
 
 Verulam said or judged ; " or, — " If you believe 
 not me, yet believe Lord Bacon." At another 
 time I might take the running title of the volume, 
 and at another, the name of the biographer; — 
 " Turn to your Rawley ! He will set you right ; " 
 or, — " There you will find a depth, which no 
 research will ever exhaust;" or whatever other 
 strong expression my sense of Bacon's greatness 
 and of the intrinsic worth and the value of the 
 proofs and specimens of that greatness, contained 
 and preserved in that volume, would excite and 
 justify. But let my expressions be as vivid and 
 unqualified as the most sanguine temperament ever 
 inspired, would any man of sense conclude from 
 them that I meant — and meant to make others 
 believe — that not only each and all of these 
 anecdotes, adages, decisions, extracts, incidents 
 had been dictated, word by word, by Lord Bacon ; 
 and that all Rawley's own observations and infer- 
 ences, all the connectives and disjunctives, all the 
 recollections of time, place, and circumstance, 
 together with the order and succession of the 
 narrative, were in like manner dictated and revised 
 by the spirit of the deceased Chancellor? The 
 answer will be — must be ; — No man in his senses ! 
 " No man in his senses — in this instance ; but in that 
 of the Bible it is quite otherwise ; — for (I take it as 
 an admitted point that) it — is quite otherwise ! " 
 
62 LETTER III. 
 
 And here I renounce any advantage I might 
 obtain for my argument by restricting the applica- 
 tion of our Lord's and the Apostle's words to the 
 Hebrew Canon. I admit the justice — I have long 
 felt the full force — of the remark — " "We have all 
 that the occasion allowed." And if the same awful 
 authority does not apply so directly to the 
 Evangelical and Apostolical writings as to the 
 Hebrew Canon, yet the analogy of faith justifies 
 the transfer. If the doctrine be less decisively 
 Scriptural in its application to the JSTew Testament 
 or the Christian Canon, the temptation to doubt it 
 is likewise less. So at least we are led to infer ; 
 since in point of fact it is the apparent or imagined 
 contrast, the diversity of spirit which sundry indi- 
 viduals have believed themselves to find in the Old 
 Testament and in the Grospel, that has given 
 occasion to the doubt ; — and, in the heart of thou- 
 sands who yield a faith of acquiescence to the 
 contrary, and find rest in their humility, — supplies 
 fuel to a fearful wish that it were permitted to make 
 a distinction. 
 
 But, lastly, you object, that — even granting that 
 no coercive, positive reasons for the belief — no 
 direct and not inferred assertions, — of the plenary 
 inspiration of the Old and New Testament, in the 
 generally received import of the term, could be 
 adduced, yet, in behalf of a doctrine so catholic, 
 
LETTER III. 63 
 
 and during so long a succession of ages affirmed 
 and acted on by Jew and Christian, Greek, Bomish, 
 and Protestant, you need no other answer than — 
 " Tell me, first, why it should not be received ! 
 Why should I not believe the Scriptures through- 
 out dictated, in word and thought, by an infallible 
 Intelligence ? " — I admit the fairness of the retort ; 
 and eagerly and earnestly do I answer : For every 
 reason that makes me prize and revere these 
 Scriptures; — prize them, love them, revere them, 
 beyond all other books ! Why should I not ? 
 Because the Doctrine in question petrifies at once 
 the whole body of Holy "Writ with all its harmonies 
 and symmetrical gradations, — the flexile and the 
 rigid, — the supporting hard and the clothing soft, 
 — the blood which is the life, — the intelligencing 
 nerves, and the rudely woven, but soft and springy, 
 cellular substance, in which all are embedded and 
 lightly bound together. This breathing organism, 
 this glorious panharmonicon, which I had seen 
 stand on its feet as a man, and with a man's voice 
 given to it, the Doctrine in question turns at once 
 into a colossal Memnon s head, a hollow passage 
 for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many 
 men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but one 
 voice and the same ; — and no man uttered it, and 
 never in a human heart was it conceived. Why 
 should I not ? — Because the Doctrine evacuates of 
 
64 LETTER III. 
 
 all sense and efficacy the sure and constant tradi- 
 tion, that all the several books bound up together 
 in our precious family Bibles were composed in 
 different and widely distant ages, under the greatest 
 diversity of circumstances, and degrees of light and 
 information, and yet that the composers, whether 
 as uttering or as recording what was uttered and 
 what was done, were all actuated by a pure and 
 holy Spirit, one and the same — (for is there any 
 spirit pure and holy, and yet not proceeding from 
 God — and yet not proceeding in and with the 
 Holy Spirit ?) — one Spirit, working diversly,* now 
 awakening strength, and now glorifying itself in 
 weakness, now giving power and direction to 
 knowledge, and now taking away the sting from 
 error ! Ere the summer and the months of ripen- 
 ing had arrived for the heart of the race ; while the 
 whole sap of the tree was crude, and each and every 
 fruit lived in the harsh and bitter principle ; even 
 then this Spirit withdrew its chosen ministers from 
 the false and guilt-making centre of Self. It con- 
 verted the wrath into a form and an organ of love, 
 and on the passing storm-cloud impressed the fair 
 
 * I use the adverb diversly from the adjective divers in 
 order to distinguish the Scriptural and Pauline sense of the 
 word — the sense in which I here use it — from the logical usage 
 of the term diversely, from diverse, that is, different in kind, 
 heterogeneous. The same Spirit may act and impel diversly, 
 but, being a good Spirit, it cannot act diversely. 
 
LETTER III. 65 
 
 rainbow of promise to all generations. Put the 
 lust of Self in the forked lightning, and would it 
 not be a Spirit of Moloch ? But God maketh the 
 lightnings his ministers, fire and hail, vapours and 
 stormy winds fulfilling his word. 
 
 Curse ye Meroz, said the angel of the Lord ; curse 
 ye Utterly the inhabitants thereof— sang Deborah. 
 Was it that she called to mind any personal 
 wrongs — rapine or insult — that she or the house of 
 Lapidoth had received from Jabin or Sisera ? No ; 
 she had dwelt under her palm tree in the depth of 
 the mountain. But she was a mother in Israel ; 
 and with a mother's heart, and with the vehemency 
 of a mother's and a patriot's love, she had shot 
 the light of love from her eyes, and poured the 
 blessings of love from her lips, on the people that 
 bod jeoparded their lives unto the death against the 
 oppressors; and the bitterness, awakened and 
 borne aloft by the same love, she precipitated in 
 curses on the selfish and coward recreants who 
 came not to the help of the Lord, to the help of the 
 Lord, against the mighty. As long as I have the 
 image of Deborah before my eyes, and while I 
 throw myself back into the age, country, circum- 
 stances, of this Hebrew Bonduca in the not yet 
 tamed chaos of the spiritual creation ; — as long as 
 I contemplate the impassioned, high-souled, heroic 
 woman in all the prominence and individuality of 
 
 F 
 
66 LETTER III. 
 
 will and character, — I feel as if I were among the 
 first ferments of the great affections — the proplastic 
 waves of the microcosmic chaos, swelling up against 
 — and yet towards — the outspread wings of the 
 Dove that lies brooding on the troubled waters. 
 So long all is well, — all replete with instruction 
 and example. In the fierce and inordinate I am 
 made to know and be grateful for the clearer and 
 purer radiance which shines on a Christian's paths, 
 neither blunted by the preparatory veil, nor crim- 
 soned in its struggle through the all-enwrapping 
 mist of the world's ignorance : whilst in the self- 
 oblivion of these heroes of the Old Testament, 
 their elevation above all low and individual in- 
 terests, — above all, in the entire and vehement 
 devotion of their total being to the service of their 
 divine Master, I find a lesson of humility, a ground 
 of humiliation, and a shaming, yet rousing, example 
 of faith and fealty. But let me once be persuaded 
 that all these heart-awakening utterances of human 
 hearts — of men of like faculties and passions with 
 myself, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, triumphing 
 — are but as a JDivina Commedia of a superhuman — 
 Oh bear with me, if I say — Ventriloquist ; — that 
 the royal Harper, to whom I have so often submitted 
 myself as a many-stringed instrument for his fire-tipt 
 fingers to traverse, while every several nerve of 
 emotion, passion, thought, that thrids the flesh-and- 
 
LETTER III. 67 
 
 blood of our common humanity, responded to the 
 touch, — that this sweet Psalmist of Israel was 
 himself as mere an instrument as his harp, an 
 automaton poet, mourner, and supplicant ; — all is 
 gone, — all sympathy, at least, and all example. I 
 listen in awe and fear, but likewise in perplexity 
 and confusion of spirit. 
 
 Yet one other instance, and let this be the 
 crucial test of the Doctrine. Say that the Book of 
 Job throughout was dictated by an infallible 
 Intelligence. Then re-peruse the book, and still, 
 as you proceed, try to apply the tenet : try if you 
 can even attach any sense or semblance of meaning 
 to the speeches which you are reading. What! 
 were the hollow truisms, the unsufficing half-truths, 
 the false assumptions and malignant insinuations 
 of the supercilious bigots, who corruptly defended 
 the truth : — were the impressive facts, the piercing 
 outcries, the pathetic appeals, and the close and 
 powerful reasoning with which the poor sufferer — 
 smarting at once from his wounds, and from the 
 oil of vitriol which the orthodox liars for God were 
 dropping into them — impatiently, but uprightly 
 and holily, controverted this truth, while in will and 
 in spirit he clung to it ; — were both dictated by an 
 infallible Intelligence? — Alas! if I may judge 
 from the manner in which both indiscriminately 
 are recited, quoted, appealed to, preached upon, by 
 
 f 2 
 
68 LETTER IV. 
 
 the routiniers of desk and pulpit, I cannot doubt 
 that they think so, — or rather, without thinking, 
 take for granted that so they are to think ; — the 
 more readily, perhaps, because the so thinking 
 supersedes the necessity of all after-thought. 
 
 Farewell. 
 
 LETTEB IY. 
 
 My dear Eeieih), 
 
 Totj reply to the conclusion of my Letter: 
 "What have we to do with routiniers ? Quid mihi 
 cum homunculis put at a putide reputantibus ? Let 
 nothings count for nothing, and the dead bury the 
 dead ! "Who but such ever understood the Tenet 
 in this sense ? " — 
 
 In what sense then, I rejoin, do others under- 
 stand it? If, with exception of the passages 
 already excepted, namely, the recorded words of 
 G-od — concerning which no Christian can have 
 doubt or scruple, — the Tenet in this sense be 
 inapplicable to the Scripture, destructive of its 
 noblest purposes, and contradictory to its own 
 express declarations, — again and again I ask: — 
 What am I to substitute ? What other sense is 
 
LETTER IV. 69 
 
 conceivable that does not destroy the doctrine 
 which it professes to interpret — that does not 
 convert it into its own negative ? As if a geome- 
 trician should name a sugar loaf an ellipse, adding 
 — " By which term I here mean a cone ;" — and 
 then justify the misnomer on the pretext that the 
 ellipse is among the conic sections ! And yet — 
 notwithstanding the repugnancy of the Doctrine, 
 in its unqualified sense, to Scripture, [Reason, and 
 Common Sense theoretically, while to all practical 
 uses it is intractable, unmalleable, and altogether 
 unprofitable — notwithstanding its irrationality, and 
 in the face of your expostulation, grounded on the 
 palpableness of its irrationality, — I must still avow 
 my belief that, however flittingly and unsteadily, 
 as through a mist, it is the Doctrine which the 
 generality of our popular divines receive as ortho- 
 dox, and this the sense which they attach to the 
 words. 
 
 Eor on what other ground can I account for the 
 whimsical subintelligiturs of our numerous harmon- 
 ists, — for the curiously inferred facts, the inventive 
 circumstantial detail, the complemental and supple- 
 mental history which, in the utter silence of all 
 historians and absence of all historical documents, 
 they bring to light by mere force of logic ? — And 
 all to do away some half score apparent discrepancies 
 in the chronicles and memoirs of the Old and New 
 
70 LETTER IV. 
 
 Testaments; — discrepancies so analogous to what 
 is found in all other narratives of the same story 
 by several narrators, — so analogous to what is 
 found in all other known and trusted histories by 
 contemporary historians, when they are collated 
 with each other, (nay, not seldom when either 
 historian is compared with himself,) as to form in 
 the eyes of all competent judges a characteristic 
 mark of the genuineness, independency, and (if I 
 may apply the word to a book,) the veraciousness 
 of each several document ; a mark the absence 
 of which would warrant a suspicion of collusion, 
 invention, or at best of servile transcription; — 
 discrepancies so trifling in circumstance and import, 
 that, although in some instances it is highly probable, 
 and in all instances, perhaps, possible that they are 
 only apparent and reconcilable, no wise man would 
 care a straw whether they were real or apparent, 
 reconciled or left in harmless and friendly variance. 
 What, I ask, could have induced learned and 
 intelligent divines to adopt or sanction subterfuges, 
 which, neutralising the ordinary criteria of full or 
 defective evidence in historical documents, would, 
 taken as a general rule, render all collation and 
 cross-examination of written records ineffective, 
 and obliterate the main character by which authen- 
 tic histories are distinguished from those traditional 
 tales, which each successive reporter enlarges and 
 
LETTER IV. 71 
 
 fashions to his own fancy and purpose, and every 
 different edition of which more or less contradicts 
 the other ? Allow me to create chasms ad libitum, 
 and ad libitum to fill them np with imagined facts 
 and incidents, and I would almost undertake to 
 harmonise Falstaff's account of the rogues in buck- 
 ram into a coherent and consistent narrative. 
 What, I say, could have tempted grave and pious 
 men thus to disturb the foundation of the Temple, 
 in order to repair a petty breach or rat-hole in the 
 wall, or fasten a loose stone or two in the outer 
 court, if not an assumed necessity arising out of the 
 peculiar character of Bible history ? 
 
 The substance of the syllogism, by which their 
 procedure was justified to their own minds, can be 
 no other than this. That, without which two asser- 
 tions — both of which must be alike true and correct 
 — would contradict each other, and consequently be, 
 one or both, false or incorrect, must itself be true. 
 But every word and syllable existing in the original 
 text of the Canonical Books, from the Cherethi and 
 JPheletM * of David to the name in the copy of a 
 family register, the site of a town, or the course of 
 a river, were dictated to the sacred amanuensis by 
 an infallible Intelligence. Here there can be 
 neither more nor less. Important or unimportant 
 gives no ground of difference ; and the number of 
 
 * 2 Sam. xx. 23 ; 1 Chron. xviii. 17.— Ed. 
 
72 LETTEE, IV. 
 
 the writers as little. The secretaries may have 
 been many, — the historian was one and the same, 
 and he infallible. This is the minor of the syllogism ; 
 and if it could be proved, the conclusion would be 
 at least plausible; and there would be but one 
 objection to the procedure, namely, its uselessness. 
 For if it have been proved already, what need of 
 proving it over again, and by means — the removal, 
 namely, of apparent contradictions — which the 
 infallible Author did not think good to employ? 
 But if it have not been proved, what becomes of 
 the argument which derives its whole force and 
 legitimacy from the assumption. 
 
 In fact, it is clear that the harmonists and their 
 admirers held and understood the Doctrine literally. 
 And must not that divine likewise have so under- 
 stood it, who, in answer to a question concerning 
 the transcendant blessedness of Jael, and the 
 righteousness of the act, in which she inhospitably, 
 treacherously, perfidiously, murdered sleep, the 
 confiding sleep, closed the controversy by observing 
 that he wanted no better morality than that of the 
 Bible, and no other proof of an action's being 
 praiseworthy than that the Bible had declared it 
 worthy to be praised ; — an observation, as applied 
 in this instance, so slanderous to the morality and 
 moral spirit of the Bible as to be inexplicable, 
 except as a consequence of the Doctrine in dispute ? 
 
LETTER IV. 73 
 
 — But let a man be once fully persuaded that there 
 is no difference between the two positions — " The 
 Bible contains the religion revealed by God " — and 
 — " Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, 
 and was revealed by God ;" — and that whatever can 
 be said of the Bible, collectively taken, may and 
 must be said of each and every sentence of the 
 Bible, taken for and by itself; — and I no longer 
 wonder at these paradoxes. I only object to the 
 inconsistency of those who profess the same belief, 
 and yet affect to look down with a contemptuous or 
 compassionate smile on John Wesley for rejecting 
 the Copernican system as incompatible therewith ; 
 or who exclaim " Wonderful ! " when they hear 
 that Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy old woman to 
 the gallows in honour of the Witch of Endor.* In 
 
 * He sent two, nor does it appear that the poor creatures 
 were at all crazy. 
 
 Rose Cullender and Amy Duny, widows, of Lowestoff, 
 Suffolk, were tried for witchcraft, on the 10th of March, 
 1665, at Bury St. Edmunds. Sir M. Hale told the jury, 
 "that he would not repeat the evidence unto them, lest by 
 so doing he should wrong the evidence on the one side or 
 the other. Only this he acquainted them, that they had two 
 things to inquire after : first, whether or no these children 
 were bewitched ; secondly, whether the prisoners at the bar 
 were guilty of it. 
 
 " That there were such creatures as witches, he made no doubt 
 at all. For, first, tlie Scriptures had affirmed so much. Secondly, 
 the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, 
 which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime. And 
 
74 LETTER IV. 
 
 the latter instance it might, I admit, have been an 
 erroneous (though even at this day the all but 
 universally received) interpretation of the word, 
 which we have rendered by witch ; — but I challenge 
 these divines and their adherents to establish the 
 compatibility of a belief in the modern astronomy 
 and natural philosophy with their and "Wesley's 
 doctrine respecting the inspired Scriptures, without 
 reducing the doctrine itself to a plaything of wax ; ' 
 — or rather to a half-inflated bladder, which, when 
 the contents are rarefied in the heat of rhetorical 
 generalities, swells out round, and without a crease 
 or wrinkle ; but bring it into the cool temperature 
 
 such hath been the judgment of this kingdom, as appears by 
 that Act of Parliament, which hath provided punishments 
 proportionable to the quality of the offence. And desired 
 them strictly to observe their evidence; and desired the 
 great God of heaven to direct their hearts in the weighty 
 thing they had in hand. For to condemn the innocent, and 
 to let the guilty go free were both an abomination to the 
 Lord." 
 
 They were found guilty on thirteen indictments. The 
 bewitched got well of all their pains the moment after the 
 conviction ; " only Susan Chandler felt a pain like pricking 
 of pins in her stomach." 
 
 " The Judge and all the Court felt fully satisfied with the 
 verdict, and thereupon gave judgment against the witches 
 that they should be hanged." 
 
 " They were much urged to confess, but would not." 
 
 "They were executed on Monday, the 17th of March 
 following, but they confessed nothing." — State Trials, vi. 
 p. 700.— Ed. 
 
LETTER IV. 75 
 
 of particulars, and you may press, and as it were 
 except, what part you like — so it be but one part 
 at a time — between your thumb and finger. 
 
 !Now, I pray you, which is the more honest, nay, 
 which the more reverential, proceeding, — to play at 
 fast and loose in this way ; or to say at once, " See 
 here in these several writings one and the same 
 Holy Spirit, now sanctifying a chosen vessel, and 
 fitting it for the reception of heavenly truths pro- 
 ceeding immediately from the mouth of God, and 
 elsewhere working in frail and fallible men like 
 ourselves, and like ourselves instructed by God's 
 word and laws ? " — The first Christian martyr had 
 the form and features of an ordinary man, nor are 
 we taught to believe that these features were 
 miraculously transfigured into superhuman sym- 
 metry ; but he being filled with the Holy Ghost, 
 they that looked stedfastly on him, saw his face as it 
 had been the face of an angel. Even so has it ever 
 been, and so it ever will be, with all who with 
 humble hearts and a rightly disposed spirit scan 
 the Sacred Volume. And they who read it with 
 an evil heart of unbelief and an alien spirit — what 
 boots for them the assertion that every sentence 
 was miraculously communicated to the nominal 
 author by God himself ? "Will it not rather pre- 
 sent additional temptations to the unhappy scoffers, 
 and furnish them with a pretext of self-justification? 
 
