And after a great deal to the same effect, he proceeds—
‘The humblest and least educated of our countrymen must have wilfully neglected the inestimable privileges secured to all alike, if he has not himself found, if he has not from his own personal experience discovered, the sufficiency of the Scriptures in all knowledge requisite for a right performance of his duty as a man and a Christian. Of the labouring classes, who in all countries form the great majority of the inhabitants, more than this is not demanded, more than this is not perhaps generally desirable.’—‘They are not sought for in public counsel, nor need they be found where politic sentences are spoken. It is enough if every one is wise in the working of his own craft: so best will they maintain the state of the world.’ p. 7.
Now, if this is all that is necessary or desirable for the people to know, we can see little difference between the doctrine of the Lay Sermon, and ‘that complete system of papal imposture, which inters the Scriptures in a dead language, and commands its vassals to take for granted what it forbids them to ascertain.’ If a candidate is to start for infallibility, we, for our parts, shall give our casting vote for the successor of St. Peter, rather than for Mr. Coleridge. The Bible, we believe, when rightly understood, contains no set of rules for making the labouring classes mere ‘workers in brass or in stone,’—‘hewers of wood or drawers of water,’ each wise in his own craft. Yet it is by confining their inquiries and their knowledge to such vocations, and excluding them from any share in politics, philosophy, and theology, ‘that the state of the world is best upheld.’ Such is the exposition of our Lay-Divine. Such is his application of it. Why then does he blame the Catholics for acting on this principle—for deducing the practical consequence from the acknowledged premise? Great as is our contempt for the delusions of the Romish Church, it would have been still greater, if they had opened the sacred volume to the poor and illiterate; had told them that it contained the most useful knowledge for all conditions and for all circumstances of life, public and private; and had then instantly shut the book in their faces, saying, it was enough for them to be wise in their own calling and to leave the study and interpretation of the Scriptures to their betters—to Mr. Coleridge and his imaginary audience. The Catholic Church might have an excuse for what it did in the supposed difficulty of understanding the Scriptures, their doubts and ambiguities, and ‘wax-like pliability to all occasions and humours.’ But Mr. Coleridge has no excuse; for he says, they are plain to all capacities, high and low together. ‘The road of salvation,’ he says, ‘is for us a high road, and the way-farer, though simple, need not err therein.’ And he accordingly proceeds to draw up a provisional bill of indictment, and to utter his doubtful denunciations against us as a nation, for the supposed neglect of the inestimable privileges, secured alike to all, and for the lights held out to all for ‘maintaining the state’ of their country in the precepts and examples of Holy Writ; when, all of a sudden, his eye encountering that brilliant auditory which his pen had conjured up, the Preacher finds out, that the only use of the study of the Scriptures for the rest of the people, is to learn that they have no occasion to study them at all—‘so best shall they maintain the state of the world.’ If Mr. Coleridge has no meaning in what he writes, he had better not write at all: if he has any meaning, he contradicts himself. The truth is, however, as it appears to us, that the whole of this Sermon is written to sanction the principle of Catholic dictation, and to reprobate that diffusion of free inquiry—that difference of private, and ascendancy of public opinion, which has been the necessary consequence, and the great benefit of the Reformation. That Mr. Coleridge himself is as squeamish in guarding his Statesman’s Manual from profanation as any Popish priest can be in keeping the Scriptures from the knowledge of the Laity, will be seen from the following delicate morceau, which occurs, p. 44.
‘When I named this Essay a Sermon, I sought to prepare the inquirers after it for the absence of all the usual softenings suggested by worldly prudence, of all compromise between truth and courtesy. But not even as a Sermon would I have addressed the present Discourse to a promiscuous audience; and for this reason I likewise announced it in the title-page, as exclusively ad clerum, i.e. (in the old and wide sense of the word) to men of clerkly acquirements, of whatever profession. I would that the greater part of our publications could be thus directed, each to its appropriate class of readers.[[6]] But this cannot be! For among other odd burrs and kecksies, the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity, we have now a Reading Public—as strange a phrase, methinks, as ever forced a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of Meditation; and yet no fiction! For our readers have, in good truth, multiplied exceedingly, and have waxed proud. It would require the intrepid accuracy of a Colquhoun to venture at the precise number of that vast company only, whose heads and hearts are dieted at the two public ordinaries of Literature, the circulating libraries and the periodical press. But what is the result? Does the inward man thrive on this regimen? Alas! if the average health of the consumers may be judged of by the articles of largest consumption; if the secretions may be conjectured from the ingredients of the dishes that are found best suited to their palates; from all that I have seen, either of the banquet or the guests, I shall utter my Profaccia with a desponding sigh. From a popular philosophy and a philosophic populace, good sense deliver us!’
