6. Whether the Seraphim Ardentes do not manifest their virtues by the way of vision and theory? and whether practice be not a sub-celestial and merely human virtue?
7. Whether the Vision Beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual representment to each individual Angel of his own present attainments and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?
8 and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to be damned at last, and the man never suspect it beforehand?
Learned Sir, my Friend,
Presuming on our long habits of friendship and emboldened further by your late liberal permission to avail myself of your correspondence, in case I want any knowledge, (which I intend to do when I have no Encyclopaedia or Lady's Magazine at hand to refer to in any matter of science,) I now submit to your enquiries the above Theological Propositions, to be by you defended, or oppugned, or both, in the Schools of Germany, whither I am told you are departing, to the utter dissatisfaction of your native Devonshire and regret of universal England; but to my own individual consolation if thro' the channel of your wished return, Learned Sir, my Friend, may be transmitted to this our Island, from those famous Theological Wits of Leipsic and Gottingen, any rays of illumination, in vain to be derived from the home growth of our English Halls and Colleges. Finally, wishing, Learned Sir, that you may see Schiller and swing in a wood (vide Poems) and sit upon a Tun, and eat fat hams of Westphalia,
I remain,
Your friend and docile Pupil to instruct
CHARLES LAMB.
1798.
To S. T. Coleridge.
[Lamb's last letter to Coleridge for two years. See note to the next letter.
Lamb's reading of Thomas Aquinas probably was at the base of his theses. William Godwin, in his "History of Knowledge, Learning and Taste in Great Britain," which had run through some years of the New Annual Register, cited, in 1786, a number of the more grotesque queries of the old Schoolmen. Mr. Kegan Paul suggested that Lamb went to Godwin for his examination paper; but I should think this very unlikely. Some of the questions hit Coleridge very hard.
This letter was first printed by Joseph Cottle in his Early Recollections, 1837, with the remark: "Mr. Coleridge gave me this letter, saying, 'These young visionaries will do each other no good.'" It marks an epoch in Lamb's life, since it brought about, or, at any rate, clinched, the only quarrel that ever subsisted between Coleridge and himself.