76 LETTER IV. 
 
 When, in my third Letter, I first echoed the 
 question, " "Why should I not ? " the answers came 
 crowding on my mind. I am well content, how- 
 ever, to have merely suggested the main points, in 
 proof of the positive harm which, both historically 
 and spiritually, our religion sustains from this 
 Doctrine. Of minor importance, yet not to be 
 overlooked, are the forced and fantastic interpreta- 
 tions, the arbitrary allegories and mystic expan- 
 sions of proper names, to which this indiscriminate 
 Bibliolatry furnished fuel, spark, and wind. A 
 still greater evil, and less attributable to the 
 visionary humour and weak judgment of the indi- 
 vidual expositors, is the literal rendering of Scrip- 
 ture in passages, which the number and variety of 
 images employed in different places, to express one 
 and the same verity, plainly mark out for figurative. 
 And, lastly, add to all these the strange — in all 
 other writings unexampled — practice of bringing 
 together into logical dependency detached sen- 
 tences from books composed at the distance of 
 centuries, nay, sometimes a millennium, from each 
 other, under different dispensations, and for differ- 
 ent objects. Accommodations of elder Scriptural 
 phrases — that favourite ornament and garnish of 
 Jewish eloquence — incidental allusions to popular 
 notions, traditions, apologues — (for example, the 
 dispute between the Devil and the Archangel 
 
LETTER IY. 77 
 
 Michael about the body of Moses. Jude 9),— fancies 
 and anachronisms imported from the synagogue of 
 Alexandria into Palestine by, or together with, the 
 Septuagint Version, and applied as mere argumenta 
 ad homines — (for example, the delivery of the Law 
 by the disposition of Angels, Acts vh\ 53, Gal. iii. 
 19, JELeb. ii. 2) — these, detached from their context, 
 and, contrary to the intention of the sacred writer, 
 first raised into independent theses, and then 
 brought together to produce or sanction some new 
 credendwn, for which neither separately could have 
 furnished a pretence ! By this strange mosaic, 
 Scripture texts have been worked up into passable 
 likenesses of Purgatory, Popery, the Inquisition, 
 and other monstrous abuses. But would you have 
 a Protestant instance of the superstitious use of 
 Scripture arising out of this dogma ? Passing by 
 the Cabala of the Hutchinsonian School as the 
 dotage of a few weak-minded individuals, I refer 
 you to Bishop Hacket's Sermons on the Incarna- 
 tion. And if you have read the same author's Life 
 of Archbishop Williams, and have seen and felt 
 (as every reader of this latter work must see and 
 feel,) his talent, learning, acuteness, and robust 
 good sense, you will have no difficulty in determin- 
 ing the quality and character of a dogma, which 
 could engraft such fruits on such a tree.* 
 
 * " Did not the life of Archbishop Williams prove other- 
 
78 LETTER IV. 
 
 It will perhaps appear a paradox, if, after all 
 these reasons, I should avow that they weigh less 
 in my mind against the Doctrine, than the motives 
 usually assigned for maintaining and enjoining it. 
 Such, for instance, are the arguments drawn from 
 the anticipated loss and damage that would result 
 from its abandonment; as that it would deprive 
 the Christian world of its only infallible arbiter in 
 questions of Faith and Duty, suppress the only 
 common and inappellable tribunal ; that the Bible 
 is the only religious bond of union and ground of 
 unity among Protestants, and the like. For the 
 confutation of this whole reasoning it might be 
 sufficient to ask : — Has it produced these effects ? 
 Would not the contrary statement be nearer to 
 the fact? What did the Churches of the first 
 four centuries hold on this point ? To what 
 did they attribute the rise and multiplication of 
 
 wise, I should have inferred from these Sermons that Hacket 
 from his first boyhood had been used to make themes, 
 epigrams, copies of verses, and the like on all the feasts and 
 festivals of the Church ; had found abundant nourishment 
 for this humour of points, quirks, and quiddities, in the study 
 of the Fathers and glossers ; and remained a junior soph all 
 his life long." . . . . " Let any competent judge read Hacket's 
 Life of Archbishop Williams, and then these Sermons, and 
 so measure the stultifying, nugifying, effect of a bund and 
 uncritical study of the Fathers, and the exclusive prepos- 
 session in favour of their authority in the minds of many of 
 our Church dignitaries in the reign of Charles I." — Lit. 
 Remains, III. pp. 175 and 183. — Ed. 
 
LETTER IV. 79 
 
 heresies ? Can any learned and candid Protestant 
 affirm that there existed and exists no ground for 
 the charges of Bo suet and other eminent Eomish 
 divines ? It is no easy matter to know how to 
 handle a party maxim, so framed that, with the 
 exception of a single word, it expresses an import- 
 ant truth, but which by means of that word is 
 made to convey a most dangerous error. 
 
 The Bible is the appointed conservatory, an 
 indispensable criterion, and a continual source and 
 support of true Belief. But that the Bible is the 
 sole source ; that it not only contains, but consti- 
 tutes, the Christian Religion ; that it is, in short, a 
 Creed, consisting wholly of articles of Faith ; that 
 consequently we need no rule, help, or guide, 
 spiritual or historical, to teach us what parts are 
 and what are not articles of Faith — all being such 
 — and the difference between the Bible and the 
 Creed being this, that the clauses of the latter are 
 all unconditionally necessary to salvation, but those 
 of the former conditionally so, that is, as soon as 
 the words are known to exist in any one of the 
 canonical Books ; and that, under this limitation, 
 the belief is of the same necessity in both, and not 
 at all affected by the greater or lesser importance 
 of the matter to be believed ; — this scheme differs 
 widely from the preceding, though its adherents 
 often make use of the same words in expressing 
 
80 LETTER IV. 
 
 their belief. And this latter scheme, I assert, was 
 brought into currency by and in favour of those by 
 whom the operation of grace, the aids of the Spirit, 
 the necessity of regeneration, the corruption of our 
 nature, in short, all the peculiar and spiritual 
 mysteries of the Grospel were explained and diluted 
 away. 
 
 And how have these men treated this very Bible ? 
 — I, who indeed prize and reverence this sacred 
 library, as of all outward means and conservatives 
 of Christian faith and practice the surest and the 
 most reflective of the inward Word ; — I, who hold 
 that the Bible contains the religion of Christians, 
 but who dare not say that whatever is contained in 
 the Bible is the Christian religion, and who shrink 
 from all question respecting the comparative worth 
 and efficacy of the written "Word as weighed against 
 the preaching of the Grospel, the discipline of the 
 Churches, the continued succession of the Ministry, 
 and the communion of Saints, lest by comparing I 
 should seem to detach them ; — I tremble at the 
 processes, which the Grotian divines without scruple 
 carry on in their treatment of the sacred Writers, 
 as soon as any texts declaring the peculiar tenets of 
 our Faith are cited against them, — even tenets and 
 mysteries which the believer at his baptism receives 
 as the title-writ and bosom-roll of his adoption ; 
 and which, according to my scheme, every Christian 
 
LETTER IV. 81 
 
 born in Church-membership ought to bring with 
 him to the study of the sacred Scriptures as the 
 master-key of interpretation. Whatever the doctrine 
 of infallible dictation may be in itself, in their 
 hands it is to the last degree nugatory, and to be 
 paralleled only by the Romish tenet of Infallibility, 
 — in the existence of which all agree, but where, 
 and in whom, it exists is still matter of debate. 
 Every sentence found in a canonical Book, rightly 
 interpreted, contains the dictum of an infallible 
 Mind ; — but what the right interpretation is, — or 
 whether the very words now extant are corrupt or 
 genuine — must be determined by the industry and 
 understanding of fallible, and alas ! more or less 
 prejudiced theologians. 
 
 And yet I am told that this Doctrine must not 
 be resisted or called in question, because of its 
 fitness to preserve unity of faith, and for the 
 prevention of schism and sectarian by-ways ! — Let 
 the man who holds this language trace the history 
 of Protestantism, and the growth of sectarian 
 divisions, ending with Dr. Hawker' s^Z£ra-Calvinistic 
 Tracts, and Mr. Belsham's New Version of the 
 Testament. And then let him tell me that for the 
 prevention of an evil which already exists, and 
 which the boasted preventive itself might rather 
 seem to have occasioned, I must submit to be 
 silenced by the first learned Infidel, who throws in 
 
82 LETTER IV. 
 
 my face the blessing of Deborah, or the cursings of 
 David, or the Grecisms and heavier difficulties in 
 the biographical chapters of the Book of Daniel, or 
 the hydrography and natural philosophy of the 
 Patriarchal ages. — I must forego the means of 
 silencing, and the prospect of convincing, an alienated 
 brother, because I must not thus answer : — " My 
 Brother ! "What has all this to do with the truth 
 and the worth of Christianity ? If you reject a 
 priori all communion with the Holy Spirit, there is 
 indeed a chasm between us, over which we cannot 
 even make our voices intelligible to each other. 
 But if — though but with the faith of a Seneca or 
 an Antonine — you admit the co-operation of a 
 divine Spirit in souls desirous of good, even as the 
 breath of heaven works variously in each several 
 plant according to its kind, character, period of 
 growth, and circumstance of soil, clime, and aspect ; 
 — on what ground can you assume that its presence 
 is incompatible with all imperfection in the subject 
 — even with such imperfection as is the natural 
 accompaniment of the unripe season ? If you call 
 your gardener or husbandman to account for the 
 plants or crops he is raising, would you not regard 
 the special purpose in each, and judge of each by 
 that which it was tending to ? Thorns are not 
 flowers, nor is the husk serviceable. But it was 
 not for its thorns, but for its sweet and medicinal 
 
LETTER IV. 83 
 
 flowers that the rose was cultivated ; and he who 
 cannot separate the husk from the grain, wants the 
 power because sloth or malice has prevented the 
 will. I demand for the Bible only the justice which 
 you grant to other books of grave authority, and to 
 other proved and acknowledged benefactors of 
 mankind. Will you deny a spirit of wisdom in 
 Lord Bacon, because in particular facts he did not 
 possess perfect science, or an entire immunity from 
 the positive errors which result from imperfect 
 insight? A Davy will not so judge his great 
 predecessor. For he recognises the spirit that is 
 now working in himself, and which under similar 
 defects of light and obstacles of error had been his 
 guide and guardian in the morning twilight of his 
 own genius. Must not the kindly warmth awaken 
 and vivify the seed, in order that the stem may 
 spring up and rejoice in the light ? As the genial 
 warmth to the informing light, even so is the 
 pre-disposing Spirit to the revealing Word." 
 
 If I should reason thus — but why do I say if? 
 — I have reasoned thus with more than one serious 
 and well-disposed Sceptic; and what was the 
 answer ? — " You speak rationally, but seem to 
 forget the subject. I have frequently attended 
 meetings of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 
 where I have heard speakers of every denomination, 
 Calvinist and Arminian, Quaker and Methodist, 
 
 g 2 
 
84 LETTER IV. 
 
 Dissenting Ministers and Clergymen, nay, digni- 
 taries of the Established Church, — and still have 
 I heard the same doctrine, — that the Bible was not 
 to be regarded or reasoned about in the way that 
 other good books are or may be ; — that the Bible 
 was different in kind, and stood by itself. By some 
 indeed this doctrine was rather implied than 
 expressed, but yet evidently implied. But by far 
 the greater number of the speakers it was asserted 
 in the strongest and most unqualified words that 
 language could supply. "What is more, their prin- 
 cipal arguments were grounded on the position, 
 that the Bible throughout was dictated by 
 Omniscience, and therefore in all its parts in- 
 fallibly true and obligatory, and that the men, 
 whose names are prefixed to the several books or 
 chapters, were in fact but as .different pens in the 
 hand of one and the same Writer, and the words 
 the words of God himself;— and that on this 
 account all notes and comments were superfluous, 
 nay, presumptuous, — a profane mixing of human 
 with divine, the notions of fallible creatures, with 
 the oracles of Infallibility, — as if God's meaning 
 could be so clearly or fitly expressed in man's as in 
 God's own words! But how often you yourself 
 must have heard the same language from the 
 pulpit!"— 
 
 What could I reply to this? — I could neither 
 
LETTER IV. 85 
 
 deny the fact, nor evade the conclusion, — namely, 
 that such is at present the popular belief. Yes — I 
 at length rejoined — I have heard this language 
 from the pulpit, and more than once from men who 
 in any other place would explain it away into 
 something so very different from the literal sense of 
 their words as closely to resemble the contrary. 
 And this, indeed, is the peculiar character of the 
 doctrine, that you cannot diminish or qualify but 
 you reverse it. I have heard this language from 
 men, who knew as well as myself that the best and 
 most orthodox divines have in effect disclaimed the 
 doctrine, inasmuch as they confess it cannot be 
 extended to the words of the sacred Writers, or 
 the particular import, — that therefore the Doctrine 
 does not mean all that the usual wording of it 
 expresses, though what it does mean, and why they 
 continue to sanction this hyperbolical wording, I 
 have sought to learn from them in vain. But let a 
 thousand orators blazon it at public meetings, and 
 let as many pulpits echo it, surely it behoves you to 
 inquire whether you cannot be a Christian on your 
 own faith ; and it cannot but be beneath a wise 
 man to be an Infidel on the score of what other 
 men think fit to include in their Christianity ! 
 
 Now suppose — and, believe me, the supposition 
 will vary little from the fact — that in consequence 
 of these views the Sceptic's mind had gradually 
 
86 LETTER IV. 
 
 opened to the reception of all the truths enumerated 
 in my first Letter. Suppose that the Scriptures 
 themselves from this time had continued to rise in 
 his esteem and affection — the better understood, 
 the more dear; as in the countenance of one, 
 whom through a cloud of prejudices we have at 
 least learned to love and value above all others, 
 new beauties dawn on us from day to day, till at 
 length we wonder how we could at any time have 
 thought it other than most beautiful. Studying 
 the sacred volume in the light and in the freedom 
 of a faith already secured, at every fresh meeting 
 my Sceptic friend has to tell me of some new 
 passage, formerly viewed by him as a dry stick on a 
 rotten branch, which has budded and, like the rod of 
 Aaron, brought forth buds and bloomed blossoms, and 
 yielded almonds. Let these results, I say, be sup- 
 posed, — and shall I still be told that my friend is 
 nevertheless an alien in the household of Faith ? 
 Scrupulously orthodox as I know you to be, will 
 you tell me that I ought to have left this Sceptic as 
 I found him, rather than attempt his conversion by 
 such means ; or that I was deceiving him, when I 
 said to him : — 
 
 "Friend! The truth revealed through Christ 
 has its evidence in itself, and the proof of its 
 divine authority in its fitness to our nature and 
 needs ; — the clearness and cogency of this proof 
 
LETTER IV. 87 
 
 being proportionate to the degree of self-knowledge 
 in each individual hearer. Christianity has likewise 
 its historical evidences, and these as strong as is 
 compatible with the nature of history, and with the 
 aims and objects of a religious dispensation. And 
 to all these Christianity itself, as an existing Power 
 in the world, and Christendom as an existing Fact, 
 with the no less evident fact of a progressive 
 expansion, give a force of moral demonstration that 
 almost supersedes particular testimony. These 
 proofs and evidences would remain unshaken, even 
 though the sum of our religion were to be drawn 
 from the theologians of each successive century, 
 on the principle of receiving that only as divine, 
 which should be found in all, — quod semper, quod 
 ubique, quod ab omnibus. Be only, my Eriend ! as 
 orthodox a believer as you would have abundant 
 reason to be, though from some accident of birth, 
 country, or education the precious boon of the 
 Bible, with its additional evidence, had up to this 
 moment been concealed from you ; — and then read 
 its contents with only the same piety which you 
 freely accord on other occasions to the writings of 
 men, considered the best and wisest of their several 
 ages ! "What you find therein coincident with your 
 pre-established convictions, you will of course 
 recognise as the revealed "Word, while, as you 
 read the recorded workings of the "Word and the 
 
88 LETTER IV. 
 
 Spirit in the minds, lives, and hearts of spiritual 
 men, the influence of the same Spirit on your own 
 being, and the conflicts of grace and infirmity in 
 your own soul, will enable you to discern and to 
 know in and by what spirit they spake and acted, 
 — as far at least as shall be needful for you, and in 
 the times of your need. 
 
 " Thenceforward, therefore, your doubts will be 
 confined to such parts or passages of the received 
 Canon, as seem to you irreconcilable with known 
 truths, and at variance with the tests given in the 
 Scriptures themselves, and as shall continue so to 
 appear after you have examined each in reference 
 to the circumstances of the Writer or Speaker, the 
 dispensation under which he lived, the purpose of 
 the particular passage, and the intent and object 
 of the Scriptures at large. Respecting these, 
 decide for yourself: and fear not for the result. I 
 venture to tell it you before hand. The result will 
 be, a confidence in the judgment and fidelity of the 
 compilers of the Canon increased by the apparent 
 exceptions. For they will be found neither more 
 nor greater than may well be supposed requisite, on 
 the one hand, to prevent us from sinking into a 
 habit of slothful, undiscriminating, acquiescence, 
 and on the other to provide a check against those 
 presumptuous fanatics, who would rend the Urim 
 and Thummim from the breastplate of judgment, and 
 
LETTER V. 89 
 
 frame oracles by private divination from each letter 
 
 of each disjointed gem, uninterpreted by the Priest, 
 
 and deserted by the Spirit, which shines in the 
 
 parts only as it pervades and irradiates the whole." 
 
 Such is the language in which I have addressed a 
 
 halting friend, — halting, yet with his face towards 
 
 the right path. If I have erred, enable me to see 
 
 my error. Correct me, or confirm me. 
 
 Farewell. 
 
 LETTER Y. 
 
 Yes ! my dear Eriend, it is my conviction that 
 in all ordinary cases the knowledge and belief of 
 the Christian Eeligion should precede the study of 
 the Hebrew Canon. Indeed, with regard to both 
 Testaments, I consider oral and catechismal instruc- 
 tion as the preparative provided by Christ himself 
 in the establishment of a visible Church. And to 
 make the Bible, apart from the truths, doctrines, 
 and spiritual experiences contained therein, the 
 subject of a special article of faith, I hold an 
 unnecessary and useless abstraction, which in too 
 many instances has the effect of substituting a 
 barren acquiescence in the letter for the lively faith 
 that cometh ~by hearing ; even as the hearing is 
 
90 LETTER V. 
 
 productive of this faith, because it is the word of 
 G-od that is heard and preached. {Bom. x. 8, 17.) 
 And here I mean the written word preserved in the 
 armoury of the Church to be the sword of faith out 
 of the mouth of the preacher, as Christ's ambassa- 
 dor and representative (JRev. i. 16), and out of the 
 heart of the believer, from generation to generation. 
 Who shall dare dissolve or loosen this holy bond, 
 this divine reciprocality, of Faith and Scripture ? 
 Who shall dare enjoin aught else as an object of 
 saving faith, beside the truths that appertain to 
 salvation ? The imposers take on themselves a 
 heavy responsibility, however defensible the opinion 
 itself, as an opinion, may be. For by imposing it, 
 they counteract their own purposes. They ante- 
 date questions, and thus in all cases aggravate the 
 difficulty of answering them satisfactorily. And 
 not seldom they create difficulties that might never 
 have occurred. But, worst of all, they convert 
 things trifling or indifferent into mischievous pre- 
 texts for the wanton, fearful difficulties for the 
 weak, and formidable objections for the inquiring. 
 For what man fearing God dares think any the 
 least point indifferent, which he is required to 
 receive as Grod's own immediate word miraculously 
 infused, miraculously recorded, and by a succession 
 of miracles preserved unblended and without 
 change ? — Through all the pages of a large and 
 
LETTER V. 91 
 
 multifold volume, at each successive period, at 
 every sentence, must the question recur : — " Dare 
 I believe — do I in my heart believe — these words 
 to have been dictated by an infallible reason, and 
 the immediate utterance of Almighty God ? " — 
 No ! It is due to Christian charity that a question 
 so awful should not be put unnecessarily, and 
 should not be put out of time. The necessity I 
 deny. And out of time the question must be put, 
 if after enumerating the several articles of the 
 Catholic Faith I am bound to add : — " and further 
 you are to believe with equal faith, as having the 
 same immediate and miraculous derivation from 
 God, whatever else you shall hereafter read in any 
 of the sixty-six books collected in the Old and New 
 Testaments." 
 
 I would never say this. Tet let me not be 
 misjudged as if I treated the Scriptures as a 
 matter of indifference. I would not say this : but 
 where I saw a desire to believe, and a beginning 
 love of Christ, I would there say : — " There are 
 likewise sacred "Writings, which, taken in connec- 
 tion with the institution and perpetuity of a visible 
 Church, all believers revere as the most precious 
 boon of God, next to Christianity itself, and attri- 
 bute both their communication and preservation to 
 an especial Providence. In them you will find all 
 the revealed truths, which have been set forth and 
 
92 LETTER VI. 
 
 offered to you, clearly and circumstantially recorded; 
 
 and, in addition to these, examples of obedience 
 
 and disobedience both in states and individuals, 
 
 the lives and actions of men eminent under each 
 
 dispensation, their sentiments, maxims, hymns, and 
 
 prayers, — their affections, emotions, and conflicts ; 
 
 — in all which you will recognise the influence of 
 
 the Holy Spirit, with a conviction increasing with 
 
 the growth of your own faith and spiritual 
 
 experience." 
 
