Scripture faith is required as the condition of all spiritual influ ence for purely spiritual and moral effects, and that primary regeneration, which precedes a moral one in time, and is not necessarily the ground of a change of heart and life, was never derived from the Word of God, but has been put into it by a series of inferences, and is supported principally by an implicit reliance on the general enlightenment of the early Christian writers. The doctrine may not be directly injurious to morality, since it allows actual faith to be a necessary instrument in all moral renovation; but the indirect practical consequences of insisting upon shadows as if they were realities, and requiring men to accept as a religious verity of prime importance a senseless dogma, the offspring of false metaphysics, must be adverse to the interests of religion. Such dogmatism has a bad effect on the habits of thought by weakening the love and perception of truth, and it is also injurious by producing disunion and mutual distrust among Christians.

The subtlest matter has all the properties of matter as much as the grossest. Let us see how this notion, that the soul consists of subtle matter, affects the form of doctrine, by trying it on that of baptism. The doctrine insisted on as primitive by a large party in the Church, nay set forth as the very criterion stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiæ Anglicana, by some of them, is this, that, in the moment of baptism, the soul receives the Holy Spirit within it; that the Holy Spirit remains within the soul, even though the baptized, as soon as he becomes capable of moral acts, proves faithless and wicked, until it is expelled for ever by a large but indefinite amount of wickedness, entitled utter reprobacy. How intolerable this doctrine is in its moral and spiritual aspect, how it evacuates the Scriptural phrase, Christ in us, of its emphatic meaning, it is useless to urge upon those, who believe it to have been taught by the Apostles. I now only allege that no man originally could have framed such a conception as this, who had our modern conceptions of spirit, or had considered what is the idea involved in the words presence of the Holy Spirit to our spirit. When the doctrine is unfolded and presented to the masters and doctors of it, they fly off to the notion of an inward potential righteousness. But this mere capability of being saved and sanc

20

tified, we have from our birth, nor can it be increased, because it is essentially extra gradum,not a thing of degrees. Our capability of being spiritualized by divine grace is unlimited. Who are they that explain away the baptismal gift into a shadow? *° My Father, in his latter years, looked upon baptism as a formal and public reception into a state of spiritual opportunities (at least so I understand him), which is equivalent, I suppose, to the doctrine of some of our divines, Waterland among others, that it is a consignment of grace to the soul. It is conceivable that in consequence of such consignment, the soul, by the will of God, may have more outward means of receiving spiritual influence than it would otherwise have had; if prayer can affect the course and complex of events in favor of those who are not praying, so may the rite of baptism influence it in favor of the baptized, though he be passive in baptism. The objection to the Antiquitarian doctrine is not that it implies a mystery, not that it implies the reception of a spiritual opportunity independently of the will of the receiver, but that, as it is commonly stated, it contradicts the laws of the human understanding, and either affirms what cannot be true,-what brings confusion into our moral and spiritual ideas, or else converts the doctrine into an ineffectual vapor-" a potentiality in a potentiality or a chalking of chalk to make white white." My Father, as I understand

20 See remarks on this subject in the Mission of the Comforter, pp. 476-7.

21 See this whole argument, given at greater length in the Essay on Rationalism, appended to the fifth edition of the Aids to Reflection.

Two fallacies are current on the subject of momentary baptismal transubstantiation. First, men say, that as we are passive in our original creation, so we are passive in our spiritual re-creation. The answer may be given from the Angelical Doctor, who teaches that we are not passive in our original creation; and, indeed, it needs not the wisdom of an angel to see that neither man nor any other animal can become alive without a corresponsive act on his part,--a sub-co-operation. If we throw a stone into the still, unmoving pool, the waters leap up: the pool has not stirred itself, but it co-operates in the production of motion. The second com. monplace fallacy is this: as a seed is set in the ground, and remains inert and latent for a time, then germinates, shoots up and bears fruit, so grace may be poured into the soul of a child incapable of moral acts, may remain latent for a time, then, when reason and the moral sense have come into

him, continued to deny that the gift of baptism is a spiritual recreation preceding actual faith or any moral capability,-an introduction of the spirit into the soul, which it passively undergoes, as the dead cage receives the living bird, or a lodgment of the Spirit within it irrespectively of its own moral state; a total change wrought all in a moment conferring upon it no positive moral melioration but only a power unto righteousness,—a capability of being renewed by grace in addition to that which inheres in man from the first; or on the other hand a partial and incipient spiritual change; since regeneration ex vi termini is something total and general; to be born again, re-natus, implies a new nature; is so described in Scripture and was so understood in the early Church. He looked upon it as an external grant, called regeneration in virtue of that which it is its object to promote and secure, a grant which comes into effect gradually, as the will yields to the pressure of the Spirit from without, but which may be made of none effect by the will's resistance. Such a view of the effect of baptism is well expressed by George Herbert in these lines

