Editor’s Notes

In the this part, we present Fr Coleridge’s account of St Luke’s Gospel on the Resurrection. The fact that some of these points have been overlooked has led to confusion over how the four Gospels can be reconciled – but this confusion is totally dispelled by Fr Coleridge.

We have previously published Fr Coleridge’s harmonisation of the Gospels’ account of the Resurrection narratives:

1. How to avoid being disappointed by the Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection

2. Getting the Resurrection appearances in order

3. How and why Our Lord appeared after the Resurrection

4. The Risen Christ’s appearances before the Ascension

The WM Review also published a synthesis of these accounts, based on Fr Coleridge’s work, in one continuous text:

• The Resurrection synthesised into a single narrative

In this mini-series, Fr Coleridge provides further explanation of why each Gospel treats of these matters in their particular ways – and the role of these accounts in the life of the Church.

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The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord in the Four Gospels

The Life of our Life, Vol. II

Chapter XI
St. Matt. xxvii. 35–44; St. Mark xv. 24–32; St. Luke xxiii. 34–43; St. John xix. 13–27; Story of the Gospels, § 170.
Burns and Oates, London, 1876

1. What St Matthew and St Mark convey in their Resurrection accounts

2. What St Luke conveys in his Resurrection account

St Luke supplementary

St. Luke, in the history of the Resurrection, plays the same part as in the rest of the Gospel narrative.

That is, his narrative is complete in itself, he as far as possible prefers to give new incidents which resemble those which have been already given by the Evangelists who have preceded him, rather than to relate exactly what the others have related, he supplements what requires supplement, and while he writes throughout as an historian he gives a colour and character of his own to the whole story which make it as individual as the tone of a voice or the expression of a countenance.

His parallelism rather than identity with St. Matthew and St. Mark begins from the last touches which he gives to his account of the entombment of our Lord. For he mentions the women who had followed our Lord from Galilee as watching the burial, and their going home that evening, and before the Sabbath had begun, preparing their spices and unguents. This is enough to tell us, in St. Luke’s modest way, that he is speaking of a party of women different from that which had been mentioned by St. Matthew and St. Mark.

Then he carries on the history of these same women. They came to the sepulchre deep in the twilight—evidently therefore before the others, who, as St. Mark tells us, did not arrive until the sun had risen. Here again we have one of St. Luke’s notes of difference. They find the stone rolled away, go in, and the Body is not there. Two angels, instead of one, appear to them, and ask them why they seek the living among the dead, and remind them of the words of our Lord as to His Passion and Resurrection, while He was in Galilee.

No charge is given to them to tell the Apostles, but they go and tell these things to the eleven and the other disciples. Their words appear to them as idle wanderings, and are not believed. This is St. Luke’s contribution to the first part, as we have called it, of the three into which the Gospel narrative of the Resurrection may be divided. He sums up by naming the women who ‘told these things to the Apostles,’ but this catalogue is not to be considered as including those only who belonged to the party of which St. Luke has himself spoken.

It is an enumeration of all the women who at different times brought messages to the Apostles—Mary Magdalene, the first, Joanna and her companions, the second, and Mary mother of James and the others with her, the third. As the Apostles were the witnesses to the world, so these women were to the Apostles, the witnesses whose word they ought to have believed at once.

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The latter parts of the history in his Gospel

St. Luke’s further account hangs together without any break. He mentions first, in a few words, the visit of Peter to the tomb. Then he gives at full length the story of the travellers to Emmaus, and how our Lord made Himself known to them in the ‘breaking of bread.’

The account which Cleophas and his companion gave our Lord of the state of their knowledge as to the incidents of the day before they left Jerusalem exactly coincides with that which one would give who had heard the account of the women whom St. Luke has already mentioned, for he speaks of their having been to the sepulchre before light, of the vision of angels, that is, more than one, and he makes no mention of an order to go to Galilee. The message to go into Galilee was not sent by them.

The other fact he mentions is the visit of ‘some of ours,’ that is, Peter and John, to the tomb. We cannot doubt that the visit thus paid by St. Peter prepared his mind, at all events, for the fulness of faith which was afterwards rewarded by our Lord’s appearance to him, of which the travellers are informed when they return to Jerusalem.

St. Luke then proceeds to what we have called the second element in the history. He says nothing of those appearances of our Lord to His Apostles of which St. Matthew and St. Mark have spoken, but he adds the entirely new incident of His appearance to them on the very evening of Easter Day, when He entered while the doors were shut, showed them His hands and feet, bade them feel Him, and even ate something with them.

Then St. Luke passes at once, without any mention again of Galilee, to the charge or instruction which our Lord gave to the Apostles—as it seems, at a time subsequent to that of the first apparition to them on Easter Day, at which our Lord conferred on them the Holy Ghost and the power of absolution, of which this Evangelist makes no mention. St. Luke’s instruction relates to the fulfilment of the Scriptures, to the gift of intelligence given to them at this time, to their duty as witnesses, and the command to remain in Jerusalem until the coming of the Holy Ghost.

He then, as has been said, briefly mentions the Ascension, and the time they spent in retirement, ‘being always in the Temple praising and blessing God.’

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The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord in the Four Gospels

1. What St Matthew and St Mark convey in their Resurrection accounts

2. What St Luke conveys in his Resurrection account

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

Subscribe now

Share The Father Coleridge Reader

Subscribe to The WM Review

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Editor’s Notes

We have previously published Fr Coleridge’s harmonisation of the Gospels’ account of the Resurrection narratives:

1. How to avoid being disappointed by the Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection

2. Getting the Resurrection appearances in order

3. How and why Our Lord appeared after the Resurrection

4. The Risen Christ’s appearances before the Ascension

The WM Review also published a synthesis of these accounts, based on Fr Coleridge’s work, in one continuous text:

• The Resurrection synthesised into a single narrative

In the chapter following this treatment, Fr Coleridge provides further explanation of why each Gospel treats of these matters in their particular ways – and the role of these accounts in the life of the Church.

In the first part of this new mini-series, we present Fr Coleridge’s account of Ss Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels.

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The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord in the Four Gospels

The Life of our Life, Vol. II

Chapter XI
St. Matt. xxvii. 35–44; St. Mark xv. 24–32; St. Luke xxiii. 34–43; St. John xix. 13–27; Story of the Gospels, § 170.
Burns and Oates, London, 1876

1. What St Matthew and St Mark convey in their Resurrection accounts

Brevity of the Evangelists

Something has already been said as to the disappointing character of the Gospel records of the Resurrection of our Lord and of all that followed upon it—disappointing, that is, unless they are viewed in the true light. It would seem as if the Evangelists, at least the earlier two of them, had almost thought their work was over when they had finished the account of our Lord’s death and barely mentioned His Resurrection.

The last named mystery was the dogmatic foundation of all the hope of the Christian hereafter and of all his spiritual life here. The details seem dwarfed in the importance of the central truth. They speak of it as a truth which was so familiar to those to whom they addressed themselves as to dispense them from distinguishing times and places and circumstances.

So it is with people who talk or write about some great and all absorbing event of which they have been witnesses, and with which those to whom they speak or write are perfectly conversant. It is not difficult to harmonize the accounts of the several Evangelists, as has been shown in the preceding chapter.

The only difficulty comes from the abruptness and brevity of the writers on whom we depend, and the immense difference between ourselves and those for whom they at first wrote. This difficulty naturally decreases in proportion as the writers recede in point of time from the great event of which they are speaking. There is no abruptness of transition in the narrative of St. John, and less in that of St. Luke than in those of St. Matthew and St. Mark.

St Matthew and St Mark

St. Matthew and St. Mark may very well be taken together. St. Mark is here, as in many parts of his Gospel, a silent commentator and explainer of St. Matthew. The account in each may be divided into three very simple heads, and as we find the same order followed, more or less, even by the latest Evangelists, we may fairly consider that it is founded on the nature of the subject-matter.

First there is an account of the women going to the sepulchre, and receiving the message from the angel, that our Lord was not there, and that the disciples are to see Him in Galilee. Then there is the appearance of our Lord Himself to the eleven Apostles. Thirdly, there is a charge or commission given by our Lord concerning their future work in the world.

That is, the simplest elements of the Gospel statement as to the Resurrection come to these three: how the Apostles were first informed by others of the truth, how they knew it themselves, and the commission which their Risen Master gave them. Around these central and simple elements each Evangelist has grouped some other facts of his own, but these form, as it were, the skeleton of the Gospel narratives.

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St Matthew’s account

St. Matthew and St. Mark name the same women in their respective accounts, except that St. Mark adds Salome to Mary Magdalene and Mary the Mother of James. Each of these Evangelists mentions them as watching the burial of our Lord on Friday. St. Matthew adds that on Saturday, towards the close of the day, the two Maries came to visit the sepulchre. St. Mark adds that on the evening of Saturday, after the Sabbath was over, they bought their spices and ointments for the pious work which they contemplated performing on the morrow.

But St. Matthew then leaves them. He passes abruptly from the Saturday night to the Sunday morning, and from the women preparing their spices to the sepulchre of our Lord and the guards around it, of whom he had just before been speaking. He mentions the earthquake after our Lord’s Resurrection, the angel rolling away the stone and sitting on it, and the terror of the guards.

All this of course took place before the women approached the sepulchre in the morning, though on account of his great abruptness and conciseness St. Matthew, if he were a modern writer, might be thought to lead us to understand that the women were present, unless he showed either by word or by a division in his work, that he was passing to a new subject.

He then tells us what the angel said to the women, whom he does not name, and who therefore must be supposed to be the same as those whom he has named before, or at least to have been a company including some of them. He makes no mention of their approach, or of their entering the sepulchre, but he tells us how they went out of it, and ran to tell the Apostles, and were met on their way by our Lord, Who sent them with the same message to the Apostles as that which they had received from the angel.

Then he tells us of the guard going into the city, and of the bribe given them by the Chief Priests. This is the first part of the history as he relates it, that is, this is what he tells us of the way in which the news of the Resurrection was sent to the Apostles. The second part consists of the apparition of our Lord to the eleven on the mountain in Galilee which He had appointed, which seems to have been the apparition to five hundred brethren and more of which St. Paul speaks.

St. Matthew then proceeds to the third part of the history, as to which he mentions the charge to go and teach all nations, baptizing them and instructing them in all that our Lord has commanded, and His promise to be with them all days even unto the consummation of the world.

St Mark’s account

St. Mark’s account must be considered as an independent narrative, which also silently comments on and explains St. Matthew.

As to the first part of the whole, he adds the name of Salome to that of the two Maries, when he speaks of the women who prepared ointments overnight. We may understand this, not as obliging us to think that all the three whom he mentions are the subjects of his narrative as it proceeds, but rather as intimating that what he there relates happened to some of them.

He omits all mention of the earthquake and the guard. He distinguishes, moreover, very carefully the time of the approach of the women to the sepulchre: it was very early, but the sun had risen. This makes it clear that the visit was comparatively late.

He mentions, in his picturesque love of details, the conversation of the holy women about rolling away the stone. He tells us they entered in and saw the angel, ‘a young man,’ sitting on the right, the side on which the slab of the Holy Sepulchre is. He mentions the message given to the women to carry to the Apostles, and then leaves them, saying that they fled from the sepulchre in trembling and fear, and told no one as they went.

Then he omits the appearance of our Lord to them, and, as if to restore her to her rights, he says that the first to whom our Lord appeared was Mary Magdalene, ‘early on the Sunday.’ It is clear that he substitutes this appearance to Mary Magdalene alone for that which St. Matthew has mentioned to the women together, among whom she may or may not have been—but, taking the whole evidence together, it may seem most likely that she was not.

St. Mark then mentions very shortly the appearance of our Lord to the two travellers to Emmaus, though he does not name the place. This is the first part of his narrative. The second consists of the visit of our Lord to the eleven while at meat when He upbraided them for their incredulity; and the third part is the charge to go and preach the Gospel to the whole creation, and the promise of miraculous signs by which the charge was accompanied.

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The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord in the Four Gospels

1. What St Matthew and St Mark convey in their Resurrection accounts

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

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Editor’s Notes

This Gospel read on the Third Sunday after Easter takes us back to Christ’s final words to the Apostles in the Cenacle, on the night of Maundy Thursday, immediately before leaving for Gethsemane.

In this text, Christ prepares the Apostles for his imminent Passion and Resurrection, veiling the horror of his suffering in promises of future joy, clarity, and power in prayer.

Most of all, the “dual sense” of Christ’s words—pertaining to his Passion and Resurrection, as well as his Ascension and Second Coming—explain why these passages are read at this part of the Liturgical Year.

He teaches how the Church must live in the world after his visible departure – but he does not only prepare the Apostles for that reality. He also promises them that the Holy Ghost will be sent to them and direct their work, even amidst persecution and dereliction.

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Parting Words

Passiontide, Part III, Chapter VI

Chapter VI
St. John xvi. 16-33, Story of the Gospels, § 156
Burns and Oates, London, 1886

Part I: What did Christ leave unsaid on the night he was betrayed?

Christ made some elements of doctrine crystal clear, while left others to develop over time—but why?

1. What did Christ leave unsaid on the night he was betrayed?

Part II: Why the Church reads the Last Supper discourses in Eastertide

Our Lord spoke enigmatically before the Passion about going away, and returning—but what ‘going away’ was he talking about?

2. Why the Church reads the Last Supper discourses in Eastertide

Part III: Why Christ compared Christian joy to giving birth

Our Lord did not promise that his followers would be free from sorrow. But what kind of sorrow?

3. Why Christ compared Christian joy to giving birth

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

Subscribe now

Share The Father Coleridge Reader

Subscribe to The WM Review

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Follow our projects on Twitter, YouTube and Telegram:

• The WM Review

• Twitter (The WM Review)

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Editor’s Notes

The liturgical readings on the Sundays of Easter rapidly move on from the Resurrection, and soon become focused on the Ascension. Those readings are primarily drawn from the discourses at the Last Supper, but the Gospels themselves indicate that there were a number of appearances of Our Lord in the lead up to the Ascension itself.

In this part, Fr Coleridge explains those appearances.

Over at The WM Review, we published a synthesis of all four narratives based on Fr Coleridge’s harmony:

Subscribe now

The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord

The Life of our Life, Vol. II

Chapter X
Burns and Oates, London, 1876

1. How to avoid being disappointed by the Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection

2. Getting the Resurrection appearances in order

3. How and why Our Lord appeared after the Resurrection

4. The Risen Christ’s appearances before the Ascension

On the mountain

The other chief manifestation of this time in Galilee is that of which St. Paul speaks in the passage to which reference has already been made, when our Lord was seen, as he says, by more than five hundred brethren at once. It is clear that a manifestation of this kind could hardly have taken place near Jerusalem, without attracting great notice.

Although it was perfectly easy for our Lord to quell by an exertion of power any attempts that might have been made to hinder such an assembly, or to prevent any measures that might otherwise have been taken in consequence, it was not in accordance with the Divine order of Providence that any display of power of that kind should be made.

On the contrary, one of the reasons which may fairly be assigned for the retirement into Galilee at this time, is the security which would be afforded thereby for the meetings of the disciples and for the quiet communings with the Apostles with which our Lord was now chiefly occupied. Galilee would be all the more secure, inasmuch as a considerable space of time had now passed since our Lord had been seen in that province in the exercise of His ordinary Ministry.

It must always be uncertain whether we are to consider the juxtaposition of certain incidents in St. Matthew, and indeed, in this part of the history, in the other Evangelists also, as a sure sign that the incidents thus placed side by side were actually connected in time and scene. But there seems no reason for doubting that St. Matthew intends us to consider that at this great meeting, which he speaks of as a meeting of the eleven Apostles on a mountain which our Lord had appointed,1 the great charge was conferred upon them with which the narrative of the first Gospel is closed.

Thus this manifestation would in a manner correspond to and be the complement of the manifestation on the shore of the sea of Tiberias, of which we have last spoken. On that occasion our Lord conferred on St. Peter the supreme care and government of His Church, in the presence of other Apostles. At this on the mountain our Lord conferred on the whole Apostolic body, as it seems, in the presence of a large body of believers, the commission to be the teachers of the whole world.

‘All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to keep all things whatsoever I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you all days, even unto the consummation of the world.’

Last scene in St. Mark

We have spoken of the final manifestations which are given by St. Matthew and St. John: it remains to say a few words as to those which end this part of the history in St. Mark and St. Luke. Each Evangelist ends his work with a characteristic passage, in harmony with the general tone which has pervaded his Gospel. St. Mark mentions the message to the Apostles to go into Galilee,2 but he gives us no account of anything that passed there. The scene of his last passage is evidently Jerusalem.

He tells us that our Lord, ‘at a later time,’ appeared to the eleven as they were at meat, and that He upbraided them with their incredulity and hardness of heart in not believing those who had seen that He was risen. This incident seems to belong very naturally indeed to the first Easter Day, and may perhaps seem out of place at a later point of time, especially after the return of the Apostles to Jerusalem which must have taken place before the Ascension.

It must remain quite uncertain, as has been said, whether this manifestation of Himself took place at the earlier date or at the later, but as it seems in St. Mark to be connected with the last words of our Lord which he records, there can be no reason against placing it there. When we remember the importance and the prerogatives of faith in the new kingdom, it need not surprise us to find our Lord at the very last so earnestly rebuking the founders of that kingdom for their own defects in this regard. St. Mark brings out especially the power of miracles as conferred on the Apostles and on believers generally in order to authenticate their mission.

‘He said to them, Go into the whole world, and preach the Gospel to the whole creation.3 He that shall believe and be baptized shall be saved, and he that shall not believe shall be condemned. But these signs shall follow those who believe: in My Name they shall cast out devils, they shall speak with new tongues, they shall take up serpents, and if they drink anything deadly, it shall not hurt them, they shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover.’

And the Evangelist adds, that our Lord was afterwards taken up into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God.

‘But they went forth, and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word by the signs which followed.’

Last scene in St. Luke

St. Luke’s last manifestation is one in which our Lord speaks to the Apostles of the fulfilment which had been necessary of all that had been written concerning Him in the Law of Moses, in the Prophets, and in the Psalms.4 He then opened their intelligences that they might understand the Scriptures.

‘So it is written, and so it did behove Christ to suffer, and to rise again from the dead the third day, and that penitence and remission of sins should be preached in His Name unto all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.’

‘And you,’ He said, ‘are the witnesses of these things. And I send the promise of My Father upon you; but do you abide in the city, until you be clothed with power from on high.’

St. Luke concludes his Gospel with a short mention of the Ascension of our Lord, in the act of blessing them. ‘And they adoring Him returned unto Jerusalem with great joy, and they were always in the Temple, praising and glorifying God.’

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The Ascension

A few passages from St. Luke’s other work, the Acts of the Apostles, which is in truth a continuation of the Gospels, relating the Life of our Lord in His Church, must suffice to end this history.5

The Acts open with a more detailed account of what took place just before the Ascension than has been given in the Gospel. Our Lord, he says, appeared to His chosen Apostles for forty days, speaking of the kingdom of God. He bade them remain in Jerusalem, to await there the promise of His Father, which they had heard from Himself, ‘for John indeed baptized with water, but you shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost after these few days.’

They asked Him whether He was now about to restore the kingdom of Israel. He told them that it was not for them to know the times and the seasons which the Father has kept in His own power. Their work was to receive the power of the Holy Ghost which should come upon them, and to be witnesses to Him in Jerusalem, in all Judæa, in Samaria, and to the very end of the earth. While He was speaking He was raised up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. They remained gazing up into heaven, when two angels stood by them and addressed them as Men of Galilee! why did they stand thus looking up into heaven?

‘This Jesus, Who is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come as you have seen Him go into heaven.’