 Farewell. 
 
 LETTER YI. 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 In my last two Letters I have given the 
 state of the argument, as it would stand between a 
 Christian thinking as I do, and a serious well- 
 disposed Deist. I will now endeavour to state the 
 argument, as between the former and the advocates 
 for the popular belief, — such of them, I mean, as 
 are competent to deliver a dispassionate judgment 
 in the cause. And again, more particularly, I 
 mean the learned and reflecting part of them, who 
 are influenced to the retention of the prevailing 
 dogma by the supposed consequences of a different 
 view, and, especially, by their dread of conceding to 
 
LETTER VI. 93 
 
 all alike, simple and learned, the privilege of picking 
 and choosing the Scriptures that are to be received 
 as binding on their consciences. Between these 
 persons and myself the controversy* may be reduced 
 to a single question : — 
 
 Is it safer for the Individual, and more conducive 
 to the interests of the Church of Christ, in its 
 
 * It is remarkable that both parties might appeal to 
 the same text of St. Paul, — iracra ypa(pi] deSiryeva-Tos /ecu 
 w(pe\ifios Trpbs 5i5a(TKaAiav } k. t. A. (2 Tim. iii. 16,) which 
 favours the one or the other opinion accordingly as the 
 words are construed ; and which, again, is the more probable 
 construction, depends in great measure on the preference 
 given to one or other of two different readings, the one 
 having and the other omitting the conjunction copulative koX. 
 
 [The English version is : — All Scripture is given by inspira- 
 tion of God, and is profitable, &c. And in this rendering of 
 the original the English is countenanced by the established 
 Version of the Dutch Reformed Church : — Alle de Schrift is 
 van Godt ivgegeven, ende is nuttigh, &c. And by Diodati : — 
 Tutta la Scrittura e divinamente inspirata, ed util, &c. And 
 by Martin : — Toute VEcriture est divinement inspiree, et pro- 
 fitable, &c. And by Beza : — Tota Scriptura divinitus est 
 inspirata, et utilis, &c. 
 
 The other rendering is supported by the Vulgate s — 
 Omnis Scriptura, divinitus inspirata, utilis est ad, <kc. By 
 Luther : — Denn alle Schrift von Gott eingegeben, ist nutze zur, 
 dec. And by Calmet : — Toute V Ecriture, qui est inspiree de 
 Dieu, est utile, &c. And by the common Spanish transla- 
 tion : — Toda Escritura, divinamente inspirada, es util para 
 ensenar, &c. This is also the rendering of the Syriac (Pesch.) 
 and two Arabic Versions, and is followed by Clement of 
 Alexandria, Origen, and most of the Fathers. See the note 
 
94 LETTER VI. 
 
 twofold character of pastoral and militant, to 
 conclude thus : — The Bible is the "Word of God, 
 and therefore true, holy, and in all parts unques- 
 tionable; — or thus, — The Bible, considered in 
 reference to its declared ends and purposes, is true 
 and holy, and for all who seek truth with humble 
 spirits an unquestionable guide, and therefore it is 
 the Word of God? 
 
 In every generation, and wherever the light of 
 Eevelation has shone, men of all ranks, conditions, 
 and states of mind have found in this Volume a 
 correspondent for every movement toward the 
 Better felt in their own hearts. The needy soul 
 has found supply, the feeble a help, the sorrowful 
 a comfort ; yea, be the recipiency the least that can 
 consist with moral life, there is an answering grace 
 ready to enter. The Bible has been found a 
 spiritual "World, — spiritual, and yet at the same 
 time outward and common to all. You in one 
 place, I in another, all men somewhere or at some 
 time, meet with an assurance that the hopes and 
 fears, the thoughts and yearnings that proceed 
 from, or tend to, a right spirit in us, are not dreams 
 or fleeting singularities, no voices heard in sleep, 
 
 to Griesbach. Tertullian represents the sense thus : — Legi- 
 mus, Omnem Scripturam, cedificationi habilem, divinitus in- 
 spirari. De Habit. Mul. c. iii. Origen has it several times, 
 &e6iruev(rros ovaa, axpsXifiSs iari, and once as in the received 
 text.— Ed.] 
 
LETTER VI. 95 
 
 or spectres which the eye suffers but not perceives. 
 As if on some dark night a pilgrim, suddenly- 
 beholding a bright star moving before him, should 
 stop in fear and perplexity. But lo ! traveller 
 after traveller passes by him, and each being ques- 
 tioned whither he is going, makes answer, " I am 
 following yon guiding Star ! ' ' The pilgrim quickens 
 his own steps, and presses onward in confidence. 
 More confident still will he be, if by the way side 
 he should find, here and there, ancient monuments, 
 each with its votive lamp, and on each the name of 
 some former pilgrim, and a record that there he 
 had first seen or begun to follow the benignant 
 Star! 
 
 No otherwise is it with the varied contents of 
 the Sacred Volume. The hungry have found food, 
 the thirsty a living spring, the feeble a staff, and the 
 victorious warfarer songs of welcome and strains of 
 music ; and as long as each man asks on account of 
 his wants, and asks what he wants, no man will 
 discover aught amiss or deficient in the vast and 
 many-chambered storehouse. But if instead of 
 this, an idler or a scoffer should wander through the 
 rooms, peering and peeping, and either detects, or 
 fancies he has detected here, a rusted sword or 
 pointless shaft, there a tool of rude construction, 
 and superseded by later improvements (and pre- 
 served, perhaps, to make us more grateful for 
 
96 LETTER VI. 
 
 them) ; — which of two things will a sober-minded 
 man, — who from his childhood upward had been 
 fed, clothed, armed, and furnished with the means 
 of instruction from this very magazine, — think the 
 fitter plan? — Will he insist that the rust is not 
 rust, or that it is a rust sui generis, intentionally 
 formed on the steel for some mysterious virtue in 
 it, and that the staff and astrolabe of a shepherd- 
 astronomer are identical with, or equivalent to, the 
 quadrant and telescope of Newton or Herschel ? — 
 Or will he not rather give the curious inquisitor 
 joy of his mighty discoveries, and the credit of 
 them for his reward ? — 
 
 Or lastly, put the matter thus. For more than 
 a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has 
 gone hand in hand with civilisation, science, law, 
 — in short, with the moral and intellectual cultiva- 
 tion of the species, always supporting, and often 
 leading the way. Its very presence, as a believed 
 Book, has rendered the nations emphatically a 
 chosen race, and this too in exact proportion as it 
 is more or less generally known and studied. Of 
 those nations, which in the highest degree enjoy its 
 influences, it is not too much to affirm, that the 
 differences public and private, physical, moral and 
 intellectual, are only less than what might be 
 expected from a diversity in species. Good and 
 holy men, and the best and wisest of mankind, the 
 
LETTER VI. 97 
 
 kingly spirits of history, enthroned in the hearts of 
 mighty nations, have borne witness to its influences, 
 have declared it to be beyond compare the most 
 perfect instrument, the only adequate organ, of 
 Humanity ; — the organ and instrument of all the 
 gifts, powers, and tendencies, by which the indi- 
 vidual is privileged to rise above himself — to leave 
 behind, and lose his dividual phantom self, in order 
 to find his true Self in that Distinctness where no 
 division can be, — in the Eternal I Am, the Ever- 
 living "Woed, of whom all the elect from the 
 arch-angel before the throne to the poor wrestler 
 with the Spirit until the breaking of day are but the 
 fainter and still fainter echoes. And are all these 
 testimonies and lights of experience to lose their 
 value and efficiency, because I feel no warrant of 
 history, or Holy Writ, or of my own heart for 
 denying, that in the framework and outward case 
 of this instrument a few parts may be discovered of 
 less costly materials and of meaner workmanship ? 
 Is it not a fact that the Eooks of the New 
 Testament were tried by their consonance with 
 the rule, and according to the analogy, of Eaith ? 
 Does not the universally admitted canon — that 
 each part of Scripture must be interpreted by the 
 spirit of the whole — lead to the same practical 
 conclusion as that for which I am now contending ; 
 — namely, that it is the spirit of the Bible, and not 
 
98 LETTER VI. 
 
 the detached words and sentences, that is infalli- 
 ble and absolute ? — Practical, I say, and spiritual 
 too ; — and what knowledge not practical or 
 spiritual are we entitled to seek in our Bibles ? 
 Is the grace of Grod so confined, — are the evidences 
 of the present and actuating Spirit so dim and 
 doubtful, — that to be assured of the same we 
 must first take for granted that all the life 
 and co-agency of our humanity is miraculously 
 suspended ? 
 
 "Whatever is spiritual, is eo nomine supernatural ; 
 but must it be always and of necessity miraculous ? 
 Miracles could open the eyes of the body ; and he 
 that was born blind beheld his Redeemer. But 
 miracles, even those of the Eedeemer himself, 
 could not open the eyes of the self-blinded, of the 
 Sadducean sensualist or the self-righteous Pharisee ; 
 — while to have said, J saw thee under the fig tree, 
 sufficed to make a JSTathanael believe. 
 
 To assert and to demand miracles without 
 necessity was the vice of the unbelieving Jews 
 of old ; and from the Eabbis and Talmudists the 
 infection has spread. And would I could say that 
 the symptoms of the disease are confined to the 
 Churches of the Apostasy ! But all the miracles, 
 which the legends of Monk or Rabbi contain, can 
 scarcely be put in competition,, on the score of 
 complication, inexplicableness, the absence of all 
 
LETTER VI. 99 
 
 intelligible use or purpose, and of circuitous self- 
 frustration, with those that must be assumed by the 
 maintainers of this doctrine, in order to give effect 
 to the series of miracles, by which all the nominal 
 composers of the Hebrew nation before the time of 
 Ezra, of whom there are any remains, were suc- 
 cessively transformed into automaton compositors, 
 — so that the original text should be in sentiment, 
 image, word, syntax, and composition an exact 
 impression of the divine copy ! In common con- 
 sistency the theologians, who impose this belief on 
 their fellow Christians, ought to insist equally on 
 the superhuman origin and authority of the Masora, 
 and to use more respectful terms, than has been 
 their wont of late, in speaking of the false Aristeas's 
 legend concerning the Septuagint. And why the 
 miracle should stop at the Greek Version, and not 
 include the Vulgate, I can discover no ground in 
 reason. Or if it be an objection to the latter, that 
 this belief is actually enjoined by the Papal Church, 
 yet the number of Christians who read the Lutheran, 
 the Genevan, or our own authorised, Bible, and are 
 ignorant of the dead languages, greatly exceeds the 
 number of those who have access to the Septuagint. 
 "Why refuse the writ of consecration to these, or to 
 the one at least appointed by the assertors' own 
 Church ? I find much more consistency in the 
 opposition made under pretext of this doctrine to 
 
 .. 
 
100 LETTER VI. 
 
 the proposals and publications of Kennicot, Mill, 
 Bentley, and Archbishop JNewcome. 
 
 But I am weary of discussing a tenet, which the 
 generality of divines and the leaders of the 
 Eeligious Public have ceased to defend, and yet 
 continue to assert or imply. The tendency mani- 
 fested in this conduct, the spirit of this and the 
 preceding century, on which, not indeed the tenet 
 itself, but the obstinate adherence to it against the 
 clearest light of reason and experience, is grounded, 
 —this it is which, according to my conviction, 
 gives the venom to the error, and justifies the 
 attempt to substitute a juster view. As long as it 
 was the common and effective belief of all the 
 Eeformed Churches, (and by none was it more 
 sedulously or more emphatically enjoined than by 
 the great [Reformers of our Church,) that by the 
 good Spirit were the spirits tried, and that the 
 light, which beams forth from the written Word, 
 was its own evidence for the children of light ; — as 
 long as Christians considered their Bible as a 
 plenteous entertainment, where every guest, duly 
 called and attired, found the food needful and 
 fitting for him, and where each — instead of troubling 
 himself about the covers not within his reach — 
 beholding all around him glad and satisfied, praised 
 the banquet and thankfully glorified the Master 
 of the feast, — so long did the Tenet — that the 
 
LETTER VI. 101 
 
 Scriptures were written under the special impulse of 
 the Holy Grbost remain safe and profitable. Nay, 
 in the sense, and with the feelings, in which it was 
 asserted, it was a truth — a truth to which every 
 spiritual believer now and in all times will bear 
 witness by virtue of his own experience. And if 
 in the overflow of love and gratitude they con- 
 founded the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, 
 working alike in weakness and in strength, in the 
 morning mists and in the clearness of the full day ; 
 — if they confounded this communion and co- 
 agency of divine grace, attributable to the Scripture 
 generally, with those express, and expressly 
 recorded, communications and messages of the 
 Most High, which form so large and prominent a 
 portion of the same Scriptures ; — if, in short, they 
 did not always duly distinguish the inspiration, the 
 imbreathment, of the predisposing and assisting 
 Spieit from the revelation of the informing 
 "Woed, — it was at worst a harmless hyperbole. 
 It was holden by all, that if the power of the 
 Spirit from without furnished the text, the grace 
 of the same Spirit from within must supply the 
 comment. 
 
 In the sacred Volume they saw and reverenced 
 the bounden wheat-sheaf that stood upright and had 
 obeisance from, all the other sheaves — (the writings, 
 I mean, of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church) 
 
102 LETTER VI. 
 
 — sheaves depreciated indeed, more or less, with 
 
 tares, 
 
 And furrow-weeds, 
 Darnel and many an idle flower that grew 
 Mid the sustaining corn ; 
 
 yet sheaves of the same harvest, the sheaves of 
 brethren ! JNor did it occur to them, that, in 
 yielding the more full and absolute honour to the 
 sheaf of the highly favoured of their father, they 
 should be supposed to attribute the same worth 
 and quality to the straw-bands which held it 
 together. The bread of life was there. And this 
 in an especial sense was tread from heaven ; for no 
 where had the same been found wild ; no soil or 
 climate dared claim it for its natural growth. In 
 simplicity of heart they received the Bible as the 
 precious gift of God, providential alike in origin, 
 preservation, and distribution, without asking the 
 nice question, whether all and every part were 
 likewise miraculous. The distinction between the 
 providential and the miraculous, between the divine 
 "Will working with the agency of natural causes, 
 and the same "Will supplying their place by a 
 special fiat — this distinction has, I doubt not, many 
 uses in speculative divinity. But its weightiest 
 practical application is shown, when it is employed 
 to free the souls of the unwary and weak in faith 
 from the nets and snares, the insidious queries and 
 
LETTER VI. 103 
 
 captious objections, of the Infidel by calming the 
 flutter of their spirits. They must be quieted, 
 before we can commence the means necessary for 
 their disentanglement. And in no way can this be 
 better effected than when the frightened captives are 
 made to see in how many points the disentangling 
 itself is a work of expedience rather than of neces- 
 sity ; — so easily and at so little loss might the web 
 be cut or brushed away ! 
 
 First, let their attention be fixed on the history 
 of Christianity as learnt from universal tradition, 
 and the writers of each successive generation. Draw 
 their minds to the fact of the progressive and still 
 continuing fulfilment of the assurance of a few 
 fishermen, that both their own religion, though of 
 divine origin, and the religion of their conquerors, 
 which included or recognised all other religions of 
 the known world, should be superseded by the faith 
 in a man recently and ignominiously executed. 
 Then induce them to meditate on the universals of 
 Christian Faith, — on Christianity, taken as the 
 sum of belief common to G-reek and Latin, to 
 Romanist and Protestant. Show them that this 
 and only this is the ordo traditionis, quam tra- 
 diderunt Apostoli iis quibus committebant ecclesias, 
 and which we should have been bound to follow, 
 says Irenaeus, si neque Apostoli quidem Scripturas 
 reliquissent. This is that regulajidei, that sacra- 
 
104 LETTER VI. 
 
 mentum symboli memorice mandatum, of which St. 
 Augustine says ; — noveritis hoc esse Fidei Catholicce 
 fundamentum super quod edificium surrexit Ecclesice. 
 This is the norma Catholici et JEcclesiastici sensus, 
 determined and explicated, but not augmented, by 
 the Mcene Fathers, as Waterland has irrefragably 
 shown ; — a norm or model of Eaith grounded on the 
 solemn affirmations of the Bishops collected from 
 all parts of the Eoman empire, that this was the 
 essential and unalterable Gospel received by them 
 from their predecessors in all the churches as the 
 7rapa§ocris eKKkrjaiao-Tiicr), cui, says Irenseus, assentiunt 
 multcd gentes eorum qui in Christum credunt sine 
 charta et atramento, scriptam hdbentes per Spiritum 
 in cordibus suis salutem, et veterum traditionem 
 diligenter custodientes. Let the attention of such 
 as have been shaken by the assaults of Infidelity be 
 thus directed, and then tell me wherein a spiritual 
 physician would be blameworthy, if he carried on 
 the cure by addressing his patient in this manner : — 
 " All men of learning, even learned unbelievers, 
 admit that the greater part of the objections, urged in 
 the popular works of Infidelity, to this or that verse 
 or chapter of the Bible, prove only the ignorance or 
 dishonesty of the objectors. But let it be supposed 
 for a moment that a few remain hitherto unan- 
 swered, — nay, that to your judgment and feelings 
 they appear unanswerable. What follows ? That 
 
LETTEE VI. 105 
 
 the Apostles' and Mcene Creed is not credible, the 
 Ten Commandments not to be obeyed, the clauses 
 of the Lord's Prayer not to be desired, or the 
 Sermon on the Mount not to be practised ? — See 
 how the logic would look. David cruelly tortured 
 the inhabitants of Eabbah (2 Sam. xii. 31 ; 1 Chron. 
 xx. 3), and in several of the Psalms he invokes the 
 bitterest curses on his enemies ; therefore it is not 
 to be believed that the love of God toward us was 
 manifested in sending his only-begotten Son into the 
 world, that we might live through Sim (1 Johniv. 9). 
 Or : Abijah is said to have collected an army of 
 400,000 men, and Jeroboam to have met him with 
 an army of 800,000, each army consisting of chosen 
 men (2 Chron. xiii. 3), and making together a host 
 of 1,200,000, and Abijah to have slain 500,000 
 out of the 800,000 : therefore, the words which 
 admonish us that if God so loved us, we ought also to 
 love one another (1 John iv. 11), even our enemies, 
 yea, to bless them that curse us, and to do good to 
 them that hate us (Matt. v. 44), cannot proceed 
 from the Holy Spirit. Or : The first six chapters 
 of the Book of Daniel contain several words and 
 phrases irreconcilable with the commonly received 
 dates, and those chapters and the Book of Esther 
 have a traditional and legendary character unlike 
 that of the other historical books of the Old 
 Testament ; therefore, those other books, by contrast 
 
106 LETTER VI. 
 
 with which the former appear suspicious, and the 
 historical document, 1 Cor. xv. 1 — 8, are not to be 
 credited ! " 
 
 We assuredly believe that the Bible contains all 
 truths necessary to salvation, and that therein is 
 preserved the undoubted Word of G-od. We assert 
 likewise that, besides these express oracles and 
 immediate revelations, there are Scriptures which 
 to the soul and conscience of every Christian man 
 bear irresistible evidence of the Divine Spirit assist- 
 ing and actuating the authors ; and that both these 
 and the former are such as to render it morally 
 impossible that any passage of the small incon- 
 siderable portion, not included in one or other of 
 these, can supply either ground or occasion of any 
 error in faith, practice, or affection, except to those 
 who wickedly and wilfully seek a pretext for their 
 unbelief. And if in that small portion of the Bible 
 which stands in no necessary connection with the 
 known and especial ends and purposes of the 
 Scriptures, there should be a few apparent errors 
 resulting from the state of knowledge then existing 
 — errors which the best and holiest men might 
 entertain uninjured, and which without a miracle 
 those men must have entertained ; if I find no such 
 miraculous prevention asserted, and see no reason 
 for supposing it — may I not, to ease the scruples of 
 a perplexed inquirer, venture to say to him : " Be it 
 
LETTER VI. 107 
 
 so. What then ? The absolute infallibility even 
 of the inspired writers in matters altogether inci- 
 dental and foreign to the objects and purposes of 
 their inspiration is no part of my Creed ; and even 
 if a professed divine should follow the doctrine of 
 the Jewish Church so far as not to attribute to the 
 Hagiographa, in every word and sentence, the same 
 height and fulness of inspiration as to the Law and 
 the Prophets, I feel no warrant to brand him as a 
 heretic for an opinion, the admission of which dis- 
 arms the Infidel without endangering a single 
 article of the Catholic Faith. — If to an unlearned 
 but earnest and thoughtful neighbour, I give the 
 advice ; — " Use the Old Testament to express the 
 affections excited, and to confirm the faith and 
 morals taught you, in the New, and leave all the 
 rest to the students and professors of theology and 
 Church history ! Tou profess only to be a Christian:" 
 — am I misleading my brother in Christ ? 
 
