The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
TekstThis we know and this we are taught by the holy Apostle Paul; that without will there is no ground or base of sin; that without the law this ground or base cannot become sin; (hence we do not impute sin to the wolf or the tiger, as being without or below the law;) but that with the law cometh light into the will; and by this light the will becometh a free, and therefore a responsible, will.
Yea! the law is itself light, and the divine light becomes law by its relation and opposition to the darkness; the will of God revealed in its opposition to the dark and alien will of the fallen Spirit. This freedom, then, is the free gift of God; but does it therefore cease to be freedom?
All the sophistry of the Predestinarians rests on the false notion of eternity as a sort of time antecedent to time. It is timeless, present with and in all times.
There is an excellent discourse of the great Hooker's, affixed with two or three others to his Ecclesiastical Polity, on the final perseverance of Saints81; but yet I am very desirous to meet with some judicious experimental treatise, in which the doctrine, with the Scriptures on which it is grounded, is set forth more at large; as likewise the rules by which it may be applied to the purposes of support and comfort, without danger of causing presumption and without diminishing the dread of sin.
Above all, I am anxious to see the subject treated with as little reference as possible to the divine predestination and foresight; the argument from the latter being a mere identical proposition followed by an assertion of God's prescience.
Those who will persevere, will persevere, and God foresees; and as to the proof from predestination, that is, that he who predestines the end necessarily predestines the adequate means, I can more readily imagine logical consequences adverse to the sense of responsibility than Christian consequences, such as an individual may apply for his own edification.
And I am persuaded that the doctrine does not need these supports, according, I mean, to the ordinary notion of predestination. The predestinative force of a free agent's own will in certain absolute acts, determinations, or elections, and in respect of which acts it is one either with the divine or the devilish will; and if the former, the conclusions to be drawn from God's goodness, faithfulness, and spiritual presence; these supply grounds of argument of a very different character, especially where the mind has been prepared by an insight into the error and hollowness of the antithesis between liberty and necessity.
Ib. p. 178.
But how contrary to this is the walk and conduct of some who profess to be pilgrims, and yet can wilfully and deliberately go upon the Devil's ground, and indulge themselves in carnal pleasures and sinful diversions.
Note in Edwards on the Enchanted Ground.
But what pleasures are carnal, – what are sinful diversions, – so I mean as that I may be able to determine what are not? Shew us the criterion, the general principle; at least explain whether each individual case is to be decided for the individual by his own experience of the effects of the pleasure or the diversion, in dulling or distracting his religious feelings; or can a list, a complete list, of all such pleasures be made beforehand?
Part III
In initio.
I strongly suspect that this third part, which ought not to have been thus conjoined with Bunyan's work, was written by a Roman Catholic priest, for the very purpose of counteracting the doctrine of faith so strongly enforced in the genuine Progress.
Ib. p. 443, in Edwards.
Against all which evils fasting is the proper remedy.
It would have been well if the writer had explained exactly what he meant by the fasting, here so strongly recommended; during what period of time abstinence from food is to continue and so on. The effects, I imagine, must in good measure depend on the health of the individual. In some constitutions, fasting so disorders the stomach as to produce the very contrary of good; – confusion of mind, loose imaginations against the man's own will, and the like.
In fine.
One of the most influential arguments, one of those the force of which I feel even more than I see, for the divinity of the New Testament, and with especial weight in the writings of John and Paul, is the unspeakable difference between them and all other the earliest extant writings of the Christian Church, even those of the same age (as, for example, the Epistle of Barnabas,) or of the next following, – a difference that transcends all degree, and is truly a difference in kind. Nay, the catalogue of the works written by the Reformers and in the two centuries after the Reformation, contain many many volumes far superior in Christian light and unction to the best of the Fathers. How poor and unevangelic is Hermas in comparison with our Pilgrim's Progress!
Notes on Select Discourses by John Smith 82
It would make a delightful and instructive essay, to draw up a critical and (where possible) biographical account of the Latitudinarian party at Cambridge, from the close of the reign of James I to the latter half of Charles II.
The greater number were Platonists, so called at least, and such they believed themselves to be, but more truly Plotinists. Thus Cudworth, Dr. Jackson (chaplain of Charles I, and vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne), Henry More, this John Smith, and some others. Taylor was a Gassendist, or inter Epicureos evangelizantes, and, as far as I know, he is the only exception.
They were all alike admirers of Grotius, which in Jeremy Taylor was consistent with the tone of his philosophy. The whole party, however, and a more amiable never existed, were scared and disgusted into this by the catachrestic language and skeleton half-truths of the systematic divines of the Synod of Dort on the one hand, and by the sickly broodings of the Pietists and Solomon's-Song preachers on the other.
What they all wanted was a pre-inquisition into the mind, as part organ, part constituent, of all knowledge, an examination of the scales, weights and measures themselves abstracted from the objects to be weighed or measured by them; in short, a transcendental æsthetic, logic, and noetic. Lord Herbert was at the entrance of, nay, already some paces within, the shaft and adit of the mine, but he turned abruptly back, and the honour of establishing a complete 
of philosophy was reserved for Immanuel Kant, a century or more afterwards.
From the confounding of Plotinism with Platonism, the Latitudinarian divines fell into the mistake of finding in the Greek philosophy many anticipations of the Christian Faith, which in fact were but its echoes. The inference is as perilous as inevitable, namely, that even the mysteries of Christianity needed no revelation, having been previously discovered and set forth by unaided reason.
