recommended to the present students of theology in our estaplished schools, a few passages as thoroughly Pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the established Church, as the following sentences in the concluding page of Spinoza's Ethics:-Deinde quó mens hoc amore divino seu beatitudine magis gaudet, eó plus intelligit, eó majorem in affectus habet potentiam, et eó minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur: atque adeó ex eo, quód mens hoc amore divino seu beatitudine gaudet, potestatem habet libidines coercendi, nemo beatitudine gaudet quia affectus coercuit; sed contra potestas libidines coercendi ex ipsâ beatitudine oritur. With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted that I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I know what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in the understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions and actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one individual? Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves Him, be his speculative opinions what they may : and whether in any given instance certain opinions, be they unbelief or misbelief, are compatible with a sincere love of God, God only can know. But this I have said, and shall continue to say that if the doctrines, the sum of which I believe to constitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity, then Unitarianism is not, and rice versa and that in speaking theologically and impersonally, i.e., of Psilanthropism and Theanthropism as schemes of belief, without reference to individuals who profess either the one or the other, it will be absurd to use a different language as long as it is the dictate of common sense that two opposites cannot properly be called by the same name. I should feel no offence if a Unitarian applied the same to me, any more than if he were to say that two and two being four, four and four must be eight: : This has been my object, and this alone can be my defenceand O! that with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude! the unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having earnestly endeavoured to kindle young minds, and to guard them against the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of Christianity, as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church, though not discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that religion passes out of the ken of reason only where the eye of reason has reached its own horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation: even as the day softens away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the upraised eye views only the starry heaven which manifests tself alone and the outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the awful depth, though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial Word that re-affirmeth it from Eternity to Eternity, whose choral echo is the universe. ΘΕΩ, ΜΟΝΩ. ΔΟΞΑ. THE STATESMAN'S MANUAL; OR, THE BIBLE THE BEST GUIDE TO POLITICAL SKILL AND FORESIGHT: A Lay Sermon, ADDRESSED TO THE HIGHER CLASSES OF SOCIETY, WITH AN APPENDIX, CONTAINING COMMENTS AND ESSAYS CONNECTED WITH THE STUDY OF THE INSPIRED WRITINGS. BY S. T. COLERIDGE, Esq. Ad isthæc quæso vos, qualiacunque primo videantur aspectu, attendite, ut qui vobis forsan insanire videar, saltem quibus insaniam rationibus cognoscatis." LONDON. |