 This I believe by my own dear experience, — that 
 the more tranquilly an inquirer takes up the Bible 
 as he would any other body of ancient writings, the 
 livelier and steadier will be his impressions of its 
 superiority to all other books, till at length all 
 other books and all other knowledge will be valuable 
 in his eyes in proportion as they help him to a 
 better understanding of his Bible. Difficulty after 
 difficulty has been overcome from the time that I 
 
108 LETTER VI. 
 
 began to study the Scriptures with free and un- 
 boding spirit, under the conviction that my faith in 
 the Incarnate Word and his Grospel was secure, 
 whatever the result might be ; — the difficulties that 
 still remain being so few and insignificant in my 
 own estimation, that I have less personal interest 
 in the question than many of those who will most 
 dogmatically condemn me for presuming to make a 
 question of it. 
 
 So much for scholars — for men of like education 
 and pursuits as myself. With respect to Christians 
 generally, I object to the consequence drawn from 
 the Doctrine rather than to the Doctrine itself; — a 
 consequence not only deducible from the premises, 
 but actually and imperiously deduced ; according to 
 which every man that can but read is to sit down 
 to the consecutive and connected perusal of the 
 Bible under the expectation and assurance that the 
 whole is within his comprehension, and that, 
 unaided by note or comment, catechism or litur- 
 gical preparation, he is to find out for himself what 
 he is bound to believe and practise, and that what- 
 ever he conscientiously understands by what he 
 reads, is to be his religion. For he has found it 
 in his Bible, and the Bible is the Religion 01 
 Protestants ! 
 
 Would I then withhold the Bible from the Cot- 
 tager and the Artisan ? — Heaven forefend ! The 
 
LETTER VI. 109 
 
 fairest flower that ever clomb up a cottage window 
 is not so fair a sight to my eyes, as the Bible 
 gleaming through the lower panes. Let it but be 
 read as by such men it used to be read ; when they 
 came to it as to a ground covered with manna, even 
 the bread which the Lord had given for his people 
 to eat ; where he that gathered much had nothing 
 over, and he that gathered little had no lack. They 
 gathered every man according to his eating. They 
 came to it as to a treasure-house of Scriptures; 
 each visitant taking what was precious and leaving 
 as precious for others ; — Tea, more, says our worthy 
 old Church-historian, Fuller, where " the same man 
 at several times may in his apprehension prefer 
 several Scriptures as best, formerly most affected 
 with one place, for the present more delighted with 
 another, and afterwards, conceiving comfort therein 
 not so clear, choose other places as more pregnant 
 and pertinent to his purpose. Thus God orders it, 
 that divers men, (and perhaps the same man at 
 divers times) make use of all his gifts, gleaning and 
 gathering comfort, as it is scattered through the 
 whole field of the Scripture." 
 
 Farewell. 
 
110 LETTER VII. 
 
 LETTEE VII. 
 
 You are now, rny dear Eriend, in possession ot 
 my whole mind on this point, — one thing only 
 excepted which has weighed with me more than all 
 the rest, and which I have therefore reserved for 
 my concluding Letter. This is the impelling prin- 
 ciple, or way of thinking, which I have in most 
 instances noticed in the assertors of what I have 
 ventured to call Bibliolatry, and which I believe to 
 be the main ground of its prevalence at this time, 
 and among men whose religious views are anything 
 rather than enthusiastic. And I here take occasion 
 to declare, that my conviction of the danger and 
 injury of this principle was and is my chief motive 
 for bringing the Doctrine itself into question ; the 
 main error of which consists in the confounding of 
 two distinct conceptions, revelation by the Eternal 
 Word, and actuation of the Holy Spirit. The 
 former indeed is not always or necessarily united 
 with the latter — the prophecy of Balaam is an 
 instance of the contrary, — but yet being ordinarily, 
 
LETTER VII. 1U 
 
 and only not always, so united, the term, Inspiration, 
 has acquired a double sense. 
 
 First, the term is used in the sense of Information 
 miraculously communicated by voice or vision ; and 
 secondly, where without any sensible addition or 
 infusion, the writer or speaker uses and applies his 
 existing gifts of power and knowledge under the 
 predisposing, aiding, and directing actuation of 
 (rod's Holy Spirit. Now — between the first sense, 
 that is, inspired revelation, and the highest degree 
 of that grace and communion with the Spirit, which 
 the Church under all circumstances, and every 
 regenerate member of the Church of Christ, is per- 
 mitted to hope, and instructed to pray, for — there 
 is a positive difference of kind, — a chasm, the pre- 
 tended overleaping of which constitutes imposture, 
 or betrays insanity. Of the first kind are the Law 
 and the Prophets, no jot or tittle of which can pass 
 unfulfilled, and the substance and last interpreta- 
 tion of which passes not away ; for they wrote of 
 Christ, and shadowed out the everlasting Grospel. 
 But with regard to the second, neither the holy 
 writers — the so called Kagiograplii — themselves, 
 nor any fair interpretations of Scripture, assert any 
 such absolute diversity, or enjoin the belief of any 
 greater difference of degree, than the experience of 
 the Christian World, grounded on, and growing 
 with, the comparison of these Scriptures with other 
 
112 LETTER VII. 
 
 works holden in honour by the Churches, has estab- 
 lished. And this difference I admit ; and doubt 
 not that it has in every generation been rendered 
 evident to as many as read these Scriptures under 
 the gracious influence of the spirit in which they 
 were written. 
 
 But alas ! this is not sufficient ; this cannot but 
 be vague and unsufficing to those, with whom the 
 Christian religion is wholly objective, to the exclu- 
 sion of all its correspondent subjective. It must 
 appear vague, I say, to those whose Christianity, as 
 matter of belief, is wholly external, and, like the 
 objects of sense, common to all alike ; — altogether 
 historical, an opus operatum, — its existing and pre- 
 sent operancy in no respect differing from any other 
 fact of history, and not at all modified by the super- 
 natural principle in which it had its origin in time. 
 Divines of this persuasion are actually, though 
 without their own knowledge, in a state not dissi- 
 milar to that, into which the Latin Church sank 
 deeper and deeper from the sixth to the fourteenth 
 century ; during which time religion was likewise 
 merely objective and superstitious, — a letter proudly 
 emblazoned and illuminated, but yet a dead letter 
 that was to be read by its own outward glories 
 without the light of the Spirit in the mind of the 
 believer. The consequence was too glaring not to 
 be anticipated, and, if possible, prevented. Without 
 
LETTER VII. 113 
 
 that spirit in each true believer, whereby we know 
 the spirit of truth and the spirit of error in all 
 things appertaining to salvation, the consequence 
 must be — So many men, so many minds ! — And 
 what was the antidote which the Priests and Eabbis 
 of this purely objective Faith opposed to this peril ? 
 — Why, an objective, outward Infallibility ; con- 
 cerning which, however, the differences were scarcely 
 less or fewer than those which it was to heal ; — an 
 Infallibility, which, taken literally and unqualified, 
 became the source of perplexity to the well-disposed, 
 of unbelief to the wavering, and of scoff and triumph 
 to the common enemy ; — and which was, therefore, 
 to be qualified and limited, and then it meant so 
 much and so little, that to men of plain under- 
 standings and single hearts it meant nothing at all. 
 It resided here. No ! there. No ! but in a third 
 subject. Nay ! neither here, nor there, nor in the 
 third, but in all three conjointly ! 
 
 But even this failed to satisfy ; and what was the 
 final resource, — the doctrine of those who would 
 not be called a Protestant Church, but in which doc- 
 trine the Fathers of Protestantism in England 
 would have found little other fault, than that it 
 might be affirmed as truly of the decisions of any 
 other Bishop as of the Bishop of Borne ? The final 
 resource was to restore what ought never to have 
 been removed— the correspondent subjective, that 
 
114 LETTER VII. 
 
 is, the assent and confirmation of the Spirit promised 
 to all true believers, as proved and manifested in 
 the reception of such decision by the Church Uni- 
 versal in all its rightful members. 
 
 I comprise and conclude the sum of my conviction 
 in this one sentence. Revealed Religion (and I 
 know of no religion not revealed) is in its highest 
 contemplation the unity, that is, the identity or co- 
 inherence, of Subjective and Objective. It is in 
 itself, and irrelatively, at once inward Life and 
 Truth, and outward Pact and Luminary. But as 
 all Power manifests itself in the harmony of corre- 
 spondent Opposites, each supposing and supporting 
 the other, — so has Eeligion its objective, or historic 
 and ecclesiastical pole, and its subjective, or spi- 
 ritual and individual pole. In the miracles, and 
 miraculous parts of religion — both in the first com- 
 munication of divine truths, and in the promulgation 
 of the truths thus communicated — we have the 
 union of the two, that is, the subjective and 
 supernatural displayed objectively — outwardly and 
 phenomenally — as subjective and supernatural. 
 
 Lastly, in the Scriptures, as far as they are not 
 included in the above as miracles, and in the mind 
 of the believing and regenerate Reader and Me- 
 ditater, there is proved to us the reciprocity, or 
 reciprocation, of the Spirit as subjective and objec- 
 tive, which in conformity with the Scheme proposed 
 
LETTER VII. 115 
 
 by me, in aid of distinct conception and easy 
 recollection, I have named the Indifference.* What 
 I mean by this, a familiar acquaintance with the 
 more popular parts of Luther's "Works, especially 
 his Commentaries, and the delightful volume of his 
 Table Talk, would interpret for me better than I 
 can do for myself. But I do my best, when I say 
 that no Christian probationer, who is earnestly 
 working out his salvation, and experiences the 
 conflict of the spirit with the evil and the infirmity 
 within him and around him, can find his own state 
 brought before him and, as it were, antedated, in 
 writings reverend even for their antiquity and 
 enduring permanence, and far more, and more abun- 
 dantly, consecrated by the reverence, love, and 
 grateful testimonies of good men through the long 
 succession of ages, in every generation, and under 
 all states of minds and circumstances of fortune, — 
 that no man, I say, can recognise his own inward 
 experiences in such writings, and not find an 
 
 * "The Papacy elevated the Church to the virtual exclusion 
 or suppression of the Scriptures; the modern Church of 
 England, since Chillingworth, has so raised up the Scriptures 
 as to annul the Church : both alike have quenched the Hoi 
 Spirit, as the mesothesis or indifference of the two, and sub- 
 stituted an alien compound for the genuine Preacher, which 
 should be the synthesis of the Scriptures and the Church, and 
 the sensible voice of the Holy Spirit." — Lit. Mem. v. iii. p. 
 9Z.—M. 
 
 i 2 
 
116 LETTER VII. 
 
 objectiveness, a confirming and assuring outward- 
 ness, and all the main characters of reality, reflected 
 therefrom on the spirit, working in himself and in 
 his own thoughts, emotions, and aspirations — 
 warring against sin, and the motions of sin. The 
 unsubstantial, insulated Self passes away as a 
 stream ; but these are the shadows and reflections 
 of the Bock of Ages, and of the Tree of Life that 
 starts forth from its side. 
 
 On the other hand, as much of reality, as much 
 of objective truth, as the Scriptures communicate 
 to the subjective experiences of the Believer, so 
 much of present life, of living and effective import, 
 do these experiences give to the letter of these 
 Scriptures. In the one the Spirit itself beareth 
 witness with our spirit, that we have received the 
 spirit of adoption; in the other our spirit bears 
 witness to the power of the Word, that it is indeed 
 the Spirit that proceedeth from God. If in the 
 holy men thus actuated all imperfection of know- 
 ledge, all participation in the mistakes and limits of 
 their several ages had been excluded, how could 
 these Writings be or become the history and 
 example, the echo and more lustrous image of the 
 work and warfare of the sanctifying Principle in us ? 
 — If after all this, and in spite of all this, some cap- 
 tious litigator should lay hold of a text here or 
 there — St. Paul's cloak left at Troas ivith Carpus, of 
 
LETTER VII. 117 
 
 a verse from the Canticles, and ask : " Of what 
 spiritual use is this ? " — the answer is ready : — It 
 proves to us that nothing can be so trifling as not 
 to supply an evil heart with a pretext for unbelief. 
 
 Archbishop Leighton has observed that the 
 Church has its extensive and intensive states, and 
 that they seldom fall together. Certain it is, that 
 since kings have been her nursing fathers, and 
 queens her nursing mothers, our theologians seem 
 to act in the spirit of fear rather than in that of 
 faith ; and too often instead of inquiring after the 
 Truth in the confidence, that whatever is truth 
 must be fruitful of good to all who are in Sim that 
 is true, they seek with vain precautions to guard 
 against the possible inferences which perverse and 
 distempered minds may pretend, whose whole 
 Christianity, — do what we will — is and will remain 
 nothing but a Pretence. 
 
 Tou have now my entire mind on this momentous 
 Question, the grounds on which it rests, and the 
 motives which induce me to make it known ; and I 
 now conclude by repeating my request — Correct 
 me, or confirm me. 
 
 Farewell. 
 
NOTE 
 
 ON THE 
 
 "CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 
 BY SARA COLERIDGE. 
 
 " The main error of which " (ordinary doctrine of 
 plenary inspiration) "consists in the confounding of 
 two distinct conceptions, revelation by the Eternal 
 Word, and actuation of the Holy Spirit. Between the 
 first sense, that is, inspired revelation, and the highest 
 degree of that grace and communion with the Spirit, 
 which the Church under all circumstances, and every 
 regenerate member of the Church of Christ, is per- 
 mitted to hope, and instructed to pray, for — there is 
 a positive difference of kind, — a charm, the pretended 
 overleaping of which constitutes imposture, or betrays 
 insanity. Of the first hind are the Law and the Prophets, 
 no jot or tittle of which can pass unfulfilled, and the 
 substance and last interpretation of which passes not 
 away ; for they wrote of Christ, and shadowed out the 
 everlasting Gospel. But with regard to the second, 
 neither the holy writers themselves, nor any fair 
 interpretations of Scripture, assert any such absolute 
 diversity, or enjoin the belief of any greater difference 
 of degree than the experience of the Christian world, 
 
120 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 grounded on, and growing with, the comparison of 
 these Scriptures with other works holden in honour by 
 the Churches, has established." 
 
 " But, alas ! this is not sufficient : this cannot but be 
 vague and unsuffhcing to those whose Christianity, as 
 matter of belief, is wholly external, and, like the objects 
 of sense, common to all alike, altogether historical, an 
 opus operatum. 
 
 "Does not the universally admitted canon — that 
 each part of Scripture must be interpreted by the 
 spirit of the whole — lead to the same practical con- 
 clusion as that for which I am now contending ; — 
 namely, that it is the Spirit of the Bible, and not the 
 detached words and sentences, that is infallible and 
 absolute ? 
 
 "We assuredly believe that the Bible contains all 
 truths necessary to salvation, and that therein is pre- 
 served the undoubted Word of God." 
 
 ' ' Malice scorned, puts out 
 Itself, but argued, gives a kind of credit 
 To a false accusation." 
 
 A kind of credit may for a time accrue to falsehood 
 from the very contest which it has seemed worthy to 
 occasion ; but, on the other hand, the prosecution of it 
 — that is to say, its exposure by close and careful 
 argument, may serve to the positive advancement of 
 truth ; more especially when the calumny relates to 
 religious opinion, and has been prompted by the odium 
 theologicum; since in such a case, the debate turns less 
 upon personal matters, and more upon points by the 
 
OP AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 121 
 
 consideration of which general principles and abstract 
 rules of right and wrong are elucidated, than when 
 facts of life and conduct, rather than opinions, are in 
 question. All falsehood is mortal and perishable in its 
 nature ; yet mortal as it is, a sort of dying immortality 
 or perpetuity of revivescence belongs to some particular 
 delusions and forms of untruth. Lies so ancient that 
 they date almost from the beginning, and were pierced 
 with the arrows of Eeasoning when the world was yet 
 in its infancy, rise up from their graves, clad in new 
 mail, like the dragons' teeth of Theban story, and come 
 forth again to battle. Swarms of deceptions, which of 
 old had been encountered by such sweeping blasts of 
 contradiction, that they might be supposed as utterly 
 extinct as the frogs and locusts that opened the doors 
 of the House of Bondage, fly forth again to plague 
 the world, showing their decease to have been but a 
 stupefaction or winter sleep, like that of bats and 
 swallows. Still, although falsehood perishes even when 
 unassailed by those against whom it is directed ; and 
 comes to life again, after being put violently to death, 
 it is not advisable always to leave it to the course of 
 nature, or to refrain from pursuing it on account of its 
 powers of resuscitation : Let us all in our day endeavour 
 to combat untruth in every form in which it can appear, 
 and leave the final event to the Father of Lights, from 
 whom cometh every good and perfect gift of being and 
 of knowing. 
 
 To apply these remarks. I have never doubted for a 
 moment, that the accusation brought against this little 
 work, namely, that it denies the Inspiration of Holy 
 Scripture and undermines the faith in the Bible as the 
 Word of God, must put out itself 'in proportion as the book 
 is read with ordinary attention and intelligence ; that it 
 
122 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 is even now dead for all who have read the book, and 
 lives only for those who place implicit faith in the 
 party organs whence it has proceeded, considering it a 
 part of Christian zeal and prudence to keep on one 
 side of all questions : to note and repeat every con- 
 demnatory sentence of their oracle, while they carefully 
 refrain from communication with the condemned — the 
 work pronounced heretical — lest it should perplex 
 their minds by saying somewhat in its own behalf and 
 exhibiting some contrariety to the vague and violent 
 censure, which they have made up their minds to 
 regard as an utterance of true piety and wisdom. 
 The book is its own vindication ; but the book cannot 
 examine the strain of the accusatory discourse, detect 
 the pernicious principle which it involves, or expose 
 the unworthy means resorted to for the sake of accre- 
 diting it. There is the more inducement to this in 
 the present instance, that so strong an example of 
 superficial, deceptive, and at the same time for many 
 minds, in a low condition of thought and feeling, 
 persuasive argument as that to which I refer, — so 
 perfect a specimen of morbid mental anatomy as it 
 illustrates — is of rare occurrence ; and as men are 
 more vividly impressed by an exhibition of what has 
 presented itself within the precincts of the actual, than 
 by hypotheses and abstractions, however legitimate, 
 and by strongly marked characters than by such as are 
 faint and partial, I think that the mere display of the 
 case will be sufficiently useful to justify the time and 
 trouble it may cost to writer and reader. 
 
