tective measure ?" The present Ministry exists on the weakness and desperate character of the Opposition. The sober part of the nation are afraid of the latter getting into power, lest they should redeem some of their pledges.

THE

2

APRIL 29, 1823.

Church of Rome.

1

'HE present adherents of the Church of Rome are not, in my judgment, Catholics. We are the Catholics. We can prove that we hold the doctrines of the primitive Church for the first three hundred years. The Council of Trent made the Papists what they are. A foreign Romish bishop has declared that the Protestants of his acquaintance were more like what he conceived the enlightened Catholics to have been before the Council of Trent than the best of the latter in his days. Perhaps you will say, this bishop was not a good Catholic. I cannot answer for that. The course of Christianity and the Christian Church may not unaptly be likened to a mighty river, which filled a wide channel, and bore along with its waters mud, and gravel, and weeds, till it met a great rock in the middle of its stream. By some means or other, the water flows purely, and separated from the filth, in a deeper and narrower course on one side of the rock, and the refuse of the dirt and troubled water goes off on the other in a broader current, and then cries out, "We are the river!"

A person said to me lately, "But you will, for civility's sake, call them Catholics, will you not ?" I answered, that I would not; for I would not tell a lie upon any, much less upon so solemn an occasion. The adherents of the Church of Rome, I repeat, are not Catholic Christians. If they are, then it follows that we Protestants are heretics and schismatics, as, indeed, the Papists very logically, from their own premisses, call us. And " Roman Catholics" makes no difference. Catholicism is not capable of degrees or local

'See " Aids to Reflection," p. 180, note.-H. N. C.

2 Mr. Coleridge named him, but the name was strange to me, and I have been unable to recover it.-H. N. C.

apportionments. There can be but one body of Catholics, To talk strictly of Irish or Scotch Roman

ex vi termini.

Catholics is a mere absurdity.

It is common to hear it said, that, if the legal disabilities are removed, the Romish Church will lose ground in this country. I think the reverse; the Romish religion is, or, in certain hands, is capable of being made, so flattering to the passions and self-delusion of men, that it is impossible to say how far it would spread, amongst the higher orders of society especially, if the secular disadvantages now attending its profession were removed.'

THE

APRIL 30, 1823.

Zendavesta.-Pantheism and Idolatry.

HE Zendavesta must, I think, have been copied in parts from the writings of Moses. In the description of the creation, the first chapter of Genesis is taken almost literally, except that the sun is created before the light, and then the herbs and the plants after the sun; which are precisely the two points they did not understand, and therefore altered as errors."

There are only two acts of creation, properly so called, in the Mosaic account-the material universe, and man. The intermediate acts seem more as the results of secondary causes, or, at any rate, of a modification of prepared materials.

Pantheism and idolatry naturally end in each other; for

1 Here, at least, the prophecy has been fulfilled. The wisdom of our ancestors, in the reign of King William III., would have been jealous of the daily increase in the numbers of the Romish Church in England, of which every attentive observer must be aware. See Sancti Dominici Pallium, in vol. ii., p. 80, of Mr. Coleridge's Poems.-H. N. C. The reference is, here as elsewhere, to the collected edition of 1834, in 3 vols.

2 The Zend, or Zendavesta, is the sacred book ascribed to Zoroaster, or Zerdusht, the founder or reformer of the Magian religion. The modern edition or paraphrase of this work, called the Sadda, written in the Persian of the day, was, I believe, composed about three hundred years ago.-H. N. C.

The Judaic religion is the exact

all extremes meet.

medium, the true compromise.

MAY 1, 1823.

Difference between Stories of Dreams and Ghosts.-Phantom Portrait.Witch of Endor.- Socinianism.

THE

HERE is a great difference in the credibility to be attached to stories of dreams and stories of ghosts. Dreams have nothing in them which are absurd and nonsensical; and, though most of the coincidences may be readily explained by the diseased system of the dreamer, and the great and surprising power of association, yet it is impossible to say whether an inner sense does not really exist in the mind, seldom developed, indeed, but which may have a power of presentiment.1 All the external senses have their correspondents in the mind; the eye can see an object before it is distinctly apprehended;—why may there not be a correspnding power in the soul? The power of prophecy might have been merely a spiritual excitation of this dormant faculty. Hence you will observe that the Hebrew seers sometimes seem to have required music, as in the instance of Elisha before Jehoram :- But now bring me a minstrel. And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon

