I have heard but two arguments of any weight adduced in favour of passing
this Reform Bill, and they are in substance these:--1. We will blow your
brains out if you don't pass it. 2. We will drag you through a horsepond if
you don't pass it; and there is a good deal of force in both.
* * * * *
Talk to me of your pretended crisis! Stuff! A vigorous government would in
one month change all the data for your reasoning. Would you have me believe
that the events of this world are fastened to a revolving cycle with God at
one end and the Devil at the other, and that the Devil is now uppermost!
Are you a Christian, and talk about a crisis in that fatalistic sense!
_March_ 31. 1832.
JOHN, CHAP. III. VER. 4.--DICTATION AND INSPIRATION.--GNOSIS--NEW
TESTAMENT CANON.
I certainly understand the [Greek: ti emoi kai soi gynai] in the second
chapter[1] of St. John's Gospel, as having a _liquid increpationis_ in it--
a mild reproof from Jesus to Mary for interfering in his ministerial acts
by requests on her own account.
I do not think that [Greek: gynai] was ever used by child to parent as a
common mode of address: between husband and wife it was; but I cannot think
that [Greek: m_eter] and [Greek: gynai] were equivalent terms in the mouth
of a son speaking to his mother. No part of the Christopaedia is found in
John or Paul; and after the baptism there is no recognition of any maternal
authority in Mary. See the two passages where she endeavours to get access
to him when he is preaching:--"Whosoever shall do the will of God, the
same is my brother, and my sister, and my mother"[2] and also the
recommendation of her to the care of John at the crucifixion.
[Footnote 1: Verse 4.]
[Footnote 2: Mark, ch. iii. ver. 35.]
* * * * *
There may be dictation without inspiration, and inspiration without
dictation; they have been and continue to be grievously confounded. Balaam
and his ass were the passive organs of dictation; but no one, I suppose,
will venture to call either of those worthies inspired. It is my profound
conviction that St. John and St. Paul were divinely inspired; but I totally
disbelieve the dictation of any one word, sentence, or argument throughout
their writings. Observe, there was revelation. All religion is revealed;--
_revealed_ religion is, in my judgment, a mere pleonasm. Revelations of
facts were undoubtedly made to the prophets; revelations of doctrines were
as undoubtedly made to John and Paul;--but is it not a mere matter of our
very senses that John and Paul each dealt with those revelations, expounded
them, insisted on them, just exactly according to his own natural strength
of intellect, habit of reasoning, moral, and even physical temperament? We
receive the books ascribed to John and Paul as their books on the judgment
of men, for whom no miraculous discernment is pretended; nay, whom, in
their admission and rejection of other books, we believe to have erred.
Shall we give less credence to John and Paul themselves? Surely the heart
and soul of every Christian give him sufficient assurance that, in all
things that concern him as a _man_, the words that he reads are spirit and
truth, and could only proceed from Him who made both heart and soul.--
Understand the matter so, and all difficulty vanishes: you read without
fear, lest your faith meet with some shock from a passage here and there
which you cannot reconcile with immediate dictation, by the Holy Spirit of
God, without an absurd violence offered to the text. You read the Bible as
the best of all books, but still as a book; and make use of all the means
and appliances which learning and skill, under the blessing of God, can
afford towards rightly apprehending the general sense of it--not solicitous
to find out doctrine in mere epistolary familiarity, or facts in clear _ad
hominem et pro tempore_ allusions to national traditions.
* * * * *
Tertullian, I think, says he had seen the autograph copies of some of the
apostles' writings. The truth is, the ancient Church was not guided by the
mere fact of the genuineness of a writing in pronouncing it canonical;--
its catholicity was the test applied to it. I have not the smallest doubt
that the Epistle of Barnabas is genuine; but it is not catholic; it is
full of the [Greek: gn_osis], though of the most simple and pleasing sort.
I think the same of Hermas. The Church would never admit either into the
canon, although the Alexandrians always read the Epistle of Barnabas in
their churches for three hundred years together. It was upwards of three
centuries before the Epistle to the Hebrews was admitted, and this on
account of its [Greek: gn_osis]; at length, by help of the venerable
prefix of St. Paul's name, its admirers, happily for us, succeeded.
* * * * *
So little did the early bishops and preachers think their Christian faith
wrapped up in, and solely to be learned from, the New Testament,--indeed,
can it be said that there was any such collection for three hundred years?
--that I remember a letter from ----[1] to a friend of his, a bishop in the
East, in which he most evidently speaks of the _Christian_ Scriptures as of
works of which the bishop knew little or nothing.
[Footnote 1: I have lost the name which Mr. Coleridge mentioned.--ED.]
_April_ 4. 1832.