335 and feasting his party-hatred, and with those individuals before 325 the eyes of his imagination enjoying, trait by trait, horror after horror, the picture of their intolerable agonies? Yet this bigot would have an equal right thus to criminate the one good and great man, as these men have to criminate the other. Milton has said, and I doubt not but that Taylor with equal 330 truth could have said it, 'that in his whole life he never spake against a man even that his skin should be grazed.' He asserted this when one of his opponents (either Bishop Hall or his nephew) had called upon the women and children in the streets to take up stones and stone him (Milton). It is known that Milton repeatedly used his interest to protect the royalists; but even at a time when all lies would have been meritorious against him, no charge was made, no story pretended, that he had ever directly or indirectly engaged or assisted in their persecution. Oh! methinks there are other and far better feelings 340 which should be acquired by the perusal of our great elder writers. When I have before me, on the same table, the works of Hammond and Baxter; when I reflect with what joy and dearness their blessed spirits are now loving each other; it seems a mournful thing that their names should be perverted to 345 an occasion of bitterness among us, who are enjoying that happy mean which the human too-much on both sides was perhaps necessary to produce. The tangle of delusions which stifled and distorted the growing tree of our well-being has been torn away; the parasite-weeds that fed on its very roots have been 350 plucked up with a salutary violence. To us there remain only quiet duties, the constant care, the gradual improvement, the cautious unhazardous labours of the industrious though contented gardener-to prune, to strengthen, to engraft, and one by one to remove from its leaves and fresh shoots the slug and 355 the caterpillar. But far be it from us to undervalue with light and senseless detraction the conscientious hardihood of our predecessors, or even to condemn in them that vehemence, to which the blessings it won for us leave us now neither temptation nor pretext. We antedate the feelings, in order to 360 criminate the authors, of our present liberty, light and toleration.' (The Friend, No. IV. Sept. 7, 1809.) [1818, i. 105.] If ever two great men might seem, during their whole lives, to have moved in direct opposition, though neither of them has at any time introduced the name of the other, Milton and 365 Jeremy Taylor were they. The former commenced his career by attacking the Church-Liturgy and all set forms of prayer. The latter, but far more successfully, by defending both. Milton's next work was against the Prelacy and the then 335 him 1817, 1829. 349 has] have 1817. 346 us 1817, 1829. 347 human TO0-MUCH 1817, 1829. 360 feelings 1817, 1829. 361 authors 1817, 1829. 370 existing Church-Government-Taylor's in vindication and sup port of them. Milton became more and more a stern republics. or rather an advocate for that religious and moral aristocracy which, in his day, was called republicanism, and which, even more than royalism itself, is the direct antipode of modern jacobinism. 375 Taylor, as more and more sceptical concerning the fitness of men in general for power, became more and more attached to the prerogatives of monarchy. From Calvinism, with a still decreasing respect for Fathers, Councils, and for Church-antiquity in general, Milton seems to have ended in an indifference. 380 if not a dislike, to all forms of ecclesiastic government, and to have retreated wholly into the inward and spiritual churchcommunion of his own spirit with the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. Taylor, with a growing reverence for authority, an increasing sense of the insufficiency of 385 the Scriptures without the aids of tradition and the consent of authorized interpreters, advanced as far in his approaches (not indeed to Popery, but) to Roman-Catholicism, as a conscientious minister of the English Church could well venture. Milton would be and would utter the same to all on all occasions: he 390 would tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Taylor would become all things to all men, if by any means he might benefit any; hence he availed himself, in his popular writings, of opinions and representations which stand often in striking contrast with the doubts and convictions ex395 pressed in his more philosophical works. He appears, indeed, not too severely to have blamed that management of truth (istam falsitatem dispensativam) authorized and exemplified by almost all the fathers: Integrum omnino doctoribus et coetus Christiani antistitibus esse, ut dolos versent, falsa veris inter400 misceant et imprimis religionis hostes fallant, dummodo veritatis commodis et utilitati inserviant. The same antithesis might be carried on with the elements of their several intellectual powers. Milton, austere, condensed. imaginative, supporting his truth by direct enunciation of lofty 405 moral sentiment and by distinct visual representations, and in the same spirit overwhelming what he deemed falsehood by moral denunciation and a succession of pictures appalling or repulsive. In his prose, so many metaphors, so many alle gorical miniatures. Taylor, eminently discursive, accumulative, 410 and (to use one of his own words) agglomerative; still more rich in images than Milton himself, but images of fancy, and presented to the common and passive eye, rather than to the 373 called 1817, 1829. Catholicism 1817, 1829. management 1817, 1829. agglomerative 1817, 1829. 380 all 1817, 1829. 