66

'See this point suggested and reasoned with extraordinary subtlety in the third essay (marked C), in the Appendix to the "Statesman's Manual," or first "Lay Sermon," p. 19, &c. One beautiful paragraph I will venture to quote:-" Not only may we expect that men of strong religious feelings, but little religious knowledge, will occasionally be tempted to regard such occurrences as supernatural visitations; but it ought not to surprise us if such dreams should sometimes be confirmed by the event, as though they had actually possessed a character of divination. For who shall decide how far a perfect reminiscence of past experiences (of many, perhaps, that had escaped our reflex consciousness at the time)-who shall determine to what extent this reproductive imagination, unsophisticated by the will, and undistracted by intrusions from the senses, may or may not be concentred and sublimed into foresight and presentiment? There would be nothing herein either to foster superstition on the one hand, or to justify contemptuous disbelief on the other. Incredulity is but Credulity seen from behind, bowing and nodding assent to the Habitual and the Fashionable."-H. N. C.

him." Everything in nature has a tendency to move in cycles; and it would be a miracle if, out of such myriads of cycles moving concurrently, some coincidences did not take place. No doubt, many such take place in the daytime; but then our senses drive out the remembrance of them, and render the impression hardly felt; but when we sleep, the mind acts without interruption. Terror and the heated imagination will, even in the daytime, create all sorts of features, shapes, and colours out of a simple object possessing none of them in reality.

But ghost stories are absurd. Whenever a real ghost appears, by which I mean some man or woman dressed up to frighten another, if the supernatural character of the apparition has been for a moment believed, the effects on the spectator have always been most terrible,-convulsion, idiocy, madness, or even death on the spot. Consider the awful descriptions in the Old Testament of the effects of a spiritual presence on the prophets and seers of the Hebrews, the terror, the exceeding great dread, the utter loss of all animal power. But in our common ghost stories, you always find that the seer, after a most appalling apparition, as you are to believe, is quite well the next day. Perhaps, he may have a headache; but that is the outside of the effect produced. Alston, a man of genius, and the best painter yet produced by America, when he was in England, told me an anecdote which confirms what I have been saying. It was, I think, in the University of Cambridge, near Boston, that a certain youth took it into his wise head to endeavour to convert a Tom-Painish companion of his by appearing as a ghost before him. He accordingly dressed himself up in the usual way, having previously extracted the ball from the pistol which always lay near the head of his friend's bed. Upon first awaking, and seeing the apparition, the youth who was to be frightened, A., very coolly looked his companion the ghost in the face, and said, "I know you. This is a good joke; but you see I am not frightened. Now you may vanish!" The ghost stood still. "Come," said A., " that is enough.

1 2 Kings, iii. 15, and see 1 Sam. x. 5.—H. N. C.

I shall get angry. Away!" Still the ghost moved not. By," ejaculated A., "if you do not in three minutes go away, I'll shoot you." He waited the time, deliberately levelled the pistol, fired, and, with a scream at the immobility of the figure, became convulsed, and afterwards died. The very instant he believed it to be a ghost, his human nature fell before it.

1

"Last Thursday my uncle, S. T. C., dined with us, and several men came to meet him. I have heard him more brilliant, but he was very fine, and delighted every one very much. It is impossible to carry off, or commit to paper, his long trains of argument; indeed, it is not always possible to understand them, he lays the foundation so deep, and views every question in so original a manner. Nothing can be finer than the principles which he lays down in morals and religion. His deep study of Scripture is very astonishing; the rest of the party were but as children in his hands, not merely in general views of theology, but in nice verbal criticism. He thinks it clear that St. Paul did not write the Epistle to the Hebrews, but that it must have been the work of some Alexandrian Greek, and he thinks Apollos. It seemed to him a desirable thing for Christianity that it should have been written by some other person than St. Paul; because, its inspiration being unquestioned, it added another independent teacher and expounder of the faith.

"We fell upon ghosts, and he exposed many of the stories physically and metaphysically. He seemed to think it impossible that you should really see with the bodily eye what was impalpable, unless it were a shadow; and if what you fancied you saw with the bodily eye was in fact only an impression on the imagination, then you were seeing something out of your senses, and your testimony was full of uncertainty. He observed how uniformly, in all the bestattested stories of spectres, the appearance might be accounted for from the disturbed state of the mind or body of the seer, as in the instances of Dion and Brutus. Upon

1 What follows in the text within commas was written about this time, and communicated to me by Mr. Justice Coleridge.-H. N. C.

D