LETTERS ON THE INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES - LETTER IV

Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit

by Samuel T. Coleridge

LETTERS ON THE INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES - LETTER IV, CONFESSIONS OF AN INQUIRING SPIRIT by Samuel T. Coleridge
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My dear friend,

You reply to the conclusion of my Letter: "What have we to do with
routiniers? Quid mihi cum homunculis putata putide reputantibus?
Let nothings count for nothing, and the dead bury the dead! Who but
such ever understood the tenet in this sense?"

In what sense then, I rejoin, do others understand it? If, with
exception of the passages already excepted, namely, the recorded
words of God--concerning which no Christian can have doubt or
scruple,--the tenet in this sense be inapplicable to the Scripture,
destructive of its noblest purposes, and contradictory to its own
express declarations,--again and again I ask:- What am I to
substitute? What other sense is conceivable that does not destroy
the doctrine which it professes to interpret--that does not convert
it into its own negative? As if a geometrician should name a sugar-
loaf an ellipse, adding--"By which term I here mean a cone;"--and
then justify the misnomer on the pretext that the ellipse is among
the conic sections! And yet--notwithstanding the repugnancy of the
doctrine, in its unqualified sense, to Scripture, Reason, and Common
Sense theoretically, while to all practical uses it is intractable,
unmalleable, and altogether unprofitable--notwithstanding its
irrationality, and in the face of your expostulation, grounded on the
palpableness of its irrationality,--I must still avow my belief that,
however fittingly and unsteadily, as through a mist, it IS the
doctrine which the generality of our popular divines receive as
orthodox, and this the sense which they attach to the words.

For on what other ground can I account for the whimsical
subintelligiturs of our numerous harmonists--for the curiously
inferred facts, the inventive circumstantial detail, the complemental
and supplemental history which, in the utter silence of all
historians and absence of all historical documents, they bring to
light by mere force of logic? And all to do away some half score
apparent discrepancies in the chronicles and memoirs of the Old and
New Testaments--discrepancies so analogous to what is found in all
other narratives of the same story by several narrators--so analogous
to what is found in all other known and trusted histories by
contemporary historians, when they are collated with each other (nay,
not seldom when either historian is compared with himself), as to
form in the eyes of all competent judges a characteristic mark of the
genuineness, independency, and (if I may apply the word to a book),
the veraciousness of each several document; a mark, the absence of
which would warrant a suspicion of collusion, invention, or at best
of servile transcription; discrepancies so trifling in circumstance
and import, that, although in some instances it is highly probable,
and in all instances, perhaps, possible that they are only apparent
and reconcilable, no wise man would care a staw whether they were
real or apparent, reconciled or left in harmless and friendly
variance. What, I ask, could have induced learned and intelligent
divines to adopt or sanction subterfuges, which neutralising the
ordinary criteria of full or defective evidence in historical
documents, would, taken as a general rule, render all collation and
cross-examination of written records ineffective, and obliterate the
main character by which authentic histories are distinguished from
those traditional tales, which each successive reporter enlarges and
fashions to his own fancy and purpose, and every different edition of
which more or less contradicts the other? Allow me to create chasms
ad libitum, and ad libitum to fill them up with imagined facts and
incidents, and I would almost undertake to harmonise Falstaff's
account of the rogues in buckram into a coherent and consistent
narrative. What, I say, could have tempted grave and pious men thus
to disturb the foundation of the Temple, in order to repair a petty
breach or rat-hole in the wall, or fasten a loose stone or two in the
outer court, if not an assumed necessity arising out of the peculiar
character of Bible history?

The substance of the syllogism, by which their procedure was
justified to their own minds, can be no other than this. That,
without which two assertions--both of which MUST be alike true and
correct--would contradict each other, and consequently be, one or
both, false or incorrect, must itself be true. But every word and
syllable existing in the original text of the Canonical Books, from
the Cherethi and Phelethi of David to the name in the copy of a
family register, the site of a town, or the course of a river, were
dictated to the sacred amanuensis by an infallible intelligence.
Here there can be neither more nor less. Important or unimportant
gives no ground of difference; and the number of the writers as
little. The secretaries may have been many--the historian was one
and the same, and he infallible. This is the MINOR of the syllogism,
and if it could be proved, the conclusion would be at least
plausible; and there would be but one objection to the procedure,
namely, its uselessness. For if it had been proved already, what
need of proving it over again, and by means--the removal, namely, of
apparent contradictions--which the infallible Author did not think
good to employ? But if it have not been proved, what becomes of the
argument which derives its whole force and legitimacy from the
assumption?

