RICHARD CLAY AND SONS, LONDON AND BUNGAY.
Footnotes
[1]. That children, even at a much younger age than ten, do sometimes exercise their young minds to very ill purpose about these subtle metaphysical questions is probably within the experience of all who know anything about children, and it is amusingly illustrated by the following answer (which I have on the authority of an intimate friend) from a seven-years-old to his mother when blaming him for some misconduct: “Why did you born me then? I didn’t want to be borned. You should have asked me before you borned me.”
[2]. See the [Definitions] at the end of the book.
[3]. “Reason” is used, in these letters, in a sense for which Coleridge (I believe) preferred to use “Understanding.” But as long as we have a verb “reason,” commonly used of mathematical, logical, and ordinary processes of arguing, so long it will be inexpedient, in a popular treatise, to use the word in any but its popular sense. Perhaps some might give the name of “higher Reason” to what I call Imagination.
[4]. Faith is “desire (approved by the Conscience) of which we imagine the fulfilment, while putting doubt at a distance”: see the [Definitions] at the end of the volume.
[5]. Some passages in the Old Testament (notably Isaiah xlv. 7) state that God “created evil;” and results attributed by one author to Satan (1 Chron. xxi. 1) are attributed by another to “the anger of the Lord” (2 Sam. xxiv. 1). Much of course depends upon the meaning of the word “evil;” and I am knowingly guilty of talking absurdly when I first define evil as “that which is not in accordance with God’s intention,” and then proceed to say that “God did not create evil.” But all people who discourse philosophically on this subject talk far more absurdly than I do: for I am consciously, but they are unconsciously, illogical. The belief that God “created evil,” whether held or not by the authors of any of the books of the Old Testament, is against the whole tenour of the teaching of Christ.
[6].
“Naught is on earth, O God, without thy hand,
Save deeds of folly wrought by evil men.”