If it were possible to be serious after a passage like this, we might ask, what is to hinder a convert of ‘the church of superstition’ from exclaiming in like manner, ‘From a popular theology, and a theological populace, Good Lord deliver us! ‘Mr. Coleridge does not say—will he say—that as many sects and differences of opinion in religion have not risen up, in consequence of the Reformation, as in philosophy or politics, from ‘the misgrowth of our luxuriant activity?’ Can any one express a greater disgust, (approaching to nausea), at every sect and separation from the Church of England, which he sometimes, by an hyperbole of affectation, affects to call the Catholic Church? There is something, then, worse than ‘luxuriant activity,’—the palsy of death; something worse than occasional error,—systematic imposture; something worse than the collision of differing opinions,—the suppression of all freedom of thought and independent love of truth, under the torpid sway of an insolent and selfish domination, which makes use of truth and falsehood equally as tools of its own aggrandisement and the debasement of its vassals, and always must do so, without the exercise of public opinion, and freedom of conscience, as its control and counter-check. For what have we been labouring for the last three hundred years? Would Mr. Coleridge, with impious hand, turn the world ‘twice ten degrees askance,’ and carry us back to the dark ages? Would he punish the reading public for their bad taste in reading periodical publications which he does not like, by suppressing the freedom of the press altogether, or destroying the art of printing? He does not know what he means himself. Perhaps we can tell him. He, or at least those whom he writes to please, and who look ‘with jealous leer malign’ at modern advantages and modern pretensions, would give us back all the abuses of former times, without any of their advantages; and impose upon us, by force or fraud, a complete system of superstition without faith, of despotism without loyalty, of error without enthusiasm, and all the evils, without any of the blessings, of ignorance. The senseless jargon which Mr. Coleridge has let fall on this subject, is the more extraordinary, inasmuch as he declares, in an early part of his Sermon, that ‘Religion and Reason are their own evidence;’—a position which appears to us ‘fraught with potential infidelity’ quite as much as Unitarianism, or the detestable plan for teaching reading and writing, and a knowledge of the Scriptures, without the creed or the catechism of the Church of England. The passage in which this sweeping clause is introduced en passant, is worth quoting, both as it is very nonsensical in itself, and as it is one of the least nonsensical in the present pamphlet.
‘In the infancy of the world, signs and wonders were requisite, in order to startle and break down that superstition, idolatrous in itself, and the source of all other idolatry, which tempts the natural man to seek the true cause and origin of public calamities in outward circumstances, persons and incidents: in agents, therefore, that were themselves but surges of the same tide, passive conductors of the one invisible influence, under which the total host of billows, in the whole line of successive impulse, swell and roll shoreward; there finally, each in its turn, to strike, roar, and be dissipated.
‘But with each miracle worked there was a truth revealed, which thenceforward was to act as its substitute: And if we think the Bible less applicable to us on account of the miracles, we degrade ourselves into mere slaves of sense and fancy; which are, indeed, the appointed medium between earth and heaven, but for that very cause stand in a desirable relation to spiritual truth then only, when, as a mere and passive medium, they yield a free passage to its light. It was only to overthrow the usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously appealed to. Reason and Religion are their own evidence. The natural sun is, in this respect, a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapours of the night-season, and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its interception.’ p. 12.