 The article in the " English Review " for December, 
 1848, entitled "Tendencies toward the Subversion of 
 Faith," has, indeed, been already subjected to a severe 
 and searching analysis by Archdeacon Hare and 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 123 
 
 Mr. Maurice, in order to the refutation of its many 
 injurious mis-statements relative to themselves. To 
 show how it has dealt with my Father, especially in 
 regard to the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, will 
 be but to complete that darkly faithful picture by 
 filling up the background, which they have but slightly 
 indicated, with its full measure of shadow. But let me 
 present a general view of its design. The following 
 method of crimination is adopted by the reviewer : a 
 considerable number of writers, English and German, 
 are brought into one most heterogeneous company, 
 and on the alleged ground, that they all agree on a 
 certain principle, or in certain sentiments concerning 
 religious inquiry, — although it is confessed, because to 
 conceal the fact would convict the writer of gross 
 injustice even with the pliant and passive readers on 
 whose sympathy he appears to calculate, — that on the 
 most momentous questions which can agitate the mind 
 of man they differ one among another toto ccelo, — by 
 the whole space of heaven — and if of heaven we may 
 well be allowed to " couple hell," — whatever infidel 
 tendency can be discovered or imagined in the teaching 
 of any one of the set is boldly attributed to all in 
 common — as if the whole body of their opinions were 
 one mass which must needs be leavened throughout 
 with whatever poison is contained in any one indi- 
 vidual's portion. It seems to be assumed by the 
 reviewer, that the most dangerous opinions which 
 belong to any of this arbitrarily formed band are the 
 necessary results of the principle they all hold in 
 common (that they all hold in common any such 
 principle as that which he imputes to them is by no 
 means to be allowed) — and on this plea the tendencies 
 of those opinions and their consequences are coolly 
 
124 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 attributed to them all. By a similar process of reason- 
 ing we might discover Mahometan tendencies in all the 
 great Fathers of the Church. St. Jerome, St. Austin, 
 and St. Thomas Aquinas agreed with the author of the 
 Koran, in condemning polytheism and idolatry — ergo, 
 the opinions of Jerome, Augustine, and Aquinas tend 
 the same way as those of Mahomet, namely, to the 
 subversion of the doctrine of the cross and the divinity 
 of Christ. Disbelief in a plurality of Gods may serve 
 quite as well for a common indicator of religious 
 tendencies as the principle which maintains the fitness 
 of free inquiry in matters of faith. It might quite as 
 rationally, and even more plausibly, be urged, that 
 the Unity of the Godhead is a most dangerous tenet 
 to insist upon, and must tend to the denial of the 
 Incarnation, as that a man must be in the way to 
 deny Revealed religion because he would have all 
 men search the Scriptures for himself, search heaven 
 and earth and his own heart and mind, the world 
 without and the world within, by means of the 
 faculties which God has given him, in order to the 
 formation of his religious faith, and denies that sub- 
 mission to authority is the only principle on which 
 he is to proceed in settling his religion. Socinus and 
 the first Reformers, held in common, that Scripture 
 binds the conscience only as interpreted by reason ; 
 that each individual must ultimately judge for himself, 
 not only who and where are the true teachers of 
 religion, but whether and how far their teaching is 
 true. And the same notion is implied in the argu- 
 ments of many of the ancient Fathers ; ergo, the 
 Reformers and the ancient Fathers sought to under- 
 mine the Catholic belief in the divinity of Christ ! A 
 Papist indeed will readily adopt this inference, but 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 125 
 
 can an English Keviewer afford to allow it ? His own 
 root principle, that it is unsafe not to rest the whole 
 edifice of the faith on outward evidence, if common 
 principles have the associative power ascribed to them 
 in his argument, would bind him in close connection 
 with the vilest and most degraded religions on the face 
 of the earth ; for the lower men are in the scale of 
 intellect and feeling the more they rest on the sensuous 
 and external, the more they look to see signs and 
 wonders, and to hear the voice of multitudes giving 
 testimony, in order to believe. Where can men look 
 for proof and witness except in the sphere they know 
 and are familiar with 1 They who cannot realise the 
 spiritual to their apprehension, nor behold the invisible, 
 cannot be expected to find evidences in the world of the 
 spiritual and invisible. 
 
 To revert to the Anglican Inquisitor and his mode of 
 discovering heresy and unbelief. Coleridge agreed with 
 Blanco White, or Blanco White assented to the opinion 
 of Coleridge, held by great divines before either of 
 them saw the light, that "the main end of religion 
 being the improvement of our nature and faculties, 
 every part of religion is to be judged by its relation to 
 this end ; " or that the great test of the truth of a 
 religion is its capability of evolving the highest faculties, 
 and satisfying the highest requirements of the human 
 mind ; that reason, considered as a speculative power, 
 not in its highest sense, as the fountain of ideas moral 
 and spiritual, is to be "allowed the office in theology of 
 determining on the negative truth of whatever we are 
 required to believe ! " therefore Coleridge's teaching 
 tends the same way as that of Blanco White, namely 
 to scepticism concerning the survival of personal con- 
 sciousness after the dissolution of the body and a 
 
126 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 future state of weal or woe for the human soul ! Now 
 it must be admitted that Blanco White was not guarded 
 from lapsing into a state of cheerless doubt or disbelief, 
 and letting go from his "slack hand" the precious 
 hopes of the Gospel, by the adoption of that maxim 
 concerning the true test of religion, which has just been 
 stated ; but till the Beviewer has pointed out any 
 religious principle, an intellectual assent to which will 
 keep a man in the right way for evermore, he has 
 certainly no right to assume that any which Blanco 
 White held in common with Coleridge tends to the 
 infidelity into which he fell towards the end of his life, 
 in my belief from latent partial insanity ; since bodily 
 unsoundness is not unfrequently manifested in the 
 form of mental disorder, — of pride, perverseness, cause- 
 less gloom, and impotence of religious faith and hope 
 and joy in the Spirit. I mention the maxim above 
 stated, although the Reviewer has not specified it, as 
 being the most important on the theory of faith upon 
 which they were of one mind. It is however specified 
 in the article, that Blanco White " about 1825 formed 
 a personal acquaintance with Coleridge, and on one 
 occasion, paid a visit at his house six hours in length ! " 
 (at a time, let the reader observe, when he was by pro- 
 fession an orthodox Anglican ;) nay more, that he and 
 Mr. Coleridge afterwards wrote to each other ! ! — and 
 these facts are adduced as proofs of a general affinity 
 in their opinions, a oneness of tendency between them ; 
 — although Coleridge continued, to the end of his life, 
 a zealous defender of the Trinity, which he held to be 
 "the foundation of all rational theology;" "the one 
 substantive truth, which is the form, manner, and 
 involvent of all truths ; " and thought there was " no 
 medium between the Catholic Faith of Trinal Unity 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 127 
 
 and Atheism disguised in the self-contradictory term, 
 Pantheism ; " while poor Blanco White was discovering 
 that he had never really believed in the Trinity at all, 
 and finally sinking from Socinianism into regular self- 
 avowed disbelief of the Christian Eevelation, or rather, 
 finding that Socinianism is, logically developed, dis- 
 belief in a spiritual Eevelation, even though it accepts 
 the Scriptures as records of historic truth ! Had the 
 Reviewer looked for aught in the Memoir of Blanco 
 White but weapons for his own illicit warfare, he must 
 have seen that his latter correspondence contains no 
 allusion to Coleridge or his views except one, and that 
 in the form of a sneer intimating a peevish and un- 
 founded suspicion — a suspicion evidently engendered by 
 the dispathy produced in his mind by my Father's increas- 
 ingly firm grasp of doctrines with respect to which his 
 own mind was in a state of collapse — which, in this con- 
 dition of feeble irritability, he had begun to regard 
 with anger and a forced contempt.* 
 
 * The article speaks thus at p. 423 : "To those who have 
 perused Blanco White's life, the sympathy between Coleridge 
 and him will not seem in the least surprising. They differed 
 in details doubtless, because B. White rejected almost all the 
 doctrines of Christianity in particular, " (such minor and sub- 
 ordinate points, for instance, as the Trinity, the Incarnation, 
 the spiritual effect of Sacraments, the Divinity of the Bible I) 
 ' ' But they were agreed in doubting or denying the Inspiration 
 of the Word of God 1 ' — (What the truth of this assertion is in 
 respect to Coleridge, let the reader judge) — "and their studies 
 were directed to the same sources. The German philosophers 
 and writers on religious subjects (we cannot bear to call them 
 theologians), such as Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Strauss, 
 Nitsch, Neander, Paulus, &c, were especial objects of admiration 
 
128 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 It would hardly be credited, I think, that because 
 my father was disposed to give German philosophy 
 and theology a fair hearing, to winnow the sheaves 
 of Teutonic thought before tying it in bundles to 
 be burnt, or because he adopted the mental philo- 
 sophy of Kant ( — and who has ever yet out-argued that 
 analysis of the pure reason, or the mind considered as 
 the intellectual faculty apart from what it gains by 
 experience — which he approved ? — ) because he even 
 allowed some part of his reasonings in relation to 
 theism, though only as hints and helps towards the 
 detection of paralogisms in theology, — for the trial of 
 untempered weapons which must bend or break in 
 actual conflict — therefore he should be accused of 
 sympathy with " such men as Strauss," whose book he 
 never saw, and of whose hypothesis for solving the 
 problem of Christianity, h'e was, by anticipation, a most 
 zealous, I think I may add a very successful opponent ! 
 Or that because he had at one time intercourse with 
 B. White, and strove to infuse into him truly philoso- 
 phical and Catholic views, he should be set forth as a 
 kindred spirit with that " most unhappy man of men," 
 unhappy in the constitution of his mind and in its 
 circumstances, who, however, spite of the blindness 
 that came upon him respecting the divinity of Christ 
 and a personal resurrection, preserved a faith in the 
 one Supreme Being — a sense of fealty and unconditional 
 submission to Him, as the Creator and Moral Governor 
 of the world, I doubt not vastly more sincere and 
 sustaining than that of numbers who think they do 
 God service by transforming his doctrine into Atheism, 
 
 to B. White, just as they were to Coleridge, and to his disciples, 
 Mr. Hare and Mr. Sterling." 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 129 
 
 and conforming his life and morals to their view of 
 his opinions.* There are many thoughtful men who 
 declare that they were diverted from such notions as 
 those of Strauss, from Deism more or less masked and 
 disguised, by the teaching of Coleridge, when the 
 divinity of the Reviewer's school of thought, " dry as 
 the desert sands," or of Church Methodists, " unstable 
 as water," might have driven them in that direction, 
 or any direction opposite to the plainly irrational and 
 utterly heartless. 
 
 The Reviewer himself would hardly fail to perceive 
 the iniquity of his mode of inferring and concluding, 
 if he found it applied to any but objects, the sight of 
 whom excites his party feelings, so as to cover him with 
 cloudy mists of passion. Let us suppose that some 
 distinguished writer, who joins hand and heart with 
 him against Wesleyanism on the one hand, and " Ger- 
 manism " on the other, were accused of treachery to the 
 
 * TO JOSEPH BLAKCO WHITE. 
 
 Could' st thou so calmly, tried one, yield thy breath 
 Void of the Christian's sure and certain hope ? 
 Didst thou to earth confine our being's scope, 
 Yet, fix'd on One Supreme with fervent faith, 
 As though intent t' escape eternal scath, 
 Shun the smooth worldly ways that hell-ward slope ? 
 thou light-searching spirit that didst grope 
 In such bleak shadows here, 'twixt life and death, 
 For thee have I borne witness, though in ruth, 
 Like thee by blame unmoved — dare hope and pray 
 That thou, released from that ill frame of clay, 
 Thine earth-born clog, renew' d in heavenly youth, 
 Mayst find that bliss untold, 'mid endless day, 
 Awaits each earnest soul that lived for Truth. — S. C. 
 
130 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 Church in whose bosom he had been nurtured and is 
 still nourished, simply because zealots of Ultra-Mon- 
 tanism in France mentioned him with high respect, or 
 Italian Ecclesiastics condescended to admit that he 
 wrote like a Catholic. "Were such an inference drawn, 
 even respecting one who walked somewhat nearer to 
 Eome than the English Reviewer himself considered 
 wise or safe, would he not indignantly reply, that the 
 books of this writer were before the world, and so long 
 as it is impossible, out of them, to convict him of teaching 
 in a spirit contrary to his engagements and position in 
 a Reformed Church, so long we ought to suppose his 
 conscience void of reproach, and his conduct in religion 
 conformed to those same rules of honesty and of honour 
 which every good man observes in his general walk % 
 Would he not think it shameful to breathe suspicion 
 against such a man on the ground of a partial sympathy, 
 or by reason of what other men think or pretend to 
 have discovered in his writings ? Which of my father's 
 assailants, who strive to fasten on him a character of 
 infidelity, and to set up a beacon of warning against his 
 books, ever dared to lay hold of him in the Temple of 
 his own Christian philosophy ? Which of them has 
 examined his system at large, or even fairly stated with 
 due regard to what came before and followed after, 
 any one of the particular passages, which have been 
 cited as evidence of tendencies, to subvert the faith ? Who 
 that has once fairly entered his structure of thought 
 and opinion, so grand in its ground plan, so exquisitely 
 finished in parts, would accuse him of any disposition 
 to undermine the Faith in a Spiritual Religion 1 He 
 examined what are commonly called, among orthodox 
 writers, the walls and foundations of the Faith in 
 Christ, thought portions of them unsound, and most of 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 131 
 
 them put to an important purpose to which, of them- 
 selves, they are unequal. His procedure is open and 
 manifest — he threw out no suspicions against any doc- 
 trine without an explicit statement of the grounds of 
 his doubts, — he never sought to convey an opinion into 
 the minds of readers by addresses to the sensuous fancy, 
 false analogies and visible images, the mockery of ideas ; 
 as showmen paint fancy monsters on the outside of 
 their booths to prepossess beholders with the exciting 
 character of what is within ; and it is a question, 
 whether any man. who really evoked the powers of 
 thought, and addressed the higher and purer faculties 
 of man's nature, ever led a studious and attentive 
 reader finally away from truth, which he might other- 
 wise have embraced sincerely and effectively. 
 
 He would, indeed, have denied, what the Reviewer 
 asserts, that a belief in the plenary inspiration of Holy 
 Writ, understood in the ordinary sense, is the only 
 " rational foundation of his own belief" in Christianity. 
 He would have maintained first, that such never has 
 been, and by the nature of the human mind and of the 
 truths in question, never can be, the ground of any 
 vital saving belief in Eedemption by Christ, the Incar- 
 nation of a Saviour truly God, the Aids of the Spirit, 
 and a personal Eesurrection of the entire man. That 
 if these spiritual verities were not apprehensible by the 
 human, though actuated and inspired, minds of the 
 first teachers of the Gospel, neither could they be fitted 
 to regenerate the minds of disciples, — to raise, to purify, 
 to justify through fa ith — the true beatific vision upon 
 earth. That if they were not " adapted to the needs 
 and capabilities " of our " human nature," consequently 
 proved divine by their divine fruits, the moral and 
 spiritual effects visible to the moral and spiritual 
 
 k 2 
 
132 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 eye throughout the domains of the Gospel, no 
 other species of proof would accredit them as the 
 religion of a race gradually increasing in power of 
 thought, the heirs of an estate and property of know- 
 ledge and intelligence accumulating from age to age. 
 That if they were not attested by the voice of Christen- 
 dom, echoed from generation to generation, no other 
 kind of testimony would avail to make men Christians 
 in faith and practice, though it might serve to make 
 dull and obstinate men bigots and even persecutors in 
 behalf of an hereditary creed. All this evidence is 
 entirely independent of belief in plenary inspiration of 
 Holy Writ, understood in the sense against which my 
 father contended ; all this is indispensable, and where 
 this is, a belief that all the Sacred Writers, in all they 
 wrote, were guarded absolutely from error, may well 
 be dispensed with. 
 
 Why did not the Reviewer state his inquisition prin- 
 ciple boldly and plainly at once, and place it, so stated 
 in the front of his article ? Why did he not plainly 
 say (what his reasoning, if it have any coherency, 
 implies), neither more nor less than this : Every man, 
 who maintains that saving faith cannot be determined 
 by one man for another, or that a man must see with 
 the eyes of his own mind every spiritual reality which 
 is to bless him here and bring him finally to a higher 
 state of blessedness than can be enjoyed in the taber- 
 nacle of the flesh — every man who declares the Bible 
 to be its own evidence, and that the perception — 
 (whether it ever becomes the object of abstract 
 contemplation and reflection or no, but at least the 
 perception — ) of this evidence is indispensable to its 
 efficacy in educating the soul ; or in other words, that 
 the great substantiative Revelation without which the 
 
OP AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 133 
 
 outward one is a cold and empty outline, is that of the 
 heart and spirit — every man who maintains that 
 although the individual can be benefited by religious 
 inquiry only as it is proportioned to his native powers, 
 his means and opportunities, yet that speculation at 
 large must be free, not restrained by a certain official 
 body, who are to say to the ocean of human thought, 
 So far shalt thou go and no farther, and here shall thy 
 proud waves be stayed ; that, whatever may be the 
 interests of an ecclesiastico-political despotism, true 
 religion can never be served by popish interdictions 
 and suppressions, but the more widely the realm of 
 thought is extended, the wider and hence the firmer 
 may the foundations of faith be laid — is a traitor to the 
 cause of God, and must, however spiritual his doctrines 
 may appear, in all he teaches be tending to undermine 
 a sure belief in Christianity 1 But no ! such an enun- 
 ciation from the first — such a display in full daylight 
 of his argumentative machinery, would have been 
 superfluous for the readers he reckoned on, and 
 would but have tended, if it had any effect at all, to 
 defeat the object of the article. For it would have 
 aivakened reflection. Far better was his purpose served 
 by playing before the eyes of readers little images of 
 falsified facts, apart from their causes and occasions — 
 appearances of links and connections between the 
 various writers whom it was desired to bring into 
 one common condemnation — links and connections 
 between one and another, at a "particular time and for 
 a particular object, being exhibited, apart from their 
 conditions and circumstances, as uniting the religious 
 mind of some party at one end of the row with the 
 blank infidelity of another party at the extreme oppo- 
 site end— the Christian philosophy of the former with 
 
134 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 the Anti- Christian philosophy of the latter, — the 
 qualification of Christian and Anti-Christian being 
 quietly suppressed as unimportant to the examination ! 
 
 " Veramente piu volte appajon cose, 
 Che danno a dubitar falsa matera 
 Per le vere cagion, che son nascose." 
 
 Letters pass — an interview takes place — influence is 
 exercised — intercourse is carried on by some of the 
 parties — some give their suffrages the same way in 
 support of an obnoxious writer, who never appeared 
 on the arena of controversy till one who, as the oldest, 
 bears the chief weight of the general accusation, was 
 dead — all these items of outward action and common- 
 places of gossip are paraded before the eye of the 
 reader like so many shreds from the Bag-fair of Lack- 
 reason and Poverty of Thought. Thus the careless and 
 ill-disposed are amused and confirmed in their pre- 
 judices, and hold themselves fully authorised to speak 
 of all the writers named in the Review, doubtless with 
 the omission of even the Reviewer's admissions in 
 favour of some of them, as propagators of Infidelity 
 and covert Atheism. There is no attempt throughout 
 the article to examine any part of the teaching of the 
 accused parties, unless the citation of a passage quite 
 sure to mislead an uninformed reader as to the main 
 drift of the work in which it occurs, if presented 
 without its context and with the Reviewer's commentary, 
 can be called such. The whole process consists in the 
 collocation of extrinsic marks and symptoms — inferences 
 at second hand to warrant conclusions the most com- 
 prehensive and stringent that one human being can 
 draw against another in respect of his frame of religious 
 thought and opinion. A more undisguised appeal to 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 135 
 
 ignorant zealotry and unreflecting prejudice, or as Mr. 
 Maurice expresses it, " to all the bitterness, hardness, 
 and cruelty, which are in the English religious mind, 
 above all to the sense which there is in that mind of 
 the necessity of cleaving to some sect or system of 
 opinions, because it has so feeble a hold on the 
 eternal truths which the Bible and the Creeds set 
 forth," — although, from particular circumstances, my 
 attention has been a good deal drawn to the Base 
 Arts of Periodical Literature — it was never my lot to 
 examine. 
 
 In reality the only thing common to the writers 
 whom the Ee viewer packs together, is, that they all, 
 though with positive views of their own the most 
 various and diverse, agree in negativing such views of 
 faith as he and his school rely upon — in holding them 
 to be in a religious sense already nothing. This is the 
 true unity amongst them, and he would have done him- 
 self more justice, in respect of coherency of thought, if 
 he could have afforded to state his real ground of dis- 
 approval and apprehension, instead of confounding 
 oppugnancy to his religious opinions with hostility and 
 resistance to the Divine light. He has indeed some 
 reason to dislike and dread the author of the Aids to 
 Reflection ; his system is in danger from that and every 
 other work which leads men to think on what they are 
 required to believe. The writers he assails are unani- 
 mous in counteracting him, or at least such opinions as 
 those he strives to uphold ; he therefore would represent 
 them as equally one in co-operating with the Prince of 
 Darkness — with the Spirit of Infidelity and Rebellion 
 against God. He should have reflected, before he pub- 
 lished so many fearful charges, as Archdeacon Hare 
 says of those against himself, and as I can say of those 
 
136 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 against my father, " without a tittle of evidence," and 
 capable, as has been shown, of direct disproof, whether 
 he has any good right to place himself in such direct 
 antithesis to him who was an injurious falsifier from 
 the beginning ; whether in his eager desire to maintain 
 what, in his positiveness rather than certainty, (for 
 Certainty brings proper proof, while Positiveness, like 
 the article, only assumes and asserts,) he identifies with 
 the cause of the Gospel, he is not joining hands with 
 those who are ready to cheat and deceive in furtherance 
 of their own opinion, and to vent half-truths which are 
 in effect whole falsehoods of the grossest kind. Lucifer 
 from the highest Angel passed mysteriously into a 
 Devil, and in this ambiguous transitional stage of his 
 existence perhaps it was that he begat the subtle fiend 
 Lying for God — the most specious and bright-seeming 
 emissary of the Pit, who conceals a dark distorted 
 body beneath robes of light and " wings of sky-tinctured 
 grain." 
 