Then they returned to Jerusalem to await the coming of the Holy Ghost. St. Luke goes on to relate the beautiful story of the beginnings of the Christian Church, the Apostles remaining in prayer with our Blessed Lady and the holy women, the election of St. Matthias in place of Judas at the bidding of Peter, the coming of the Comforter on the day of Pentecost, the miracle of the tongues, St. Peter’s address to the multitude, and the first admissions by baptism into the fold of our Lord.

Beginnings of the Church

The description which St. Luke gives of the fervour of that first Christian Church seems to gather into itself all the characteristic features which might be expected in a community which was the purest and freshest outburst of the seed sown in our Lord’s Human Life—unity in the Apostolic doctrine, in the reception of the Blessed Sacrament, and in prayer, the supernatural power of the Church manifesting itself in the holy fear which it produced by its display of miraculous power, and, still more wonderful and beautiful, the multitude of believers of one heart and soul, having even their earthly possessions in common, ever praying and praising God in the Temple, filled with a simple holy joy and peace, winning the love and favour of all around, and drawing by the charm of their lives and characters great numbers into the fold.

Other and darker lines were soon to be introduced into the picture, and the brightness of its heavenly beauty was soon to become dim, for the history of the Church was not to be in the main different in its incidents from the history of our Lord Himself.

But here, while the fair vision is as yet undarkened with gloom, before persecution comes from without, before national jealousies spring up within, before St. Peter has to use his magisterial power in punishment, before Stephen wins the first martyr’s crown and sets the example of efficacious prayer for the conversion of persecutors, before the first heresies and the first schisms, the first controversies and the first apostasies, even before the Church is thrown open to the Gentiles, and their great Apostle rises to take his place by the side of St. Peter, we may fitly pause and close the volume of the earthly history of the Life of our Life.

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The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord

1. How to avoid being disappointed by the Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection

2. Getting the Resurrection appearances in order

3. How and why Our Lord appeared after the Resurrection

4. The Risen Christ’s appearances before the Ascension

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

Subscribe now

Share The Father Coleridge Reader

Subscribe to The WM Review

Give a gift subscription

Follow our projects on Twitter, YouTube and Telegram:

• The WM Review

• Twitter (The WM Review)

• YouTube

• Telegram

Editor’s Notes

Easter Week is over, but Eastertide continues. The liturgical readings on the Sundays of Easter move on from the Resurrection, and soon become focused on the Ascension – but we are going to continue considering Fr Coleridge’s account of the Resurrection narratives.

As noted in another article, Fr Coleridge’s work did not just include commentary on the Gospels, but also their harmonisation.

In his two-volume work The Life of our Life – the same title as that which is given to his much longer series of the life of Our Lord – he deals with the harmonistic questions with great clarity, and sometimes even ingenuity.

The Resurrection is one area in which such ingenuity is needed. In this mini-series, we will present Chapters X and XI of Volume II, along with our own ordering of his harmony.

In this part, he begins setting the Resurrection appearances in order – and draws out some important points that some might find surprising.

Over at The WM Review, we published a synthesis of all four narratives based on Fr Coleridge’s harmony:

Subscribe now

The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord

The Life of our Life, Vol. II

Chapter X
Burns and Oates, London, 1876

1. How to avoid being disappointed by the Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection

2. Getting the Resurrection appearances in order

3. How and why Our Lord appeared after the Resurrection

The travellers to Emmaus

The little band of the disciples, outside the Apostles, was as full of doubt and hesitation as the Apostles themselves. As yet, only the holy women professed to have seen our Lord. He left the report to work its way and prepare heart after heart for the astounding and most marvellous truth.

Two of the party, one of whom was Cleophas, set out in the course of the day for Emmaus, a village at a considerable distance.1 He joined them, in appearance as a stranger, entered into conversation with them, and asked the cause of their sorrow. They told Him of the death of their Master, of the women, Joanna’s party, who had visited the sepulchre and seen the Angels, who declared Him to be alive, and of the inspection of the tomb made by Peter and John. More they had not heard.

Our Lord reproached them for their dulness in believing what had been so plainly foretold in Scripture, and expounded to them passage after passage that related to His own Person. When they arrived in the afternoon at Emmaus, they urged Him to come and lodge with them, as it was towards evening, and then, when they sat down to their meal, He took bread, and blessed it, and gave it to them, and by this familiar action the knew their Master and Lord. He was gone at once, and they too returned in all haste to Jerusalem, to tell what they had seen to the rest.

Their tale was not believed, but when they went to the eleven Apostles it was confirmed. In the course of the day our Lord had appeared to Peter himself, and there was no more doubt. ‘The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared unto Simon.’ This is the manifestation of which St. Paul speaks in the first place, because it was the first manifestation made to one of the appointed witnesses who were to testify to the world.

It mattered very little whether the tale told by the two travellers was credited or not, and it is not wonderful that we should be told that they were disbelieved by some, as St. Mark tells us—all the more as their story implied a further revelation of the new conditions of the Risen Life of our Lord, Who, if He was not in more places than one, at least passed from one place to another with a celerity and freedom which in itself must have seemed miraculous.

Gradual revelations

Thus at the close of the first Easter Day the hearts of the disciples of various classes in Jerusalem had been prepared for the full certainty of faith as to our Lord’s Resurrection.

If it seems to us that the revelation was unduly delayed, or broken to them with a gradual care which appears unintelligible, it is because we do not understand either the extremity of consternation and distress into which the sudden catastrophe of the Passion had thrown them, or the immense importance attached by our Lord to the merit of faith.

He had it in His power to bring home the truth with the utmost certainty of conviction, by the evidence of the senses, to all the inhabitants of Jerusalem at once, from Pilate or Caiaphas or Herod downwards. The way which He choose was the way which we know was the best, because He chose it, and it was the most consonant to the whole character of God’s Providence in regard of the new Kingdom. The law of that Providence made the acceptance of the truth depend on the will, in the sense in which we say that faith in general depends on the will, and therefore the Apostles and others had to be dealt with in the gentlest way.

If all had been able to believe in the truth of the Resurrection at the simple word of the women, or like St. John, at the sight of the empty sepulchre, we cannot doubt that it would have been better. Our Lord would then have been able to commence at once the instruction of His Apostles in the things concerning the kingdom of God, which were to be the main topics of His conversation with them during the few weeks which were to pass before His Ascension.

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The Ten Apostles

The disciples who had returned from Emmaus were still speaking of what they had seen, and hearing what had passed in Jerusalem during their absence, when our Lord Himself suddenly stood in the midst of the holy company.2

The doors were fast shut, ‘for fear of the Jews,’ and He entered without opening them or giving any sign of His approach. He addressed them for the first time with the salutation which expresses so well the peculiar and characteristic grace which He had won for heaven and earth, men and angels, by His triumph over sin and death, ‘Peace be with you!’ ‘It is I, fear not,’ He added, and when they shrank back in fright and trouble, He bade them see His hands and feet, in which He still preserved the marks of His glorious Wounds, and bade them feel Him, that He was not a spirit.

Even then their joy was so great, as in a way of its own to hinder their belief, and then He asked them for something that He might eat, and they gave Him part of a broiled fish and a honeycomb. He ate some of this, and then gave the rest to them. It was then that He solemnly commissioned the Apostles, sending them, as His Father had sent Him, breathed on them, saying, ‘Receive the Holy Ghost,’ and gave them the power to forgive and retain sins.

St Thomas

We have one more appearance of our Lord to the Apostles chronicled for us, before that departure into Galilee which had been spoken of by Himself before His Passion, and also by the angels and by Himself to the holy women after the Resurrection.

This was just a week after the appearance of which we have been now speaking. Thomas had not been with the rest when our Lord visited them, and when he was told of what had passed he declared that he would believe nothing but his own senses. He must see the marks of the nails and feel them for himself, and put his hand into the wound of our Lord’s side.

Our Lord then appeared this second time to all the Apostles, Thomas being now with them, and gave him the test on which he had insisted. Thomas confessed his faith, calling Him ‘My Lord and my God.’ Then our Lord summed up, as it were, the whole of these successive manifestations of Himself in Jerusalem, saying, ‘Because thou hast seen, Thomas, thou hast believed. Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed.’

By the Lake of Tiberias

A week out of the forty days had now passed, the feast was over, and the multitudes of strangers from distant lands, as well as from Galilee and Peræa, were hastening to their homes. Galilee had been fixed by our Lord as the scene of the manifestations of Himself which He had promised to make to them after the Resurrection, and there some weeks were now spent by the Apostles and the other disciples.

We are not told of any other manifestations in Jerusalem before the journey of the company of disciples to Galilee, and we must suppose that faith in the Resurrection spread gradually among the mass of the disciples as distinguished from the Apostles. But a veil hangs over by far the greater part of this blessed time, nor are we told of the particulars of any teaching of our Lord except in the few prominent instances which yet remain to be mentioned.

The most detailed account of any appearance of our Lord is that which is given by St. John as the third manifestation which was made to the Apostles.3 This was the occasion when seven of them were together fishing, St. Peter, St. Thomas, St. James, St. John, St. Bartholomew or Nathanael, and two others. They fished all night, as once before, in the early days of our Lord’s Public Ministry, and caught nothing.

In the dawn of the morning our Lord was on the shore near them, but they did not know Him. He asked them if they had any food, and when they answered No, He bade them cast their net on the right side of the boat. The net was filled with fishes. St. John had already discerned our Lord, and told St. Peter Who it was. St. Peter leapt into the sea in his short tunic, and made for the land. The others followed in the boat, dragging the net. They found our Lord, with a fire of coals burning, a fish upon it, and some bread.

Then our Lord told them to bring some of the fish which they had caught, and Peter dragged the net to land, with a hundred and fifty-three large fishes in it. The net was unbroken. Our Lord bade them come and take their food, no one asking Him Who He was, ‘knowing that it was the Lord.’ Then it was that our Lord asked St. Peter three times whether he loved Him more than the others. Each time St. Peter answered in almost the same words, and received the charge to feed the sheep and the lambs.4 The last time St. Peter was pained at the question, and told our Lord that He knew all things, He knew that he loved Him.

Then our Lord prophesied to him of his martyrdom:

‘Amen, amen, I say to thee, when thou wast young thou didst gird thyself, and didst walk where thou wouldst. But when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hands, and another shall gird thee and lead thee whither thou wouldst not.’ Now, too, St. Peter asked our Lord what was to be the lot of St. John, and received the mysterious answer, ‘So I will have him to remain till I come. What is it to thee? Follow thou Me.’

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The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord

1. How to avoid being disappointed by the Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection

2. Getting the Resurrection appearances in order

3. How and why Our Lord appeared after the Resurrection

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

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Another trip to the South West

Many readers expressed appreciation for my article last week, titled ‘How we found Fr Coleridge’s grave’.

I had been trying to find the site of Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ’s final resting place, and had narrowed it down to two possible cemeteries in Ottery St Mary. With very little to go on beyond these scraps, and some optimism and prayers, my family and I drove to the South West of England on Fr Coleridge’s anniversary in the hope of finding the grave.

That article was an anniversary post, and was accompanied by two obituaries written at the time of Fr Coleridge’s death – and featured photographs from the British Jesuit Archive (used with written permission):

The good news for those who enjoy reading such “pilgrimage posts” , like my earlier WM Review ‘Resting Roots’, is that another one is now before them.

Because while we did find Fr Coleridge’s grave… I unfortunately had lost my wallet in Ottery St Mary.

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The lost wallet

After a lot of searching throughout the house, I worked out the last place I had used a card was in a farm shop cafe there (for some traditional Devonshire scones and clotted cream). I called the place on Saturday and confirmed that it was there. Thankfully, nothing had been taken from it. I said I’d call back on Monday to work out whether we could have it posted, or needed to collect it.

A minor debate ensued in the house: did I leave it in the cafe, or had Mrs Wright left it in the farm shop? I had forgotten to ask when I called them. Where it had been found would indicate who was at fault.

In the meantime… how to get the wallet back? The post would take a while, as well as being expensive and insecure. Should I go back to pick it up in person? It’s not a short journey, and I have work to be doing. The car had also been making funny noises on the last trip (concerningly high revs, sounding like it could explode at any moment…), and wouldn’t get into the garage until Tuesday.

But the rest of the week after that was jam-packed, and getting down there would be impossible.

There was nothing for it. It had to be Monday.

Mrs Wright heroically agreed to drive us down there so that I could work on my laptop during the journey. This would also give us an opportunity to ask where the wallet had been found.

So with more optimism and prayers (this time about the car), while the kids were at school and with Baby Wright in the back seat, off we went.

And we decided to make a very quick visit to another site from Fr Coleridge’s life on the way.

Alfington

Henry James Coleridge was born in Ottery St Mary, the second son of the judge Sir John Taylor Coleridge. I wrote about Ottery St Mary in the article already mentioned (including its annual flaming tar barrel tradition).

But I did not write about Alfington (or Alphington).

The Coleridges were an important family in the area, and indeed England: many gravestones in the churchyard bear the same name; the celebrated poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Fr Coleridge’s great-uncle) was also from the same town; the priest’s older brother, John Duke Coleridge, later became the Lord Chief Justice of England.

Given the family roots, it was natural that Henry James returned to the area.

Soon after he left Oxford – having failed to obtain a position as a Tutor at Oriel College, due in part to suspicions of impending “Romanism” – he decided to take a country curacy with the Anglican Establishment. Here is how Bishop Patterson describes it:

“Part of the parish of Ottery St. Mary, where was, and now is, the home of his family, was erected into a separate cure, and Henry Coleridge was asked to become the first curate. The Judge [Sir John Taylor Coleridge] was naturally desirous that he should be near home, and the church and parsonage were soon built with this view. Other circumstances combined to recommend this course to him.”

That “separate cure” is Alfington, a couple of miles north of Ottery St Mary.

Confusingly, there is a ward of Exeter named Alphington – and material about Fr Coleridge tells us that he was in “Alphington”. However, it seems clear that it was to Alfington that Fr Coleridge went: this small, probably medieval1 village is two miles from Ottery St Mary, whereas Alphington is about 15 miles away; and the church of St James and St Anne (and its parsonage and school) in Alfington were indeed built by Sir John Taylor Coleridge in 1849. The details matched up – although it was noticeable that Henry James Coleridge is not mentioned in any of the information about the church.

As Providence had it, Alfington was on the route to the farm shop where my wallet had been left, and only about five minutes away. So we managed to stop and take a look.

The church was off the main road, and only accessible through a very narrow road that wound around and upwards. But before long, we reached it.

Here is the parsonage, built by Sir John Taylor Coleridge for his son:

Here is the church. It does not have a beautiful exterior, as it was intended to be temporary and built with cheap materials.2

There was a beehive:

While the interior is also austere, it is much more beautiful.

Was this the pulpit from which he preached as an Anglican?

Coleridge at Alfington

Fr Coleridge was comfortable and happy in Alfington. Here, he was able to serve God as he believed he should, and care for souls – but this comfort was to be elevated to a higher level in due course. As Fr Clarke writes in his obituary:

“During the years that elapsed between the time of his leaving Oxford and his reception into the Church, the seed that had been sown at Trinity and Oriel was springing up and growing to its full perfection. In his peaceful little parish in his beloved Devonshire, surrounded by those he loved, and engaged in the congenial work of the Christian ministry, he enjoyed an earthly happiness which made his obedience to conscience and the great sacrifice that it entailed all the more meritorious in the sight of God.”

That seed of Catholic truth, watered with faithfulness to actual graces given to him, was indeed growing – although Coleridge remained cautious. Bishop Patterson wrote:

“The sensitive sincerity of his nature shrank from affecting to be dogmatic without a distinct and final basis on which to rest such a pretension.”

Patterson presents letters showing Coleridge’s state of mind in 1849, in which he advises Patterson himself to put away doubts about the Church of England and to fulfil his duties of state:

“You have indeed a sore trial in those feelings” (of doubt as to the Anglican position), “as I have in a way, though I do not know the cost of a struggle because it is my way to yield. More blessed is your pain! I think of you often, and seem to see that you are sure to conquer, through God’s grace, and that your doubts will all tend to your perfection. It must be so, dear friend, for you fight under good guidance.”

He presents another letter to similar effect – showing how important the perceived fruits of Anglican sacraments were to Coleridge’s position:

“To speak seriously, I am inclined to give up as unholy (almost) all attempts to unchurch the Church of England. For the existence of God’s grace with her is very clearly evident, and not only this, but it is, as Dr. Pusey says, closely connected with her sacraments and ordinances. Now of this phenomenon we can only give one account to ourselves: it is the work of God. The only other alternative is, that it is the work of His enemy, imitating for the destruction of His children His gracious operations.

“If then He be with us in the sacraments, or to speak more properly, in the Church, even if He gives this grace as a means to lead persons elsewhere (as He scattered fragments of truth and light over the heathen world), yet we can only follow surely where He would lead us by these means; by clinging closely to them and using them with all our heart.”

Coleridge believed that he could content himself by “put[ting] a Catholic sense” on the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles (although Newman had been denounced for doing just that in Tract 90, in 1841):

“To doubt and criticize is at once, so far, to begin by losing our hold of His hand. Let us then cling to it, and it will lead us ‘a little further on’ if it be His will. Leaving controversy to those who can deal with it, let us try to make ourselves humble and holy… I give up my hostility to the Thirty-nine Articles as long as I am allowed to put a Catholic sense on them. My path is of course beset with difficulties and my present position full of temptations (don’t laugh at me, but pray for me), but I must do the best I can.

Coleridge concluded by offering his assurance that if one despises what appear to be unfaithful doubts, whilst remaining faithful to what light one is given by God, then doubts based on truth will persist:

“See if you can comfort yourself with the considerations which influence me. You once said something which made me fear you attached far more weight to my opinion than you should… Now at present, with all the weight that much affection, at all events, can give to such an entreaty, I do pray you to dismiss your doubts. If I have done anything towards unsettling you, I hope I have at least demolished my own authority by this palinode. […]

“God bless you, my dear friend… Scatter to the winds unfaithful doubts; if they are not unfaithful, they will come back again to us when we are more worthy of light.”

We should note that while there may be a certain truth in this, there may also be a certain complacency or presumption there as well. It is most fitting to allow Father Coleridge to contradict (or clarify) the Reverend Coleridge on this point:

“[O]ur Lord was evidently most anxious to impress on those who came across His preaching the extreme importance of closing with the graces offered to them. The time of grace was soon to pass away, perhaps never to return.

“It need not be said that an opportunity once neglected can never be recovered. But all opportunities must be taken when they occur. They pass away, and their return cannot be reckoned on.”3

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His conversion

Most fortunately for Coleridge, the opportunity did not pass away altogether. Bishop Patterson writes:

“[H]is soul was not deserted by its Creator, and from time to time new circumstances stirred again the depths within him, and what he wrote in 1847, that his ‘doubts if not unfaithful would come back,’ came to pass. His peaceful home and the loving pastoral care which he gave to his flock at Alphington, much prayer, many earnest Communions, a life of quiet austerity and self-denial, of high aspirations after the more excellent way at whatever cost of human ties and interests, in a word, the unreserved surrender of self; these were the sure ways which led him on to the perfect day.”

Prompted by several events which rendered the idea of a “Catholic position in the Church of England” (or a “Via Media”) untenable – such as the condemnation of W.G. Ward and that of a sermon by Dr Pusey on the Eucharist – many began, Bishop Patterson said, “to shake the minds and wills of men out of any routine in which they may have been living more or less unconsciously.”

Some of Fr Coleridge’s friends and acquaintances became Catholics around this time. However, Patterson writes, Coleridge was the sort of man who really had to be convinced himself, and could not simply follow others on a human faith alone, or by pressure:

“He was, however, not a man to be pushed on by the force of argument, or even of example, and his answers to such appeals were always such as to show that the work of conviction could only be wrought in him by the operation of his own thought in subordination to the grace of God.”