"O blessed streams! either ye do prevent

And stop our sins from growing thick and wide,
Or else give tears to drown them as they grow-"

and is explained by himself in this passage from some of his manuscript remains:

"I see the necessity of greatly expanding and clearing up the chapter on Baptism in the Aids to Reflection, and of proving the substantial accordance of my scheme with that of our Church. I still say, that an act of the Spirit in time, as that it might be

play, may produce good thoughts and good works: the fruit of the Spirit. The objection to this is, that a spiritual being is not in a spiritual being, as a material thing is in a material thing; it is in it, or present to it, only inasmuch as it acts upon it. It is the heart itself which, by the power of the Spirit, must bear the fruit of virtue,-not a something lodged within it, as the seed in the ground. Spiritual effects in the soul may exist unperceived by men,-may not produce outward works of holiness till long after they have been produced; but when the deeds are evil, as they are in many who were baptized in infancy, we may fairly say that the effects were not produced-in other words, that the person who shows such an unspiritual mind, was not spiritually regenerated in baptista

asserted at the moment of the uttering of the words, I baptize thee in the name, &c.—now the Spirit begins to act—is false in Philosophy and contrary to Scripture, and that our Church service needs no such hypothesis. Further, I still say, that the communication of the Spirit as of a power or principle not yet possessed, to an unconscious agent by human ministry, is without precedent in Scripture, and that there is no Scripture warrant for the doctrine-and that the nature of the Holy Spirit communicated by the Apostles by laying on of hands is a very difficult question-and that the reasons for supposing it to be certain miraculous gifts of the spirit peculiar to the first age of Christianity and during the formation of the Church, are neither few nor insignificant.

"Observe, I do not deny (God forbid!) the possibility or the reality of the influence of the Spirit on the soul of the infant. His first smile bespeaks a Reason (the Light from the Life of the Word), as already existent, and where the Word is, there will the Spirit act. Still less do I think lightly of the Graces which the child receives as a living Part of the Church, and whatever flows from the Communion of Saints, and the epixwpnois of the Spirit.

"The true import is this. The operations of the Spirit are as little referable to Time as to Space; but in reference to our principles of conduct towards, and judgment concerning, our neighbor, the Church declares, that before the time of the baptism there is no authority for asserting, and that since the time there is no authority for denying, the gift and regenerative presence of the Holy Spirit, promised, by an especial covenant, to the members of Christ's mystical Body-consequently, no just pretence for expecting or requiring another new Inition or Birth into the state of Grace."

My Father denied not that the Spirit may influence the soul of an infant, but he still refused to separate the presence of the Holy Spirit from spiritual effects, and these from reason and the moral being. Those whom he differed from are wont to argue, not that the infant is capable of moral effects in virtue of its awakening reason, but that it may be spiritually renovated in its whole soul before it is morally renewed at all: to this opinion he was ever wholly opposed. The new birth, as the change of the soul itself,

is out of time; viewed phenomenally in its manifestations, it takes place, as my Father conceives, gradually, as a man becomes gradually a new creature, different from what he was by nature (or in other words a good Christian), the new birth indicating the spiritual ground, the new creature the effect and change produced.

Mr. Coleridge's view of the Eucharist with his view of Sacraments generally has been adopted and explained by his younger son." Would that all my labors in explaining our Father's views and clearing them from misrepresentation, could be so superseded! But my brother's present avocations are all engrossing, and more indispensable than the defence of opinions, however serviceable those may be deemed to the cause of truth. In connexion however with the subject just touched upon, of primitive religious metaphysique, I am desirous, in times like these, to specify, what my Father's notion of the real presence was not: that was not the notion of a real presence in bread and wine. My Father has been called a Pantheist by the blunderers of the day, because he believed in the real presence of God throughout Creation animate and inanimate; that He is present to every blade of grass and clod of the valley, as well as to all things that breathe and live; that were He to hide his face, that is, withdraw his power, the World would vanish into nothing. But the pre

sence in the Eucharist is a spiritual presence or agency for the production of spiritual effects. God sustains mere material things by his power, but is he present to them as the Spirit of Holiness, the life-giving Word? Can bread and wine become holy and spiritual, and be nourished to everlasting life? What do we gain by this strange self-contradictory dogma, except an articulation of air? The sacrament is not for the bread and wine but for the soul of the receiver, and if we hope to receive the Spirit by means of the hallowed elements, have we not all that the doctrine can give us in the way of spiritual advantage? When I have urged this consideration upon a maintainer of the

22 See the Scriptural Character of the English Church, &c., by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, M. A., now Principal of St. Mark's College, Chelsea. Last six sermons, passim. See also Coleridge's Remains, vols. iii. and iv.