The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 10: On the Constitution of the Church and State 9781400867851

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Editorial Practice, Symbols, and Abbreviations
Chronological Table
Editor's Introduction
On the Constitution of the Church and State
Editor's Appendixes
Index

Citation preview

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE · 10

ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH AND STATE

General Editor: KATHLEEN COBURN Associate Editor: BART WINER

THE COLLECTED WORKS 1. LECTURES 1795: ON POLITICS AND RELIGION 2. THE WATCHMAN 3. ESSAYS ON HIS TIMES 4. THE FRIEND 5. LECTURES 1808-1819: ON LITERATURE 6. LAY SERMONS 7. BIOGRAPHIA LITERARIA 8. LECTURES 1818-1819: ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 9. AIDS TO REFLECTION 10. ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE CHURCH AND STATE 11. SHORTER WORKS AND FRAGMENTS 12. MARGINALIA 13. LOGIC 14. TABLE TALK 15. OPUS MAXIMUM 16. POETICAL WORKS GENERAL INDEX

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE from a portrait painted by Moses Haughton, 1832 Christ's Hospital; reproduced by kind permission

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On the Constitution of the Church and State EDITED BY

John Colmer

ROUTLEDGE & KEGAN PAUL ogo BOLLINGEN SERIES LXXV PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

This edition of the text by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is copyright © 1976 by Princeton University Press The Collected Works, sponsored by Bollingen Foundation, is published in Great Britain by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane, London EC4V 5EL ISBN 0-7100-8107-3 and in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey ISBN 0-691-09877-8 LCC 74-32569 The Collected Works constitutes the seventy-fifth publication in Bollingen Series The present work is number 10 of the Collected Works

Designed by Richard Garnett Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press

THIS EDITION OF THE WORKS OF SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE IS DEDICATED IN GRATITUDE TO THE FAMILY EDITORS IN EACH GENERATION

CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS EDITORIAL PRACTICE, SYMBOLS, AND ABBREVIATIONS CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

On the Constitution of the Church and State Advertisement Chapter i Chapter n Chapter i n Chapter iv Chapter v Chapter vi Chapter v n Chapter V I I I Chapter ix Chapter x Chapter xi Chapter x n Idea of the Christian Church First Character Second Character Third Character Fourth Character On the Third Possible Church, or the Church of Antichrist vii

page ix xi

xiii xix XXXiii

5 11 23 32 37 42 50 61 71 77 82 95 102 113 114 116 116,118 124 129

Church and State

viii

Second Part: or, Aids to a Right Appreciation of the Bill Admitting Catholics to Sit in Both Houses of Parliament, &c &c Author's Appendix

147

Glossary to the Appended Letter

165

Appendix: Letter to

173

EDITOR'S APPENDIXES

A Preface to Church and State (1839) by Henry Nelson Coleridge

191

B

The Catholic Emancipation Act, 1829

203

C Manuscript drafts of Church and State D 1 Manuscript Fragment on the Catholic Question

213

D 2 Manuscript Fragment on the Origin of the Priesthood

227 229

E

A Letter from Coleridge to the Rev James Gillman in a Copy of Church and State F Annotated Copies

233 237

INDEX

239

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from a portrait painted by Moses Haughton, 1832 frontispiece 2. On the Constitution of the Church and State (2nd ed 1830). Title-page facing page 4 3. A corrected page of Church and State containing the beginning of a letter from Coleridge to the Rev JamesGillman facing page 116 4. A leaf of the manuscript draft of Church and State facing page 138

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS OWE a special debt of gratitude to Miss Kathleen Coburn, whose

I

kindness and understanding have sustained me in my long edito­ rial labours and whose immense scholarship has been a constant inspiration and always so generously put at my disposal. To Mr Bart Winer too I owe a great debt. My task has been lightened as a result of the editions that have already appeared in this series, and I should like to thank Barbara Rooke, Lewis Patton, and Peter Mann for all the invaluable help they have provided. The works published on Coleridge's later political writings by David P. Calleo, William F. Kennedy, R. J. White, Basil Willey, Raymond Williams, and Carl R. Woodring have also influenced me in ways that will be obvious to the reader from my Introduction and notes. For the solution of a particularly elusive source in St Augustine I am grateful to Mr Gerald Bonner of the University of Durham; for comment on the historical and political background I owe a special debt to Professor Austin Gough, who kindly read a draft of my Introduction and drew attention to interest­ ing Continental parallels; for information about Coleridge's political journalism and for transcripts of passages in Egerton 2801 I am grateful to Professor David V. Erdman; for the solution of several problems I owe a debt to Dr John Barrell, whose edition of Church and State appeared in 1972; for tracing classical sources and for supplying translations I am indebted to the following: Mr A. French, Mr R. F. Newbold, Mr R. F. Willetts, but especially to Mrs G. J. R. Arnold. And for help with Biblical allusions to Mr Michael J. Tolley, and for legal allusions to Dr John Finnis. Many libraries and their staffs have been exceptionally co-opera­ tive. It is impossible to thank them all, but I should like to record my gratitude to the British Museum and its staff, to Victoria College Library and its staff, to Mr I. D. Raymond and the staff of the Barr Smith Library, Adelaide, and to Mr Peter Pagan for providing special research facilities in the Public Library at Bath in 1967. At an early stage in my editorial work, the award of a Senior Research Fellowship at the University of Birmingham gave me time