But eventually he arrived at the conclusion:

“In April, 1852, after long and patient prayer and the very gradual surrender of one position after another, and the painful trials involved in growing divergence from his revered and beloved father’s religious opinions, and the giving up, as this seemed to involve, of all home ties and of his personal interests, he submitted to the claims of the Catholic Church, and at thirty years of age began life anew.”

Fr Clarke writes:

“But all the charms of Ottery St. Mary and its happy and peaceful life disappeared in presence of the Voice that, in the beginning of 1852, bade Henry Coleridge go forth from the country that he loved, and from the kindred that he held so dear, and out of his father’s house that had been so happy a home to him from his childhood upwards, and turn his steps to the unknown land which God was showing him.”

“In the spring of 1852,” writes the friend and contemporary whom I have already quoted, “I had been a Catholic for two and a half years, and was living at my father’s house in Portman Square, when I received a message from Father Coleridge asking me to call upon him. I found him in a most prostrate and helpless condition. He had fully resolved to seek admission into the Church, and had detached himself from all his connections and obligations at Oxford and elsewhere, and had announced his intention to his family. But he knew nothing of the existing Church in England, and did not know how to act, or which way to turn, in order to effect his purpose.

“At my suggestion we made an eight days’ retreat together under Father Douglas, during which Father Coleridge was received into the Church and had time and quiet to review his position.”

Time in Alfington drawing to a close – relations with his family

After his conversion, he said that he had remained in Alphington for the sake of his father. After he left Alfington and Ottery St Mary, he made his way to Rome to prepare for the priesthood. In 1852, he wrote to Patterson from Rome:

“I cannot quite tell when it was that I resolved that nothing should any longer hinder me from laying aside all that kept me from the Church of Rome, giving up Alphington and my fellowship, and, after a short interval of rest and quiet, doing what you have done.

“I have never been unhappy since; and though I have had much sorrow to go through (and may have some more) and have met with great opposition, all has only confirmed my conviction and strengthened my purpose… My sister had a most severe illness, and the trouble and anxiety of that time delayed me a little, as I did not wish my father should have so much on his mind at once.

“He has been the great cause of my staying so long at Alphington, and now it has been a most severe blow to him that I have gone. He has built (against my wish) a very nice house, school-house and school, close to the little church which you remember… Nothing could be more happy than my place there. I was so fond of the people and of their children, and they had thoroughly given me their hearts. However, I made up my mind to leave before Lent, and parted with them at Quinquagesima… Well, that parting is over, and another with my dear cousins at the Manor House, and here I am at home at last, where I mean to remain, not so much to make up my mind—that is already done—as to prepare myself by quiet and thought for a new life.

“The state of mind of my father and mother is a great grief to me, but prayer is a comfort, and I know that God’s ways are wonderful, and that He can change the most settled prejudices by the power of His grace. They wish me to go abroad, … but I do not wish to act in any way as if influenced by the better condition of (Catholic) things abroad, but only by the one fact that the English Church is not in communion with the centre of Unity.”

His family came to terms with his conversion, as he later wrote:

“My father was much hurt for some time because I could not join in family prayers, but now he seems much less put out, and can even speak without a sigh of my going to Mass or sermon.

“In fact it is not as he had expected, for he had conjured up all sorts of visions of conspiracies and dark designs against all the rest of the family which I was to be for ever practising; and he thought he himself would be publicly assailed as a Romanizer, whereas people take very little notice of the matter. I think the fuss about family prayers is rather a good thing; though it pains me to pain him in any way, it is a continual memento of the claims of the Church.”

By the time of his departure from Anglican ministry, Sir John Taylor Coleridge seems to have come to terms with it. The Irish Monthly presents comments from his father’s journal:

“On Quinquagesima Sunday, February 22, 1852, Henry Coleridge gave up his post at Alfington. His father writes in his journal under that date: ‘To-day he closes his Alfington ministry, and a trying day it will be for him, but I trust he will be supported.’

“His brother writes to his father on Ash Wednesday: ‘It must have been a moving scene at Alfington, and I should like to have been there. He leaves in peace with every one, which is a great comfort, and no one can say of him that he secedes because he did not work, or got on badly with his people.’”4

Fr Coleridge also maintained a good relationship with his brother. Following an 1863 visit to their elderly father, Lord Coleridge wrote:

“My brother’s visit did him great good. We had not been together for many years, and my brother was so gentle and good and so carefully avoided anything that could give pain that, save for its shortness, the visit had really no drawbacks.

“The more I see and hear of the Jesuits, the more I am impressed with their general superiority and freedom from nonsense. I always did rejoice that, if my brother must be a Roman Catholic and must be in an Order, he chose the Jesuit Order rather than any more modern one.”5

When we consider the prejudice against the Society of Jesus in England, Lord Coleridge’s comments are very striking. He was later reproached in court, as The Irish Monthly recounts:

“In the famous Tichborne trial the Claimant, while being examined by Coleridge (then Solicitor-General), said sneeringly, ‘You appear to be very innocent, considering that your brother is a Jesuit.’ While protesting against the insult, Coleridge confessed ‘the highest love and regard and veneration’ for his brother.

“Father Coleridge the same evening wrote to “my dearest John” a note in which he speaks of “the tender love that there is between us, and which I trust will go on deepening always, and which is one of the greatest blessings and happinesses of my life.”6

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The Coleridges at Alfington

The church was not only built by the Coleridges, but also maintained at their expense. There are many mentions to the Coleridges throughout the church.

Fr Coleridge’s brother has a memorial there:

Coleridges are also mentioned on the stained glass windows.

But another famous Coleridge is mentioned throughout St James and St Anne’s.

‘Bishop’ John Coleridge Patteson, The Anglican ‘Martyr’

The church contained more than one reference to John Coleridge Patteson (no relation to Bishop Patterson, cited throughout this piece).

Coleridge Patteson succeeded Fr Coleridge as curate at Alphington. Fr Coleridge expected that this would happen. He wrote this in 1852:

“… Coleridge Patteson, whom you remember at Balliol, may possibly succeed me at Alphington, as we have all been wishing. He is a most sweet and excellent fellow, and though his travels and sojourn at Rome has not made him a Catholic, he is such a modest, quiet person, that I can expect anything of him by and bye, by God’s mercy.

“Anyhow, he is the man of all others I wish to succeed me, for the sake at all events of the temporal wants of my dear people and children. I know he will go on quietly and plainly without troubling them with violent anti-Catholicism… Yesterday I resigned my fellowship: so they will put me in the Times soon… Will you thank Manning for his great kindness to us all?”¹

Coleridge Patteson never became a Catholic. An outstanding linguist and sailor, he went on mission work for the Church of England in the Pacific Islands, and was late made the Anglican Bishop of Melanesia. One of his methods was bringing Melanesian students to a school where they would be taught skills and the basics of the Anglican religion. They would return to their homes as teachers of both.

This strategy did not lead to any great success – as is typical. As Cardinal Billot wrote:

“[O]ne must well acknowledge that from the moment when the Protestants, especially the Anglicans, jealous of the striking successes of Catholicism, began to undertake missions to convert the infidels, they obtained no positive result.”7

One cannot help but feel sorry for well-intentioned men, as Coleridge Patteson seems to have been, whose ministries are rendered sterile by their separation from the true Church of Christ.

Meanwhile, an illegal trade known as “blackbirding” had emerged. Although the slave trade had been abolished in the British Empire, this “labour recruitment” practice saw the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands and elsewhere were kidnapped or tricked into indentured service by sailors. One method was posing as missionaries, before forcing Islanders onto the boats. This in turn resulted in reprisals against the actual missionaries.

Coleridge Patteson – with a missionary method with certain external similarities to the blackbirders’ trade – was a very high profile example of this. Despite steps taken to regulate labour recruitment, he was murdered on the island of Nupaku.

It is not entirely clear what happened, or why: the murder was commonly taken to be a reprisal for the blackbirding of five men from the island.

He had been welcomed onto the island on a canoe, leaving other shipmen aboard another ship. His body was found with a shattered skull, likely from a club; the top of his head had also been cut open. A contemporary account also describes how his body had been pierced with arrows after the death – in such a way as to indicate the customary sign of a revenge killing. His body was found in a canoe at sea, stripped except for his boots and stockings, wrapped in mats.

After his body was found, the population of the island appeared on the shore to shout, before disappearing from view. This was taken as an indicating of collective responsibility for a revenge killing.

A few years later, alternative theories were appearing. A Nukapu man claimed that one man had killed Coleridge Patteson, and had been punished; the body had been washed by the women of the island, and the placing in the canoe was taken as a mark of respect. Another theory, based on a Nukapan account, held that the Nukapans did not like Coleridge Patteson’s visits and requests for young men to go to his schools, and so eventually killed him to put a stop to it.

There are other explanations as to what may have happened (such as violations of rankings among the Nukapans), and it seems unlikely that the truth will ever be known.

But one thing is notable. Aside from the much later theory about his missionary methods, few of the accounts seem to indicate that he was killed “in hatred of the faith” – even for the Anglican faith.

In spite of this, he has been treated as a martyr by the “Established Church”. The Alfington church contained memorials to Coleridge Patteson and his “martyrdom”.

But whether or not he was a martyr for the Anglican religion, or for the Gospel in a broad sense, he was certainly a martyr for the abolition of blackbirding: his death caused an outcry in England, and led to laws that prohibited the trade.

In fact, David Hilliard argues that his death was instrumentalised for political motives from the start, and that the revenge theory was “born not out of investigation into the actions of the Nukapu people themselves, but out of a desire to condemn the activities of labour recruiters.”8

Fr Coleridge’s high estimation of his cousin must count for something in natural terms, and his separation from the church makes this loss of life tragic, rather than glorious.

Readers may consult what Pope Benedict XIV had to say about the possibility “non-Catholic martyrs” here:

• Can a non-Catholic be a martyr? Benedict XIV’s explanation

Conclusion: The Farm Shop

After our very rapid visit to St James and St Anne’s, we got to the farm shop to retrieve my wallet.

Given that we had to get back to pick up the other little Wrights from school, there was no time to do anything else except buy some traditional Devonshire pasties and some coffees, while the manager went to the safe.

I’m pleased to say that we managed to get back in time, and without the car breaking down or exploding. (Update 21 April 2026: Turns out it was a failing wheel bearing. This can be pretty dangerous. A long drive like this with a car in such a state is really not advised.)

But before signing off, I am obliged to note: after passing the test of correctly reciting the name and address on my driving licence, I asked the manager whether she knew where in the establishment my wallet had been found.

It had been left in the cafe.

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

Subscribe now

Share The Father Coleridge Reader

Subscribe to The WM Review

Give a gift subscription

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Editor’s Notes

The Second Sunday after Easter is known as “Good Shepherd Sunday,” based on the reading from the Gospel. Having just celebrated the Resurrection, the Church turns back to this passage, because Easter reveals the full meaning of Christ as Shepherd: he lays down his life, rises again, and continues to gather and guide his sheep – now and for eternity.

It also points towards the Ascension and Pentecost, after which his Apostles will assume their roles as the Pastors of the Church.

Our Lord’s sermon, recounted by St John, takes place in Jerusalem during the Feast of Tabernacles (Sukkot). According to Fr Coleridge, John Chapter X0 recounts two separate events (the second being at the Feast of the Dedication, or Hanukkah).

The sermon explains the escalating conflict between Christ and the Pharisees and the Chief Priests, with Our Lord exposing the contrast between the way they relate to the “flock”, and how he fulfils his divine mission. He lays the foundation for the Church’s true pastoral office, refutes the claims of illegitimate religious authority, and reveals the divine charity at the heart of his mission.

As well as presenting himself as the Good Shepherd who will unify Jews and Gentiles, he foretells how he will reconcile all men to God through his voluntary Passion.

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The Good Shepherd

The Preaching of the Cross, Part I, Chapter XV

St. John x. 1–21.
Story of the Gospels, § 96
Burns and Oates, London, 1886

Part I: Why does Christ call the Chief Priests ‘thieves and robbers’?

He would have embraced them—maybe they would have been our priests. But they chose to betray their sacred office, and to try to destroy Him.

1. Why does Christ call the Chief Priests ‘thieves and robbers’?

Part II: Why Christ is ‘the door’ through which every good shepherd must come

Christ exposes the wolves in shepherds’ clothing—and warns that no true pastor can oppose Him.

2. Why Christ is ‘the door’ through which every good shepherd must come

Part III: ‘I am the Good Shepherd’—What that means for Christians

Surrounded by enemies plotting his death and excommunicating his followers from the Synagogue, the Good Shepherd declares his love for his sheep.

3. ‘I am the Good Shepherd’—What that means for Christians

Part IV: Why the Good Shepherd told the wolves they had no power over him

He warned them that their apparent victory would be nothing of the kind.

4. Why the Good Shepherd told the wolves they had no power over him

Part V: Effect of ‘The Good Shepherd’ on the different classes of the Jews

He was ‘set for the fall and for the resurrection of many in Israel,’ and this was beginning to take shape.

5. Effect of ‘The Good Shepherd’ on the different classes of the Jews

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

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Editor’s Notes

As readers will have noticed from yesterday, we at last managed to obtain a portrait of Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ, and secured the kind permission of the British Jesuit Archive to use it in that article; we similarly gained permission to use a second photograph in this one.

We have previously published Fr Coleridge’s initial obituary in The Month. To mark the anniversary of his death on 13th April, we published a second, lengthier tribute to the Jesuit priest by Bishop James Laird Patterson, from the same publication. This was accompanied by another lengthy obituary by Fr Coleridge’s successor as Editor of The Month, Fr Richard F. Clarke SJ. This is the article which is below.

Fr Clarke is perhaps most known today as the editor of Fr Franz Spirago’s The Catechism Explained. He was another convert from Anglicanism, and was sent to Fr Coleridge for instruction by Cardinal Newman. He wrote many small booklets, as well as a book on Logic for the Manuals of Catholic Philosophy Stonyhurst Series.

Fr Clarke’s recollections deal more with Fr Coleridge’s conversion and career as a Jesuit. Most intriguing, perhaps, is the account Fr Clarke provides of Fr Coleridge’s interview with Mélanie Calvat, the seer of La Salette, which took place on Coleridge’s journey to Rome for priestly studies. His general account of Coleridge’s virtue is most edifying.

We hope that his tribute contributes to the estimation of Fr Coleridge as a man and a priest amongst our readers. Please remember the repose of his soul in your prayers.

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Recollections of Henry James Coleridge – Fr Richard F. Clarke SJ

The Month, Vol. 74, No. 348, June 1893

No. 348, June 1893, pp. 153-167.
Headings and some line breaks added for ease of reading online

1. Recollections of Henry James Coleridge by the Lord Bishop of Emmaus

2. Recollections of Henry James Coleridge by the Editor (of The Month, Fr Richard F. Clarke SJ)

See also:

• Who was Father Henry James Coleridge SJ?

• How we found Fr Coleridge’s grave

Compiler of Recollections

I fear that my share in the contributions towards a sketch of Father Coleridge must be those of a compiler rather than of an original contributor. For though my acquaintance with him dates from nearly a quarter of a century ago, and I have lived in close personal relations with him for several years, yet the period of my friendship with him was the most eventless period of what was throughout an uneventful life, one in which he lived a life of great seclusion, and was occupied almost entirely with his books and his prayers.

Perhaps my best plan will be to marshal in historical order the information that I have gained from others, adding and inserting such details as I am able to furnish from my own personal knowledge as I proceed.

“My first acquaintance with Henry Coleridge,” writes one of his contemporaries, “was when he entered Eton, at the house of Mr. Harry Dupuis, who was one of the assistant masters. He (H.J.C.) must have been then about fourteen years of age, his physique was frail and feeble in the extreme, and there was something sad and pensive in his manner and bearing, but his features were attractive and intelligent.

“He was placed high in the school for his age, and soon gained a reputation among the boys as ‘a clever fellow.’ In spite of his frail physique, he was a good cricketer and was in the eleven, and played all games well that did not require great bodily strength.”

Coleridge’s purity of soul

Perhaps it is not inappropriate to these early days to speak of a trait of character, or rather I should perhaps say, a grace from God that was very remarkable in him, and that was the extreme purity of his soul. He had the strongest dislike of anything coarse or indelicate, and this seems to have protected him from the dangers of a big public school.

I have heard the moral condition of the Protestant public schools spoken of in his presence, and he was always quite eager in his defence of Eton in his day. “I dare say there was evil,” he would say, “but thank God, I never saw anything of it in the set in which I was.” When some one in a pamphlet described the Protestant schools as “sinks of iniquity,” he got quite angry, and declared that from his own personal knowledge, he could contradict the statement.

“No one could know him well,” writes a friend of his youth, “without being convinced how morally straight he was,” and it was not necessary to have known him in his early days to be able to bear witness to his blameless life. When quite an old man, the sweet savour of his purity of soul still clung to him, imparting to his manner and to his words a sort of childlike simplicity and grace which is one of the privileges of the clean of heart.

Coleridge’s time at Oxford

But we must continue our historical account:

“Father Coleridge was elected a scholar of Trinity College, Oxford, while still a boy at Eton, and went up to Oxford in the ordinary course. At the University he was a hard-working and industrious student. He became much attached to Mr. Isaac Williams, one of the tutors of his College. By him he was initiated in what was called the ‘Oxford’ or ‘Tractarian movement,’ which was then assuming large proportions. Mr. Isaac Williams afterwards wrote and published a Harmony of the Gospels, containing much erudition and scholarship. The subject took possession of the young scholar, and gave a direction to his mind and studies in which he persevered to the end of his life.

“Before he became a Catholic he had already begun to utter aspirations as to publishing a Life of Christ, based upon a Harmony of the four Gospels. Father Coleridge has written on an infinite variety of subjects, articles in magazines, lives and letters of saints, devotional books, &c., but all his literary work, all his studies and teaching, have centred round his Life of Christ, which is the book by which he will be remembered.

“In due time he took his B.A. degree and a first class, and was afterwards elected to a fellowship at Oriel. By a singular coincidence, Father Christie took part in his election a short time before resigning his own fellowship, and the tie which bound them together in the society which at that time took the lead in Oxford, was a sort of anticipation of their subsequent fellowship in another and still more distinguished Society, and of their associated labours for nearly a quarter of a century in those literary and ministerial labours which owed much of their success, from the human side, to their life at Oxford.

“At Oriel Coleridge [he] found Newman (the late Cardinal), Church (late Dean of St. Paul’s), Charles Marriott, Eden, and a heterogeneous host of men of talent and various acquirements. The Guardian newspaper was started as an organ of the soi-disant Catholic party, by Sir Frederick Rogers (an Oriel man), now Lord Blachford. It was published in London, and was conducted by one staff in London, and another at Oriel. Coleridge was on the Oriel staff. His special department was the reviewing of books, but he entered into the general plans and counsels of the editors, and sometimes contributed articles on other subjects.

“Oxford was then much agitated by the ‘Tractarian movement,’ which spread beyond the limits of the University, and seemed to take hold of the country. Indeed there was a moment later on, when, until a reaction set in, it almost seemed likely to lead to a national secession to Rome.

“In 1847 a ‘Brotherhood’ was started in Oxford, composed of Fellows, Tutors of Colleges, and undergraduates, numbering about thirty. It had no rules or organization, and was merely social and devotional. The members met alternately in the rooms of one another on every Friday, and recited a portion of the Divine Office in common. They used Catholic books of devotion, and sought, in the union of the Brotherhood, sympathy and support in maintaining a Catholic spirit. Father Coleridge was one of this ‘Brotherhood.’”