In fact, it is clear that the harmonists and their admirers held and
understood the doctrine literally. And must not that divine likewise
have so understood it, who, in answer to a question concerning the
transcendant blessedness of Jael, and the righteousness of the act,
in which she inhospitably, treacherously, perfidiously murdered
sleep, the confiding sleep, closed the controversy by observing that
he wanted no better morality than that of the Bible, and no other
proof of an action's being praiseworthy than that the Bible had
declared it worthy to be praised?--an observation, as applied in this
instance, so slanderous to the morality and moral spirit of the Bible
as to be inexplicable, except as a consequence of the doctrine in
dispute. But let a man be once fully persuaded that there is no
difference between the two positions: "The Bible contains the
religion revealed by God," and "Whatever is contained in the Bible is
religion, and was revealed by God," and that whatever can be said of
the Bible, collectively taken, may and must be said of each and every
sentence of the Bible, taken for and by itself, and I no longer
wonder at these paradoxes. I only object to the inconsistency of
those who profess the same belief, and yet affect to look down with a
contemptuous or compassionate smile on John Wesley for rejecting the
Copernican system as incompatible therewith; or who exclaim
"Wonderful!" when they hear that Sir Matthew Hale sent a crazy old
woman to the gallows in honour of the Witch of Endor. In the latter
instance it might, I admit, have been an erroneous (though even at
this day the all but universally received) interpretation of the
word, which we have rendered by WITCH; but I challenge these divines
and their adherents to establish the compatibility of a belief in the
modern astronomy and natural philosophy with their and Wesley's
doctrine respecting the inspired Scriptures, without reducing the
doctrine itself to a plaything of wax; or rather to a half-inflated
bladder, which, when the contents are rarefied in the heat of
rhetorical generalities, swells out round, and without a crease or
wrinkle; but bring it into the cool temperature of particulars, and
you may press, and as it were except, what part you like--so it be
but one part at a time--between your thumb and finger.

Now, I pray you, which is the more honest, nay, which the more
reverential proceeding--to play at fast and loose in this way, or to
say at once, "See here, in these several writings one and the same
Holy Spirit, now sanctifying a chosen vessel, and fitting it for the
reception of heavenly truths proceeding immediately from the mouth of
God, and elsewhere working in frail and fallible men like ourselves,
and like ourselves instructed by God's word and laws?" The first
Christian martyr had the form and features of an ordinary man, nor
are we taught to believe that these features were miraculously
transfigured into superhuman symmetry; but HE BEING FILLED WITH THE
HOLY GHOST, THEY THAT LOOKED STEADFASTLY on HIM, SAW HIS FACE AS IT
HAD BEEN THE FACE OF AN ANGEL. Even so has it ever been, and so it
ever will be with all who with humble hearts and a rightly disposed
spirit scan the sacred volume. And they who read it with AN EVIL
HEART OF UNBELIEF and an alien spirit, what boots for them the
assertion that every sentence was miraculously communicated to the
nominal author by God himself? Will it not rather present additional
temptations to the unhappy scoffers, and furnish them with a pretext
of self-justification?

When, in my third letter, I first echoed the question "Why should I
not?" the answers came crowding on my mind. I am well content,
however, to have merely suggested the main points, in proof of the
positive harm which, both historically and spiritually, our religion
sustains from this doctrine. Of minor importance, yet not to be
overlooked, are the forced and fantastic interpretations, the
arbitrary allegories and mystic expansions of proper names, to which
this indiscriminate Bibliolatry furnished fuel, spark, and wind. A
still greater evil, and less attributable to the visionary humour and
weak judgment of the individual expositors, is the literal rendering
of Scripture in passages, which the number and variety of images
employed in different places to express one and the same verity,
plainly mark out for figurative. And lastly, add to all these the
strange--in all other writings unexampled--practice of bringing
together into logical dependency detached sentences from books
composed at the distance of centuries, nay, sometimes a millennium
from each other, under different dispensations, and for different
objects. Accommodations of elder Scriptural phrases--that favourite
ornament and garnish of Jewish eloquence; incidental allusions to
popular notions, traditions, apologues (for example, the dispute
between the Devil and the archangel Michael about the body of Moses,
Jude 9); fancies and anachronisms imported from the synagogue of
Alexandria into Palestine, by or together with the Septuagint
version, and applied as mere argumenta ad homines (for example, the
delivery of the Law by the disposition of angels, Acts vii. 53, Gal.
iii. 19, Heb. ii. 2),--these, detached from their context, and,
contrary to the intention of the sacred writer, first raised into
independent theses, and then brought together to produce or sanction
some new credendum for which neither separately could have furnished
a pretence! By this strange mosaic, Scripture texts have been worked
up into passable likenesses of purgatory, Popery, the Inquisition,
and other monstrous abuses. But would you have a Protestant instance
of the superstitious use of Scripture arising out of this dogma?
Passing by the Cabbala of the Hutchinsonian School as the dotage of a
few weak-minded individuals, I refer you to Bishop Hacket's sermons
on the Incarnation. And if you have read the same author's life of
Archbishop Williams, and have seen and felt (as every reader of this
latter work must see and feel) his talent, learning, acuteness, and
robust good sense, you will have no difficulty in determining the
quality and character of a dogma which could engraft such fruits on
such a tree.