 The Reviewer's general charge may, however, be 
 translated into truth — into what is really and wholly 
 true. "Tendencies toward the subversion of Faith." 
 Let Faith be defined in accordance with the notions 
 implied in the review, and we may readily admit the 
 justness of the allegation. It is distinctive of the 
 Writer's school to speak as if faith consisted in the 
 admission of religious credenda, without any refer- 
 ence to their internal credibility for the mind that 
 admits them, on authority and alleged proof from with- 
 out. Historical testimony, or rather what passes for 
 such with an influential majority, is, in their system, 
 not merely a bulwark or buttress of religion, but the 
 rock upon which it rests. Faith with them is not a 
 spiritual intuition — the substance of things hoped for 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 137 
 
 and evidence of things unseen with the bodily eye — but 
 an assent to some truth which is, or may be, utterly 
 unperceived by the eye of the mind, on a system of 
 evidences of which the logical understanding alone is 
 to judge. Is this that spiritual principle to which 
 Scripture ascribes the power of saving the soul by 
 purifying the heart 1 Can such blind submission be by 
 any essential mark plainly distinguished from that abject 
 credulity and obstinate adherence of spirit to articles 
 obtruded by a self-asserting authority,* which may be 
 
 * The grand argument for the Papal Infallibility with some 
 eminent and experienced Romish controversialists is simply this, 
 that such Infallibility is pretended to. The principal reason 
 they allege for maintaining the Church of Rome to be the true 
 Church, out of which there is no salvation — to which alone the 
 promises of Christ belong — is merely that she claims to be the true 
 Church — declares ■ herself in possession of the Spirit of Truth, 
 and the power of working miracles. This is a bold way of 
 illustrating the Scriptural precept, ash and ye shall receive — 
 knock and it shall be opened unto you. Rome has but to ask 
 belief in her signs and wonders, to set forth pitiable and revolting 
 forms of disease in some of her members as images of our Lord's 
 awful wounds, or to set up the ancient dust of a cemetery as a 
 sacred receptacle of the Saviour's overflowing virtue, accredited 
 by a couple of dreamers, and straightway crowds celebrate the 
 miserable miracle and bestow their offerings at the shrine of the 
 manufactured martyr and saint. The Pope has but to sit as God 
 showing himself that he is God, to make the high altar his foot- 
 stool, and receive the adoration of his Cardinals ! to exalt the 
 Blessed Mary (doubtless to her own grief and horror, were she 
 now susceptible of aught but blessedness, ) into a new Bruiser of 
 the Serpents Head, a secondary and as it were vicegerent 
 Redeemer, the Intercessor betwixt Christ and His Church, that 
 is to say between God and Man — to make a new Door of the 
 Sheepfold — open out a new fountain of all hope, grace, and 
 salvation — to claim to be himself a delegated Saviour, the Head 
 
138 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 found in union with the most debased and abominable 
 superstitions, the lowest and most impure code of 
 morals 1 It is not to be denied that the writers in 
 question, those to whom the Reviewer allows most 
 orthodoxy, more distinctly and earnestly perhaps than 
 those whom he places at the bottom of the list in point 
 of right belief, have laboured toward the subversion of 
 such & faith as this, or rather such a theory concerning 
 the faith that is to save the soul. I fully believe that 
 they and others following in their steps will succeed in 
 overthrowing that confidence in the sole sufficiency of 
 what has commonly been received as outward evidence, 
 and in the danger and folly of •applying other deeper 
 tests of the truth, and will thereby strengthen the faith 
 in Christ, by bringing into prominence the only ground 
 which is strong enough and wide enough to bear a 
 
 of the Church upon earth ! — Such arrogations are quite sufficient 
 to subdue the mind of multitudes — and indeed the maintainers 
 of implicit faith and uninquiring submission to authority seem 
 to be quite in a false position when they set at nought those of 
 the Papacy. If any reader is startled, and inclined to doubt 
 what I have repeated concerning the Virgin Mary, I refer him 
 to the Pope's last Encyclical Letter ; for confirmation of what I 
 have said about the Pope's setting his feet on the Altar, let him 
 read Dr. Wordsworth's exposure of the Church of Rome in his 
 admirable Letters to Gondon, and consult the authorities to which 
 he there refers. His account of the inauguration of a Pope must 
 make any but the slaves of Rome or her thorough-paced admirers 
 shudder ; but, shocking as such practical blasphemy must appear 
 to all else, I believe it to be excellent policy, supreme wisdom in 
 reference to this world and its generations. The loftier are the 
 pretensions of ecclesiastical usiirpers, even if they outsoar those 
 which the plain of Shinar witnessed of old, the greater will be 
 their success. In this fearful sense is the kingdom of heaven 
 daily taken by violence in the modern Babylon. 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 139 
 
 structure intended for immortality. So long as men 
 fancy, without examination, that there is an array of 
 evidences amply sufficient per se to secure the whole 
 body of the faith, they will feel little inducement to 
 examine what security is contained in the articles 
 themselves, or to hold them in that truth which alone 
 can endure. Their very dread of argument and 
 investigation is a plain proof that the school in ques- 
 tion has no such insight, and therefore no such ground 
 of confidence. They who feel the divinity of the Bible 
 as a whole, to be a truth no more to be gainsaid by a 
 spiritually sane mind than the blue face of the heavens 
 can be discoloured and lose its azure for the sound and 
 healthful eye, however the patient afflicted with 
 acyanoblepsia may report of it, will entertain no dread 
 of criticism or metaphysical investigations imported 
 from Germany or elsewhere, however they may dis- 
 sent from the conclusions of particular investigators. 
 The Idea of a divine Redeemer cannot be argued 
 away ; upon the degree of power with which this is 
 evolved from within, — and realised by the submission 
 of the practical life to its influence, depends the faith 
 in Holy Scripture. To those who behold this Idea 
 vividly, and are possessed by it, the New Testament 
 will ever appear true history — the Old will be received 
 in such a spirit as deep belief in the Gospel necessitates. 
 Kant speaks in his Preface to the KritiJc der reinen 
 Vernunft, of the "ridiculous despotism of the schools" 
 — how they "raise a loud cry about public danger 
 when their spiders' webs are pulled to pieces, of which 
 webs the public had never taken notice and the loss of 
 which it can never feel." That theory of belief or of 
 theological profession, which the Reviewer so zealously 
 guards, identifying any danger in which free inquiry 
 
140 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 may place it with jeopardy of the Faith, is a human 
 tissue that may be rent, I trust, without- peril to 
 Christianity, which never has been sustained on any 
 other foundation than that of its intrinsic worth and 
 credibility, attested by its visible spiritual fruits. \ 
 
 A belief, however true and pure, which is held with- 
 out being 'spiritually apprehended is but a talent of 
 gold wrapped in a napkin. If it be spiritually appre- 
 hended, this proof of its truth must be far before, even 
 if it do not supersede, every other. I say spiritually 
 apprehended, for doubtless a distinction must be made 
 betwixt the power to exhibit a doctrine in an exact 
 philosophical formula, or to show its accordance with 
 speculative reason, and that of beholding, or beneficially 
 possessing, the idea which forms its life and substance. 
 For the Church at large a consistent dogmatic system 
 distinctly drawn out is necessary ; but this wall of 
 fortification need not surround every private dwelling, 
 every one of the many mansions in the great House of 
 the Spirit. 
 
 But let me give the very words in which the Reviewer 
 states the principle that unites, according to his judg- 
 ment, so many dissimilar and mutually opposed thinkers 
 in the common service of infidelity. "What is the 
 common characteristic of that school ? We believe it 
 to consist simply in the striving after intellectual 
 liberty," (to desire the bondage of the intellect there- 
 fore, is in his opinion, the only religious attitude of 
 mind ;) "a tendency to reject all which does not com- 
 mend itself to the individual reason as right and true 
 — a tendency to resist authority, of whatever nature it 
 may be, which interposes any restraint on the freedom 
 of speculation. It is not so much any objective truth, 
 which thinkers of this class contend for, as liberty of 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 141 
 
 thought in general. Their objection is not to individual 
 doctrines, but to any supposed obligation on individuals 
 to receive those doctrines." This vague but sweeping 
 charge may receive two precise interpretations, the one 
 totally different from the other — the one involving 
 principles that must overturn all settled belief in 
 revealed religion, while the other is the exponent of 
 such as are absolutely necessary to the holding of 
 religious belief truthfully, intelligently, therefore effec- 
 tively and securely. Will the author dare to construe 
 it thus ? — the writers in question, one and all of them, 
 deny that there is any objective reality independent of 
 the human mind, of supreme interest to the individual, 
 which does not at all times appear such to his 
 individual mind, whatever be his means and opportu- 
 nities of coming to the knowledge of the truth, whatever, 
 from the use of his will, the use he may make of them ; 
 they hold it right to disregard all outward testimony 
 that may be alleged, all the impressions, convictions, 
 reasonings of other minds that can serve to guide and 
 to modify the results of religious meditation ; to set 
 aside all consideration of the consentient feelings and 
 belief of the lights of the world from age to age ? Will 
 he dare, I say, to construe the charge thus, and to bring 
 it thus construed to bear upon the author of the Aids 
 to Eeflection, the Lay Sermons, the Friend, and the 
 Letters on Inspiration ? My Father, from the time 
 that he rose out of the suspense and uncertainty as 
 to his theological system, which caused him to seek, for 
 awhile, a recess with the Unitarians, (whom he found, 
 however, quite as dogmatic in their narrow creed as the 
 Church in her wider one,) — when the elements of 
 Faith were for his mind in a sort of chaos that was 
 yet to be shaped by Eeason, divinely illumined, into a 
 
142 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 spiritual world, — from this time forth was a defender 
 of historical Christianity, and as such of course of 
 appropriate historical testimony and proof, although, 
 for reasons which neither the Eeviewer nor any other 
 assailant has ever attempted to rebut, he considered 
 this secondary and subordinate in the system of evi- 
 dence, and dependent, in a great degree, for its cogency 
 and persuasiveness on the intrinsic character of the 
 great vital spiritualities which the religious history 
 represents as objectively realised. He doubtless some- 
 times sought to demonstrate the weakness of alleged 
 authority and testimony in particular instances ; but 
 on the subject of authority and testimony at large, 
 his principles are in accordance with those of the 
 great Christian Doctors and Fathers and Philo- 
 sophers from the beginning of the Christian sera to 
 the present day. 
 
 But the accusation may be reduced to truth under 
 the following form : the accused are guilty of holding 
 that no man receives spiritual benefit from any doctrine 
 which he does not apprehend by the spirit within him ; 
 that a belief so held, however pure and true in itself, is 
 but as the talent of gold folded in a napkin, and instead 
 of purifying the heart, may lie side by side in the 
 treasury of the mind with the most abject superstitions 
 and lowest moral perceptions ; that a theological 
 formula, like that of con or £ra?is-substantiation, which 
 cannot be proved consistent with itself and with the 
 laws of thought, is a nullity and can be no proper expo- 
 nent of a spiritual truth, although a spiritual truth may 
 be arbitrarily united with it : that the formal statement 
 of a doctrine being its body, without which it cannot be 
 organised so as to become a living moving reality, it 
 must be injured in its internal being, and impeded in its 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 143 
 
 free motions, by such imprisonment, and be in constant 
 clanger of extinction. 
 
 Mr. Coleridge rejects no belief, which has prevailed 
 in the Church, without considering all that is alleged on 
 its behalf of every kind of testimony. But if a doctrine 
 appears to be self-contradictory and devoid of spiritual 
 sigmficancy, if the maintainors of the tenet cannot them- 
 selves disprove the charge that it obtrudes upon the 
 mind a visual image to which no spiritual idea corre- 
 sponds, which cannot be exchanged for aught of value 
 in the world of super-sensual reality, that image being 
 a mere fabric of the brain, like the visions of poets or 
 romancers, (more truly indeed than they, as the visions 
 of good poets always represent a truth,) are w e bound 
 to acquiesce in it by force of any outward proof or testi- 
 mony that has ever yet been alleged in support of 
 particular views in theology ? 
 
 The Eomanist, in accordance with the policy of his 
 Church system, demands of course that every doctrine 
 should be implicitly received, without regard to its 
 internal character. Yet a voice which even his system 
 cannot stifle, with a whisper clearly audible in the lull 
 of theological dogmatising, urges him to justify his 
 belief, if possible, in the Court of Eeason and the 
 Spiritual Sense : to show that it is not self-contradic- 
 tory — that it does represent a spiritual reality. He 
 alleges that, in the Lord's Supper, there is a change of 
 substance, the accidents of bread and wine remaining 
 unchanged. This reasoning he puts forth, requiring 
 you however not to exercise your reasoning faculty 
 upon it ; — which is as reasonable a procedure as if one 
 should offer to cheer the heart of the sinking way- 
 farer, by pouring wine into his cup, at the same time 
 forbidding him to drink, lest he should discover, in 
 
Ui NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 the process of swallowing, that it is not wine but water 
 dyed red with some deleterious ingredient, that has 
 been charitably bestowed upon him ; or as if one should 
 give a starving beggar counters for coin, enjoining him 
 not to deal with them, lest he should find that they are 
 not good money, and have no currency. To enjoy a 
 religious truth is indeed something more than to sub- 
 ject it to intellectual analysis ; but I think it may be 
 affirmed, that a tenet, which will not endure this 
 process, is no vehicle of a spiritual truth and substance 
 by which the simple may be nourished to eternal life. 
 Believing thus, we who have not delivered ourselves 
 up blindfold to any self-asserted church upon earth, 
 assured that the Divine Light, even Christ Jesus, who 
 ever referred man to his innate powers of receiving and 
 perceiving heavenly truth, owns no church that 
 demands, and is satisfied with, implicit faith, — will 
 venture to examine the pretended wine — the so-called 
 coin of value. "We will venture to ask what is the 
 sense or signification of the saying, that the accidents 
 of bread are to be found apart from the substance of 
 bread, and that the substance of flesh, apart from the 
 accidents of flesh, supports the accidents of bread ? 
 The accidents of bread, taken together with whatso- 
 ever it is that constitutes their unity or makes them 
 to be one thing, are what we mean by the word bread, 
 neither more nor less ; and to affirm that bread can be 
 absent where its accidents are present, and that flesh 
 can be where the accidents or sensuous phenomena of 
 flesh are not, what is it but to affirm and deny in one 
 and the same proposition 1 All that we mean by 
 bread is present in the elements after consecration 
 as before, and all that we mean by flesh is absent. 
 The substance of bread is neither more nor less than 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 145 
 
 whatsoever stands under — sub stat — the accidents, or 
 sensuous appearances, of bread. If it be asked, how is 
 this proved 1 I reply, it has been demonstrated by a 
 metaphysical deduction, which has never yet been 
 invalidated, that the term (substance) is a mere form 
 of the intellect which expresses the unity of any par- 
 ticular external object. We can become cognisant 
 only of that which is presented to us by our faculties 
 of sense, or which the mind perceives within itself. 
 "What reason can we have to believe that there is any- 
 thing in this or that object beyond what meets our 
 senses and the connection of it into one thing by a 
 mental act ? If there were anything beyond this, we 
 have no power of ascertaining it. To say therefore 
 that the substance of one thing can be under the 
 accidents of another thing, as if substance, instead of 
 being a mere relative term, expressing the unity of 
 any congeries of johceno?nena, were a self-subsisting 
 independent reality, which could be abstracted from 
 that to which it relates, — that the substance of a 
 material object can exist apart from all accidents, 
 determinations, or modes of being, and can be trans- 
 ferred from one set of modes or determinations to 
 another ; just as a pedestal may be removed from 
 under that which it supports, and placed under another 
 object ; is really as absurd as to imply that a subject 
 can exist without a predicate, and a predicate without 
 a subject — or that we might conceive North apart from 
 South, or, extinguishing the West, might yet retain the 
 East, as an intelligible term, in the description of the 
 realms of Space. 
 
 Our Saviour in his miracles appealed to the senses 
 of beholders for the proof of the sensuous transforma- 
 tion ; but these dealers in signs and wonders, the 
 
146 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 priests of Borne, proclaim a supernatural, sensuous, or 
 at least material, change to which our senses can bear 
 no witness. They who maintain the real presence to be 
 the substance or substrate of the flesh and blood of our 
 Lord's body under the material accidents of bread and 
 wine, plainly hold the dogma in that " gross corporeal 
 sense" which Mr. Newman, when he wrote Tract 
 ninety, abjured. Your thorough Romanist is dis- 
 satisfied unless it be confessed that the flesh of our 
 Lord's body, which was seen and handled eighteen 
 hundred years ago, is present under the phenomena 
 of bread. A real presence of the whole undivided 
 Christ, divine and human, soul and supersensuous 
 body, to the entire man of every devout receiver, — this 
 sublime and substantial belief seems to them, in their 
 grovelling fanaticism, a thin impalpable shade, a 
 mockery, a rationalistic subterfuge. The gross and 
 sensible is alone, to their minds, the substantial. They 
 are unable to breathe the thin air at the mountain 
 summit of a philosophical and spiritual faith. But it 
 is vain to argue against a reasonless and irrational 
 creed with those who make it their boast that they 
 neither deny, nor even suspend their assent to, articles, 
 however in themselves indefensible, if they be but 
 commended to them by what their reasoning and con- 
 cluding faculty has decided to be sufficient authority. 
 It is natural enough, in the sphere they inhabit, wherein 
 "imposture, organised into a comprehensive and self- 
 consistent whole, forms a world of its own, in which 
 inversion is the order of nature " — it is natural enough 
 in such a sphere, wherein " all forms of sophistry are 
 native," that the most unnatural creed should appear 
 the most worthy of belief; and that the saying of 
 Tertullian should be taken, not in Tertullian's excel- 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 147 
 
 lent sense, but in its literal senselessness : — Prorsus 
 credibile est quia ineptum est; — certum est quia im- 
 
 I believe, however, it may be shown that consub- 
 stantiation, as taught by some of our Anglican divines, 
 is as empty a doctrine as the dogma insisted on by the 
 Council of Trent : that what this tenet asserts beyond, 
 and in distinction from, the doctrine of the Eeal Presence 
 as taught by Hooker, namely that Christ Himself is 
 present to the spirit of the faithful receiver of the sacra- 
 ment duly administered, is equally devoid of spiritual 
 content. What is the meaning of the word presence 
 when applied to a thing of spirit % A material object 
 is present to man when it is near enough in space to his 
 material organism to be apprehended by his outward 
 senses. A spiritual object cannot be present in this 
 way. Considered in itself, it has no relations of space. 
 Spirit is present either to spirit or to matter by acting 
 or operating upon it, — by producing certain effects. A 
 spiritual power is present to material things by causing 
 certain material results ; it is thus we understand 
 the presence of God in the Material Universe. The 
 Divine Spirit maintains in life the whole frame of 
 visible things, and is, in this sense, the A nima Mundi, 
 Jehovah was said to be present in the burning bush. 
 and in the Shechinah within the Holy of Holies. 
 What does this mean, but that the Lord caused visible 
 tokens to appear in particular places in order to assure 
 the hearts of believers, to signify to them that they 
 were under an extraordinary Providence, or that their 
 prayers should be answered. But this proves nothing 
 with respect to the Being of God Himself. God Him- 
 self is not in the Temple made with hands, or nigh 
 
 * De Came Christi, cap. v. 
 
 L 2 
 
148 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 the altar, or on the table of divine communion, except 
 as He is everywhere. But man in his human frame 
 is present in particular places ; and God in his converse 
 with man addresses him in his own language, conforms 
 Himself to his faculties. It will hardly be affirmed 
 that the words This is my body, must needs be taken 
 in a literal sense ; that the expression may not be 
 figurative, while the import is real and substantial ; 
 namely, this is that whereby the power of my humanity 
 shall be operative in your spirits, nourishing your souls 
 and bodies to eternal life ; this is my body in power and 
 operation : the effect being put for the cause by a com- 
 mon form of rhetoric. 
 