xii

Church and State

to explore some of the relevant background to Coleridge's ideas on Church and State. I am particularly grateful to Professor T. J. B. Spencer for his kindness and hospitality during this period. A generous grant from the Bollingen Foundation enabled me to examine printed and manuscript holdings in American and Canadian libraries, and I am grateful to the following libraries for allowing me to publish material gathered then: Berg Collection, The New York Public Library; Pierpont Morgan Library, and the University Libraries of Harvard, Yale, and Victoria College, Toronto. A later grant from the Princeton University Press allowed me to visit the British Museum at a time when I urgently needed to carry out final checking of manuscripts. I should also like to thank the University of Adelaide for granting me study leave in 1966-7 and 1973-4, and for support from its research funds. For the skilful typing I should like to thank Mrs W. Reeves, Mrs Christine Pullen, and Mrs Joan Craik, and for assistance in assem­ bling research materials, Miss Helen Brown and Miss Robin Eaden. From time to time my wife has given very substantial help, often on occasions when her own work was making severe demands on her precious time. For this and her constant encouragement I am deeply grateful. Adelaide, S. Australia

JOHN COLMER

EDITORIAL PRACTICE, SYMBOLS, AND ABBREVIATIONS

T

HE text of the present edition follows Coleridge's second edition of 1830, except for the correction of obvious printer's errors. Corrections given in Coleridge's annotated copies are reproduced in the textual notes. Two editions were published in Coleridge's lifetime, both dated 1830, although the first edition actually appeared in December 1829. Since Coleridge himself revised the text of the second edition, expanding it in the process, this forms the basis of the copy text. Henry Nelson Coleridge edited a third edition, which was published, together with a second edition of the Lay Sermons, five years after Coleridge's death, in 1839. The phrase on the title-page, "Edited from the Author's Corrected Copies with Notes", would seem to apply only to the Lay Sermons. Since the revisions of Church and State cannot be traced back to copies marked by the author and consist mainly of corrections of syntax, idiom, and punctuation, they seem to have no special authority and are not therefore included in the textual apparatus. However, Η. N. Coleridge's corrections of Cole­ ridge's Greek quotations have been silently adopted where appropriate. His excellent notes have also been used occasionally, with due acknowledg­ ment. All significant variants between first and second editions are recorded in the textual notes, together with variants in copies annotated by the author.

There are fragments of original manuscripts in the British Museum (Add MS 34225 ff 115—27T and Egerton 2001 ff 204-7T) for two small sections of the text (pp 53-75 and 139-44). In Editor's Appendix C, these frag­ ments are printed literatim, including Coleridge's cancellations, for the light they may throw on his process of composition. The two following copies contain revisions in Coleridge's hand : Copy G. A copy of the second edition, inscribed to the Rev James Gillman, now in the Yale University Library. Copy W. A copy of the second edition, inscribed to W. Wordsworth, now in the Harvard University Library. Variants are recorded in the textual notes. Further details of these and other presentation copies appear in Appendix F. Coleridge's footnotes are indicated by symbols (*, t, etc) and are printed full measure. Editor's footnotes are numbered and (when not too brief) printed in double columns. The order of the editor's footnotes follows (perhaps Coleridgian) logic; i.e. it is assumed that when the text contains

xiv

Church and State

an asterisk or a dagger the reader then turns from text to note and then goes back again. The editor's footnotes, which are sometimes notes on Coleridge's footnotes, follow that order. Thus the footnote indicators within the text may leap from 1 to 5, notes 2-4 being notes on Coleridge's footnotes. Textual notes (a~b, etc) at the foot of the page, preceding the editor's notes, give the earlier wording in the first edition and manuscripts, and revised wording in annotated copies. The editions referred to in the editor's footnotes are, when they are known, those Coleridge used; "see" before the edition indicates that it is not necessarily the edition Coleridge cites or quotes (though it may be an edition he is known to have used). The text of all quotations from Coleridge's marginal comments in books has been made to conform to the reading adopted in the manuscript of the Marginalia in the Collected Works, even where, for the reader's con­ venience, a reference is supplied to another source—for example, Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century ed R. F. Brinkley (Durham, N.C. 1955). The following symbols are used in quoting from manuscript (with "wild") as an example): [wild] A reading supplied by the editor. [?wild] An uncertain reading. [?wild/world] Possible alternative readings. Twildl A tentative reading (owing to obliterations, torn paper, etc). [ . . .] A n illegible word o r phrase. Isle, whose Merchants are Princes, whose Traffickers the honorable of the Earth; who stretcheth out her hand over the Sea, and She is the Mart of Nations!" (Isai: XXIII.) The" National Church, in the dark Age of Queen Elizabeth, in the unenlightened times of Burleigh, Hooker, Spenser, Shakespear and Lord Bacon, A GREAT VENERABLE ESTATE OF THE REALM; but now by "All the Intellect of the Kingdom," it determined to be a one of the very many theological Sect