It will perhaps appear a paradox if, after all these reasons, I
should avow that they weigh less in my mind against the doctrine,
than the motives usually assigned for maintaining and enjoining it.
Such, for instance, are the arguments drawn from the anticipated loss
and damage that would result from its abandonment; as that it would
deprive the Christian world of its only infallible arbiter in
questions of faith and duty, suppress the only common and
inappellable tribunal; that the Bible is the only religious bond of
union and ground of unity among Protestants and the like. For the
confutation of this whole reasoning, it might be sufficient to ask:
Has it produced these effects? Would not the contrary statement be
nearer to the fact? What did the Churches of the first four
centuries hold on this point? To what did they attribute the rise
and multiplication of heresies? Can any learned and candid
Protestant affirm that there existed and exists no ground for the
charges of Bossuet and other eminent Romish divines? It is no easy
matter to know how to handle a party maxim, so framed, that with the
exception of a single word, it expresses an important truth, but
which by means of that word is made to convey a most dangerous error.

The Bible is the appointed conservatory, an indispensable criterion,
and a continual source and support of true belief. But that the
Bible is the sole source; that it not only contains, but constitutes,
the Christian Religion; that it is, in short, a Creed, consisting
wholly of articles of Faith; that consequently we need no rule, help,
or guide, spiritual or historical, to teach us what parts are and
what are not articles of Faith--all being such--and the difference
between the Bible and the Creed being this, that the clauses of the
latter are all unconditionally necessary to salvation, but those of
the former conditionally so, that is, as soon as the words are known
to exist in any one of the canonical books; and that, under this
limitation, the belief is of the same necessity in both, and not at
all affected by the greater or lesser importance of the matter to be
believed;--this scheme differs widely from the preceding, though its
adherents often make use of the same words in expressing their
belief. And this latter scheme, I assert, was brought into currency
by and in favour of those by whom the operation of grace, the aids of
the Spirit, the necessity of regeneration, the corruption of our
nature, in short, all the peculiar and spiritual mysteries of the
Gospel were explained and diluted away.

And how have these men treated this very Bible? I, who indeed prize
and reverence this sacred library, as of all outward means and
conservatives of Christian faith and practice the surest and the most
reflective of the inward Word; I, who hold that the Bible contains
the religion of Christians, but who dare not say that whatever is
contained in the Bible is the Christian religion, and who shrink from
all question respecting the comparative worth and efficacy of the
written Word as weighed against the preaching of the Gospel, the
discipline of the Churches, the continued succession of the Ministry,
and the communion of Saints, lest by comparing them I should seem to
detach them; I tremble at the processes which the Grotian divines
without scruple carry on in their treatment of the sacred writers, as
soon as any texts declaring the peculiar tenets of our Faith are
cited against them--even tenets and mysteries which the believer at
his baptism receives as the title-writ and bosom-roll of his
adoption; and which, according to my scheme, every Christian born in
Church-membership ought to bring with him to the study of the sacred
Scriptures as the master-key of interpretation. Whatever the
doctrine of infallible dictation may be in itself, in THEIR hands it
is to the last degree nugatory, and to be paralleled only by the
Romish tenet of Infallibility--in the existence of which all agree,
but where, and in whom, it exists stat adhuc sub lite. Every
sentence found in a canonical Book, rightly interpreted, contains the
dictum of an infallible Mind; but what the right interpretation is--
or whether the very words now extant are corrupt or genuine--must be
determined by the industry and understanding of fallible, and alas!
more or less prejudiced theologians.