In 1848 he took Orders, and left Oxford for parochial work in Devonshire.

Father Coleridge, like most Oxford men, had a filial and devoted love of his Alma mater. He was conscious of the solid and lasting good that he had gained from his time of residence there. Perhaps he idealized Oxford somewhat, and judged of it rather from the companions whom he chose for himself, than from a thorough knowledge of the University at large. He was in a good set in a good College, and seemed to forget that there were also to be found bad sets and Colleges utterly inferior to Trinity.

I well remember his indignation at a book written by one of his contemporaries at another College, in which a somewhat unfavourable picture was drawn of Oxford society in the writer’s day. Father Coleridge was quite angry and declared it most unfair that a man who was in one of the worst sets at one of the worst Colleges should describe the University at large as if it was of the same kidney with the men among whom the writer lived.

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Coleridge’s time at Ottery St. Mary, and his conversion

During the years that elapsed between the time of his leaving Oxford and his reception into the Church, the seed that had been sown at Trinity and Oriel was springing up and growing to its full perfection. In his peaceful little parish in his beloved Devonshire, surrounded by those he loved, and engaged in the congenial work of the Christian ministry, he enjoyed an earthly happiness which made his obedience to conscience and the great sacrifice that it entailed all the more meritorious in the sight of God.

But all the charms of Ottery St. Mary and its happy and peaceful life disappeared in presence of the Voice that, in the beginning of 1852, bade Henry Coleridge go forth from the country that he loved, and from the kindred that he held so dear, and out of his father’s house that had been so happy a home to him from his childhood upwards, and turn his steps to the unknown land which God was showing him.

“In the spring of 1852,” writes the friend and contemporary whom I have already quoted, “I had been a Catholic for two and a half years, and was living at my father’s house in Portman Square, when I received a message from Father Coleridge asking me to call upon him. I found him in a most prostrate and helpless condition. He had fully resolved to seek admission into the Church, and had detached himself from all his connections and obligations at Oxford and elsewhere, and had announced his intention to his family. But he knew nothing of the existing Church in England, and did not know how to act, or which way to turn, in order to effect his purpose.

“At my suggestion we made an eight days’ retreat together under Father Douglas, during which Father Coleridge was received into the Church and had time and quiet to review his position. The retreat ended on Sunday morning, and on Saturday Father Petcherine (a Russian Redemptorist, a fervent and eloquent preacher, who had been preaching in Ireland) returned to Clapham, and nothing would satisfy him but that Father Coleridge should kneel during the High Mass on a prie-dieu in front of the altar, and that he (Father Petcherine) should preach his panegyric.

“The panegyric was of the most fervent kind. It began with a description of the sudden passage from winter to summer, from ice and snow to exuberant vegetation, in the climate of Russia (the preacher’s native land). ‘Such, my brethren, is the state of England; the ice and snows of Protestantism are melting away, and a vigorous and flowery vegetation at once bursts forth. Here I have before me (pointing to Father Coleridge) one of the first flowers, which we accept as the earnest of a glorious summer,’ &c.

“The panegyric certainly amused Father Coleridge, and probably edified the congregation. This stay at Clapham was one of the few occasions upon which Father Coleridge seemed to be entirely happy—his countenance beamed as if irradiated by reconciliation with the God of all joy and gladness, and in after life an allusion to Father Petcherine and the ‘Russian spring’ would always provoke a smile from him, even in the fits of his constitutional sadness; and he contracted an intimate friendship with Father Douglas (who is now Superior of the Redemptorists in Rome), whom he chose as his director during the whole of his residence in Rome.

“Father Coleridge was received in private, but his conversion was soon known, talked about, and got into the newspapers. Cardinal Wiseman claimed him as his subject, and prevailed upon him to attend Mass in his private chapel, after which Father Coleridge received Confirmation, and then a select party of Catholics met at breakfast in the Cardinal’s house. Father Coleridge asked me many questions, amongst others, what my own intentions were for the future. I had made a year’s study of philosophy at the Roman College, had come over to England on necessary business, and was about to return to Rome in the autumn to continue my studies. He proposed to accompany me to the Eternal City.

“In the beginning of September, 1852, I met Father Coleridge by appointment in London, and we travelled together to Paris. Louis Napoleon had made his coup d’état, and was awaiting the issue of the plebiscite before proclaiming himself Emperor. There was some military display as we passed through Paris. Father Coleridge sympathized with Napoleon, and said that the French were an ‘Imperial race.’ On our way south from Paris to Lyons, we made the acquaintance of a French priest (the Abbé Pottier) who was bound for Algeria in order to join the African Mission, and we agreed to be fellow-travellers as far as our routes lay in the same direction.

“We started from Lyons in his company for La Salette, where the recent apparition was the subject of discussion far and wide. In approaching the mountain we fell in with M. and Madame Roquefeuille, who were travelling thither from l’Aveyron, en action de grâces for a cure obtained by the latter through invocation of Notre Dame de la Salette. We joined them, and made the ascent of the mountain together.

“The accommodation afforded by the missionaries on the scene of the apparition was primitive and rough in the extreme, but Masses were going on all the morning, and the anniversary of the apparition, which had occurred the previous day (the same day that the voting took place for Napoleon’s plebiscite), had brought twenty thousand people to pass the day and night on the summit of the mountain.

“From La Salette we went to Grenoble, where Melanie (the girl of the apparition) was living with the Sisters de la Providence. We called on the Bishop, who received us most courteously and at once gave us a note which secured for us admission to the convent and an interview with Melanie. The Abbé Pottier acted as interpreter, and Father Coleridge put her through a searching cross-examination like the hereditary lawyer that he was. There was no flaw in the girl’s evidence, and the different parts of her story hung together very well. From Grenoble we went to the Grande Chartreuse on the eve of the feast of St. Bruno, and kept St. Bruno’s day—the only day in the year on which their rule of silence is relaxed—with the Carthusian monks. Crossing the Alps by the Mount Cenis to Turin, we proceeded to Rome.

“At Rome, Father Coleridge at first entered the English College, then moved into the Collegio Pio, and finally settled at the Accademia. The majority of the community at the Accademia were Italians, all, or nearly all, of whom have since become Cardinals, but there were among them a German, a Frenchman, and several Englishmen, the late Cardinals Manning and Howard, the present Cardinal Vaughan, Mgr. Talbot (Warwick Street), and one or two more. Father Coleridge appeared contented here, but very reserved. E uomo di studio, the Italians said, and they left him to his thoughts and his studies.

“But he was more than a mere student, and it cost him little time or labour to keep abreast of the theological lectures at the Roman College which he attended regularly; he kept up his intercourse with Father Douglas, whom he took for his director, and made himself acquainted with works of asceticism, hagiology, and devotion, many of which he afterwards published in English in the Quarterly Series.

“But, as usual, the centre of his thoughts, to which everything else gravitated, was the Life of Christ and the four Gospels. His favourite book was the Life of Christ by Ludolph the Saxon, and this, he maintained, was the book which was the means of the conversion of St. Ignatius at Loyola when he was recovering from the wound he received at Pampeluna. I never heard him give his evidence for this opinion, but he held it, and said he could prove it.

“There is little variety and few events in the life of a student. When the schools were closed in August, Father Coleridge generally left Rome and visited some interesting spot during a portion of the vacation. One year he spent a month at Loreto, another year he did the same at Naples. And the Accademia possessed a villa at Tivoli, where he made several short visits. It was near Tusculum and the Sabine farm of Horace, and was a point from which Vico Varo and Subiaco could be visited.

“The order of the day at the Accademia was as follows: Rise at 6 a.m. Half an hour’s meditation. Mass at 7. Breakfast. Morning schools at the Roman College. Repetitore. Dinner at 1 p.m. Half an hour recreation. A short siesta. Afternoon schools at Roman College. A walk before sunset. Supper, 9 p.m. in winter, 10 p.m. in summer.

“After four years’ study of theology, Father Coleridge was ordained priest in 1856, and, half a year later, took his degree of Doctor of Theology in the beginning of 1857. He left Rome in May of that year, and on the 7th of September, 1857, entered the S.J. Novitiate at Beaumont. There is little to record of him in his novitiate, except that he was edifying and observant in all the virtues and practices of a novice. As he entered the Novitiate as a priest, only one year was allowed for his novitiate, and in his second year he made his tertianship, devoting himself to the study of the Institute.

“In September, 1859, he took his vows, and was sent to St. Beuno’s, where he was made Professor of Holy Scripture, and simultaneously reviewed his Moral Theology. As Professor he treated on the four Gospels. He was also Minister at St. Beuno’s for about eighteen months. He did not like teaching, and was always urging the establishment of a literary organ of Catholic opinion. This came to him in 1865, when he left St. Beuno’s for Farm Street as operarius and ‘Editor of The Month.’ In 1868 he made his long retreat at Milltown Park, near Dublin, and on the 15th of August in the same year he was professed of the four vows.”

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Fr Clarke’s own conversion and instruction by Fr Coleridge

It was in the following year that I myself first made his acquaintance. At the end of the summer term of 1869 I felt that the time had come when I ought to act on what had long been a growing conviction and had at length ripened into a certain assurance, and join myself to that Church whither God had for many years been leading me. I had always had a great admiration for the Society of Jesus, and by a Jesuit I desired to be received. I accordingly asked Dr. Newman for a line of introduction to one of the Jesuit Fathers in London, and to Father Coleridge he sent me, describing me as “one who already has a great devotion to your Society.”

I have no very special reminiscences of my intercourse with him previously to my reception, except that he treated me with the greatest kindness, and took in the situation at once. He gave me the penny Catechism to read through carefully, telling me that if I believed it all, there was nothing for me except to become a Catholic without delay. When he saw how fully convinced I was, he advised me to lose no time, warning me that the grace of God “is not like something that you can put away in a drawer and go and take out at any time convenient to you.”

After my reception I went abroad for a few months, and then returned to Oxford and continued the work of tuition there as a private “coach” for a time, while I was making up my mind as to my future career. At this time the presence of Catholics at Oxford was strongly discouraged, if not forbidden, and Father Coleridge was quite amusingly divided between his love for Oxford and his wish to fall in with a proposal which was under the circumstances a prudent one, on the one hand, and his fear of saying a word that might seem to be disloyal to the directions of authority on the other.

He solemnly warned me of the perils of a Protestant University, and of the responsibility of co-operating with its teaching by taking pupils there, but all the time I read, or thought I read, between the lines, a secret approval on his part of the step I contemplated. It reminded me of Mr. Winkle’s instructions in the celebrated duel scene in Pickwick. At all events, back to Oxford I went, and I have never seen reason to regret it.

Living with Fr Coleridge

From time to time I saw Father Coleridge during the first decade of my life in the Society, but in 1881 I came to London and was brought into continual intercourse with him. Yet I can find but little to record that would be of any general interest. He lived a student’s life, almost always in his room and always at work. All the morning through, and often for a good part of the rest of the day, the unceasing click click of his typewriter told of his unceasing industry.

But he was always ready to sacrifice any amount of time to any one who needed his help or advice. His gentleness and courtesy always touched me, and his extreme desire not to wound. He had a most tender and affectionate heart, and no one valued more than he did any mark of confidence or friendly approach, and this all the more on account of a certain shyness of manner which is supposed to be one of the inheritances of the Englishman, and which made others sometimes a little afraid of him.

“He was a very firm and faithful friend,” writes one who worked with him on THE MONTH for some years, “and one of those who improve on acquaintance, and whom to know intimately is to love. Those who met him in some uncongenial atmosphere or knew him slightly, often thought him unsympathetic. Lady Georgiana Fullerton prized his friendship as a special grace bestowed by God. Cardinal Newman admitted him to his close friendship, and with something of admiration as well as affection. He spoke of Father Coleridge’s treatment of the Beatitudes as having given him the greatest pleasure.

“His care of his spiritual children when suffering from ill-health or any other cause was beyond all praise. He never spared himself. More than one appeal reached him from within an Anglican convent, and the charity and prudence and power with which he assisted the petition, avoiding all that could give reasonable offence, but never resting till the cause was gained, were enough to mark him out as having an influence of no common kind. He was always gentle in his judgment about the good faith of those who had not found their way into the Church.

“As editor he sometimes intervened to tone down unnecessary fierceness about ‘heretics.’ He was most cautious in all that touched upon doctrine, and though his own intuitions were very safe, for he had Catholic instincts, he always caused every word to be carefully examined by a Professor of Theology, and either struck out or modified with the docility of a child anything which was considered by his adviser to be weak or doubtful. It is one of the faults of his style that he puts in too many qualifying clauses in his unwillingness to make strong assertions.”

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Vice-Rector of Farm Street – an amusing anecdote

In the same year in which he ceased to edit The Month he became for a time Vice-Rector of Farm Street. In this post he showed a consideration for others and a conciliatory spirit that those who knew him superficially had scarcely expected. His quiet manner and a certain habit of making playfully severe remarks on the foibles of others made men fail to appreciate or realize his great spirit of charity towards all around him. But there was always a good-humour and jocular tone even in his sharpest sayings that prevented them from inflicting any wound.

A good sample of his “attic salt” occurred on the occasion of the visit of some Father who was continually belauding the virtues of his mother. Day by day, those who associated with him were forced to listen to a panegyric of her virtues, until at length Father Coleridge remarked, during a pause in the harangue, “Father X——, don’t you think it would be a good plan if you were to write a Life of your mother, and then all who wished to do so could read it.”

In his quiet way he was full of fun, and had a great insight into character. He found out the Nun of Kenmare long before her final defection, and characterized some letters she wrote him as “most impudent.” As Rector he showed great tact in his intercourse with the authorities of the diocese, and obtained leaves and privileges from them that were never granted to any one else. During his time of office the Jesuits were invited to give missions in the diocese, and Cardinal Manning himself came and preached the panegyric of St. Ignatius in Farm Street Church.

He was also, while acting as Rector, always most ready to listen to the advice or representations of any of his subordinates. He was slow in arriving at an opinion, and did not do so without due consideration, and when his opinion was once formed, it might generally be relied upon. He knew this, and from his persistency in a decision thus arrived at, some came to regard him as obstinate.

But this he never was. A Father who was acting under him during this time was at variance with him as to the dedication of a new altar that was to be erected, and desired to see it dedicated to St. Aloysius, while Father Coleridge had the idea of an altar to be called the altar of the Crucifix. It was represented to him that in a Jesuit church the altars should be distinctively Jesuit, and that this was the prevailing feature of the churches of the Society on the Continent. Father Coleridge listened and thought over the matter, and presently said: “I have quite come round to your view;” and the altar was accordingly dedicated to St. Aloysius. It was Father Coleridge who superintended the building of the Farm Street house, though it was not he, but Father Porter, who decided on its erection.

All those who have lived in it can bear witness to the extreme care that has been taken to provide for its warmth and suitability for its purpose, and if this is mainly due to the ability of the architect, we must not forget that his choice and the directions he received were the work of the then Superior.

Happier writing than governing – his ‘apostleship of good books’

But Father Coleridge was far more at home as a writer than as a Superior, and was very glad when the return of Father Porter enabled him to get back to his books. His great work, over and above the books that he himself wrote, was the formation of a house of writers. This he kept steadily before himself from his first coming to Farm Street.

He felt most keenly the deficiencies of Catholic literature, and with his usual quiet and steady persistency, set himself to the inauguration of some plan by which the want might be supplied. He showed his prudent sagacity in the policy he adopted. He knew that literary work is as a rule very unremunerative for Catholic writers, and that the house of writers would never permanently flourish without some available funds. So he set to work to gather together some sort of foundation, and also to provide, by availing himself of all the literary talent within his reach, a set of books which should be at the same time standard books of permanent value, and a steady source of income to the literary body who were to compose the staff of the new house.

It was his constant dread that he would die with this undone. When Superiors encouraged the work he was in high spirits, when they seemed to be willing to disband the writers in order to supply more immediately pressing demands he grew sad at the thought. His persistent energy had many a battle to fight and many a trial to endure, but he carried his point, and has left behind him a flourishing house of writers whose publications have a wide and steady sale, and among them none are more widely spread or in more continual demand than what he himself wrote, and especially than his Life of our Lord. I was astonished when travelling in America to find that every Bishop, and every priest of any literary turn, almost invariably had on his bookshelves some of the works of Father Coleridge, and the red covers of his Quarterly Series had found their way into every good library.

In this respect his work, like that of most men who undertake a really great enterprise, did not in his lifetime bear more than the first-fruits, with however the promise of a glorious harvest to come. It was also Father Coleridge who, by an article in The Month, first suggested the idea of the Manuals of Catholic Philosophy, which have a large and steady sale both in England and America, as well as the idea of other similar series not yet realized.

Clarke’s views as Coleridge’s successor at The Month

Of Father Coleridge’s success as Editor of The Month there is no one more competent to speak than his successor in that responsible and difficult post. It is to Father Coleridge that is due its present high repute and the position which it occupies in our periodical literature. His own classical training, his wide range of information, his scholarly and exact mind, his literary taste, his theological knowledge, and the useful experience he had gained as a constant contributor to, and as the Oxford sub-editor of, the Guardian newspaper, made him excellently qualified for the work.

The mere fact that he continued to carry on the editorship for fifteen years without intermission, and handed to his successor a task rendered comparatively easy by the system and order that he had established in its issue, testifies to successful labours which claim the gratitude of all those interested in Catholic literature.

The last article ever written by Father Coleridge was that on Cardinal Newman, entitled “A Father of Souls,” in The Month for October, 1890. It carries with it the marks of the intense affection that he entertained for the great master who broke down the barriers that had kept so many outside the Church. It is written in his best style; he was always strongest in biographical articles, and he had in his friend and teacher a theme to inspire his pen.

For some time subsequently to this he continued his Life of our Lord, and he laboured on assiduously as long as his active brain was able to think, and long after he was unable to hold a pen or write a line. Even when his failing powers rendered it impossible for him to produce anything for publication, he still read largely, and took the keenest interest in all that bore directly or indirectly on the Tractarian movement and the conversion of Anglicans.

Coleridge’s industry

We cannot attempt in the present article any account of his magnum opus, the Life of our Lord. It is in itself a work for a lifetime, and if he had written nothing else, his life would indeed have been well spent. But it was in quantity only a fraction of what was produced by his industrious and untiring pen.

“He was immensely industrious. His pen was always at work, and he wrote readily and without much correcting. This was partly due to facility in finding the right word without delay, but it was also partly due to a certain carelessness about minute graces of style: curiosa felicitas was not an object of his ambition. The form in which he cast a sentence was not a matter to detain him long. He did not retouch and improve, and sometimes would not even care to correct palpable faults. When his mind was saturated with some subject familiar and freshly thought over, he seemed literally to fling his mind upon the paper, and the rapidity of composition was extraordinary.

“He was very sensible of the trouble given to his friends by his illegible writing, and bravely in his old age learned type-writing for their sake. This was quickly rewarded, for when his right arm was paralyzed he could still work on with his left hand at the printing, and the last two volumes of his great work were prepared in this manner. The last volume shows many signs of failing power, but in the last but one he is still quite himself. Indeed it is a specially interesting volume, containing as it does several of his most carefully weighed conclusions, which he had waited many years before he ventured to express.

“As an instance of this was his conviction that Judas was not the first example of a sacrilegious communicant. He maintained that such an opinion had no excuse, that it went directly against the text of the Gospel. Judas, he said, left the supper-table before the institution of the Blessed Sacrament, and was consequently neither a priest nor a bad communicant.”

Though he finished his last volume of the Life of our Lord at Roehampton, his work was practically over when he left Farm Street. The two years spent at the Noviceship were years of patient suffering and waiting for the day when he should receive his well-earned reward in Heaven.

