[Coleridge’s Literary Remains, Volume 4. by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]@TWC D-Link bookColeridge’s Literary Remains, Volume 4. BOOK I 11/18
It is almost an argument on his side, that nothing he believed is more strange and inexplicable than his own belief of them. Ib.p.
76. The third sect were the Ranters.
These also made it their business, as the former, to set up the light of nature under the name of Christ in men, and to dishonour and cry down the Church, &c. But why does Baxter every where assert the identity of the new light with the light of nature? Or what does he mean exclusively by the latter? The source must be the same in all lights as far as it is light. Ib.p.
77. And that was the fourth sect, the Quakers; who were but the Ranters turned from horrid profaneness and blasphemy to a life of extreme austerity on the other side. Observe the _but_. Ib. Their doctrine is to be seen in Jacob Behmen's books by him that hath nothing else to do, than to bestow a great deal of time to understand him that was not willing to be easily understood, and to know that his bombasted words do signify nothing more than before was easily known by common familiar terms. This is not in all its parts true.
It is true that the first principles of Behmen are to be found in the writings of the Neo-Platonists after Plotinus, and (but mixed with gross impieties) in Paracelsus;--but it is not true that they are easily known, and still less so that they are communicable in common familiar terms.
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