[Coleridge’s Literary Remains, Volume 4. by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]@TWC D-Link bookColeridge’s Literary Remains, Volume 4. INTRODUCTION, p 2/14
16. The truth of the doctrine is vehemently insisted on, in a variety of places, by the great R.Moses ben Maimon; who founds upon it the unity of the Godhead, and ranks it among the fundamental articles of the Jewish religion.
Thus in his celebrated Letter to the Jews of Marseilles he observes, &c. But what is obtained by quotations from Maimonides more than from Alexander Hales, or any other Schoolman of the same age? The metaphysics of the learned Jew are derived from the same source, namely, Aristotle; and his object was the same, as that of the Christian Schoolmen, namely, to systematize the religion he professed on the form and in the principles of the Aristotelian philosophy. By the by, it is a serious defect in Mr.Oxlee's work, that he does not give the age of the writers whom he cites.
He cannot have expected all his readers to be as learned as himself. Ib.ch.iii.p.
26. Mr.Oxlee seems too much inclined to identify the Rabbinical interpretations of Scripture texts with their true sense; when in reality the Rabbis themselves not seldom used those interpretations as a convenient and popular mode of conveying their own philosophic opinions. Neither have I been able to admire the logic so general among the divines of both Churches, according to which if one, two, or perhaps three sentences in any one of the Canonical books appear to declare a given doctrine, all assertions of a different character must have been meant to be taken metaphorically. Ib.p.
26-7. The Prophet Isaiah, too, clearly inculcates the spirituality of the Godhead in the following declaration: 'But Egypt is man, and not God: and their horses flesh, and not spirit'.
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