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His retirement and life after the stroke

During his retirement there his interest in earthly things was merely in their relation to things spiritual. During the last year of his life the entire occupation of his thoughts with the things of Heaven became more marked than ever. He rarely asked for anything or any one except for the Life of our Lord, for the Blessed Sacrament, and for his confessor. He had a special devotion for the Miserere, and used always to recite it as a preparation for Holy Communion. The Lauda Sion was also a great favourite with him, and often brought tears to his eyes. Night and day his beads were in his hands, and his crucifix was ever by his side.

On Holy Communion mornings, during the last few months, when his mind was wandering, it was always enough to put his crucifix to his lips in order to recall his thoughts. He used continually to kiss it with the liveliest sentiments of sorrow, patience, love, gratitude, and desire, and often shed copious tears of emotion. Unless absolutely unable to rise, he would never miss hearing Holy Mass. When he could not hear Mass, he would read it over to himself, and he struggled to say his Office as long as he could hold a book.

He was to the last full of gaiety and quiet fun, very contented with whatever was given him, never yielding to any sort of grumbling or finding fault, in spite of the trying character of his helpless life. He was always sociable and glad of a chat, and grateful to any one who would come and sit with him for half an hour, and most thankful for all the little services rendered him by the novices and brothers. To his Superiors he showed a love that is one of the marks of a true son of the Society, yielding always to anything proposed to him, however repugnant he was to it naturally, if he was told that the Rector or his confessor wished it.

Towards the end of his life, when in his wandering hours he was sometimes difficult to manage, the expression of the wish of his Superior always recalled him to himself and to ready compliance with what he was asked to do.

During the last six or eight months his thoughts were continually fixed on Heaven and the Beatific Vision. When the first attack of mental wandering came on some six months since, he tried again and again to find some favourite passage of his in Suarez on the subject. When at last it was found for him, he had it read to him over and over again, and meanwhile the tears were flowing fast as he listened.

It was just the same to the last. His thoughts were always on the things of Heaven, and even when his mind was wandering the most, he clearly showed by the words that fell from his lips, how things spiritual entirely occupied his thoughts.

His lasting impact

Father Coleridge will leave his mark behind him. He was one of the last of the Tractarian school, properly so called, before the element of Ritualism had begun to intermingle with it.

He will also be remembered as one of the most hard-working and successful literary men among modern Catholics. As practically the founder of The Month, and as the originator of the Quarterly Series, he will always live in the grateful memory of English Catholics. Many will treasure up the recollection of him as a most kind personal friend and most prudent adviser.

All, whether Catholics or Protestants, cannot fail to admire and respect his great ability, his generous sacrifice for conscience’ sake, his indefatigable industry, his literary power, his affectionate heart, and his spirit of loyalty and unswerving obedience to all through whom he recognized the voice of God speaking to him.

R. F. C.

Recollections of Henry James Coleridge

1. Recollections of Henry James Coleridge by the Lord Bishop of Emmaus

2. Recollections of Henry James Coleridge by the Editor (of The Month, Fr Richard F. Clarke SJ)

See also:

• Who was Father Henry James Coleridge SJ?

• How we found Fr Coleridge’s grave

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

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Editor’s Notes

As readers will notice, we have at last managed to obtain a portrait of Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ, and secured the kind permission of the British Jesuit Archive to use it in this article. We are very glad that his portrait has been made public for the first time in many years. (The painting which we have used hitherto is supposedly of Fr Coleridge, although we have never had great confidence of this, and depicts a man probably at a much younger stage of life than he would have been as a Catholic and priest.)

We previously published Fr Coleridge’s initial obituary in The Month. On this anniversary of his death, we are publishing a second, lengthier tribute to the Jesuit priest by Bishop James Laird Patterson from the same publication, a few weeks later. This was accompanied by a second lengthy obituary by Fr Coleridge’s successor as Editor of The Month, Fr Richard F. Clarke SJ (which we will publish tomorrow).

As the memorial makes clear, Patterson was a contemporary of Coleridge’s at Oxford. He became a Catholic in 1850, two years before Coleridge. Nonetheless, Coleridge played and continued to play an important influence on Patterson. Here is a photo of Bishop Patterson:

Patterson was later made an honorary chamberlain to Pope Pius IX, and the President of St Edmund’s College, Ware. He was consecrated a bishop in 1880, having been appointed to the diocese of Northampton – although his health made this impossible, and he was instead made the titular bishop of Emmaus (which was fitting given his tours of the Holy Land earlier in his life), and served as an auxiliary for the diocese of Westminster. He himself died in 1902.

Reading the memorial, one cannot help be struck by two key points.

First, the goodness and virtue of Fr Coleridge himself. This website is not dedicated simply to good writing, but to good writing by a good man, who loved Our Lord and sacrificed himself for his glory.

Second, the nature of the sacrifices which he made in becoming a Catholic, and the struggles which he faced in this process. The Bishop of Emmaus’ description recalls the situation facing many today. The refusal the Anglican Establishments apologists to engage with serious arguments, the hostility of many of its ministers towards those seeking to live as Catholics within its borders, the stark reality of stepping away from the comforts of the Anglican establishment and into the unknown world of “Romanism”, and the “extreme art” with which the Anglican religion sought to present itself as the true Church – all these are very familiar phenomena which continue today.

We hope that his tribute contributes to the estimation of Fr Coleridge as a man and a priest amongst our readers. Please remember the repose of his soul in your prayers.

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Recollections of Henry James Coleridge.

The Month, Vol. 74, No. 348, June 1893

No. 348, June 1893, pp. 153-167.
Headings and some line breaks added for ease of reading online

1. Recollections of Henry James Coleridge by the Lord Bishop of Emmaus

Personal Recollections

It was in 1841 that the writer of these lines first had the happiness of knowing Henry Coleridge.

He had come into residence at Trinity College, Oxford, as a scholar on the Blount foundation, and was elected to a full scholarship of that house on Trinity Monday, 1841. He soon became a prominent member of the set who, as scholars of Trinity, and subsequently as Fellows of that, and of other colleges, occupied an honourable place in the social and academic life of Oxford.

He had come to us from Eton, and was a charming specimen of the Etonian of that time; scholarly, cultivated, full of interest in the classical literature of the ancients and of his own tongue, but with a strong current of acquaintance with the larger world without, especially the world of sports, and the world of politics. He could tell you, for instance, what horse had won the Derby year by year ever since the Derby was run, and a great deal concerning the successive Ministries from the days of the Chathams to our own.

His wit was of a most refined kind and his taste in literature and art fastidious. He had the reputation of being a man, or as old people would say, a youth, of much thought, though owing to some little defect in speech and a sensitive shyness, he did not come out as a speaker at the Union, or the other debating societies to which he belonged.

His natural bent was to a critical and ironical tone, and socially he was exclusive, and consequently not generally popular: but beneath the surface, those who were admitted to his intimacy, found a warm and affectionate friend, full of generous and confiding feeling.

His religion as an Anglican

Such, in general outline, was Henry Coleridge at the age of eighteen, so far as his natural character is concerned. There remains, to complete this rough sketch, a word to be said as to his inner being and life.

This was very quietly and unobtrusively, but very profoundly and consistently, Christian and devout. At the time of which we are speaking, the religion of this country was in a state of rapid transition. The great “Evangelical” revival had indeed infused into the minds of many a strong sense of personal religion, but to the educated classes this movement of the will and affections failed to afford any rationale of religious belief, and the old-fashioned High Churchmanship of the previous generation had become too colourless and inactive to supply the need to the people.

The few only had at first been drawn to the theory which, barely seven years before the time of which we are now writing, had been elaborated in the minds, and published in the works of the writers of Tracts for the Times, but of these few were the family and friends of Henry Coleridge, and when he came up to Oxford he was already in possession of a distinct ideal of religious belief and conduct, as were others of the set to which we belonged. Among our College tutors were the friends and disciples and co-operators of John Henry Newman, formerly scholar of Trinity, and then Fellow of Oriel, and still Vicar of St. Mary’s. We had therefore in College, in the persons and influence of our tutors, Isaac Williams, John W. Copeland, Arthur Kensington, and Arthur West Haddan, living sources of a system of religious belief which had already put on to us the character of a tradition.

We were all, no doubt, in different measure affected by this “new learning.” At that time none of us had any doubt as to the Anglican Church. Our frame of mind and practice of religion were as nearly as possible such as are reflected in Keble’s Christian Year, and we found ourselves quite at home and quite satisfied in the historical and religious attitude of the seventeenth century ecclesiastical writers. We wore oak-leaves on the anniversary of the Restoration of King Charles II., in memory of the Boscobel oak; we prayed the prayers of Bishop Andrewes, and Ken, and Jeremy Taylor, we attended our College chapel morning and evening, and treated ourselves to a choral service at New College, and at Magdalen very often besides. Isaac Walton, and Donne, and George Herbert were among our favourite authors, and we were, in politics at least, non-jurors and firm believers in the “Divine right” of kings.

Once Henry Coleridge had to read an essay on such a subject, and our tutor, the once well-known, kindly “Tommy” Short, a survival of the old “port-wine” school of High Churchman, characterized it as Toryism run mad, to the indignation of our set.

Coleridge was already a finished writer in Latin, and a master of his own tongue, as his many works in later years testify, and also an earnest and acute reasoner on what was commonly called “science,” by which was chiefly, if not exclusively meant, the mental philosophy and natural theology of Aristotle and of Butler.

Looking back half a century to those days, and recalling with gratitude and respectful affection the examples of virtue and of piety which then surrounded him, the writer of these lines discerns one among that group of friends and companions whose influence over him was paramount and enduring, and that one was Henry Coleridge; the thoughtful, reasoned grace and refinement of his mind, the retiring modesty, and absolute purity, which breathed in his whole bearing and conversation, were attractive in a singular degree, and were, under God’s good Providence, powerful factors in the formation of others.

An impulse in that direction was indeed given by another contemporary, who seemed to have been preserved for that intent, for he was removed by a strange catastrophe from this world, during the summer vacation of that year (1841). From that time, for the next four years, Henry Coleridge became the constant companion, “guide, philosopher, and friend” of the present writer.

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Growing awareness

In 1844 he took the highest honours in the classical schools, and was elected to a Fellowship at Oriel, then the blue ribbon of the University, but our friendship remained as intimate as before, and we saw almost as much of each other as we had done when he was still at Trinity. In that year, however, a marked change had come over us in regard to the great question of religion. We had not come into personal contact with the authors of the “Oxford movement” in such sense as to have imbibed directly from them any definite attitude of mind on the great question of the Church.

Nevertheless, our condition had changed. Up to that time, as has been said, we had accepted without doubt and without inquiry, as a fact, the implicit conclusion that “the Church,” on whose authority we based our religious belief, was certainly the Church of our country, as by law established, and in possession of the style and title of “Church of England.” But there came a time when the security of this postulate was challenged by the events which were occurring around us. Up to this time there had been few converts to the Catholic Church, and those personally unknown to us.

We were accustomed to regard our position as impregnable. Were we not the only consistent representatives of true “Church principles,” and as greatly removed from Roman doctrines as we were from those of the Low Church people and the Dissenters, and had we not sworn at matriculation that we “willingly and ex animo received and adhered to the Thirty-nine Articles and the whole Prayer Book and Homilies of the Church of England”? When any one gave up these positions we were wont to suppose that such a defection could only arise from an error of judgment, or some moral cause which we could only guess at, and had better not inquire into.

But when the great leader of the movement, whom we had so often heard preach his parochial sermons in St. Mary’s, and at whose hands we were wont to receive Communion in that quiet old-fashioned, unrestored and undecorated chancel (for as yet Ritualism was not),—when John Henry Newman withdrew, without word or sign, to Littlemore, we were as it were awakened from the placid complacency of our security, and for the first time became practically aware that there was such a thing as the “Roman Question.” We were in those days very conscientious and loyal to our Church authorities.

For instance, we considered the University statutes as binding in conscience, and one of them was that under the heading, De conventiculis non intrandis, and so we never entered any church or chapel except those of the Church of England, and, it may be added, that we never knew any English Catholics and had no opportunity of knowing any.

But now (in 1843–4) we began to find out that our interior life was not altogether in harmony with that which was commonly considered the “Church” spiritual tone. We had been praying, fasting, and giving alms, and now we had come to need and to ask for a guidance in those practices, which was not to be had in our own College, and especially we were feeling the need of confession.

The callousness of the establishment ministers

The first subject of our doubt and inquiry was the lawfulness of confession, and this, which seemed a necessity (as in truth it is) of the interior life of the soul, led us into the whole question of the meaning and authority of the Thirty-nine Articles which we had (so to say) swallowed whole at our matriculation three or four years before.

What brought the question home to us more especially was the intention we both entertained of entering the ministry of the Established Church. Henry Coleridge was, however, as being the better informed, more independent in his line of thought and inquiry, and so far as the present writer can remember, he was still very firm, not to say combative, on the Anglican, or via media side in this and the next year. In October, 1845, Newman seceded from the Establishment, and though we both felt the shock, Coleridge seemed to be the least affected of the two, and we carried out our intention of presenting ourselves for ordination to the “diaconate” in December.

An incident which may serve as some illustration of his state of mind at that time, occurred at the first ordination held by Bishop Samuel Wilberforce. In his charge which he delivered to us with all possible solemnity of attitude and intonation, the Bishop alluded to Newman and his friends’ secession in the following words, which form the peroration of his discourse.

“They who have retired from the busy world to contemplation and a cell, have found ere now, too often, that the Satan whom they fled from in the crowd has travelled on before them to meet them in the waste. Self-confidence, fondness for speculation, love of singularity, separation from their brethren, and then the misty visions of the darkening eye, the eager throbbings of the narrowing heart, heresy, schism, unbelief, and apostacy, these are the special dangers of the unwatchful student.

“How deeply, but as yesterday, some have thus fallen even by our side, is known to all of us. They are set as beacons to us, if such is our path, that we ‘be not high-minded, but fear,’ lest like them we too be led hereafter deliberately to adopt errors which we have been permitted ere while to expose with a clearness withheld from others, and at last, to fly on the wings of an unbounded scepticism into the bosom of an unfathomed superstition.”

As we left the chapel after this remarkable explosion, one of us at least was greatly moved and felt very sad at hearing such talk about such men, and not a little fear of the “misty vision,” which had seemed to him to be rather applicable to the Thirty-nine Articles than to himself, until the orthodox sagacity of the prelate had ascribed it to its real source in the perverted mind of Newman, whence it might, he thought, possibly have descended to the present writer.

Coleridge, however, took a different view, and merely said, with a little sniff, which was habitual when he spoke with irony, “‘Unbounded scepticism’ I take to be Trench’s (who was then chaplain to the Bishop), and ‘fathomless superstition’ was the Bishop’s own.”

In truth, the note struck by Dr. Wilberforce was one we often had to hear at that period. Our seniors were constantly meeting our distressful calls on them for some intelligible explanation of the manifold inconsistencies and downright heresies of our formularies, with exhortations to do anything rather than look them fully and fairly in the face. “Contemplation and a cell” were certain, in the philosophy of those good people, to lead to a row of most unpleasant results, and were generally prescribed and banished as dangerous and unsettling.

This line was certainly safer than argument, but though we were again and again put off in this way, the doubts and the anguish of conscience recurred and would not be silenced by any such expedients. Sometimes the advice took the form of an ingenious confession that the adviser had himself gone through a period of misgiving, but had managed somehow to struggle through it and come out of “darkness” and “throbbings” into the full blaze of the Elizabethan light and peace.

On this palmary point, however, of the authority of the Church of England, our bona fides was certainly shaken before the time of our ordination. The Bishop “interviewed” each of us, and with a display of erudition and a great deal of rhetoric calculated to awe young men, sent us away silenced, if not satisfied.

Rejection as an Oriel tutor

Henry Coleridge had been urged by his friends to accept a tutorship at Oriel, but the sturdy and acute old Provost, Dr. Hawkins, had declined to allow him so to do, and it seemed to us that his case was at least one of those which the Bishop (himself an Oriel man) had in mind when he spoke of the special dangers of those who “retired from the world,” and became “unwatchful students.”

A long experience inclines us to believe that the most charitable judgment of our neighbour is also usually the most true. We will not therefore suggest that the warnings of our superiors were intended to reinforce any temptations which we had towards postponing or stifling conscientious doubts as to our religious position; but one may say that the bias of all that made life attractive and pleasant to us, was so distinctly in favour of remaining where we were, and the disadvantages and vague dread of an opposite course were so obvious, that we had no need, to say the least, of additional arguments in favour of acquiescence, and against inquiry.

That this was the case with Henry Coleridge is not a mere hypothesis. The extracts from his letters given below and written about this time, show that he was tried by very real and very specious temptations to give up the lines of thought which disturbed and tried him, and to fall back on a mode of life and on occupations which would presumably postpone, or even totally and finally remove, the consideration of the great religious problem which lay before him.

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Time at Ottery St. Mary

The failure of his desire to become a tutor at Oriel had renewed the thought which he had previously entertained at intervals, of giving up residence at Oxford, and taking a country curacy, and circumstances lent themselves to the realization of this idea.

Part of the parish of Ottery St. Mary, where was, and now is, the home of his family, was erected into a separate cure, and Henry Coleridge was asked to become the first curate. The Judge was naturally desirous that he should be near home, and the church and parsonage were soon built with this view. Other circumstances combined to recommend this course to him.

At the beginning of 1846, our friends, Montague Bernard, afterwards Fellow of All Souls, professor of international law, and a Privy Councillor, Henry Coleridge, and others had planned and carried out the editing of a weekly newspaper which became, and still remains, the most able and accredited organ of the High Church party, the Guardian, and though it soon achieved a considerable success, it was perhaps partly on that account that he early felt a shrinking from continuing to write in the tone of ascertained, if not superior, hold of the truth on subjects on which he was already realizing that inquiry and investigation were leading on to doubt.

The sensitive sincerity of his nature shrank from affecting to be dogmatic without a distinct and final basis on which to rest such a pretension. In 1847, he wrote to this effect, but things went on much as they had done, in that in the succeeding year, when at last he made up his mind to leave Oriel, and take up his abode at Ottery and then at Alphington. In May of the next year, he sums up the state of his mind as follows. His departure from Oxford had left the present writer (who had a curacy there and could therefore leave but seldom) more on his own resources, and he had developed more rapidly in that atmosphere than Henry had done in the surroundings of his country home. He writes under date May 6, 1849:

“You have indeed a sore trial in those feelings” (of doubt as to the Anglican position), “as I have in a way, though I do not know the cost of a struggle because it is my way to yield. More blessed is your pain! I think of you often, and seem to see that you are sure to conquer, through God’s grace, and that your doubts will all tend to your perfection. It must be so, dear friend, for you fight under good guidance.”

This “good guidance” was that of Dr. Pusey.

“You know that I have often said with more than usual seriousness of intention, that I think you would be happier in a country cure, and that Oxford is not the place for you.”

“I told you I had made up my mind to let home and the country pair off against Oxford and the Brotherhood.”

This “Brotherhood” was a sort of religious confraternity or guild, which the writer and others had instituted for religious and benevolent objects akin to those familiar to Catholics in the Society of St. Vincent of Paul, and which afterwards took a wide development.

Comfort in his position – conditional on God’s will

Coleridge writes again about this time stoutly enough:

“Whether it be the effect of Dr. Pusey’s conversation and aspect, or of the not entirely unlawful fascinations of home scenery and home company, I am at present what is generally understood by the phrase ‘very comfortable,’ and can only hope that you in the fogs of Oxford will be able to understand and approve my state of feeling.

