Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 404 pages of information about Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4..

Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 404 pages of information about Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4..

10.  Combine these (and I have proceeded no further than the eleventh page of her life) and think, how impossible it was, but that such a creature, so innocent, and of an imagination so heated, and so well peopled should often mistake the first not painful, and in such a frame, often pleasurable approaches to ‘deliquium’ for divine raptures; and join the instincts of nature acting in the body of a mind unconscious of them, in the keenly sensitive body of a mind so loving and so innocent, and what remains to be solved which the stupidity of most and the roguery of a few would not simply explain?

11.  One source it is almost criminal to have forgotten, and which p. 12. of the first Part brought back to my recollection; I mean, the effects—­so super-sensual that they may easily and most venially pass for supernatural, so very glorious to human nature that, though in truth they are humanity itself in the contradistinguishing sense of that awful word, it is yet no wonder that, conscious of the sore weaknesses united in one person with this one nobler nature we attribute them to a divinity out of us, (a mistake of the sensuous imagination in its misapplication of space and place, rather than a misnomer of the thing itself, for it is verily [Greek:  ho theos en haemin ho oikeios theos],) the effects, I mean, of the moral force after conquest, the state of the whole being after the victorious struggle, in which the will has preserved its perfect freedom by a vehement energy of perfect obedience to the pure or practical reason, or conscience.  Thence flows in upon and fills the soul ‘that peace which passeth understanding’, a state affronted and degraded by the name of pleasure, injured and mis-represented even by that of happiness, the very corner stone of that morality which cannot even in thought be distinguished from religion, and which seems to mean religion as long as the instinctive craving, dim and dark though it may be, of the moral sense after this unknown state (known only by the bitterness where it is not) shall remain in human nature!  Under all forms of positive or philosophic religion, it has developed itself, too glorious an attribute of man to be confined to any name or sect; but which, it is but truth and historical fact to say, is more especially fostered and favoured by Christianity; and its frequent appearance even under the most selfish and unchristian forms of Christianity is a stronger evidence of the divinity of that religion, than all the miracles of Brahma and Veeshnou could afford, even though they were supported with tenfold the judicial evidence of the Gospel miracles. [2]

[Footnote 1:  The works of the Holy Mother St. Teresa of Jesus Foundress of the Reformation of the Discalced Carmelites.  Divided into two parts.  Translated into English.  MDCLXXV.  Ed.]

[Footnote 2:  London 1685.]

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NOTES ON BURNET’S LIFE OF BISHOP BEDELL. [1]

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Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.