387 Roman-Catholicism 410 eye of the imagination. Whether supporting or assailing, he makes his way either by argument or by appeals to the affections, unsurpassed even by the schoolmen in subtlety, 415 agility, and logic wit, and unrivalled by the most rhetorical of the fathers in the copiousness and vividness of his expressions and illustrations. Here words that convey feelings, and words that flash images, and words of abstract notion, flow together, and whirl and rush onward like a stream, at once rapid and full 420 of eddies; and yet still interfused here and there we see a tongue KK or islet of smooth water, with some picture in it of earth or sky, landscape or living group of quiet beauty. Differing then so widely and almost contrariantly, wherein did these great men agree? wherein did they resemble each 425 other? In genius, in learning, in unfeigned piety, in blamelessn purity of life, and in benevolent aspirations and purposes for the moral and temporal improvement of their fellow-creatures! Both of them wrote a Latin Accidence, to render education more easy and less painful to children; both of them composed 430 hymns and psalms proportioned to the capacity of common congregations; both, nearly at the same time, set the glorious example of publicly recommending and supporting general toleration, and the liberty both of the Pulpit and the press! In the writings of neither shall we find a single sentence, like 435 those meek deliverances to God's mercy, with which Laud accompanied his votes for the mutilations and loathsome dungeoning of Leighton and others!-nowhere such a pious prayer as we find in Bishop Hall's memoranda of his own life, concerning the subtle and witty atheist that so grievously perplexed 440 and gravelled him at Sir Robert Drury's till he prayed to the Lord to remove him, and behold! his prayers were heard: for shortly afterward this Philistine-combatant went to London, and there perished of the plague in great misery! In short, nowhere shall we find the least approach, in the lives and 443 writings of John Milton or Jeremy Taylor, to that guarded gentleness, to that sighing reluctance, with which the holy brethren of the Inquisition deliver over a condemned heretic to the civil magistrate, recommending him to mercy, and hoping that the magistrate will treat the erring brother with 450 all possible mildness!-the magistrate who too well knows what would be his own fate if he dared offend them by acting on their recommendation. 416 logic] logical 1817, 1829. 422 islet] isle 1829. 420 and at once whirl 1817, 1829. Carlyle in the Life of John Sterling, cap. viii, quotes the last two words of the Preface. Was it from the same source that he caught up the words 'Balmy sunny islets, islets of the blest and the intelligible' which he uses to illustrate the lucid intervals in Coleridge's monologue? 436 meek... mercy 1817, 1829. 441 he... him 1817, 1829. 450 hoping 1817, 1829. The opportunity of diverting the reader from myself to charac 455 ters more worthy of his attention, has led me far beyond my first intention; but it is not unimportant to expose the false zeal which has occasioned these attacks on our elder patriots. It has been too much the fashion first to personify the Church of England, and then to speak of different individuals, who in 460 different ages have been rulers in that church, as if in some strange way they constituted its personal identity. Why should a clergyman of the present day feel interested in the defence of Laud or Sheldon? Surely it is sufficient for the warmest partisan of our establishment that he can assert with truth,— 465 when our Church persecuted, it was on mistaken principles held in common by all Christendom; and at all events, far less culpable was this intolerance in the Bishops, who were maintaining the existing laws, than the persecuting spirit afterwards shewn by their successful opponents, who had no such excuse. 470 and who should have been taught mercy by their own sufferings, and wisdom by the utter failure of the experiment in their own case. We can say that our Church, apostolical in its faith, primitive in its ceremonies, unequalled in its liturgical forms; that our Church, which has kindled and displayed more bright and 475 burning lights of genius and learning than all other protestant churches since the reformation, was (with the single exception of the times of Laud and Sheldon) least intolerant, when all Christians unhappily deemed a species of intolerance their religious duty; that Bishops of our church were among the first 480 that contended against this error; and finally, that since the reformation, when tolerance became a fashion, the Church of England in a tolerating age, has shewn herself eminently tolerant, and far more so, both in spirit and in fact, than many of her most bitter opponents, who profess to deem 485 toleration itself an insult on the rights of mankind! As to myself, who not only know the Church-Establishment to be tolerant, but who see in it the greatest, if not the sole safe bulwark of toleration, I feel no necessity of defending or palliating oppressions under the two Charleses, in order to 490 exclaim with a full and fervent heart, Esto perpetua! 461 they 1817, 1829. 467 culpable were the Bishops 1817, 1829. 481 reformation] Revolution in 1688 MS. corr. 1817. 1817, 1829. 490 ESTO PERPETUA 1817, 1829. 488 bulwark After 490. Braving the cry. O the Vanity and self-dotage of Authors! I, yet, after a reperusal of the preceding Apol. Preface, now some 20 years since its first publication, dare deliver it as my own judgement that both in style and thought it is a work creditable to the head and heart of the Author, tho' he happens to have been the same person, only a few stone lighter and with chesnut instead of silver hair, with his Critic and Eulogist. S. T. Coleridge, [MS. Note in a copy of the edition of 1829, vol. i, p. 353.] May, 1829. INDEX OF FIRST LINES A bird, who for his other sins. A blessed lot hath he, who having passed A green and silent spot, amid the hills A little further, O my father A lovely form there sate beside my bed A low dead Thunder mutter'd thro' the night A mount, not wearisome and bare and steep A sworded man whose trade is blood Ah! cease thy tears and sobs, my little Life All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair Almost awake? Why, what is this, and whence And in Life's noisiest hour And my heart mantles in its own delight As late each flower that sweetest blows Be, rather than be called, a child of God' |