“To speak seriously, I am inclined to give up as unholy (almost) all attempts to unchurch the Church of England. For the existence of God’s grace with her is very clearly evident, and not only this, but it is, as Dr. Pusey says, closely connected with her sacraments and ordinances. Now of this phenomenon we can only give one account to ourselves: it is the work of God. The only other alternative is, that it is the work of His enemy, imitating for the destruction of His children His gracious operations.

“If then He be with us in the sacraments, or to speak more properly, in the Church, even if He gives this grace as a means to lead persons elsewhere (as He scattered fragments of truth and light over the heathen world), yet we can only follow surely where He would lead us by these means; by clinging closely to them and using them with all our heart.

“To doubt and criticize is at once, so far, to begin by losing our hold of His hand. Let us then cling to it, and it will lead us ‘a little further on’ if it be His will. Leaving controversy to those who can deal with it, let us try to make ourselves humble and holy… I give up my hostility to the Thirty-nine Articles as long as I am allowed to put a Catholic sense on them. My path is of course beset with difficulties and my present position full of temptations (don’t laugh at me, but pray for me), but I must do the best I can.

“See if you can comfort yourself with the considerations which influence me. You once said something which made me fear you attached far more weight to my opinion than you should… Now at present, with all the weight that much affection, at all events, can give to such an entreaty, I do pray you to dismiss your doubts. If I have done anything towards unsettling you, I hope I have at least demolished my own authority by this palinode.”

He ends this letter as follows: “God bless you, my dear friend… Scatter to the winds unfaithful doubts; if they are not unfaithful, they will come back again to us when we are more worthy of light.” These words were prophetic of us both, and so far as memory recalls, they and the others above concerning the third view which could be taken as to the character of graces received in the Church of England, sufficed to leave the door of uncertainty well open. In October, 1848, he writes:

“My chance of the Oriel tutorship is, as I expected, at an end; the Provost not being able to digest my views about the No. 90 interpretation [of the Articles] which he selected as points of examination. I have the great satisfaction of having had really no choice in the matter: that is, my answers were Dr. Pusey’s, not my own, and I did not select the subjects on which I had to declare myself, and I confined myself to them. The Provost [Dr. Hawkins] was very kind… The ——— are coming here to-day, I suppose their visit will complete the dissipating process with which I have been doctoring myself lately.”

These are specimens among many of the same tenor which sufficiently illustrate the fluctuations of mind and conscience through which Coleridge was gradually passing onwards at this period.

It was a trial which only those can fully appreciate who have had themselves to pass through it. On the one side there was that which he well describes, the interior spiritual history of the soul which was so knit up with the use of the Anglican ordinances that he could not deny their efficacy, and there was the respect for the virtue and supposed authority of seniors; on the other there was the studied ambiguity and frequent heresies of the Thirty-nine Articles, and indeed of the whole Prayer Book and Homilies of the Established Church, which we had again and again pledged ourselves to by oath as accepted by us “willingly and ex animo,” as being God’s very truth: and we had no one to give us the true solution of these antagonistic elements, to say, “You have no need to deny the truth of your interior life: those were indeed the promptings of God’s actual graces leading you on to the knowledge and the love of Him in His one and only kingdom.”

The extreme art with which the Anglican formularies were framed by the astute founders of the new Church, with the object of deceiving the greater number, and the halo of venerable names, and monuments, and institutions, which surrounded him at Oxford, and the tender memories of a home such as his in sweet Devonshire, full of the gentle pieties of domestic life and of a rare culture, these and so much more that we cannot here dwell on, combined to detain Henry Coleridge in the national religion.

But meanwhile his soul was not deserted by its Creator, and from time to time new circumstances stirred again the depths within him, and what he wrote in 1847, that his “doubts if not unfaithful would come back,” came to pass. His peaceful home and the loving pastoral care which he gave to his flock at Alphington, much prayer, many earnest Communions, a life of quiet austerity and self-denial, of high aspirations after the more excellent way at whatever cost of human ties and interests, in a word, the unreserved surrender of self; these were the sure ways which led him on to the perfect day.

But besides the order of causes, divers indeed, but intimate and cogent to him as the event showed, there were events occurring on a wider stage which formed occasions such as are usually required to shake the minds and wills of men out of any routine in which they may have been living more or less unconsciously.

The treatment of converts – and his own decision

The incident of the nomination of Dr. Hampden to the Regius Professorship of Theology at Oxford, the condemnation of Dr. Pusey’s sermon on the Eucharist, and his suspension in consequence from his office of Professor for two years, the condemnation and deprival of W. G. Ward, were all of this character; but the case of Mr. Gorham in 1850 was even more startling, and was the occasion of many conversions to the Catholic Church among the friends of Henry Coleridge. The present writer was one of these, and wrote from Jerusalem, where he and his friend, now the Rev. Father Wynne, S.J., were received into the Church, urging Coleridge to take the same step.

He was, however, not a man to be pushed on by the force of argument, or even of example, and his answers to such appeals were always such as to show that the work of conviction could only be wrought in him by the operation of his own thought in subordination to the grace of God.

In April, 1852, after long and patient prayer and the very gradual surrender of one position after another, and the painful trials involved in growing divergence from his revered and beloved father’s religious opinions, and the giving up, as this seemed to involve, of all home ties and of his personal interests, he submitted to the claims of the Catholic Church, and at thirty years of age began life anew.

God alone can know the merit of such sacrifices in each individual case; but the writer of these lines has reason to know that in his case they were very real and very great, both on account of his temperament and character, and also because of his position in the family and in the world. It is, however, perhaps needless to say that the reward was such as we cannot but expect: in this world a hundred-fold in peace and in joy in believing, besides all that awaited him in that which is now his.

During the preceding months he wrote repeatedly and at great length concerning his approaching reception into the Church; and the infinite pains which he took to spare pain and embarrassment to his parents and friends, and to secure himself against all possible illusion or undue compliance with any human motive of any kind, were so worthy of his pure and loving spirit, that the present writer has great difficulty in withholding these letters from publicity, nor does he withhold them save out of regard to the feelings of others. The following extracts are from letters dated in March, May, and June, 1852, and addressed to this writer at Rome:

“It was a sad thing for me not to see you while you were in England, but that was the beginning of many such lessons I have had to learn of the exceeding strength of those prejudices which possess the minds and to some extent, I fear, seal the hearts, of those who are by nature most kind and charitable.

“I have read your book with great pleasure, most of all the part about Jerusalem and Palestine… I have been trying not to write about myself, but you will wish so much to hear of your friend. I cannot quite tell when it was that I resolved that nothing should any longer hinder me from laying aside all that kept me from the Church of Rome, giving up Alphington and my fellowship, and, after a short interval of rest and quiet, doing what you have done.

“I have never been unhappy since; and though I have had much sorrow to go through (and may have some more) and have met with great opposition, all has only confirmed my conviction and strengthened my purpose… My sister had a most severe illness, and the trouble and anxiety of that time delayed me a little, as I did not wish my father should have so much on his mind at once.

“He has been the great cause of my staying so long at Alphington, and now it has been a most severe blow to him that I have gone. He has built (against my wish) a very nice house, school-house and school, close to the little church which you remember… Nothing could be more happy than my place there. I was so fond of the people and of their children, and they had thoroughly given me their hearts. However, I made up my mind to leave before Lent, and parted with them at Quinquagesima… Well, that parting is over, and another with my dear cousins at the Manor House, and here I am at home at last, where I mean to remain, not so much to make up my mind—that is already done—as to prepare myself by quiet and thought for a new life.

“The state of mind of my father and mother is a great grief to me, but prayer is a comfort, and I know that God’s ways are wonderful, and that He can change the most settled prejudices by the power of His grace. They wish me to go abroad, … but I do not wish to act in any way as if influenced by the better condition of (Catholic) things abroad, but only by the one fact that the English Church is not in communion with the centre of Unity.”

A few weeks later he writes that he has hopes that his cousin…

“… Coleridge Patteson, whom you remember at Balliol, may possibly succeed me at Alphington, as we have all been wishing. He is a most sweet and excellent fellow, and though his travels and sojourn at Rome has not made him a Catholic, he is such a modest, quiet person, that I can expect anything of him by and bye, by God’s mercy.

“Anyhow, he is the man of all others I wish to succeed me, for the sake at all events of the temporal wants of my dear people and children. I know he will go on quietly and plainly without troubling them with violent anti-Catholicism… Yesterday I resigned my fellowship: so they will put me in the Times soon… Will you thank Manning for his great kindness to us all?”1

About a month after his reception into the Church, Coleridge writes:

“My father was much hurt for some time because I could not join in family prayers, but now he seems much less put out, and can even speak without a sigh of my going to Mass or sermon.

“In fact it is not as he had expected, for he had conjured up all sorts of visions of conspiracies and dark designs against all the rest of the family which I was to be for ever practising; and he thought he himself would be publicly assailed as a Romanizer, whereas people take very little notice of the matter. I think the fuss about family prayers is rather a good thing; though it pains me to pain him in any way, it is a continual memento of the claims of the Church.”

He writes later:

“I am very happy as I am, but I have seen too little of Catholic things yet to be ‘acclimatized.’ Perhaps I may go abroad with Wynne. I remember meeting Mr. Manning once at Bath, and I thought him then very unlikely to be a Catholic. I suppose you will not come far northwards (in the summer), but we shall meet some day and somewhere, and at all events we are no longer the one inside and the other outside the Catholic Church: Deo gratias!”

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Early days as a Catholic

In June, 1852, he writes that Newman had asked him to help him on the staff of the Catholic University in Dublin, but that he was now most desirous to study for the priesthood. This desire he carried out, and the present writer had the happiness to see him arrive in Rome for that purpose in the autumn.

There he was a fellow-student, in the Accademia dei Nobili, with a group of distinguished men, converts of that time and others, such as Cardinals Monaco, Manning, Howard, Vaughan, Mgr. Gilbert, Mgr. Talbot, Father William Eyre, S.J., and Father J. H. Wynne, S.J., Robert Isaac Wilberforce (lately Archdeacon of the West Riding), &c.

That was a time of singular charm and consolation to us Oxonians. We sat once more in the place of learners, and found again at Rome all the sense of intimate companionship and esprit de corps of our undergraduate days. Once more the pleasurable excitement of our successive examinations in the schools and gradual advancement in the career of Holy Orders, renewed our academic youth, and amply compensated for the anxieties and distresses of the past.

But that which gave the special and unprecedented happiness to us all was the sense of security and of having ventured all, and found all that we had ventured, and more than all, in the long sought haven of the Church. The stillness and rest of mind and of heart were indeed a contrast to the struggles and weary contentions of long years. There in Rome, the home of the soul, Henry Coleridge spent five peaceful years of preparation for the sacred ministry, with but brief intervals, and no doubt it was there that the call of God gradually made itself audible, so that when he returned to England as a priest in 1857, he was ripe for that great and final venture of faith which it was reserved for him to make in all the maturity of his great powers, and after full counting of the cost.

No doubt the leading of exterior circumstance, the advice of his spiritual guides, the special gifts of mind and culture, and the natural drawing towards literary work, had their weight in the bias which he felt towards the Society of Jesus, but it was far more the inmost and profoundest instinct (if one may use the word) of his spiritual being which found its ultimate and only adequate satisfaction in the bonds of the triple vows of that illustrious Company. In the autumn of 1857 he entered the Novitiate of the Society, and on the eve of so doing he wrote as follows:

“September 3, 1857. You know already where I am going and what I am to do, but I cannot go off to Beaumont Lodge without sending you a line to beg your special prayers, sure as I am that we shall always remember one another. It seems that our ways lie rather apart, and I could have wished it was not so, but they lead to the same end, and we have long ago agreed that there alone is the place for those who love one another so well, to have the full enjoyment of each other in the Bosom of our dearest Lord… Once more pray for me, my old and most dear friend, and believe me, ever your most affectionate friend.”

Final thoughts

That this resolve, which he carried out and adhered to with so much fruit and so much edification for the remaining thirty-six years of his earthly pilgrimage, was but the crowning in him of God’s work in his soul from the beginning, none who knew him will be surprised to hear.

His whole being was saturated with the love of his Divine Master, and that was the over-mastering passion of his soul, which as a lodestar guided and governed him in the way in ever-increasing light and fervour. Of no one could it be said more truly that “the boy was father of the man,” and that his “days were linked each to each by natural piety.”

As soon as he had passed through his noviceship he was sent to St. Beuno’s College, in North Wales, to teach theology, and after some five years he was transferred to the residence in London. What were his labours in the sacred ministry, what his extraordinary literary work, both as the Editor of The Month, and as the author of some twenty volumes of affective and ascetic theological works, no one who reads these pages is likely to be altogether ignorant. Our Divine Lord, His Church, His Mother and saints, were the unfailing theme on which he spent all the treasures of his thoughtful piety and ardent love, and they will be the enduring monuments of that most complete self-immolation to which God called him for His greater glory, and for his eternal reward.—R.I.P.

Tomorrow we will continue with Part II of these recollections, namely those of Fr Richard F. Clarke SJ, his successor as the Editor of The Month, perhaps most known now as the editor of Fr Franz Spirago’s The Catechism Explained. Fr Clarke’s recollections deal more with Fr Coleridge’s conversion and career as a Jesuit.

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

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Where is he?

The WM Review published its first text from Fr Henry James Coleridge in November 2022 – taken from his classic work on Purgatory, The Prisoners of the King. From there, we began posting his commentaries on the Gospels and events of the Life of Our Lord, until what became a regular feature took on a life of its own in September 2024 with this website, Father Coleridge Reader.

Since then, we have published nearly 400 articles – including commentary on the Gospels for every Sunday of the liturgical year.

Fr Coleridge is a forgotten hero, praised by some of the highest-ranking men of the Church, and ranked by them among men such as Newman, Manning, Faber, Challoner and Butler. In 1908, Cardinal Gibbons referred to a group of ten such men – including Fr Coleridge – as “household names” among American Catholics.

In 1852, seven years after Newman’s conversion, Coleridge followed. He was 30 years of age. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1857, and maintained a friendship with Newman as a Catholic.

He was an utterly prolific writer, in support of what has been called “the Apostleship of Good Books.” In addition to over 20 volumes of highly readable commentary on the Gospels, he was responsible for:

• Lives of saints (notably St Francis Xavier and St Teresa of Avila)

• Translations of rare and unusual devotional texts (e.g., Ludolph of Saxony’s Life of Christ)

• Editing The Quarterly Series of Catholics books

• Taking the lead on The Month and another journal.

This was in addition to the many hours he spent in the confessional in the Jesuit Church on Farm Street, London. He went to his reward in 1893, and is buried in Ottery St Mary in Devon, England.

Our goal with Father Coleridge Reader is as follows:

To make Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ better known and loved…

… and to make Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ a household name amongst Catholics once more.

To mark the anniversary of his death on 13th April 1893, I decided to go with my family to the town in South-West England where he was buried, and to try to find his grave, pay our respects and pray for the repose of his soul.

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Finding the grave

This was something of a mission, and I’m pleased to say it was a successful one.

Fr Coleridge was buried in Ottery St Mary, a town in Devon, South-West England. But beyond this, information online was sparse and contradictory. The Find a Grave website said that he was buried in Ottery St Mary – which was not news – but also specified the cemetery. I wrote to the local council to ask for further details, and they advised me that there were no records of the grave there, and advised that we consult the parish church.

I did indeed write to a churchwarden, but received no reply.

In the Grokipedia article on Fr Coleridge, I found an uncited reference to him being buried in the Coleridge family vault. Once again, information was sparse – although a website dedicated to the history of the British Empire featured a picture with the following description:

“The Coleridge family vault in the churchyard, marking the resting place of several members of the wider family connected with the parish.”

The monument had visibly deteriorated, and it was impossible to tell from the picture who was buried there. Armed with this information, some paper and pencils (to try and produce a rubbing of the grave if the engravings were illegible) and some prayer and optimism, we set out on the two hour drive to Devon.

I hadn’t been to Ottery since 2008 or 2009 – more on that later. But we arrived and parked up outside the parish church.

I showed the kids the image from the British Empire site, and we set about looking for it. Fortunately, it was a distinctive monument, and the picture showed it to be next to a small corrugated roof – and it proved very easy to find.

But now the real question arrived: was Fr Coleridge really among those buried here?

As expected, the writing was very difficult to read – and the stone was so rough that no amount of pencil rubbing would help.

However, a few sections of the most eroded part of the monument caught my eye. Can you see them?

I took a closer look. I could make out parts of it, just as “REV HENRY ~~~ES” – no “COLERIDGE” after them, but the other names on the monument were set in the same way. As I looked harder I could see “SECOND SON”, “SIR JOHN TAYLOR COLERIDGE”, “DEPARTED”, AND “~PRIL 13 18~3”.

Here is an enhanced image – see the third section down:

The light was terrible, and even the enhanced image is not great.

But on an even closer inspection, tracing the inscription with our fingers, more letters became legible to me and my son, and it became clear what the engraving said:

THE REV HENRY JAMES, D.D., THE SECOND SON OF
THE RT HON. SIR JOHN TAYLOR COLERIDGE
DEPARTED THIS LIFE APRIL 13 1893 AGED 70 YEARS

We had found him. Deo gratias!

My children gathered a few dandelion flowers, and we said a decade of the Rosary for the repose of Fr Coleridge’s soul, and for any Holy Souls whose bodies lay in this churchyard.

After a picnic, we also laid some white tulips, and prayed for readers of Father Coleridge Reader and The WM Review.

The WM Review focuses on explaining traditional points of theology, and using them to approach contemporary questions in the Church. But its more fundamental purpose is to strengthen what remains – to help Catholics strengthen their faith in the darkest crisis of all time, and to give them what they need to remain Catholics, within the bosom and unity of the Church, outside of which there is no salvation.

Important as theology and polemics certainly are, they are not the whole story. They cannot be the whole story.

That’s why Father Coleridge’s comprehensive work is such an important part of The WM Review’s work. And that’s also why it was wonderful to be able to visit the forgotten resting place of this man to whom I owe so much. I hope to visit it again in the future – perhaps as an organised event with readers of this publication.

Please say your own prayer for the repose of his soul.

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The parish church

Taking our leave of Fr Coleridge and his family, we also visited the thirteenth century parish church (now in the hands of the Church of England). A picture of the exterior is above; the interior was magnificent:

Unfortunately, the parish church was full of children’s toys, both in a large play area and even at the front of the sanctuary. It is understandable that people want to make their churches welcoming to children, but it detracted a lot from the magnificence in the pictures of above. I think that many readers of this website will agree that we should be seeking to raise our children up as much as is possible, rather than bringing things down to their level.

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About Ottery St Mary

This town is at least around 1,000 years old, being recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086. Its parish church has one of the oldest mechanical clocks in England – a fourteenth astronomical clock based on a geocentric cosmology.

Ottery St Mary is known for two main reasons today.

The first notable feature of Ottery St Mary is its unusual annual “Burning Tar Barrels” tradition, dating back to the seventeenth century, in which 17 barrels soaked in tar are set alight outside the town’s four pubs, and carried around on the back of a resident at speed. I attended one of these events in 2008 or 2009, and it was wild. The streets were packed and you could feel the heat from the burning barrels.

(For our American readers: This is just the sort of totally normal thing English people get up to for fun.)

The second reason the town is known today – and perhaps the more high-brow one – is that it was the birthplace of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet and great-uncle of Fr Coleridge. There are a number of monuments to the poet throughout the town.

The Coleridge family have been an important part of the town since Samuel’s father was appointed the vicar of the parish church in 1769. Fr Coleridge was born there in 1822, the second son of Sir John Taylor Coleridge – the poet’s nephew.

After Fr Coleridge’s time at Oxford, he went to Ottery as the curate of a newly established curacy in the parish. Sir John built a church and parsonage for his son (seemingly that of St James and St Anne’s, Alfington – not the main church of Ottery). Sir John was later the judge in Newman’s libel case.

