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The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Complete Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: not as of little faith, but because, believing it to be, it is natural we should expect to find traces of it, and as a noble way of employing and developing, and... more » enlarging the faculties of the soul, and this, not by way of motive, but of assimilation, producing virtue. 2d April, 1811. RELIGION. Amongst the great truths are these :— I. That religion has no speculative dogmas ; that all is practical, all appealing to the will, and therefore all imperative. / am the Lord thy God: Thou shall have none other gods but me. II. That, therefore, miracles are not the proofs, but the necessary results, of revelation. They are not the key of the arch and roof of evidence, though they may be a compacting stone in it, which gives while it receives strength. Hence, to make the intellectual faith a fair analogon or unison of the vital faith, it ought to be stamped in the mind by all the evidences duly co-ordinated, and not designed by single pen-strokes, beginning either here or there. III. That, according to No. I., Christ is not described primarily and characteristically as a teacher, but as a doer; a light indeed, but an effective light, the sun which causes what it shows, as well as shows what it first causes. IV. That a certain degree of morality is presupposed in the reception of Christianity; it is the substratum of the moral interest which substantiates the evidence of miracles. The instance of a profligate suddenly converted, if properly sifted, will be found but an apparent exception. V. That the being of a God, and the immortality of man, are everywhere assumed by Christ. VI. That Socinianism is not a religion, but a theory, and that, foo,u. very pernicious, or a very unsatisfactory, theory. Pernicious,—for it excludes all our deep and awful ideas of the perfect...« less