[Coleridge’s Literary Remains, Volume 4. by Samuel Taylor Coleridge]@TWC D-Link book
Coleridge’s Literary Remains, Volume 4.

PART III
2/18

In many caterpillars there is a large empty space in the head, the destined room for the pushing forth of the 'antennae' of its next state of being.
Ib.p.

12.
But the anti-moralists aver * * that they are quoted unfairly;--that although they disavow, it is true, the necessity, and deny the value, of practical morality and personal holiness, and declare them to be totally irrelevant to our future salvation, yet that * * I might have found occasional recommendations of moral duty which I have neglected to notice.
The same 'crambe bis decies cocta' of one self-same charge grounded on one gross and stupid misconception and mis-statement: and to which there needs no other answer than this simple fact.

Let the Barrister name any one gross offence against the moral law, for which he would shun a man's acquaintance, and for that same vice the Methodist would inevitably be excluded publicly from their society; and I am inclined to think that a fair list of the Barrister's friends and acquaintances would prove that the Calvinistic Methodists are the austerer and more watchful censors of the two.

If this be the truth, as it notoriously is, what but the cataract of stupidity uncouched, or the thickest film of bigot-slime, can prevent a man from seeing that this tenet of justification by faith alone is exclusively a matter between the Calvinist's own heart and his Maker, who alone knows the true source of his words and actions; but that to his neighbours and fellow-creedsmen, his spotless life and good works are demanded, not, indeed, as the prime efficient causes of his salvation, but as the necessary and only possible signs of that faith, which is the means of that salvation of which Christ's free grace is the cause, and the sanctifying Spirit the perfecter.

But I fall into the same fault I am arraigning, by so often exposing and confuting the same blunder, which has no claim even at its first enunciation to the compliment of a philosophical answer.


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