Here is a very pretty Della Cruscan image: and we really think it a pity, that Mr. Coleridge ever quitted that school of poetry to grapple with the simplicity of nature, or to lose himself in the depths of philosophy. His illustration is pretty, but false. He treats the miracles recorded in the Scriptures, with more than heretical boldness, as mere appeals to ‘sense and fancy,’ or to ‘the natural man,’ to counteract the impressions of sense and fancy. But, for the light of Heaven to have been like the light of day in this respect, the Sun ought to have called up other vapours opposite, as mirrors or pageants to reflect its light, dimmed by the intermediate vapours, instead of chasing the last away. We criticize the simile, because we are sure higher authority will object to the doctrine. We might challenge Mr. Coleridge to point out a single writer, Catholic, Protestant or Sectarian, whose principles are not regarded as potential infidelity by the rest, that does not consider the miraculous attestation of certain revealed doctrines as proofs of their truth, independently of their internal evidence. They are a distinct and additional authority. Reason and Religion are no more the same in this respect, than ocular demonstration and oral testimony are the same. Neither are they opposed to one another, any more. We believe in credible witnesses. We believe in the word of God, when we have reason to suppose, that we hear his voice in the thunder of his power: but we cannot, consistently with the principles of reason or of sound faith, suppose him to utter what is contrary to reason, though it may be different from it. Revelation utters a voice in the silence of reason, but does not contradict it: it throws a light on objects too distant for the unassisted eye to behold. But it does not pervert our natural organs of vision, with respect to objects within their reach. Reason and religion are therefore consistent, but not the same, nor equally self-evident. All this, we think, is clear and plain. But Mr. Coleridge likes to darken and perplex every question of which he treats. So, in the passage above quoted, he affirms that Religion is its own evidence, to confound one class of readers; and he afterwards asserts that Reason is founded on faith, to astonish another. He proceeds indeed by the differential method in all questions; and his chief care, in which he is tolerably successful, is not to agree with any set of men or opinions. We pass over his Jeremiad on the French Revolution,—his discovery that the state of public opinion has a considerable influence on the state of public affairs, particularly in turbulent times,—his apology for imitating St. Paul by quoting Shakespear, and many others: for if we were to collect all the riches of absurdity in this Discourse, we should never have done. But there is one passage, upon which he has plainly taken so much pains, that we must give it.
‘A calm and detailed examination of the facts, justifies me to my own mind, in hazarding the bold assertion, that the fearful blunders of the late dread Revolution, and all the calamitous mistakes of its opponents, from its commencement even to the era of loftier principles and wiser measures (an era, that began with, and ought to be named from, the war of the Spanish and Portuguese insurgents), every failure, with all its gloomy results, may be unanswerably deduced, from the neglect of some maxim or other that had been established by clear reasoning and plain facts, in the writings of Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavel, Bacon, or Harrington. These are red-letter names, even in the almanacks of worldly wisdom: and yet I dare challenge all the critical benches of infidelity, to point out any one important truth, any one efficient practical direction or warning, which did not preexist, and for the most part in a sounder, more intelligible, and more comprehensive form IN THE BIBLE.’
‘In addition to this, the Hebrew legislator, and the other inspired poets, prophets, historians and moralists, of the Jewish church, have two immense advantages in their favour. First, their particular rules and prescripts flow directly and visibly from universal principles, as from a fountain: they flow from principles and ideas that are not so properly said to be confirmed by reason, as to be reason itself! Principles, in act and procession, disjoined from which, and from the emotions that inevitably accompany the actual intuition of their truth, the widest maxims of prudence are like arms without hearts, muscles without nerves. Secondly, from the very nature of these principles, as taught in the Bible, they are understood, in exact proportion as they are believed and felt. The regulator is never separated from the main spring. For the words of the Apostle are literally and philosophically true: We (that is the human race) live by faith. Whatever we do or know, that in kind is different from the brute creation, has its origin in a determination of the reason to have faith and trust in itself. This, its first act of faith, is scarcely less than identical with its own being. Implicité, it is the copula—it contains the possibility—of every position, to which there exists any correspondence in reality. It is itself, therefore, the realizing principle, the spiritual substratum of the whole complex body of truths. This primal act of faith is enunciated in the word, God: a faith not derived from experience, but its ground and source; and without which, the fleeting chaos of facts would no more form experience, than the dust of the grave can of itself make a living man. The imperative and oracular form of the inspired Scripture, is the form of reason itself, in all things purely rational and moral.