Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, March 1885. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
no real bearing on the subject. The little we know as to the origin and history of many of the books of the Bible, of “the time of the formation and closing of the canon,” of its selectors and compilers, is all opposed to such a theory. Moreover, the very nature of the claim stultifies itself when examined. For “how can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expression?”
But if the tenet of verbal inspiration has been so long received and acted on “by Jew and Christian, Greek, Roman, and Protestant, why can it not now be received?” “For every reason,” answered Coleridge, “that makes me prize and revere these Scriptures; – prize them, love them, revere them beyond all other books.” Because such a tenet “falsifies at once the whole body of holy writ, with all its harmonious and symmetrical gradations.” It turns “the breathing organism into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice,” which no man hath uttered, and no human heart hath conceived. It evacuates of all sense and efficacy the fact that the Bible is a Divine literature of many books, “composed in different and widely distant ages under the greatest diversity of circumstances and degrees of light and information.” So he argues in language I have partly quoted and partly summarised. And then he breaks forth into a magnificent passage about the song of Deborah, a passage of rare eloquence with all its desultoriness, but which will hardly bear separation from the context. The wail of the Jewish heroine's maternal and patriotic love is heard under all her cursing and individualism – mercy rejoicing against judgment. In the very intensity of her primary affections is found the rare strength of her womanhood; and sweetness lies near to fierceness. Such passages probably give us a far better idea of the occasional glory of the old man's talk as “he sat on the brow of Highgate Hill,” than any poor fragments of it that have been preserved. Direct and to the point it may never have been, but at times it rose into an organ swell with snatches of unutterable melody and power.
(3.) But Coleridge contributed still another factor to the impulsion of religious thought in his time. He did much to revive the historic idea of the Church as an intellectual as well as a spiritual commonwealth. Like many other ideas of our older national life this had been depressed and lost sight of during the eighteenth century. The Evangelical party, deficient in learning generally, was especially deficient in breadth of historical knowledge. Milner's History, if nothing else, serves to point this conclusion. The idea of the Church as the mother of philosophy and arts and learning, as well as the nurse of faith and piety, was unknown. It was a part of the Evangelical creed, moreover, to leave aside as far as possible mere political and intellectual interests. These belonged to the world, and the main business of the religious man was with religion as a personal affair, of vast moment, but outside all other affairs. Coleridge helped once more to bring the Church as he did the gospel into larger room as a great spiritual power of manifold influence.
This volume On the Constitution of Church and State according to the idea of each was published in 1830, and was the last volume which the author himself published. The Catholic Emancipation question had greatly excited the public mind, and some friend had appealed to Coleridge expressing astonishment that he should be in opposition to the proposed measure. He replied that he is by no means unfriendly to Catholic emancipation, while yet “scrupling the means proposed for its attainment.” And in order to explain his difficulties he composed a long letter to his friend which is really an essay or treatise, beginning with the fundamental principles of his philosophy and ending with a description of antichrist. The essay is one of the least satisfactory of his compositions from a mere literary point of view, and is not even mentioned by Mr. Traill in his recent monograph. But amidst all its involutions and ramblings it is stimulating and full of thought on a subject which almost more than any other is liable to be degraded by unworthy and sectarian treatment. Here, as everywhere in Coleridge's writings, we are brought in contact with certain large conceptions which far more than cover the immediate subject in hand.
It has been sometimes supposed that Coleridge's theory of the Church merely revived the old theory of the Elizabethan age so powerfully advocated by Hooker and specially espoused by Dr. Arnold in later times. According to this theory the Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. But Coleridge's special theory is different from this, although allied to it. He distinguishes the Christian Church as such from any national church. The former is spiritual and catholic, the latter institutional and local. The former is opposed to the “world,” the latter is an estate of the realm. The former has nothing to do with states and kingdoms. It is in this respect identical with the “spiritual and invisible church known only to the Father of Spirits,” and the compensating counterpoise of all that is of the world. It is, in short, the Divine aggregate of what is really Divine in all Christian communities, and more or less ideally represented “in every true church.” A national church again is the incorporation of all the learning and knowledge – intellectual and spiritual – in a country. Every nation in order to its true health and civilisation requires not only a land-owning or permanent class along with a commercial, industrial, and progressive class, but moreover, an educative class to represent all higher knowledge, “to guard the treasures of past civilisation,” to bind the national life together in its past, present, and future, and to communicate to all citizens a clear understanding of their rights and duties. This third estate of the realm Coleridge denominated the “Clerisy,” and included not merely the clergy, but, in his own language, “the learned of all denominations.” The knowledge, which it was their function to cultivate and diffuse, embraced not only theology, although this pre-eminently as the head of all other knowledge, but law, music, mathematics, the physical sciences, “all the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and cultivation of which constitute the civilisation of a country.”
This is at any rate a large conception of a national church. It is put forth by its author with all earnestness, although he admitted that it had never been anywhere realised. But it was his object “to present the Idea of a national church as the only safe criterion by which we can judge of existing things.” It was only when “we are in full and clear possession of the ultimate aim of an institution” that we can ascertain how far “this aim has ever been attained in other ways.”
These, very briefly explained, are the main lines along which Coleridge moved the national mind in the third decade of this century. They may seem to some rather impalpable lines, and hardly calculated to touch the general mind. But they were influential, as the course of Christian literature has since proved. Like his own genius, they were diffusive rather than concentrative. The Coleridgian ideas permeated the general intellectual atmosphere, modifying old conceptions in criticism as well as theology, deepening if not always clarifying the channels of thought in many directions, but especially in the direction of Christian philosophy. They acted in this way as a new circulation of spiritual air all around, rather than in conveying any new body of truth. The very ridicule of Carlyle testifies to the influence which they exercised over aspiring and younger minds. The very emphasis with which he repudiates the Coleridgian metaphysic probably indicates that he had felt some echo of it in his own heart. —Fortnightly Review.
THE PORTRAIT
A Story of the Seen and the Unseen
At the period when the following incidents occurred I was living with my father at The Grove, a large old house in the immediate neighborhood of a little town. This had been his home for a number of years; and I believe I was born in it. It was a kind of house which, notwithstanding all the red and white architecture, known at present by the name of Queen Anne, builders nowadays have forgotten how to build. It was straggling and irregular, with wide passages, wide staircases, broad landings; the rooms large but not very lofty; the arrangements leaving much to be desired, with no economy of space; a house belonging to a period when land was cheap, and, so far as that was concerned, there was no occasion to economise. Though it was so near the town, the clump of trees in which it was environed was a veritable grove. In the grounds in spring the primroses grew as thickly as in the forest. We had a few fields for the cows, and an excellent walled garden. The place is being pulled down at this moment to make room for more streets of mean little houses, – the kind of thing, and not a dull house of faded gentry, which perhaps the neighborhood requires. The house was dull, and so were we, its last inhabitants; and the furniture was faded, even a little dingy, –