…
The argument from the mere universality of the belief, appears to me far stronger in favour of a surviving soul and a state after death, than for the existence of the Supreme Being. In the former, it is one doctrine in the Englishman and in the Hottentot; the differences are accidents not affecting the subject, otherwise than as different seals would affect the same wax, though Molly, the maid, used her thimble, and Lady Virtuosa an intaglio of the most exquisite workmanship.
Far otherwise in the latter. Mumbo Jumbo, or the cercocheronychous Nick-Senior, or whatever score or score thousand invisible huge men fear and fancy engender in the brain of ignorance to be hatched by the nightmare of defenceless and self-conscious weakness – these are not the same as, but are toto genere diverse from, the una et unica substantia of Spinosa, or the World-God of the Stoics.
And each of these again is as diverse from the living Lord God, the creator of heaven and earth. Nay, this equivoque on God is as mischievous as it is illogical: it is the sword and buckler of Deism.
Of the Existence and Nature of God
Besides, when we review our own immortal souls and their dependency upon some Almighty mind, we know that we neither did nor could produce ourselves, and withal know that all that power which lies within the compass of ourselves will serve for no other purpose than to apply several pre-existent things one to another, from whence all generations and mutations arise, which are nothing else but the events of different applications and complications of bodies that were existent before; and therefore that which produced that substantial life and mind by which we know ourselves, must be something much more mighty than we are, and can be no less indeed than omnipotent, and must also be the first architect and
of all other beings, and the perpetual supporter of them.
A Rhodian leap! Where our knowledge of a cause is derived from our knowledge of the effect, which is falsely (I think) here supposed, nothing can be logically, that is, apodeictically, inferred, but the adequacy of the former to the latter. The mistake, common to Smith, with a hundred other writers, arises out of an equivocal use of the word 'know.' In the scientific sense, as implying insight, and which ought to be the sense of the word in this place, we might be more truly said to know the soul by God, than to know God by the soul.
…
So the Sibyl was noted by Heraclitus as
'as one speaking ridiculous and unseemly speeches with her furious mouth.'
This fragment is misquoted and misunderstood: for – 
it should be 
unperfumed, inornate lays, not redolent of art. – Render it thus:
– – – Not her's
To win the sense by words of rhetoric,
Lip-blossoms breathing perishable sweets;
But by the power of the informing Word
Roll sounding onward through a thousand years
Her deep prophetic bodements.
is with ecstatic mouth.
…
If the ascetic virtues, or disciplinary exercises, derived from the schools of philosophy (Pythagorean, Platonic and Stoic) were carried to an extreme in the middle ages, it is most certain that they are at present in a far more grievous disproportion underrated and neglected. The regula maxima of the ancient 
was to conquer the body by abstracting the attention from it. Our maxim is to conciliate the body by attending to it, and counteracting or precluding one set of sensations by another, the servile dependence of the mind on the body remaining the same. Instead of the due subservience of the body to the mind (the favorite language of our Sidneys and Miltons) we hear nothing at present but of health, good digestion, pleasurable state of general feeling, and the like.
Letter to a Godchild
To Adam Steinmetz K 83
My Dear Godchild
I offer up the same fervent prayer for you now, as I did kneeling before the altar, when you were baptized into Christ, and solemnly received as a living member of His spiritual body, the Church.
Years must pass before you will be able to read with an understanding heart what I now write; but I trust that the all-gracious God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies, who, by his only begotten Son, (all mercies in one sovereign mercy!) has redeemed you from the evil ground, and willed you to be born out of darkness, but into light – out of death, but into life – out of sin, but into righteousness, even into the Lord our Righteousness; I trust that He will graciously hear the prayers of your dear parents, and be with you as the spirit of health and growth in body and mind.
My dear Godchild! – You received from Christ's minister at the baptismal font, as your Christian name, the name of a most dear friend of your father's, and who was to me even as a son, the late Adam Steinmetz, whose fervent aspiration and ever-paramount aim, even from early youth, was to be a Christian in thought, word, and deed – in will, mind, and affections.
I too, your Godfather, have known what the enjoyments and advantages of this life are, and what the more refined pleasures which learning and intellectual power can bestow; and with all the experience which more than threescore years can give, I now, on the eve of my departure, declare to you (and earnestly pray that you may hereafter live and act on the conviction) that health is a great blessing, – competence obtained by honorable industry a great blessing, – and a great blessing it is to have kind, faithful, and loving friends and relatives; but that the greatest of all blessings, as it is the most ennobling of all privileges, is to be indeed a Christian. But I have been likewise, through a large portion of my later life, a sufferer, sorely afflicted with bodily pains, languors, and bodily infirmities; and, for the last three or four years, have, with few and brief intervals, been confined to a sick-room, and at this moment, in great weakness and heaviness, write from a sick-bed, hopeless of a recovery, yet without prospect of a speedy recovery; and I, thus on the very brink of the grave, solemnly bear witness to you that the Almighty Redeemer, most gracious in His promises to them that truly seek Him, is faithful to perform what He hath promised, and has preserved, under all my pains and infirmities, the inward peace that passeth all understanding, with the supporting assurance of a reconciled God, who will not withdraw His Spirit from me in the conflict, and in His own time will deliver me from the Evil One!
O, my dear Godchild! eminently blessed are those who begin early to seek, fear, and love their God, trusting wholly in the righteousness and mediation of their Lord, Redeemer, Saviour, and everlasting High Priest, Jesus Christ!
O, preserve this as a legacy and bequest from your unseen Godfather and friend,
S. T. Coleridge.
July 13, 183484.