"These things I could not forbear to write. For the Light within me, that is, my Reason and Conscience, does assure me, that the Ancient and Apostolic Faith according to the historical meaning thereof, and in the literal sense of the Creed, is solid and true: and that Familism[67] in its fairest form and under whatever disguise, is a smooth tale to seduce the simple from their Allegiance to Christ."
Henry More.[68]
[65] In a leaf of corrections to the text of the first edition Coleridge directed that "prerogative as moral beings" should be read here. The correction seems to have been overlooked by Coleridge's editors.—Ed.
[66] On this principle alone is it possible to justify capital, or ignominious punishments (or indeed any punishment not having the reformation of the Criminal, as one of its objects). Such punishments, like those inflicted on Suicides, must be regarded as posthumous: the wilful extinction of the moral and personal life being, for the purposes of punitive Justice, equivalent to a wilful destruction of the natural life. If the speech of Judge Burnet to the horse-stealer (You are not hanged for stealing a horse; but, that horses may not be stolen) can be vindicated at all, it must be on this principle; and not on the all-unsettling scheme of Expedience, which is the anarchy of Morals.
[67] The religion of the Dutch sect called the "Family of Love," originated by Henry Nicholas about 1540.—Ed.
[68] More's 'Mystery of Godliness.'—Ed.
APHORISMS ON SPIRITUAL RELIGION.
And here it will not be impertinent to observe, that what the eldest Greek Philosophy entitled the Reason (ΝΟΥΣ) and Ideas, the philosophic Apostle names the Spirit and Truths spiritually discerned: while to those who in the pride of learning or in the over-weening meanness of modern metaphysics decry the doctrine of the Spirit in Man and its possible communion with the Holy Spirit, as vulgar enthusiasm, I submit the following sentences from a Pagan philosopher, a nobleman and a minister of state—"Ita dico, Lucili! sacer intra nos Spiritus sedet, malorum bonorumque nostrorum observator et custos. Hic prout a nobis tractatus est, ita nos ipse tractat. Bonus vir sine Deo nemo est." Seneca, Epist. xli.