 So again to affirm that, in the moment of baptism, 
 the soul of an infant is spiritually changed, without 
 any intuition of divine truth by the eye of the spirit 
 within him, or submission of his will to the will of 
 God, and that this is that regeneration of which our 
 Lord spake to Nicodemus, which His Apostle John 
 describes in his first Epistle General, — is not this to say 
 and unsay in a breath ? What means spiritual regen- 
 eration but a general change in the spirit wrought by 
 the Spirit of Holiness 1 What is the spirit of man 
 but his rational will, or moral andintelligential being 1 
 And how can this change, represented by our Lord and 
 his Apostle as the ground of conversion, and conse- 
 quently of eternal life and salvation, be predicated of 
 an infant, whose reason and will are yet latent and 
 inactive, who, after the sacrament, not only remains 
 liable to sin mortally, but who may, as soon as his 
 moral being is developed, discover none but evil pro- 
 pensities, and neglect all opportunities of grace and 
 salvation ? In the vegetable world, a vigorous germ 
 may be prevented from due growth and expansion by 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. H9 
 
 circumstances of soil and season, or it may be destroyed 
 mechanically by impact from without, by the crushing 
 foot, the falling stone, or gnawing insect. But this 
 oft alleged analogy has no real application here. The 
 spiritual power, a reception whereof constitutes the 
 new birth, is essentially a power to resist temptation, 
 or, in Scripture phrase, to overcome the world. A regen- 
 erate person cannot be corrupted by ill education ; 
 he is well educated by the Spirit already, in that he is 
 
 Holy Scripture describes the new birth as a moral 
 and religious general renovation, constituting the sub- 
 ject of it a new creature. Maintainers of the mystic mo- 
 mentary dogma affirm that this is regeneration viewed 
 in its results, — regeneration with all the effects it pro- 
 duces when the soul has been enlightened by Light from 
 above and the will has submitted to the leading of the 
 Spirit. But what authorises us to say, that such a 
 moral and spiritual condition, as is identified in the New 
 Testament with regeneration, is the result of a supposed 
 mystical change, which may be totally inoperative % It 
 is the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit upon 
 man's spirit which produces holiness and fitness for 
 Heaven ; and if, after baptism, the heart and mind and 
 moral being may remain unsanctified, — unaffected for 
 good by the supposed change, — how can we reasonably 
 ascribe to this imaginary font-renewal — this visionary 
 clothing of the soul in spirit-robes of perfect whiteness 
 — all that actualised faith and positive evil-overcoming 
 holiness on which the Blessed Evangelist expatiates ? 
 Obviously this font-renewal by itself does not affect the 
 moral being at all. How then can it be the source and 
 parent of a blessed trans-naturation of the whole heart 
 and mind, enduing the subject of it with eternal life ? 
 
150 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 Once more, what is the sense of daemoniac possession, 
 as commonly understood ? Can one personal identity 
 or distinct self-subsisting spirit enter into, or become 
 commingled with, another distinct personal being, as 
 Jonah entered into the body of the whale, or as leaven 
 can diffuse itself through a measure of meal ? If the 
 supposition is that the daemon does but enter the hody 
 or outward phenomenal organism of the afflicted person, 
 so that pro tempore there are two souls to one body, 
 how can it be said that, in such a case, the man is pos- 
 sessed, or how does this answer to the notion of the 
 subject commonly entertained, which is, undoubtedly, 
 that the soul of the dsemoniac is the seat of the daemon ? 
 Inspiration of Satan, or his agents and underlings, is as 
 obviously a different conception from the popular one, 
 which imports not merely that an Evil Spirit acts upon 
 the soul, then ceases to act upon it, but that a personal 
 Evil Being occupies the soul and afterwards is literally 
 cast out of it. But then our Lord spoke as if the 
 matter were as it is popularly represented. I answer, 
 why must our Lord have combated vulgar errors in 
 psychology and nosology and physics, or explained 
 scientifically the nature of madness to unprepared 
 minds, any more than anticipated the teaching of 
 Bacon and of Newton 1 Not only was this unnecessary 
 — it would directly and positively have interfered with 
 the great spiritual objects of his mission. We may 
 well believe that, in transferring the disorder of a 
 maniac to a herd of swine, unlawfully bred and 
 retained, He may have adopted the prevailing notions, 
 made use of the ordinary language of the time and 
 country in which He appeared, without derogating 
 from his divine perfections, or affecting in the least 
 degree his transcendant character as the Way and the 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 151 
 
 Truth, the Light as well as the Life of Men. There 
 are some other such empty husks in the basket of 
 popular theology ; — but to return to our Conservative, 
 and his accusation against certain modern Eeformers 
 of theological thought : 
 
 "It is not so much any objective truth which thinkers 
 of this class contend for as liberty of thought in general. 
 Their objection is not to individual doctrines, but to 
 any supposed obligation on individuals to receive those 
 doctrines." An attentive perusal of the Aids to 
 Reflection would convince any reasonable person that 
 the author contended for a whole body of objective 
 truth, and most carefully distinguished the mere sub- 
 jective forms of religious thought, which are not 
 binding on the conscience because they are merely 
 subjective, however legitimate and self-consistent, from 
 those verities which the outward Revelation, in its 
 accordance with that of the heart and spirit, en- 
 lightened from above, has realised : that if he con- 
 tended for liberty of thought he duly guarded against 
 licence or licentiousness, and demanded that specu- 
 lation might be free in order that it might be full — 
 powerful to the reception of spiritual riches, as they 
 alone whose hands are unfettered can gather in the 
 harvest. Where has he ever denied, directly or by 
 implication, that it is not obligatory on man to receive 
 objective truth when presented to him 1 To deny this 
 indeed would be to cast confusion on the face of the 
 Bible, in which faith is represented as duty, while at 
 the same time it is declared that faith comes by hear- 
 ing and knowledge of the truth, which proves it to be 
 no vague impulse distinct from any exercise of reason. 
 They who rely on outward evidence alone, and decry 
 as rationalism the belief that a perception of the 
 
152 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 reasonableness of what we are required to believe is 
 the deepest ground of faith, place the proof of religion 
 out of the sphere of the will, the heart and moral 
 being, confining it within the precincts of the under- 
 standing, which alone judges of the outward proof. 
 Such reasoners cannot consistently describe faith as 
 duty : in my Father's system faith is at once a light, a 
 beholding of truth, and " the source and sum, the energy 
 and principle of the fidelity of Man to God." How 
 gross is the misrepresentation that describes such a« 
 writer as denyiDg the obligation of individuals to 
 receive doctrines according to their light ! Nor did 
 he deny, but on the contrary affirmed, that in religion 
 as well as in merely intellectual education men may 
 with advantage receive the mere enunciations of divine 
 truth before they have an intelligent and vital faith in 
 the truths themselves ; that the mere vehicle or formula 
 may make way for reception of the content ; that the 
 sort of acquiescence which a young child gives to the 
 deep doctrines of the Christian Faith prepares the 
 mind to receive what is thus taken on trust ; or rather 
 that the spiritual truth is imperceptibly insinuated by 
 reception of the dogmatic formula, just as in the silent 
 teaching of nature ideas of reason and the moral being 
 are awakened by sounds and sights, by sensuous objects 
 and the sensuous frame of language. He well knew 
 that every man's vital religion is as light comprehended 
 by darkness ; that it is surrounded on all sides with 
 the indefinite, the hidden continuation of his mental 
 horizon : but he ever protested that this introductory 
 implicit belief is not salvation itself, but one of the 
 ways and means of it ; that the substance of saving 
 faith is a beholding of divine truth ; that the darkness 
 and mystery would have no hallowing and exalting 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 153 
 
 influence, if it were not the accompaniment of spiritual 
 perceptions as positive and sure as the pomp of groves 
 and garniture of fields is to the bodily eye. Mr. 
 Coleridge's real opinions on these subjects are at equi- 
 distance from those which the Eeviewer imputes to 
 him and those which he (the Eeviewer) himself holds. 
 " For a Christianity founded on philosophical argu- 
 ment, we have not a particle of respect or value. It 
 is a mere rope of sand, which has no principle of 
 cohesion." A belief worthy of a reasonable man must 
 be capable of a philosophical defence ; " for no gift of 
 God does or can contradict any other gift, except by 
 misuse or contradiction." But Christianity must be 
 founded on the testimony of the heart and spirit co- 
 inciding with the outward Revelation, not on argument 
 and discourse of reason, metaphysical or logical. The 
 foundation of a spiritual Eeligion is the same as its 
 matter, and as a feast is founded on meat and drink, 
 not on a deal table, so is Christianity based on its 
 own spiritual truths and the receptivity of them in 
 our spirit. It is the proper office of Philosophical 
 argument to show the reasonableness of a belief so 
 founded ; to show that " the Christian religion has 
 its objective or historic and ecclesiastical pole, and its 
 subjective or spiritual pole : that in the miracles and 
 miraculous parts of religion — both in the first com- 
 munication of divine truths, and in the promulgation 
 of the truths thus communicated, we have the union 
 of the two — that is, the subjective and supernatural 
 displayed objectively — outwardly and phenomenally 
 — as subjective and supernatural." The difference 
 betwixt Mr. Coleridge and his assailants, who seem 
 to me like men striking passionately in the dark and 
 hitting each other, or perhaps a dead wall, instead of 
 
154 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 the object of their enmity, is not that he founded 
 religion on mere speculative philosophy, they on faith. 
 They bring a philosophy to the defence of their sys- 
 tem, as well as he to his, but he complained of this 
 philosophy that it would not stand examination, was 
 incompatible with philosophy at large, as taught 
 among philosophers, and was only maintained in cer- 
 tain schools of divinity. He referred to faith as surely 
 ns they ; but he maintained faith to be an act of will 
 in the presence of reason, or a willing submission of 
 soul to truths beheld by the Light that lighteth every 
 man ; while they seem to regard it as a blind acqui- 
 escence in the truth of something unknown. He 
 maintained that true faith cannot be without the per- 
 ception of the truth believed by the individual mind 
 of the believer : which has been construed most un- 
 fairly — as if it meant, that there is no truth except 
 that which the individual mind perceives — that is to 
 say, no objective independent truth at all. They teach 
 that faith is the bare assent to what a man is assured 
 by authority to be true.* How can it benefit a man 
 
 * "Faith is the reasoning of a religious mind," says Mr. 
 Newman, ' ' or of what Scripture calls a right or renewed heart, 
 which acts upon presumptions rather than evidence, which 
 speculates and ventures when it cannot make sure of it." Faith 
 is indeed the reasoning of a religious mind, but are not those 
 reasonings sure in their way ? Is it not evidence, sui generis, 
 upon which it acts, and does it not bring a full assurance of the 
 truth, when it presents to the soul the substance of things hoped 
 for ? Mr. Newman instances St. Paul preaching at Athens, and 
 alleges that the evidence he gave of his message was but slight. 
 If it had really been slight, the men who received it as certainly 
 true, must have been deluded, for they could have had no spiri- 
 tual insight into the truths to which they gave their assent. The 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIEIT. 155 
 
 to believe that the Bible is true, without perceiving 
 its truth 1 In proportion as he perceives the truth 
 and divinity of what the Bible contains he will believe 
 the Bible to be divine, and a faith which outgoes this 
 perception can be of no direct spiritual advantage 
 to the soul. It is true that the same individual, who 
 at one time is unable to perceive the divine character 
 of a certain portion of Scripture, will at another time 
 behold it as the Word of God. By use of the light 
 that already shines within us we gain more light. 
 But to urge this as a consideration against the argu- 
 ment of the " Confessions " is to mistake its drift and 
 the author's position. The question with him turns 
 not at all upon individual opinion respecting the 
 
 saying of Locke — "The evidence that any proposition is true 
 lying only in the proofs a man has of it, whatsoever degrees 
 of assent he affords it beyond the degrees of that evidence, it is 
 plain all that surplusage of assurance is owing to some other 
 affection, and not to the love of truth," seems incontrovertible. 
 But there is a species of evidence, the evidence of the spirit 
 within to itself, which entered not into Locke's philosophy. 
 St. Paul, the closest of reasoners, who maintains the faith of 
 Christ in all its parts by appealing for its truth to the higher 
 mind of those whom he addresses, would never have expected 
 the Athenians to believe beyond reason, or to accept aught as 
 true of which they might not find appropriate and proportionate 
 proof in their own hearts. Have not we good reason to believe 
 the resurrection of Christ ? And if ive have reason to believe 
 it, why must we suppose that they took for certain that of which 
 they had only presumptive evidence ? I have just perused 
 Mr. Newman's section on the Supremacy of Faith in his Essay 
 on Development. It seems to me that his general meaning in 
 this disquisition would have been admitted by my Father as 
 just, but that some of his terms and metaphysical distinctions 
 would have been objected to. 
 
156 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 internal character of passages in the Bible, but upon 
 the value of evidence derived from this internal 
 character in comparison with that of extrinsic proof 
 and authority. The question with him is, whether a 
 passage that cannot be vindicated, as to its moral 
 bearing, by ordinary rules, founded on that law of 
 right and wrong, which God himself has inscribed on 
 the heart of man, is to be received as undoubtedly 
 divine by reason of any mere external evidence that 
 ever has been, or ever can be adduced. He never 
 assumes that his particular view and interpretation of 
 any portion of Scripture must be correct. He wrote 
 on the Inspiration of the sacred writings in the same 
 spirit as on other debated questions in history, politics, 
 physics or criticism ; — wrote in the sense that his 
 judgment was fallible, his heart liable to self-deception, 
 his moral being imperfect in the eye of God ; yet con- 
 sidered it right, after endeavouriDg by all means to 
 strengthen and purify his faculties of judgment, to 
 state his sincere opinion. When he put forth his 
 views on Shakespeare he wrote in the same sense of 
 his liability to error, well aware that his opinions 
 must fall, if they were merely individual and isolated, 
 such as never would obtain a Catholic consent. He 
 gave them as contributions to the discovery of truth, 
 and on the same principle he put forth his views on 
 divinity. But they who maintain against him, that 
 such passages were given by inspiration of God, refuse 
 to put the question on this issue. They will have it 
 tried and decided in a different court, on different 
 evidence, which court and witnesses he held incom- 
 petent to determine the matter ultimately and without 
 appeal. His opponents do not themselves affect to say 
 that Jael's act, for instance, must not in itself appear 
 
OF AX INQUIRING SPIRIT. 157 
 
 to the common moral sense of mankind, a base, 
 treacherous, cruel murder. But they say, "It is in 
 the Bible. Deborah, an inspired personage, extols it. 
 Therefore we must suppose it done by divine com- 
 mand." Yet if we compare this bloody action of the 
 Hebrew heroine with Abraham's deed of truly blessed 
 memory, how great do we find the contrast ! The 
 story of the Patriarch's intended sacrifice is evidently 
 moral throughout. It is at once symbol and history — 
 a striking and most affecting symbol of absolute sub- 
 mission to the Governor of the Universe, of perfect 
 confidence in his goodness, as of one who orders all 
 things for the best, and of unhesitating postponement 
 of the transitory and perishable to the permanent 
 invisible. The act of Jael, on the other hand, is as 
 evidently of the earth, earthy ; it is the act of a hard- 
 hearted and deceitful woman, taking advantage of an 
 open enemy by a violation of compact and of the laws 
 of hospitality, and thus winning the gratitude of her 
 country in the face of wickedness. It is the triumph 
 of evil ; — the wisdom of this world and its generation 
 which seems here a higher wisdom than belongs to the 
 children of light. 
 
 But what meant the Eeviewer by affirming that 
 Christianity, founded as he supposes Mr. Coleridge's 
 to have been, is a mere rope of sand 1 Can there be 
 no such thing as Catholic consent on internal evidence ? 
 Do men agree more absolutely on the nature and value 
 of the outward evidences of religion, than they do on 
 the internal consistency of the Christian scheme, on its 
 intrinsic excellence, on its capability of fulfilling the 
 high instincts and satisfying the needs of human nature ? 
 So far is this inward evidence from being a mere rope 
 of sand, that it is the strong cable, bound about the 
 
158 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 faith, which has ever kept it together, and prevented 
 the weaker bands of outward evidence from having to 
 sustain a weight which, if it bore upon them alone, 
 would surely break them asunder. But when writers 
 of the Reviewer's school talk thus, are they in reality 
 thinking of evidence or mental assuredness at all ? Have 
 they anything in their minds but the disposition and 
 determination of certain parties to maintain whatever 
 they have received as the truth, unaltered, whether 
 they are able to defend it by strict argument or no ? 
 Doubtless if a set of men enter into a compact to pre- 
 serve whatever they find established, without examina- 
 tion, there will be a wonderful concord of thought and 
 unity of action among them. They accept a system 
 with their eyes shut, and therefore will never be led to 
 loosen their hold upon it from any perception of its 
 deficiencies ; for they are resolved to see nothing. The 
 only objection to this theory of faith is, that it seems 
 at war with the very nature of faith itself. To be 
 determined to uphold a system is not the same thing 
 as to feel assured that it is true and represents what 
 is real though invisible.* 
 
 * I must here say, for those readers who have not yet become 
 acquainted with the Aids to Reflection (what should have been 
 said a few pages back), that Mr. Coleridge's doctrine of baptismal 
 grace agrees with, and is, the Catholic doctrine, only not as 
 popularly explained, or as described in the Tracts for the Times 
 and the theological writings of Mr. Newman. His scheme 
 establishes a more perfect analogy between the two sacraments 
 than the other, for, according to it, Baptism gives new fife to 
 the soul, the Eucharist sustains and extends it, but both on 
 condition of actual faith and through its operation. Both sacra- 
 ments confer grace, which is to be appropriated by the will ; 
 why may there not be an interval of time between the con- 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 159 
 
 The doctrine which condemns private judgment 
 labours under this difficulty, that every man must and 
 does act on the decision of his own mind in determining 
 whom to receive as teachers and depositories of re- 
 ligious truth ; and since it is not possible to determine 
 that question without judging of the truth itself, it 
 seems a direct contradiction to say that a man may and 
 must resolve either to embrace the system which was 
 presented to him first by others, or to adopt another, 
 in which, he was not educated ; yet that he may not 
 reasonably judge of the system thus received. Men 
 decide by private judgment, that the pretensions of 
 Eome are just, and thereupon throw themselves into a 
 
 signation and the appropriation ? In the holy communion as 
 truly as in baptism, the office of the rite is only to consign the 
 Holy Spirit ; that the appropriation by the will should follow 
 immediately is not essential to the doctrine ; and indeed 
 St. Augustine and other theorists on baptism have laid down, 
 that, in certain cases, the grant does not come into operation till 
 after an interval. But, according to the commonly received 
 explanation of this subject, grace enters the soul in an essentially 
 different way and with wholly different conditions in one sacra- 
 ment and the other ; the spirit of man is supposed to have been 
 born again, the will, even after the new birth, remaining 
 spiritually inoperative in the infant subject ; and yet it is held 
 that, in the communion, it receives benefit from the sacrament 
 only in and with movements of life and acts of co-operation ! 
 
 I have lately examined the various expressions of St. Augustine 
 on the effect of baptism, scattered up and down his works, with 
 especial care, and am quite satisfied that he had no such thought 
 in his mind as that of an internal spiritual renewal or change of 
 nature in the infant soul at the font : and that his language is 
 inconsistent with such a conception. He says, indeed, that Grod 
 is with baptised little ones ; but this is an ambiguous phrase, 
 and capable of different metaphysical interpretations. 
 
160 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 communion, which denies the right of private judgment 
 to all within its pale. For truly, so it is argued, a man 
 may use a lantern to guide his steps through the 
 darkness of night, and wear a heavy coat to shelter 
 him from the inclemency of the skies out of doors ; but 
 the same man will, of course, lay down his horn lumi- 
 nary, and cast aside the cumbersome frieze, when he 
 enters a room brightly lighted by a multitude of wax 
 candles, warmed by a brightly blazing fire, and enlivened 
 by a gay and goodly company. And of a truth, if the 
 faculty by which a man guides himself into a religion 
 were analogous to the traveller's lantern — if it could 
 be taken up and laid down again at will, and exchanged 
 for a better means of light as soon as it had served its 
 purpose, this supposed parallel would be very much to 
 the point. As it is, we may fairly reply, that as it was 
 one pair of eyes which guided the traveller to the 
 goodly company and which enabled him to address 
 them on his arrival ; in like manner one mental organ 
 of vision enables a man to decide respecting the Church, 
 and to examine the doctrines which are said to be 
 taught by the Church. It is urged against this view 
 that men choose their own physicians and lawyers 
 without pretending to judge of the prescriptions of the 
 former, or to criticise the legal opinions of the latter. 
 But neither case is really in point. In the practical 
 matters that concern the present life a man is obliged 
 to act upon uncertainties ; he acts for the best, but 
 with the consciousness that he may fail. He is obliged 
 to choose his physician or lawyer by common report, 
 and he often chooses wrong. Still if he happens to 
 choose rightly, he derives full benefit from his choice 
 though he neither understands physic nor law. Religion 
 is not like material medicine or the business of the 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 161 
 
 lawyer, a thing by which a man may be benefited 
 irrespectively of any personal knowledge or under- 
 standing of it in its internal character. To choose a 
 religion is to feel sure that it is true, and to secure its 
 blessings is to embrace with our whole heart and mind 
 and spirit its saving truths, and enlightening, purifying 
 revelations. I believe that my father had as high a. 
 respect for a real Catholic consent or an uninterrupted 
 tradition as most men ; but he was too independent and 
 brave, too reflective and clear-minded, to bow down 
 before the idol of Public Opinion ; to adopt vulgar con- 
 servative maxims, and yield to the despotism of a mere 
 existing majority. 
 