And yet I am told that this doctrine must not be resisted or called
in question, because of its fitness to preserve unity of faith, and
for the prevention of schism and sectarian byways! Let the man who
holds this language trace the history of Protestantism, and the
growth of sectarian divisions, ending with Dr. Hawker's ultra-
Calvinistic Tracts, and Mr. Belsham's New Version of the Testament.
And then let him tell me that for the prevention of an evil which
already exists, and which the boasted preventive itself might rather
seem to have occasioned, I must submit to be silenced by the first
learned infidel, who throws in my face the blessing of Deborah, or
the cursings of David, or the Grecisms and heavier difficulties in
the biographical chapters of the Book of Daniel, or the hydrography
and natural philosophy of the Patriarchal ages. I must forego the
means of silencing, and the prospect of convincing, an alienated
brother, because I must not thus answer "My Brother! What has all
this to do with the truth and the worth of Christianity? If you
reject a priori all communion with the Holy Spirit, there is indeed a
chasm between us, over which we cannot even make our voices
intelligible to each other. But if--though but with the faith of a
Seneca or an Antonine--you admit the co-operation of a Divine Spirit
in souls desirous of good, even as the breath of heaven works
variously in each several plant according to its kind, character,
period of growth, and circumstance of soil, clime, and aspect; on
what ground can you assume that its presence is incompatible with all
imperfection in the subject--even with such imperfection as is the
natural accompaniment of the unripe season? If you call your
gardener or husbandman to account for the plants or crops he is
raising, would you not regard the special purpose in each, and judge
of each by that which it was tending to? Thorns are not flowers, nor
is the husk serviceable. But it was not for its thorns, but for its
sweet and medicinal flowers that the rose was cultivated; and he who
cannot separate the husk from the grain, wants the power because
sloth or malice has prevented the will. I demand for the Bible only
the justice which you grant to other books of grave authority, and to
other proved and acknowledged benefactors of mankind. Will you deny
a spirit of wisdom in Lord Bacon, because in particular facts he did
not possess perfect science, or an entire immunity from the positive
errors which result from imperfect insight? A Davy will not so judge
his great predecessor; for he recognises the spirit that is now
working in himself, and which under similar defects of light and
obstacles of error had been his guide and guardian in the morning
twilight of his own genius. Must not the kindly warmth awaken and
vivify the seed, in order that the stem may spring up and rejoice in
the light? As the genial warmth to the informing light, even so is
the predisposing Spirit to the revealing Word."

If I should reason thus--but why do I say IF? I have reasoned thus
with more than one serious and well-disposed sceptic; and what was
the answer?--"YOU speak rationally, but seem to forget the subject.
I have frequently attended meetings of the British and Foreign Bible
Society, where I have heard speakers of every denomination, Calvinist
and Arminian, Quaker and Methodist, Dissenting Ministers and
Clergymen, nay, dignitaries of the Established Church, and still have
I heard the same doctrine--that the Bible was not to be regarded or
reasoned about in the way that other good books are or may be--that
the Bible was different in kind, and stood by itself. By some indeed
this doctrine was rather implied than expressed, but yet evidently
implied. But by far the greater number of the speakers it was
asserted in the strongest and most unqualified words that language
could supply. What is more, their principal arguments were grounded
on the position, that the Bible throughout was dictated by
Omniscience, and therefore in all its parts infallibly true and
obligatory, and that the men whose names are prefixed to the several
books or chapters were in fact but as different pens in the hand of
one and the same Writer, and the words the words of God Himself: and
that on this account all notes and comments were superfluous, nay,
presumptuous--a profane mixing of human with divine, the notions of
fallible creatures with the oracles of Infallibility--as if God's
meaning could be so clearly or fitly expressed in man's as in God's
own words! But how often you yourself must have heard the same
language from the pulpit!"

