The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3. Coleridge Samuel Taylor
all times, be not bound upon the peril of damnation to know and believe expressly, yet whosoever will be saved must believe them at least implicite, and in generality, as that Joseph, Mary, and Jesus fled into Egypt.
Merciful Heaven! Eternal misery and the immitigable wrath of God, and the inextinguishable fire of hell amid devils, parricides, and haters of God and all goodness – this is the verdict which a Protestant divine passes against the man, who though sincerely believing the whole Nicene creed and every doctrine and precept taught in the New Testament, and living accordingly, should yet have convinced himself that the first chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke were not parts of the original Gospels!
Ib. p.77.
So in the beginning, Nestorius did not err, touching the unity of Christ's person in the diversity of the natures of God and man; but only disliked that Mary should be called the mother of God: which form of speaking when some demonstrated to be very fitting and unavoidable, if Christ were God and man in the unity of the same person, he chose rather to deny the unity of Christ's person than to acknowledge his temerity and rashness in reproving that form of speech, which the use of the church had anciently received and allowed.
A false charge grounded on a misconception of the Syriac terms. Nestorius was perfectly justifiable in his rejection of the epithet
Ib. c.20. p.110.
Thus, then, the Fathers did sometimes, when they had particular occasions to remember the Saints, and to speak of them, by way of apostrophe, turn themselves unto them, and use words of doubtful compellation, praying them, if they have any sense of these inferior things, to be remembrancers to God for them.
The distinct gradations of the process, by which commemoration and rhetorical apostrophes passed finally into idolatry, supply an analogy of mighty force against the heretical hypothesis of the modern Unitarians. Were it true, they would have been able to have traced the progress of the Christolatry from the lowest sort of Christodulia with the same historical distinctness against the universal Church, that the Protestants have that of hierolatry against the Romanists. The gentle and soft censures which our divines during the reign of the Stuarts pass on the Roman Saint worship, or hieroduly, as an inconvenient superstition, must needs have alarmed the faithful adherents to the Protestantism of Edward VI and the surviving exiles of bloody Queen Mary's times, and their disciples.
Ib. p.111.
The miracles that God wrought in times past by them made many to attribute more to them than was fit, as if they had a generality of presence, knowledge, and working; but the wisest and best advised never durst attribute any such thing unto them.
To a truly pious mind awfully impressed with the surpassing excellency of God's ineffable love to fallen man, in the revelation of himself to the inner man through the reason and conscience by the spiritual light and substantiality – (for the conscience is to the spirit or reason what the understanding is to the sense, a substantiative power); this consequence of miracles is so fearful, that it cannot but redouble his zeal against that fashion of modern theologists which would convert miracles from a motive to attention and solicitous examination, and at best from a negative condition of revelation, into the positive foundation of Christian faith. Ib.c.22. p.116.
But if this be as vile a slander as ever Satanist devised, the Lord reward them that have been the authors and advisers of it according to their works.
O no! no! this the good man did not utter from his heart, but from his passion. A vile and wicked slander it was and is. O may God have turned the hearts of those who uttered it, or may it be among their unknown sins done in ignorance, for which the infinite merits of Christ may satisfy! I am most assured that if Dr. Field were now alive, or if any one had but said this to him, he would have replied – "I thank thee, brother, for thy Christian admonition. Add thy prayer, and pray God to forgive me my inconsiderate zeal!"
Ib. c. 23. p. 119.
For what rectitude is due to the specifical act of hating God? or what rectitude is it capable of?
Is this a possible act to any man understanding by the word God what we mean by God?
Ib. p. 129.
It is this complicated dispute, as to the origin and permission of evil, which supplies to atheism its most plausible, because its only moral, arguments; but more especially to that species of atheism which existed in Greece in the form of polytheism, admitting moral and intelligent shapers and governors of the world, but denying an intelligent ground, or self-conscious Creator of the universe; their gods being themselves the offspring of chaos and necessity, that is, of matter and its essential laws or properties. The Leibnitzian distinction of the Eternal Reason, or nature of God,
Ib. c.27. p.140.
The seventh is the heresy of Sabellius, which he saith was revived by Servetus. So it was indeed, that Servetus revived in our time the damnable heresy of Sabellius, long since condemned in the first ages of the Church. But what is that to us? How little approbation he found amongst us, the just and honourable proceeding against him at Geneva will witness to all posterity.
Shocking as this act must and ought to be to all Christians at present; yet this passage and a hundred still stronger from divines and Church letters contemporary with Calvin, prove Servetus' death not to be Calvin's guilt especially, but the common opprobrium of all European Christendom, – of the Romanists whose laws the Senate of Geneva followed, and from fear of whose reproaches (as if Protestants favoured heresy) they executed them, – and of the Protestant churches who applauded the act and returned thanks to Calvin and the Senate for it.25
Ib.
See
Tuo judicio prorsus assentior. Affirmu etiam vestros magistratus juste fecisse, quod hominem blasphemum, re ordine judicata, interfecerunt.
14th Oct. 1554. – Ed.