His son John Duke Coleridge (Fr Coleridge’s brother) followed his father into the judiciary, became the Lord Chief Justice of England, and was made the first Baron Coleridge in 1874. He and Fr Coleridge remained close throughout their lives, although Lord Coleridge found himself embroiled in matrimonial scandals which became painfully public, as recounted by Tom Hughes in his recent book A Shattered Idol: The Lord Chief Justice and his Troublesome Women.

The Barons Coleridge held their ancestral home in Ottery St Mary until 2006.

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Conclusion

I first discovered Fr Henry James Coleridge SJ years ago, when I read an article by John Daly about a problem facing many Catholics – a lack of “familiarity with Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

Many Christians today pray, confess, study doctrine, and strive to live by the moral law. Yet even with all this, something feels absent – a dryness, a distance, a lack of real knowledge of Our Lord and love for him.

We know about him, and his Gospel – but we do not yet dwell with him, walk beside him, follow him step by step through his life on earth.

We are all aware of St Jerome’s famous maxim, that ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ. Christ is, after all, the reason wanting to learn theology: and true theology is nothing more or less than his doctrine expressed in a systematic, scientific way. Frank Sheed expressed the same idea:

“We all respond to different elements in Christ, but we have to find them for ourselves. The student, like the teacher, should be soaked in the Gospels. He cannot meet our Lord anywhere else, not as He lived and moved and talked: that is where He is.”1

Daly makes the same point, saying that the Gospels “should be read again and again.” However, he adds that they can and should be “fleshed out by the perusal of more detailed works.” He writes:

“The personality of Our Lord can only become known to us through careful study of His words and deeds. When we truly know Christ, we cannot fail to admire and love Him, to be charmed by Him and to desire to follow Him. Our own values and characters will be transformed by Him to the extent that we pass our time in His divine company. Catholicism without familiarity with Jesus is but dry bones.

“As well may we try to learn to swim from a book without getting our feet wet as to try to practise seriously the religion founded by Christ to bring men to know and love Him without immersing ourselves in the records He has left us of Himself.”

The article went on to list seven authors whose works he recommended, including Fr Coleridge:

6. Fr. Henry James Coleridge S.J., The Life of Our Life, (twenty-six volumes).

Fr. Coleridge’s achievement leaves one gasping: a very complete life of Our Lord in twenty-six independent volumes, filled with information, with piety and with orthodoxy, answering every doubt, supplying every need, and doing so without concession to the wave of modernising scriptural interpretations which was already washing across Europe in the nineteenth century.

Yet the work’s renown seems to be inversely proportional to its merit – hardly anyone seems to have heard of it!

I am glad to say that this is no longer the case. Even Elon Musk’s Grokipedia features a lengthy account of Fr Coleridge’s life and career, drawing on the work of Father Coleridge Reader, and ending with the following remark:

“Today, Coleridge remains underappreciated relative to contemporaries like Newman, yet his contributions to pre-Vatican II ecumenism—through thoughtful engagements with Anglican traditions—and social Catholicism, advocating Gospel principles for societal renewal, continue to resonate. Modern recognition has grown via initiatives like the 21st-century Father Coleridge Reader project, which digitizes and audio-formats his texts to reintroduce his "apostleship of good books" to new audiences, countering superficial devotional trends with rigorous, pious scholarship.”

At a time when so many are tempted by shallow piety or sensational claims, Coleridge offers clarity, reverence, and truth. His work contains no sentimental excess, no theological compromise, and no modernist uncertainty. It is rooted in the faith of the Church and nourishes that faith in others.

It’s a fact that if more Catholics knew about authors like Fr Coleridge, many of the errors and distractions of today would lose their hold.

And this is why he must be restored to his position as a household name.

If you want to see what I mean, take a look at how far we have got through his Life of Our Lord series – and the incredible richness, depth and diversity in his writing:

If you believe Catholics need serious, doctrinally sound spiritual writing, then subscribe to emails today – or even join us as a monthly/annual subscriber:

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PS: We will be continuing our commemoration of his anniversary this week with two further in memoriam articles written at the time of his death. Hit subscribe to make sure you don’t miss them:

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PPS: In your charity, please remember the repose of Fr Coleridge’s soul in your prayers.

PPPS: A few months ago we launched a range of mugs for The WM Review. We make a small commission on them, but they are fun, and a good way of starting conversations with your guests. The Father Coleridge Mug is here:

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Editor’s Notes

“Low Sunday”, or the Easter Octave, is also known as Dominica in albis (after the white robes of the newly baptized neophytes, which are now put away) or Quasimodo Sunday (after the Introit).

On this Sunday, the Church reads the account of Our Lord’s appearance on the evening of Easter Sunday, and again a week later.

On Easter Sunday evening, Our Lord breathes on the Apostles and gives them the power to forgive sins. But St Thomas was not there, and issues his famous condition for belief – which Our Lord graciously fulfils, for our sake.

Fr Coleridge deals with all this, as well as considering whether St Thomas’ faults were as grave as they are sometimes presented.

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Easter Day

Part I: What the risen Christ did when he met all the Apostles together

Why did the risen Christ insist on ‘Peace,’ and eat in front of his Disciples?

1. What the risen Christ did when he met all the Apostles together

Part II: Easter’s lasting gift: The power to forgive sin

Before Easter Sunday was finished, Christ gave his Apostles the power to forgive sins—a power greater than that of the angels.

2. Easter’s lasting gift: The power to forgive sin

Part III: Why the Church honours St Thomas despite his doubt

Is it possible that St Thomas’ faults have been exaggerated over the centuries?

3. Why the Church honours St Thomas despite his doubt

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Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

Subscribe now

Share The Father Coleridge Reader

Subscribe to The WM Review

Give a gift subscription

Follow our projects on Twitter, YouTube and Telegram:

• The WM Review

• Twitter (The WM Review)

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Editor’s Notes

As noted in another article, Fr Coleridge’s work did not just include commentary on the Gospels, but also their harmonisation.

In his two-volume work The Life of our Life – the same title as that which is given to his much longer series of the life of Our Lord – he deals with the harmonistic questions with great clarity, and sometimes even ingenuity.

The Resurrection is one area in which such ingenuity is needed. In this mini-series, we will present Chapters X and XI of Volume II, along with our own ordering of his harmony.

In this part, he begins setting the Resurrection appearances in order – and draws out some important points that some might find surprising.

One of the chief difficulties arises from assuming that the Gospels were all talking about a single group of women visiting the tomb. This assumption is not necessitated by the texts at all. Fr Coleridge presents the arguments for several parties of women, and several visits to the Sepulchre – one of which was even on Saturday evening (the beginning of Sunday, by the reckoning of the Jews). Once we consider this possibility, which is amply supported by the Gospels themselves, and only contradicted by our own gratuitous assumptions, everything falls into place.

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The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord

The Life of our Life, Vol. II

Chapter X
Burns and Oates, London, 1876

1. How to avoid being disappointed by the Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection

2. Getting the Resurrection appearances in order

The Resurrection unseen

We may now proceed to put in order, as far as is possible, the several accounts which remain to us in the Gospels of the incidents of the great day of the Resurrection.

The Resurrection itself was unwitnessed, as far as we know, by mortal eye. When our Lord’s Soul once more entered into the Sacred Body which was lying in the sepulchre, it needed no power but its own to pierce the stone and issue forth at will. The Roman guards were the only persons present, and we are nowhere told that their eyes were enlightened so as to discern the heavenly majesty of the Risen Body of our Lord.

Early tradition has pointed out the spot on Calvary, very near indeed to the sepulchre, where our Blessed Lady was when our Lord manifested Himself to her; and we need not attempt to trace His footsteps any further until He must have left her to console that other Mary, who had stood by her at the foot of the Cross. Soon after His Resurrection, but we are not told at what interval, occurred the first incident of which the Gospels give any account.1

‘Behold, there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and coming, rolled back the stone, and sat upon it. And for fear of him the guards were struck with terror, and became as dead men.’

Thus was the sepulchre opened to the visits of our Lord’s friends, and the soldiers, who might have hindered their free approach, filled with consternation, and even, as it appears, put to flight. It was as yet not dawn, some time before sunrise.

Several parties of women

We now return to the holy women from Galilee, whom we have found the Evangelists mentioning in their accounts of the crucifixion and sepulture of our Lord. Three of these are mentioned by name by St. Matthew and St. Mark, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome. The first two of these had watched the burial on Friday evening—sitting over against the sepulchre, and seeing where He was laid.

On Saturday the same two came to visit the sepulchre, just as the evening fell.2 After sunset, they purchased aromatic ointments and spices, in order that as soon as morning dawned they might come and perform for our Lord’s sacred Body the rites which had been omitted on Friday on account of the pressure of time.

But our Lord had many such devoted friends at that time in Jerusalem or in its neighbourhood—for some of them may have had to come as far as from Bethany.

Father Coleridge Reader is a labour of love. But curating, cleaning up and publishing these texts takes real work.

To keep this project going, and to make more of this treasury available, we rely on reader support. Some posts are reserved for members to sustain this mission.

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Editor’s Notes

Fr Coleridge’s work did not just include commentary on the Gospels, but also their harmonisation.

In his two-volume work The Life of our Life – the same title as that which is given to his much longer series of the life of Our Lord – he deals with the harmonistic questions with great clarity, and sometimes even ingenuity.

The Resurrection is one area in which such ingenuity is needed. In this mini-series, we will present Chapters X and XI of Volume II, along with our own ordering of his harmony.

In this first part, he sets out the nature of the problems we face, and draws out what this actually shows us about the Gospels as documents of the Church.

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The Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord

The Life of our Life, Vol. II

Chapter X
St. Matt. xxvii. 35–44; St. Mark xv. 24–32; St. Luke xxiii. 34–43; St. John xix. 13–27; Story of the Gospels, § 170.
Burns and Oates, London, 1876

1. How to avoid being disappointed by the Gospels’ accounts of the Resurrection

Notices of this time scanty

In no part of the Gospel history is it more essential to keep in view the character of the records before us than in that which relates to the Resurrection of our Lord, and the forty days during which He remained upon earth before His Ascension.

Unless we understand the limits of the undertaking, so to speak, of the Evangelists, the ends which they had before them and the relation in which they place themselves to the great truths with which this part of the history is concerned, we shall certainly be disappointed in what they have done for us.

They will seem to have left us scanty and disconnected notices, relating rather to what is accidental and secondary than to central truths and matters of primary interest, and we shall be inclined to wonder, as many who consider the faith of Christians to rest upon literary and documentary evidence alone have wondered, how it is that so little of formal and demonstrative argument is furnished us for the greatest and most vital of all those acts of our Lord which are proposed to us as the foundations of our faith. For this pre-eminence can hardly be denied to the great truth of the Resurrection.

Disappointing to contemplatives

We are not only in danger of finding undue fault with the Evangelical records considered as historical evidences.

The devout contemplative soul may also complain that, whereas in the other portions of their narratives the Evangelists keep our Lord ever before us as the central figure in the picture—so central and prominent that all others are not merely subordinate to Him, but are actually, so to say, dwarfed by the extent to which He fills the eye—now, that we come to the moment of His triumph, to the gathering in, as it were, of the harvest for which His life and sufferings were the seed-time, He is almost withdrawn from our sight save for occasional visits and manifestations, which do not fill up a tithe even of the short space of time during which we know that He was on earth after He had risen from the dead.

Souls such as those of which we speak delight to accompany our Lord in thought from the moment at which His Blessed Soul was breathed out into the hands of His Father. They love to trace, as far may be, His steps as He went down—without His Sacred Body, which lay in the sepulchre for the appointed time—to the myriads of spirits who had passed out of this life in grace and faith, the patriarchs and prophets and saints of all ages, who, under whatever dispensation and law, had been redeemed by virtue of the Precious Blood which He had now shed upon the Cross.

They love to contemplate the welcome and joy in Limbus, the deliverance which His approach wrought in Purgatory, the acknowledgment of His Empire even in the utterly miserable regions of Hell. Again, they would like to have been told by the Evangelists how the Sacred Body, which had remained in the grave united to the Divinity, was reanimated on Easter morning by His ineffably glorious Soul, and how it issued through the stone which had been rolled to the door of the sepulchre, as it had before left the womb of Mary.

It would have delighted them if St. Luke, who has told us so much of the first months and years of our Lord’s existence, in the womb and in the arms of our Blessed Lady, had been commissioned to speak of the first interview between our Lord and His Mother a few moments after His Resurrection, or if St. John, who was now charged with a filial attendance upon her, had been allowed to speak of that communing between Him and her which Christian instincts naturally lead us to consider as the greatest occupation of our Lord during the forty days, when He was also engaged in comforting His friends or in instructing and confirming His Apostles for the great work which was now placed in their hands.

But all such desires must as yet be unsatisfied.

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Editor’s Notes

Many believe that Christ made St Peter the Pope when he changed his name and talked about “the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.” In fact, the Church teaches that St Peter’s profession of faith gave rise to a promise of the primacy, which was ultimately bestowed in the events discussed in this piece, following his threefold profession of charity:

We teach and declare that, according to the gospel evidence, a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole church of God was immediately and directly promised to the blessed apostle Peter and conferred on him by Christ the lord.

It was to Simon alone, to whom he had already said:

You shall be called Cephas, that the Lord, after his confession, You are the Christ, the son of the living God, spoke these words: Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the underworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

And it was to Peter alone that Jesus, after his resurrection, confided the jurisdiction of supreme pastor and ruler of his whole fold, saying:

Feed my lambs, feed my sheep.

You can read more about this here:

In this part, Fr Coleridge tells us…

• How Christ founded the Church in truth, while concealing its form from profane scrutiny.

• That His few words to the Apostles contained full and lasting authority.

• Why the silence of Scripture points to the dignity, not vagueness, of the Church.

He shows us that the Church was not exposed to critics, but built upon the living word and Spirit.

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Last Words by the Lake

The Passage of Our Lord to the Father

Chapter XV
St. Matt. xxvii. 45-61; St. Mark xv. 33-47; St. Luke xxiii. 44-56; St. John xix. 28-42; Story of the Gospels, § 170, 171
Burns and Oates, London, 1892

1. How did Christ feed and teach the Apostles after his Resurrection?

2. How did the risen Christ reveal the Church's divine constitution?

3. Why did Christ ask Peter three times, 'Lovest thou Me?'

4. What does 'Feed My sheep' really mean for Peter’s role in the Church?

Few words in which Our Lord conveyed instruction

It must be remembered always that there is one great subject that we know to have been ever present to our Lord (not to speak of His disciples), on which we know it to have been His object to dwell frequently in these conversations, but on which we find a remarkable silence in these records, namely, the constitution of the Church, for that seems to be the subject spoken of as the Kingdom of God.

It is very natural to think this the common and most obvious subject on which they would receive instruction from Him at this time, and yet we must be struck by the few words mentioned on the subject. We can only explain this by considering that it was our Lord’s intention to found the Church as a living body, not to describe it as a part of His work which students might examine and critics estimate.

To say that the instructions on these great subjects were given to the Apostles as the rulers and guides of an ever-living body, is much the same thing as to say that they were not given to them in any form to which appeals against their paramount authority, in the way of criticism and cavil, could be made, especially when we consider that the Church was to be the organ of the Indwelling Spirit.

The growth of the Church was to be supernatural, and not to be ordered according to the laws of natural increase and growth. A certain amount of instruction was necessary for those who were to be its first instruments and administrators, but we must always keep in mind that it was to be the work of the Divine Paraclete through the Apostolic Body, and that our Lord Himself seems to have taken care that His own personal action was not to be made very conspicuous, though His presence was the life of all.

It is quite true that we have the statements, such as that which has been already quoted, about His conversations and instructions concerning the Kingdom of God. And we know that before and after His Resurrection He ordained the Apostles, or instituted the Sacraments, and, as we believe, founded the Hierarchy and the Supreme Pontificate, and left behind Him the rule of obedience and unity, by which the ever-living Church was to stand until the end of the world.

But we search in vain for full records of the constitution of the Church according to the pattern of human institutions, which are to pass away under the waves of time and the shocks of human commotions, and are not meant to stand through them all.

Teaching by actions

Our Lord’s words were so pregnant and full of life, that it is not difficult for us to believe that He may have said but a few words to St. Peter as the charter of the everlasting Priesthood and Pontificate, and a few more to the Apostles in which He may have left behind Him the power of forgiving or retaining sins of every kind on earth, by a sentence which is ratified in Heaven—a power which had never before been entrusted to men.

We may remember that the Apostles must have been fully instructed in all necessary details of practical knowledge which their great commission required, and that the Church which they founded was to be guided through the storms of ages by the never-failing presence of the Holy Ghost. If we take this view of the actions and words of our Lord, especially during this most interesting period of the forty days, it will not seem difficult to us to attach a great importance to the words and actions which we have reason to look upon as having, more perhaps than any others, a spiritual and almost sacramental meaning of their own.

The blessed St. John, especially in his later chapters, has prepared us for this method of expecting to find some such meanings in what he relates of our Lord, and it is fortunate for us that we have so comparatively large an amount of his Gospel which belongs to this short period. We may now pass on to the few incidents of which we shall have to speak before we pass on to the Ascension.

We have thus a fair certainty that the instructions of our Lord to His Apostles during this period were mainly occupied with the great subject which has been named, the Kingdom of God. It also may be considered most probable that whatever instruction our Lord then gave them was not such as could be written down, and cast in a long form, but rather in a few short pregnant sentences, even if it were afterwards to be expanded or commented upon at greater length.

And it must always be remembered that it was a time when the Apostles were made capable of far greater insight into the ways of God and the methods of His government than they had before possessed.

Intelligence of Scripture

It may not be quite certain whether it was early or late in the course of the forty days that they received the gift which one of the Evangelists speaks of by which their intelligence was opened that they might understand the Scriptures, which seems to have been performed in some solemn way, implying the importance of the occasion and the greatness of the gift conferred on them.

The passage in St. Luke in which special mention is made of the collation of this gift of enlightenment as to the meaning of the Sacred Scriptures, may seem to suggest that the boon was bestowed upon them with a particular object, in view of their being empowered to discern and set forth to others the hidden meanings of Holy Writ with reference to the Redemption and the Passion of our Lord.

But it seems hardly well to limit the interpretation and intelligence enjoyed by the Apostles to any one particular subject which belongs to the whole range of the great gifts with which our Lord has enriched the Church. We are all familiar with the words of à Kempis:

‘For in this I feel there are two things especially necessary for me, without which this miserable life would be to me insupportable, namely, food and light… Thou hast therefore given to me, weak as I am, Thy Sacred Body for the nourishment of my soul and body, and Thou hast set Thy Word as a light to my feet. Without these two I could not well live, for the Word of God is the light of my soul, and Thy Sacrament is the Bread of Life.’1

Deep meaning of our Lord’s actions

And it is a joy to devout Christians to think that the refection of their souls in the Sacred Scriptures, was a gift increased in its efficacy and delight by a special power of intelligence imparted after the Passion by our Lord.

Moreover, it is natural to add to this enumeration of the special opportunities laid open to the Apostles at this time that their more habitual intercourse with their risen Lord may be fairly considered as having enabled them ordinarily to enter more fully and deeply into the meaning of His actions, and to see in them, after the Resurrection, Divine principles and significances such as before had been hidden from them.

The actions of which we are about to speak, and have been now speaking, being instances of what we mean.

For instance, the part taken by St. Peter in this mysterious fishing in the Lake of Tiberias may have had meanings to the already illuminated minds of the Apostles which they would not have had a few weeks before.