What could I reply to this? I could neither deny the fact, nor evade
the conclusion--namely, that such is at present the popular belief.
Yes--I at length rejoined--I have heard this language from the
pulpit, and more than once from men who in any other place would
explain it away into something so very different from the literal
sense of their words as closely to resemble the contrary. And this,
indeed, is the peculiar character of the doctrine, that you cannot
diminish or qualify but you reverse it. I have heard this language
from men who knew as well as myself that the best and most orthodox
divines have in effect disclaimed the doctrine, inasmuch as they
confess it cannot be extended to the words of the sacred writers, or
the particular import--that therefore the doctrine does not mean all
that the usual wording of it expresses, though what it does mean, and
why they continue to sanction this hyperbolical wording, I have
sought to learn from them in vain. But let a thousand orators blazon
it at public meetings, and let as many pulpits echo it, surely it
behoves you to inquire whether you cannot be a Christian on your own
faith; and it cannot but be beneath a wise man to be an Infidel on
the score of what other men think fit to include in their
Christianity!

Now suppose--and, believe me, the supposition will vary little from
the fact--that in consequence of these views the sceptic's mind had
gradually opened to the reception of all the truths enumerated in my
first Letter. Suppose that the Scriptures themselves from this time
had continued to rise in his esteem and affection--the better
understood, the more dear; as in the countenance of one, whom through
a cloud of prejudices we have at least learned to love and value
above all others, new beauties dawn on us from day to day, till at
length we wonder how we could at any time have thought it other than
most beautiful. Studying the sacred volume in the light and in the
freedom of a faith already secured, at every fresh meeting my sceptic
friend has to tell me of some new passage, formerly viewed by him as
a dry stick on a rotten branch, which has BUDDED and, like the rod of
Aaron, BROUGHT FORTH BUDS AND BLOOMED BLOSSOMS, AND YIELDED ALMONDS.
Let these results, I say, be supposed--and shall I still be told that
my friend is nevertheless an alien in the household of Faith?
Scrupulously orthodox as I know you to be, will you tell me that I
ought to have left this sceptic as I found him, rather than attempt
his conversion by such means; or that I was deceiving him, when I
said to him:-

"Friend! The truth revealed through Christ has its evidence in
itself, and the proof of its divine authority in its fitness to our
nature and needs; the clearness and cogency of this proof being
proportionate to the degree of self-knowledge in each individual
hearer. Christianity has likewise its historical evidences, and
these as strong as is compatible with the nature of history, and with
the aims and objects of a religious dispensation. And to all these
Christianity itself, as an existing power in the world, and
Christendom as an existing fact, with the no less evident fact of a
progressive expansion, give a force of moral demonstration that
almost supersedes particular testimony. These proofs and evidences
would remain unshaken, even though the sum of our religion were to be
drawn from the theologians of each successive century, on the
principle of receiving that only as divine which should be found in
all--quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus. Be only, my friend!
as orthodox a believer as you would have abundant reason to be,
though from some accident of birth, country, or education, the
precious boon of the Bible, with its additional evidence, had up to
this moment been concealed from you;--and then read its contents with
only the same piety which you freely accord on other occasions to the
writings of men, considered the best and wisest of their several
ages! What you find therein coincident with your pre-established
convictions, you will of course recognise as the Revealed Word,
while, as you read the recorded workings of the Word and the Spirit
in the minds, lives, and hearts of spiritual men, the influence of
the same Spirit on your own being, and the conflicts of grace and
infirmity in your own soul, will enable you to discern and to know in
and by what spirit they spake and acted--as far at least as shall be
needful for you, and in the times of your need.

"Thenceforward, therefore, your doubts will be confined to such parts
or passages of the received Canon as seem to you irreconcilable with
known truths, and at variance with the tests given in the Scriptures
themselves, and as shall continue so to appear after you have
examined each in reference to the circumstances of the writer or
speaker, the dispensation under which he lived, the purpose of the
particular passage, and the intent and object of the Scriptures at
large. Respecting these, decide for yourself: and fear not for the
result. I venture to tell it you beforehand. The result will be, a
confidence in the judgment and fidelity of the compilers of the Canon
increased by the apparent exceptions. For they will be found neither
more nor greater than may well be supposed requisite, on the one
hand, to prevent us from sinking into a habit of slothful,
undiscriminating acquiescence, and on the other to provide a check
against those presumptuous fanatics who would rend the URIM AND
THUMMIM FROM THE BREASTPLATE OF JUDGMENT, and frame oracles by
private divination from each letter of each disjointed gem,
uninterpreted by the Priest, and deserted by the Spirit, which shines
in the parts only as it pervades and irradiates the whole."

Such is the language in which I have addressed a halting friend--
halting, yet with his face toward the right path. If I have erred,
enable me to see my error. Correct me, or confirm me. Farewell.