Note 123 — AIDS TO REFLECTION IN THE FORMATION OF A MANLY CHARACTER, ON THE SEVERAL GROUNDS OF PRUDENCE, MORALITY, AND RELIGION. (continued 5)

Elements of Religious Philosophy, ante, p. 88—Ed.

[124] See ante, pp. 96-101.—Ed.

[125] To escape the consequences of this scheme, some Arminian divines have asserted that the penalty inflicted on Adam, and continued in his posterity, was simply the loss of immortality, Death as the utter extinction of personal Being: immortality being regarded by them (and not, I think, without good reason) as a supernatural attribute, and its loss therefore involved in the forfeiture of supernatural graces. This theory has its golden side; and as a private opinion, is said to have the countenance of more than one dignitary of our Church, whose general orthodoxy is beyond impeachment. For here the penalty resolves itself into the consequence, and this the natural and naturally inevitable consequence of Adam's crime. For Adam, indeed, it was a positive punishment: a punishment of his guilt, the justice of which who could have dared arraign? While for the Offspring of Adam it was simply a not super-adding to their nature the privilege by which the original man was contra-distinguished from the brute creation—a mere negation, of which they had no more right to complain than any other species of animals. God in this view appears only in his attribute of mercy, as averting by supernatural interposition a consequence naturally inevitable. This is the golden side of the theory. But if we approach to it from the opposite direction, it first excites a just scruple, from the countenance it seems to give to the doctrine of Materialism. The supporters of this scheme do not, I presume, contend, that Adam's offspring would not have been born men, but have formed a new species of beasts! And if not, the notion of a rational, and self-conscious soul, perishing utterly with the dissolution of the organized body, seems to require, nay, almost involves, the opinion that the soul is a quality or accident of the body—a mere harmony resulting from organization.

But let this pass unquestioned. Whatever else the descendants of Adam might have been without the intercession of Christ, yet (this intercession having been effectually made) they are now endowed with souls that are not extinguished together with the material body. Now unless these divines teach likewise the Romish figment of Purgatory, and to an extent in which the Church of Rome herself would denounce the doctrine as an impious heresy: unless they hold, that a punishment temporary and remedial is the worst evil that the impenitent have to apprehend in a future state; and that the spiritual Death declared and foretold by Christ, the death eternal where the worm never dies, is neither Death nor eternal, but a certain quantum of suffering in a state of faith, hope, and progressive amendment—unless they go these lengths (and the divines here intended are orthodox Churchmen, men who would not knowingly advance even a step on the road towards them)—then I fear, that any advantage their theory might possess over the Calvinistic scheme in the article of Original Sin, would be dearly purchased by increased difficulties, and an ultra-Calvinistic narrowness in the article of Redemption. I at least find it impossible, with my present human feelings, not to imagine otherwise than that even in heaven it would be a fearful thing to know, that in order to my elevation to a lot infinitely more desirable than by nature it would have been, the lot of so vast a multitude had been rendered infinitely more calamitous; and that my felicity had been purchased by the everlasting misery of the majority of my fellow-men, who if no redemption had been provided, after inheriting the pains and pleasures of earthly existence during the numbered hours, and the few and evil—evil yet few—days of the years of their mortal life, would have fallen asleep to wake no more,—would have sunk into the dreamless sleep of the grave, and have been as the murmur and the plaint, and the exulting swell and the sharp scream, which the unequal gust of yesterday snatched from the strings of a wind-harp!

In another place I have ventured to question the spirit and tendency of Taylor's work on Repentance.[126] But I ought to have added, that to discover and keep the true medium in expounding and applying the Efficacy of Christ's Cross and Passion, is beyond comparison the most difficult and delicate point of practical divinity—and that which especially needs a guidance from above.

[126] Perhaps in his "Unum Necessarium; or the Doctrine and Practice of Repentance," part of his "Notes on Jeremy Taylor," pp. 295-325, v. iii., of the 'Remains,' 1838.—Ed.

[127] See also "Notes on Field on the Church" (1628), in Coleridge's 'Remains,' 1838, v. iii., pp. 57-92.—Ed.