likewise he will receive additional satisfaction, should he find these miracles so wrought, and on such occasions, as to give them a personal value as symbols of important truths when their miraculousness was no longer needful or efficacious. Confessio Fidei.1 Nov. 3, 1816. I. I. I believe that I am a free agent, inasmuch as, and so far as, I have a will, which renders me justly responsible for my actions, omissive as well as commissive; likewise that I possess reason, or a law of right and wrong, which, uniting with my sense of moral responsibility, constitutes the voice of conscience. II. Hence it becomes my absolute duty to believe, and I do believe, that there is a God, that is, a Being, in whom supreme reason and a most holy will are one with an infinite power; and that all holy will is coincident with the will of God, and therefore secure in its ultimate consequences by His omnipotence ;-having, if such similitude be not unlawful, such a relation to the goodness of the Almighty, as a perfect time-piece will have to the sun. Corollary. The wonderful works of God in the sensible world are a perpetual discourse, reminding me of his existence, and shadowing out to me his perfections. But as all language presupposes in the intelligent hearer or reader those primary notions, which it symbolizes; as well as the power of making those combinations of these primary notions, which it represents and excites us to combine,—even so I believe, that the notion of God is essential to the human mind; that it is called forth into distinct consciousness 1 H. N. Coleridge, as we have seen, considered the letter to a godchild "an appropriate conclusion" to the Table Talk. Probably from like considerations he appends the pages still to follow to “Omniana.” It principally by the conscience, and auxiliarly by the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the outward creation. is, therefore, evident to my reason, that the existence of God is absolutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific demoustration, and that Scripture has so represented it. For it commands us to believe in one God. I am the Lord thy God: thou shalt have none other gods but me. Now all commandment necessarily relates to the will; whereas all scientific demonstration is independent of the will, and is apodictic or demonstrative only as far as it is compulsory on the mind, volentem, nolentem. III. My conscience forbids me to propose to myself the pains and pleasures of this life, as the primary motive, or ultimate end, of my actions;-on the contrary, it makes me perceive an utter disproportionateness and heterogeneity between the acts of the spirit, as virtue and vice, and the things of the sense, such as all earthly rewards and punishments must be. Its hopes and fears, therefore, refer me to a different and spiritual state of being: and I believe in the life to come, not through arguments acquired by my understanding or discursive faculty, but chiefly and effectively, because so to believe is my duty, and in obedience to the commands of my conscience. Here ends the first table of my creed, which would have been my creed, had I been born with Adam; and which, therefore, constitutes what may in this sense be called, natural religion, that is, the religion of all finite rational beings. The second table contains the creed of revealed religion, my belief as a Christian. II. IV. I believe, and hold it as the fundamental article of Christianity, that I am a fallen creature; that I am of myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral good, and that an evil ground existed in my will, previously to any given act, or assignable moment of time, in my consciousness. I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it, but I know that it is so. My conscience, the sole fountain of certainty, commands me to believe it, and would itself be a contradiction, were it not so—and what is real must be possible. V. I receive with full and grateful faith the assurance of revelation, that the Word, which is from all eternity with God, and is God, assumed our human nature in order to redeem me, and all mankind from this our connate corruption. My reason convinces me, that no other mode of redemption is conceivable, and, as did Socrates, would have yearned after the Redeemer, though it would not dare expect so wonderful an act of divine love, except only as an effort of my mind to conceive the utmost of the infinite greatness of that love. VI. I believe, that this assumption of humanity by the Son of God, was revealed and realized to us by the Word made flesh, and manifested to us in Christ Jesus; and that his miraculous birth, his agony, his crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension, were all both symbols of our redemption (φαινόμενα τῶν νουμένων) and necessary parts of the awful process. VII. I believe in the descent and sending of the Holy Spirit, by whose free grace obtained for me by the merits of my Redeemer, I can alone be sanctified and restored from my natural inheritance of sin and condemnation, be a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of God. Corollary. The Trinity of persons in the Unity of the God would have been a necessary idea of my speculative reason, deduced from the necessary postulate of an intelligent creator, whose ideas being anterior to the things, must be more actual than those things, even as those things are more actual than our images derived from them; and who, as intelligent, must have had co-eternally an adequate idea of himself, in and through which he created all things both in heaven and earth. But this would only have been a speculative idea, like those of circles and other mathema tical figures, to which we are not authorized by the practical reason to attribute reality. Solely in consequence of our Redemption does the Trinity become a doctrine, the belief of which as real is commanded by our conscience. But to Christians it is commanded, and it is false candour in a Christian, believing in original sin and redemption therefrom, to admit that any man denying the divinity of Christ can be a Christian. The true language of a Christian, which reconciles humility with truth would be;—God and not man is the judge of man: which of the two is the Christian, he will determine; but this is evident, that if the theanthropist is a Christian, the psilanthropist cannot be so; and vice versa. Suppose, that two tribes used the same written characters, but attached different and opposite meanings to them, so that niger, for instance, was used by one tribe to convey the notion black, by the other, white; -could they, without absurdity, be said to have the same language? Even so, in the instance of the crucifixion, the same image is present to the theanthropist and to the psilanthropist or Socinian, but to the latter it represents a mere man, a good man indeed and divinely inspired, but still a mere man, even as Moses or Paul, dying in attestation of the truth of his preaching, and in order by his resurrection to give a proof of his mission, and inclusively of the resurrection of all men :-to the former it represents God incarnate taking upon himself the sins of the world, and himself thereby redeeming us, and giving us life everlasting, not merely teaching it. The same difference, that exists between God and man, between giving and the declaration of a gift, exists between the Trinitarian and the Unitarian. This might be proved in a few moments, if we would only conceive a Greek or Roman, to whom two persons relate their belief, each calling Christ by a different name. It would be impossible for the Greek even to guess, that they both meant the same person, or referred to the same facts. |