 To this Existing Majority the English Eeviewer 
 appeals in mean-minded triumph : one of the many 
 proofs his disquisition affords, that he can have no 
 confidence in the intrinsic merits of his cause. " These 
 men fear public opinion," says he : " They know that 
 the national mind of England is strongly adverse to 
 their views. They know the principles of the clergy 
 as a body, and they are fearful of provoking a strong 
 re-action." This is an appeal to the violent and 
 unthinking Many against the Few, whose opinions are 
 too refined to be popular on their first promulgation. 
 They who dwell in the dark are ever ready to behold 
 objects of terror, fiends and goblins on all sides round, 
 as soon as their imaginations are excited by fearful 
 picturings and cries of alarm : on this propensity 
 the Eeviewer seems to calculate in his procedure. He ' 
 would make the writers whom he assails objects of 
 apprehension ; and as 
 
 ' ' Fear and Rage are one disease — 
 And both alike the ague," 
 
162 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 this was well devised to bring upon them the anger 
 of that numerous class whose zeal is not according to 
 knowledge ; but in ascribing fear of public opinion 
 to them, and accusing them of " miserable party spirit," 
 he is as wide of the mark of truth as in all his other 
 arrow shots. The temper of fearlessness and moral 
 courage is the natural companion of free inquiry, and it 
 is a fact that most of the men of whom the writer speaks 
 thus are eminently bold and incautious. The timid 
 and self-preservative are ever desirous of belonging 
 to a party in whose ranks they may be hidden ; by 
 whose many weapons they may be protected. Where 
 there is a tacit compact amongst any set of men, that 
 they shall act as one even while they think diversely, 
 each sacrificing something that is dear to him, like the 
 triumvirs of old, in order to secure the help of the rest 
 towards acquiring or preserving something still dearer 
 and more important, there is party spirit. Party 
 coalitions in this corrupt and evil sense cannot be 
 for those who hold it the duty of each individual to 
 follow the light which presents itself, or seems to 
 present itself, to his individual mind, and who permit 
 no bond of union except the common perception of 
 truth. 
 
 Achilles pursued one whom he took to be a mere 
 man beside the deep-eddying Scamander, and ever and 
 anon he thought to overtake him with his swift feet 
 and overpower him with his potent arm. But after a 
 while the supposed Agenor turned about and confronted 
 him, and began to remonstrate seriously with the pride - 
 blinded hero on the vanity of his endeavours ; and 
 behold it was no mere man, weak, mortal, van- 
 quishable ; but a god, even the god Apollo, strong, 
 deathless, unconquerable, full of light and full of 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 163 
 
 might.* So in the strength of vaunted systems of 
 outward evidence, unqualified submission to authority, 
 passive acquiescence and logic apart from metaphysic 
 insight, many a vain boaster will pursue beside the 
 loud stream of Public Opinion, that Christian Philo- 
 sophy, whereof there are now so many vigorous 
 youthful champions, and of which Coleridge, were he 
 alive at this day, would be a veteran defender. But 
 methiuks they will find, when they fancy themselves 
 about to seize and overthrow the object of their hosti- 
 lity, that it is no mere shadowy, baseless Germanism, 
 has nothing in common with that shallow Bationalism 
 of the old unspiritual Unitarian system, which, now 
 superannuated and in the last stage of decay, receives a 
 sort of contemptuous protection, in consideration that 
 it is not long for this world, from a bold-faced, hollow- 
 hearted son and heir, called Esoteric or Idealised 
 Christianity, who describes the Gospel as a well feigned 
 tale devised for the edification of the people — a mortal 
 Minerva, sprung not from Jove, but from the head of 
 mere humanity. Methinks they will find it strong 
 and imperishable, divine on both sides, as embracing 
 an outward revelation, that has come down from heaven, 
 and an inward revelation of the Spirit bearing witness to 
 our spirit, which is the work of God in the soul of man. 
 
 That these Letters on inspiration fully and unob- 
 jectionably solve the whole difficult problem of the 
 Bible, in what sense as to particulars, as well as 
 
 * T'nrre /xe, TlrjXeos vie, ttoctIv rax^acri SidoKeis, 
 avrbs Ovrjrbs sicv debv &fxt3porou ; ouSe vv iria /xe 
 eyvas, u>s 9e6s elfu, av 8 acrirepx^s /xeveaiveis. 
 
 ov \xiv [ms KTtvieis, ind ovtoi ix.6pcri.fx6s elfu. 
 
 il 2 
 
164 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 considered at large, it is the Word of God, I cannot 
 pretend to say. But of this I feel assured, that the 
 work is a step in the right direction, and tends to 
 reflection upon the insufficiency, the indefiniteness, or 
 self-contradictoriness of the popular scheme, if scheme 
 that can be called, which certain settled form has none ; 
 and indicates, as far as it goes, the true principles, on 
 which the subject ought to be examined. Of this also 
 I feel assured, that many of the objections hitherto 
 brought against it, are made in ignorance or prejudice, 
 — misapprehension of the main drift of the work, with 
 inversion of some of its arguments, and peremptory 
 assertions concerning the sense of passages in Holy 
 Writ, supposed, as thus understood, to overthrow the 
 doctrine of the treatise. 
 
 Some defenders of Plenary Inspiration insist that in 
 the " Confessions" my father fights with a shadow, an 
 imaginary combatant of his own devising. I do not 
 speak confidently on this deep and arduous theme : but 
 I own it is a question with me whether they who talk 
 thus have ever subjected their own notions to meta- 
 physical analysis, or have beheld them in that clear 
 keen light of mental science, in which Mr. Coleridge 
 was accustomed to contemplate all theological pro- 
 positions and schemes of doctrine addressed to the 
 speculative faculty. I cannot help inferring from the 
 remarks of these objectors both in negativing my 
 father's statements, and positively asserting the view 
 they substitute, that their scheme is, in substance and 
 real value, tantamount to that which, as exhibited in 
 these pages, appears to them a mere shadow ; that it 
 does, in fact, involve that mere mechanical dictation, 
 which they mean to reject : that it is either this or 
 nothing. Of such schemes my father plainly confessed 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 165 
 
 — " I cannot understand them." For do not all the 
 maintainers of theopneusty, — as maintainers of plenary 
 inspiration now call themselves, though the term cer- 
 tainly does not etymologically exclude my father's 
 view, — do not all the adversaries of the scheme which 
 my father proposed as really better, safer, more truly 
 satisfying to the heart and higher mind than any other 
 which has yet been formally stated, eagerly contend, 
 that both in regard to doctrine and moral sentiment, 
 and in regard to facts of history, the Sacred Writers 
 were infallibly guided so that they could not err ? Is 
 it conceivable that any human mind should be free to 
 use its own powers, express its own feelings, record its 
 own experience, while it is so divinely controlled as to 
 be kept from all possibility of error ? Is infallibility 
 possible exeept in the case of divine information super- 
 seding all the native powers and acquired abilities of 
 the mortal penman, all his personal emotions, reflec- 
 tions, and imaginations ? The faithful have light from 
 heaven shining in upon their human mind through 
 reason the power of divine light in the soul. In so 
 far as any Christian is regenerate his human will is 
 strengthened and sustained by the Holy Spirit. But in 
 this case there is no infallibity, — no exemption from the 
 possibility of error in thought, — of faultiness in act and 
 deed. By the reasoners to whom I allude not only are 
 the sacred historians pronounced infallible — the per- 
 sonages whom they describe as carrying forward the 
 designs of God are declared sacred too, even where no 
 comment is made upon their actions in the holy record. 
 Ehud, Jael, David, for all his acts except those which 
 are expressly blamed, are held up to honour or sheltered 
 from blame. To such a scheme we may well apply the 
 description of my father ; we may well say of it what he 
 
166 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 said of the supposed imaginary doctrine, that it " pe- 
 trifies at once the whole body of Holy Writ with all its 
 harmonies and symmetrical gradations" — " evacuates 
 of all sense and efficacy the sure and constant tradition, 
 that all the several books bound up together in our 
 precious family Bibles were composed in different and 
 widely distant ages, &c." Thus at least I think we 
 must regard it, if we attempt to place it before us in 
 any definite consistent form. If it be not a scheme of 
 divine information, superseding the individual mind, 
 how is it to be understood 1 
 
 My father's objections to the doctrine of Plenary 
 Inspiration as applied to the book of Job have been 
 treated as evincing an ignorance of the manner in which 
 it is held by competent defenders. Who has the folly, 
 they say, to suppose, that in an inspired narrative the 
 speeches of every speaker must be divine truth ? They 
 do not seem to ask themselves the question, Are the 
 speeches of Job's friends true and faithful expressions 
 of human thoughts and feelings, or are they not 1 If 
 they are such, why must we ascribe them to the infinite 
 and eternal Being as their author ? If my father 
 imagined that the speeches of Bildad, Eliphaz, and 
 Zophar were conceived by all maintainers of plenary 
 inspiration to convey religious truth, I should believe 
 him wrong. But this does not affect his argument in 
 its main drift. Is it not undeniable that his opponents 
 represent them as having flowed from no human heart, 
 but from the Spirit of Truth, informing the sacred 
 writer what to record ? Of this view he said that it 
 took away all sympathy and all example. 
 
 In the same spirit objectors have said : " Mr. Cole- 
 ridge is carried away by imagination and spends his 
 eloquence in declaiming against absurdities of his own 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 167 
 
 inventing. He knows neither what he means himself, 
 nor what they mean whom he opposes. Who ever 
 supposed that David was an automaton poet, mourner 
 and supplicant ? Of course he recorded his own expe- 
 riences, his own feelings : but the record was so over- 
 ruled that it became a full, perfect, and particular 
 prophecy of the Messiah." I confess this mode of 
 defending Plenary Inspiration looks to me very like 
 Charles Stuart's defence of his trusty servant Strafford, 
 —"faithful friend" that he was ! — that is to say an 
 abandonment of it to its fate. If David expressed his 
 own feelings, related his own troubles, hopes and fears 
 joys and sorrows, perils and deliverances, how can it be 
 affirmed that his mind was infallibly guided or that the 
 record in all its parts was the work of inspiration 1 Can 
 it be thought that the Holy Ghost did that which the 
 man David was able by human means to do himself? 
 And is it maintained that any record of human thoughts 
 and feelings will be free from the leaven of human 
 infirmity ? How can a reasoner who admits that David 
 wrote as a man might write, mourned as a man might 
 mourn, and uttered such strains of poetry as man 
 might compose, maintain the plenary inspiration of 
 Holy Writ in the sense objected to by my father? 
 That the events of David's life, his composition of the 
 Psalms included, were so ordered by Providence that 
 the whole was typical and prophetic of our Lord and 
 Saviour, this is just what my father would have 
 insisted on, and is a way of viewing the subject per- 
 fectly consonant with his whole conception of the divine 
 dealings with man, of the Inspiration of Scripture, and 
 of the grand plan of divine government from the 
 beginning of the world. If there are others who are 
 disposed to join in this charge that the author of the 
 
168 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 Confessions fights against a shadow, let them read 
 Dr. Whitby's General Preface on Inspiration of Scrip- 
 ture, and I think they will find the shadow to be a very 
 substantial body — no dead body as yet, though perhaps 
 in the way to become so. Let them remember too that 
 he anticipates this very objection at the beginning of 
 Letter IV. " Let nothings count for nothing, and the 
 dead bury the dead ! Who but such ever understood 
 the Tenet in this sense V — " In what sense then do 
 others understand it ? What other sense is conceivable 
 that does not destroy the doctrine which it proposes to 
 interpret ?" 
 
 But my father's view is decried as unsafe. What 
 security have we for any part of the faith in Christ, if 
 any part of what is contained in the Canon may be 
 human error rather than divine truth ? We may ask 
 in reply, what security can we have that faith is a 
 genuine insight, a saving assuredness of divine truth, 
 if such an external, superficial security as this is indis- 
 pensable 1 Such a security as this my father held most 
 dangerous to the interests of true religion : it is a 
 security like that of mandragora, which allays the heat 
 of fever by making the patient sleep to death. 
 
 I could not of course enter here into a general 
 defence of the treatise, even if I were prepared and 
 competent to the task ; but I will notice two instances 
 in which it has been charged with obvious error, on 
 the mere assumption that certain interpretations of 
 Scripture, by no means universally adopted amongst 
 noted divines, are unquestionably right. At page 77 
 the author cites, among other passages which he 
 conceives it not necessary to accept as the very word 
 of God, Acts v. 53. — Gal. iii. 19. {Heb. ii. 2. may refer 
 to the same thing or it may not.) This ordination 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 169 
 
 or delivery of the Law by Angels, which my father 
 looked upon as a piece of human tradition, like that 
 of Michael's dispute with the Devil about the body of 
 Moses, mentioned by St. Jude, is solemnly declared to 
 have been pre-announced in Psalm lxviii. 14 — that is 
 to say, a mere conjecture of some commentators is relied 
 on as if it were the sentence of a sovereign inappellable 
 authority, or were supported by a true Catholic consent. 
 The Psalmist only tells us that the Lord rode upon 
 Cherubim as in a triumphal chariot, and that in 
 this sublime equipage he descended on Mount Sinai. 
 The ordination of the Law by Angels is something 
 quite different from the attendance of Angels upon the 
 Lord, or their serving him as a chariot. To identify 
 the one with the other is most arbitrary — a sample of 
 the violent proceedings of Bible critics, who must 
 furnish some sort of explanation of every difficult 
 passage in Scripture in accordance with the dogmatism 
 of their school. To convey the Lord to Sinai — is to 
 ordain the law at Sinai — or implies it ! 
 
 So again, the Angel of the Lord, who called upon the 
 Israelites to curse bitterly the inhabitants of Meroz, 
 as we read in the Song of Deborah, is declared in the 
 same undoubting way to be none other than our 
 blessed Lord Himself: and on the strength of this 
 identification the curse is reckoned among those parts 
 of Holy Scripture, specified at p. 49, which are referred 
 by the sacred penman to a direct communication from 
 God ! Surely it is far safer, more consonant with the 
 tenor of the passage and with a reasonable view of the 
 whole subject, if we take this Angel of the Lord, 
 as some learned divines have done, for Barak, the 
 executor of divine wrath ; and it will hardly be main- 
 tained by any considerate person, that the Almighty 
 
170 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 always executes his wrath by divine or even by holy 
 instruments. The vengeance of the Lord may come, 
 yet wrath be upon those by whom it comes.* 
 
 Can the maintainers of such views as those here 
 objected to, be sure that they are really honourable to 
 the Father of Lights — really fitted to inspire and con- 
 firm that abiding sense and untheorising perception 
 of the supreme goodness and wisdom of God, which 
 is the deepest ground of belief in Him and fealty 
 toward Him, as our personal Liege Lord, and the 
 Moral Governor of the world 1 Can they be sure that 
 the horror with which they receive any suggestion to 
 the contrary does not proceed from attachment to a 
 particular theory concerning the Bible, which they 
 have been taught to identify with religion, — an attach- 
 ment that has its seat in the fancy and understanding, 
 rather than from genuine zeal for the stability of faith 
 in the Holy Spirit, and pious jealousy lest any belief, 
 conducive to the shining forth of his glory in the hearts 
 and minds of his rational creatures, should be under- 
 mined ? 
 
 * I have lately perused an interesting manuscript commenting 
 on the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, written by a decided 
 dissentient from the views of the author, but a fair and straight- 
 forward one, who sometimes, I think, mistakes the true import 
 of those views, but never wilfully misrepresents them. This 
 critique is written in so good a spirit, shows so much acuteness 
 and knowledge of Scripture, and enters upon the examination 
 of my father's little work in so elaborate and legitimate a 
 manner, that I cannot help wishing the author would revise and 
 publish it. I have no stronger desire with regard to the 
 Letters on Inspiration than that they should be subjected to 
 close and searching honest criticism. A trial not fairly conducted 
 can but throw darkness on the face of the subject. — Truth was 
 never yet advanced by untruthful methods, except indirectly in 
 the discussion which those Popish practices may lead to. 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 17 1 
 
 I shall cite in conclusion Adam Clarke's observation 
 on the event recorded in the fifth chapter of Judges. 
 This will serve to show that intelligent persons who 
 believe, or think they believe, the popular doctrine of 
 plenary inspiration have been unable to carry out such 
 a belief consistently, or to accept in good earnest the 
 servile bibliolatry, which maintains the moral blessed- 
 ness of Jael, and insists on exalting her as a heroine- 
 saint, actuated by the Spirit of holiness, a type of the 
 meek mother of our merciful Redeemer. 
 
 After reciting the circumstances of the assassination 
 under ten heads, he proceeds to say. "Now do we 
 not find in all this, bad faith, deceit, deep hypocrisy, 
 lying, breach of treaty, contempt of religious rites, 
 breach of the laws of hospitality, deliberate and un- 
 provoked murder 1 But what can be said in her 
 justification % All that can be said, and all that has 
 been said, is simply this : ' She might have been sincere 
 at first, but was afterwards divinely directed to do what 
 she did.' If this was so, she is sufficiently vindicated 
 by the fact ; for God has a right to dispose of the lives 
 of his creatures as he pleases : and probably the cup of 
 Sisera's iniquity was full, and his life already forfeited 
 to the justice of God. But does it appear that she 
 received any such direction from God 'I There is no 
 sufficient evidence of it : it is true that Deborah, a 
 prophetess, declares her blessed above women ; and this 
 seems to intimate that her conduct was pleasing to 
 God. If Deborah was inspired on this occasion, her 
 words are a presumptive proof that the act was right ; 
 unless we are to understand it as a simple declaration 
 of the reputation she should be held in among her 
 own sex.* But we do not find one word from Jael 
 
 * On verse 24 of the following chapter (Judges chap, v.) Adam 
 
172 NOTE ON THE CONFESSIONS 
 
 herself, stating how she was led to do an act repugnant 
 to her feelings as a woman, contrary to good faith, and a 
 breach of the rules of hospitality. Nor does the sacred 
 penman say one word to explain the case ; as in the 
 case of Ehud, he states the fact, and leaves his readers 
 to form their own opinion." 
 
 " To say as has been said in the case of Eglon, that 
 'Sisera was a public enemy, and any of the people 
 whom he oppressed might be justified in taking away 
 his life,' is a very dangerous position, as it refers one 
 of the most solemn acts of judgment and justice to 
 the caprice, or prejudice, or enthusiastic feeling of 
 every individual who may persuade himself, that he 
 is not only concerned in the business, but authorised 
 by God to take vengeance by his own hand. While 
 justice and law are in the world, God never will, as he 
 never did, abandon cases of this kind to the caprice, 
 prejudice, or party feeling of any man. The conduct 
 of Ehud and Jael are before the tribunal of God : I 
 will not justify, I dare not absolutely condemn ; there 
 I leave them, and entreat my readers to do the like." 
 
 Honest Adam, this cannot be : if you wished your 
 readers to form no judgment on the case, you should 
 not have gone so far in attempting to direct their 
 judgment. Upon such a survey the mind involuntarily 
 passes sentence on the deed, as presented to us in the 
 Bible narrative. Jael herself is before the tribunal of 
 
 Clarke lias the following note : "Blessed above women shall 
 Jael be. She shall be highly celebrated as a most heroic 
 woman ; all the Israelitish women shall glory in her. I do not 
 understand these words as expressive of the divine approbation 
 towards Jael. — The word bless, both in Hebrew and Greek, often 
 signifies to praise, to speak well of, to celebrate. This is most 
 probably the sense here." 
 
OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT. 173 
 
 God, and we dare not determine what his decision has 
 been on any human being rendering the last account — 
 no not even in the instance of Judas ; but the Jael of 
 Judges our heart and our reason cannot but condemn. 
 
 S. C. 
 
 N.B. — I feel assured that a passage, left without an 
 explanatory sentence, through the inadvertence of 
 haste, will be taken by the candid reader in the spirit 
 in which it was conceived. It will not be supposed 
 that, in that passage, any parallel, however slight or 
 partial, between a fallible human being and the sinless 
 Saviour of mankind was insinuated, or that anything 
 more was meant than an illustration, such as might 
 reverently be made, — a comparison not of persons, but 
 remotely of situation and circumstance. 
 
 S. C. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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