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Last Words by the Lake

1. How did Christ feed and teach the Apostles after his Resurrection?

2. How did the risen Christ reveal the Church's divine constitution?

3. Why did Christ ask Peter three times, 'Lovest thou Me?'

4. What does 'Feed My sheep' really mean for Peter’s role in the Church?

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

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Editor’s Notes

Many believe that Christ made St Peter the Pope when he changed his name and talked about “the keys of the kingdom of Heaven.” In fact, the Church teaches that St Peter’s profession of faith gave rise to a promise of the primacy, which was ultimately bestowed following his threefold profession of charity:

We teach and declare that, according to the gospel evidence, a primacy of jurisdiction over the whole church of God was immediately and directly promised to the blessed apostle Peter and conferred on him by Christ the lord.

It was to Simon alone, to whom he had already said:

You shall be called Cephas, that the Lord, after his confession, You are the Christ, the son of the living God, spoke these words: Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona. For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of the underworld shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.

And it was to Peter alone that Jesus, after his resurrection, confided the jurisdiction of supreme pastor and ruler of his whole fold, saying:

Feed my lambs, feed my sheep.

You can read more about this here:

In this part, Fr Coleridge tells us…

• How Christ’s appearance by the lake renewed the Apostles’ faith and revealed their mission.

• That this manifestation gave hidden signs of the Church’s future and Christ’s care.

• Why the quiet joy of the forty days shows how deeply Christ transformed His disciples.

He shows us that the risen Lord came not only to console, but to prepare His Apostles to feed His flock.

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Last Words by the Lake

The Passage of Our Lord to the Father

Chapter XV
St. Matt. xxvii. 45-61; St. Mark xv. 33-47; St. Luke xxiii. 44-56; St. John xix. 28-42; Story of the Gospels, § 170, 171
Burns and Oates, London, 1892

1. How did Christ feed and teach the Apostles after his Resurrection?

2. How did the risen Christ reveal the Church’s divine constitution?

3. Why did Christ ask Peter three times, 'Lovest thou Me?'

4. What does 'Feed My sheep' really mean for Peter’s role in the Church?

Night fishing in the Lake

After relating to us the events of the first Easter Day at Jerusalem, the blessed Evangelist St. John proceeds to give us an account of a manifestation of Himself to His Apostles by our Blessed Lord, which, as we understand the words, was the third time on which after the Resurrection He allowed the whole body to see Him at once, or at least a considerable part of their number. St. John enumerates them carefully.

‘He showed Himself after this manner. There were together Simon Peter, and Thomas, who is called Didymus, and Nathanael [that is, Bartholomew], who was of Cana of Galilee, and the sons of Zebedee, and two others of His disciples.’

If we except St. Matthew, and the Apostles who belong to our Lord’s own kindred, St. Simon and St. Jude and St. James the Less, we have thus the whole company included. It is easy to suppose that some of them were not fishermen, or had some reason for absence elsewhere. And although there could have been no difficulty about their finding place for so large a body as the whole Apostolate, it is not said that on this occasion they were in the immediate neighbourhood of any of the numerous towns or villages by the Lake itself.

This manifestation is said by St. John to have been made by the Sea of Tiberias. There is therefore a complete change of place. It must have been after the end of the second week of the forty days which were to elapse after the Resurrection, that is, in the week which begins with what we call Dominica in Albis, up to which time the so-called incredulity of St. Thomas was allowed to last, our Lord then showing Himself to him.

We fix the time in this way, and perhaps it is natural to think that about a week may have been consumed in the journey of the small band of disciples from Jerusalem to Galilee, and their partial dispersion.

The miraculous draught

This time there was no fear of the Jews, and they were free to assemble as they liked, but the incidents of this period are not many.

‘Simon Peter saith to them, I go a fishing. They say to him, We also come with thee. And they went forth and entered into the ship, and that night they caught nothing. But when morning was come Jesus stood on the shore, yet the disciples knew not that it was Jesus.’

Their labour had lasted the whole night, and it must have reminded them of former unsuccessful fishings in the same waters, and probably the hearts of many there present were full of the blessing with which our Lord had formerly rewarded them.

‘Jesus therefore said to them, Children, have you any meat? They answered Him, No. He saith to them, Cast the net on the right side of the ship, and you shall find. They cast therefore, and now they were not able to draw it, for the multitude of fishes. The disciple therefore whom Jesus loved said to Simon Peter, It is the Lord.’

He was ready to recognize any hint of a miraculous intervention from our Lord, Whom they may all have been disposed to expect suddenly. The fact of the multitude of fishes seemed to them something of itself miraculous.

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Intelligence of the Apostles

Neither St. John nor St. Peter had any doubt as to the interpretation to be assigned to what had happened. Simon Peter, indeed, acted in a manner quite in keeping with his character.

‘Simon Peter, when he heard that it was the Lord, girt his coat about him (for he was naked), and cast himself into the sea. But the other disciples came in the ship (for they were not far from the land, but as it were two hundred cubits), dragging the net with fishes.

‘As soon then as they came to land they saw hot coals lying, and a fish laid thereon, and bread. Jesus saith to them, Bring hither of the fishes which you have now caught. Simon Peter went up and drew the net to land, full of great fishes, one hundred and fifty-three. And although there were so many the net was not broken.

‘Jesus saith to them, Come and dine. And none of them that were at meat durst ask Him, Who art Thou? knowing that it was the Lord. And Jesus cometh and taketh bread, and giveth them, and fish in like manner. This is now the third time that Jesus was manifested to His disciples, after He was risen from the dead.’

We are right in taking the words quite literally, and as implying that, whatever may have been the private manifestations made to this or that disciple or saint during this period, this was in truth the third, and the third time only, in which the whole body of the Apostles, or at least the greater part of them, had a share.

We need not understand this as contradicting the other Scriptural statement, that our Lord was for forty days manifesting Himself to them and showing Himself by many proofs, and speaking of the Kingdom of God. There seems to have been some difficulty, as may naturally be supposed, about their feeling perfectly at their ease with Him in the public manifestations which are recorded, but it may have been very different when they were able one by one to speak with Him alone, to lay open to Him all the secrets of their hearts, and to receive from Him the private personal instruction and exhortation which they so much needed, and the remembrance of which in after years must have been the chiefest treasure of each individual soul among them.

Their joy at this time

If we are to judge of the kind of intercourse which existed between them and our Lord only from the accounts of which we possess the records, such as that of which we have just heard the outline, we might be inclined to think that there would have been some disappointment left in their hearts when the precious interval of the forty days came to an end.

Whereas, on the contrary, we find them distinctly described as full of joy, and able to meet the time of separation which followed on the Ascension with perfect happiness and immense peace, without a trace of sorrow or regret for the visible absence of our Lord. They were able to set themselves without fear or repining to the great work which fell to their lot. That it was so, proves to us among other things that the period of the forty days was in a most wonderful way the foundation of a new life to them, little as we are told of the particulars and details.

It is well to keep in mind that the work which our Lord had to accomplish in the souls of the Apostles during this short time was marked by immense swiftness, and they must have a wonderful gift in cooperating with the illumination and the elevation of heart and mind which were now vouchsafed to them so largely.

It must be remembered always that there is one great subject that we know to have been ever present to our Lord (not to speak of His disciples), on which we know it to have been His object to dwell frequently in these conversations, but on which we find a remarkable silence in these records, namely, the constitution of the Church, for that seems to be the subject spoken of as the Kingdom of God.

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Last Words by the Lake

1. How did Christ feed and teach the Apostles after his Resurrection?

2. How did the risen Christ reveal the Church’s divine constitution?

3. Why did Christ ask Peter three times, 'Lovest thou Me?'

4. What does 'Feed My sheep' really mean for Peter’s role in the Church?

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

Subscribe now

Share The Father Coleridge Reader

Subscribe to The WM Review

Give a gift subscription

Follow our projects on Twitter, YouTube and Telegram:

• The WM Review

• Twitter (The WM Review)

• Twitter (The Father Coleridge Reader)

• YouTube

• Telegram

Editor’s Notes

In this Part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…

• How the risen Christ appeared to devout women, whose love led them first to the tomb.

• That their fidelity prepared the way for the Apostles' faith and the Church’s witness.

• Why their joy and fear were met by Christ himself with peace, confirmation, and command.

He shows us that those who serve humbly and persevere in sorrow are rewarded with first sight of glory.

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Easter Day

The Passage of Our Lord to the Father—Chapter XIV

St. Matt. xxviii. 2-15; St. Mark xvi. 2-13; St. Luke xxiv. 1-43; St. John xx. 1-29.
Story of the Gospels, § 173-177
Burns and Oates, London, 1892

• What happened when Christ rose from the dead

• What happened when the Holy Women visited Christ's tomb?

• Why Christ told Magdalene not to touch Him—and what it means for us

• Why Christ appeared to the Holy Women before the Apostles

• How Christ restored faith on the road to Emmaus

• What the risen Christ did when he met all the Apostles together

• Easter’s lasting gift: The power to forgive sin

• Why the Church honours St Thomas despite his doubt

Our Lord and the Holy Women

The gracious dealings of our Lord with the others of these holy women are next to be mentioned, the party of whom Mary Magdalene formed a member either in going to the sepulchre originally, or later, on the Sunday morning, is mentioned by St. Luke, as failing like her to find the Body of which they were in search.

Soon after they were accosted by two Angels, who asked them, ‘Why seek you the living with the dead? He is not here, but is risen.’ They then reminded them of what He had said while He was yet in Galilee.

‘And going in, they found not the Body of the Lord Jesus. And it came to pass, as they were astonished in their mind at this, two men stood by them, in shining apparel.

‘And as they were afraid, and bowed down their countenance towards the ground, they said unto them, Why seek you the living with the dead? He is not here, but is risen. Remember how He spoke unto you when He was yet in Galilee, saying, The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again. And they remembered His words. And going back from the sepulchre, they told all these things to the Eleven, and to all the rest.

‘And it was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary of James, and the other women that were with them, who told these things to the Apostles. And these words seemed to them as idle tales, and they did not believe them.’

The party mentioned by St Mark

Later on we find a further appearance recorded by St. Mark, who says that it was very early, but adds that the sun had now risen. The names of these holy women are not given by the Evangelist, but they seem to have belonged to a party different from the former.

One remarkable thing about this party is that the words addressed to them by the Angel, who appears to them, are almost like a continuation of the appearance of the Angel of the earthquake mentioned by St. Matthew, which must have been much earlier in the day than the other apparitions already mentioned. But the words of this Angel are very similar to those of the former.

‘And the Angel answering, said to the women, Fear not you, for I know that you seek Jesus Who was crucified. He is not here, for He is risen, as He said. Come and see the place where the Lord was laid. And going quickly, tell ye His disciples that He is risen, and behold He will go before you into Galilee, there you shall see Him. Lo, I have foretold it to you.

‘And they went out quickly from the sepulchre with fear and great joy, running to tell His disciples. And behold Jesus met them, saying, All hail. But they came up and took hold of His feet, and adored Him. Then Jesus said to them, Fear not! Go, tell My brethren that they go into Galilee, there they shall see Me.’

The only difference is that the name of St. Peter is not given where the message is sent to the Apostles. The difficulty may be only apparent, and it would probably soon disappear if we were more perfectly acquainted with the circumstances as they occurred. We are also at some loss where exactly to place the appearance of our Lord Himself, the first as it seems to the disciples after that to Magdalene, of which we have an account in St. Matthew, which follows in his text directly after the former, and seems to refer to the same holy women to whom the words of the Angel were addressed.

As the women went quickly out of the sepulchre, with fear and great joy, running to tell His disciples…

‘Behold Jesus met them, saying, All hail. But they took hold of His feet, and adored Him. And Jesus said to them, Fear not! Go tell My brethren that they go into Galilee, there they shall see Me. Who when they were departed, behold some of the guards came into the city, and told the Chief Priests all things that had been done.

‘And they being assembled together with the ancients, taking counsel, gave a great sum of money to the soldiers, saying, Say you, His disciples came by night, and stole Him away when we were asleep. And if the Governor shall hear of this, we will persuade him and secure you. So they taking the money did as they were taught, and this word was spread abroad among the Jews even unto this day.’

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The office of the women

These manifestations exhaust the accounts which we possess of which the recipients were the holy women. After this, these women are withdrawn from the scene. It seems natural to think that their fervour and readiness for faith made them the fittest persons to receive these Divine favours, and that they had certainly earned them by their devotion to our Lord in His burial. They had the peculiar and most blessed office of preparing the Apostles, the appointed and chosen witnesses of the great truth, for the gradual though swift manifestation of the Resurrection itself, which St. John gathered after the words of Magdalene and the sight of the empty sepulchre, and others perhaps not long after.

It may be supposed also that the women could be of service where the Apostles could not act with safety. They were led to visit the sepulchre, not by their faith in the Resurrection, which they did not yet think of, but by their devotion to our Lord, Whom they hoped to be allowed to embalm. St. Peter was prepared for his faith by his visit to the sepulchre, as well as St. John. But no one seems to conceive the full faith exactly at the same time with another, nor do those who were the earliest to arrive at the full conviction guided to communicate it, in the present stage of its growth, to any one else, until perhaps it became the property of the Church, as when the Apostles could say, as it were officially:

‘The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared to Simon.’

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Easter Day

• What happened when Christ rose from the dead

• What happened when the Holy Women visited Christ's tomb?

• Why Christ told Magdalene not to touch Him—and what it means for us

• Why Christ appeared to the Holy Women before the Apostles

• How Christ restored faith on the road to Emmaus

• What the risen Christ did when he met all the Apostles together

• Easter’s lasting gift: Confession and the power of absolution

• Why the Church honours St Thomas despite his doubt

Read Next:

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

Subscribe now

Share The Father Coleridge Reader

Subscribe to The WM Review

Give a gift subscription

Follow our projects on Twitter, YouTube and Telegram:

• The WM Review

• Twitter (The WM Review)

• YouTube

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Editor’s Notes

In this Part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…

• How Christ's words to Magdalene reveal the shift from earthly to glorified relations

• That reverence must replace familiarity as the saints are drawn into the life of heaven

• Why even Magdalene's love had to be purified of natural clinging to His flesh.

He shows us that the risen Christ gently weans His saints from sense to sacrament.

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Easter Day

The Passage of Our Lord to the Father—Chapter XIV

St. Matt. xxviii. 2-15; St. Mark xvi. 2-13; St. Luke xxiv. 1-43; St. John xx. 1-29.
Story of the Gospels, § 173-177
Burns and Oates, London, 1892

• What happened when Christ rose from the dead

• What happened when the Holy Women visited Christ's tomb?

• Why Christ told Magdalene not to touch Him—and what it means for us

• Why Christ appeared to the Holy Women before the Apostles

• How Christ restored faith on the road to Emmaus

• What the risen Christ did when he met all the Apostles together

• Easter’s lasting gift: The power to forgive sin

• Why the Church honours St Thomas despite his doubt

‘Do not touch Me’

A difficulty has been found in the words used by our Lord to the blessed Magdalene, for He bids her not to touch Him, and gives as the reason that He is not as yet risen to His Father. This is contrasted with His dealings with the other holy women in another manifestation, whom He allowed to embrace His feet. But our Lord’s words were no doubt always absolutely true, and governed by an infinite wisdom which we may not be able to fathom, and it may be that the difficulty lies in our weakness in understanding the laws and conditions which belong to the spiritual state.

Our Lord was now in the state in which we all hope to be after the resurrection of our bodies and our entrance into eternal life. We do not know how far the conditions of His glorious existence may have been suspended for the sake of those to whom He was now, for a short time, manifesting Himself on earth before His Ascension. To Magdalene there was evidently no change of identity. But it hardly follows that there was no change, absolutely speaking. Still less that there was no more change to come.

The present stage, so to speak, was to last but a few weeks, and then He was to be permanently in the possession and use of His glorified existence. The present, then, was no time for the resumption of all those condescensions and loving familiarities which had belonged to the former life of our Lord as Man among those whom He loved and honoured upon earth. All these relations may have been meant to pass away and be naturally superseded by others more becoming the glorious state of eternity.

Passage from St. Paul

St. Paul has some wonderful words, in his Second Epistle to the Corinthians, where he says:

‘If we have known Christ after the flesh, but now we know Him so no longer. If then any be in Christ, a new creature, the old things are passed away, behold all things are made new.’1

It may have been our Lord’s intention to break off quietly, on this the first occasion on which the opportunity came—for this was His first manifestation to one of His most beloved saints after His Resurrection—the tender and more human ways in which He had been wont to show His regard to the saints, and to allow them to express their devotion to Him, which may perhaps have been sometimes less penetrated by the solemn reverence and dignity of the heavenly converse, to which Magdalene and the others were to be raised in the state which was to succeed.

After the Ascension, we find that this kind of comparative reserve on the part of our risen Saviour agreed very well with that to which it was the introduction in these forty days, which were to be succeeded by the new life to be led by the saints who remained on earth after the Ascension, Then, without a sign of repining, they resigned the visible intercourse which they enjoyed with Him after the Resurrection for the comparatively hard existence which they must have led during the remainder of their earthly exile, when, as our Lord told them, they might be inclined to long for His bodily presence, and yet were abundantly compensated by the new delights of His Sacramental Presence, and the spiritual life with Him in the Church.

Relics of St. Mary Magdalene

It is worthy of remark that where our Lord in His words to St. Mary Magdalene, says, ‘Touch Me not,’ He uses the Greek word, which seems more properly to include the notion of feeling as well as that of touching, as if it had been the following out of a natural human desire on her part to satisfy herself to the full as to the reality of His flesh. This seems to suggest a further reason for the prohibition conveyed in the words. The devout and learned commentator, Father Cornelius à Lapide, tells us that an old author of the fifteenth century mentions that the skull of St. Mary Magdalene was, and we believe is still, shown where her relics are kept, and that the bone is bare, except on the place on which our Lord is believed to have left the marks of His fingers, touching her forehead, as the old tradition tells us.

A tradition of this kind is not likely to have been mentioned in the Gospel of St. John, but the omission is no proof of its fictitious character. Traditions of this kind, however well founded, are just the kind of records which St. John would keep in the background, as involving a number of statements which the world, to whom the sacred writings were to be committed, would invariably have received with scorn and derision. They remind us of the parting admonition of the Apostle, that if all the things which our Lord did had been written, the world itself would not have ‘contained’ the things which would have been written.

The gracious dealings of our Lord with the others of these holy women are next to be mentioned, the party of whom Mary Magdalene formed a member either in going to the sepulchre originally, or later, on the Sunday morning, is mentioned by St. Luke, as failing like her to find the Body of which they were in search.

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Note to Chapter XIV

It may illustrate the remarks made above on the saying of our Lord to St. Mary Magdalene—the famous Noli me tangere if we refer to two passages in the Epistles De Virginitate, appearing to be from the authorship of St. Clement of Rome, which were translated from the Syriac by the late very learned Belgian author Beelen, and published in Latin at Louvain in 1856. The author, at the beginning, tells those to whom he writes that he thinks well to tell them the ways of living observed by himself and those of the same calling in the parts from which he writes, that the others may imitate, if they think well.

‘They do not dwell with virgins, and have nothing in common with them, neither eating nor drinking with them, and not sleeping in the place where they sleep. Women do not wash their feet, nor anoint them, and they do not sleep in a place where an unmarried girl, or one consecrated to God, sleeps.’

Later on he gives more positive instructions.

‘But if it seems to be required that we pray with them, and give them something that may help them in the way of exhortation and edification, we call together the brethren, the holy Sisters and virgins who are there, and we invite them with all modesty and decency to share in the delightful banquet of the truth. Then those of us who are able to speak, give a sermon or exhortation in the words which God gives us.

‘After this we pray and give to one another the kiss of salutation, the men to the men. The women and virgins are bound to fold their hands in their raiment, and we also with modesty and reserve, and raising our eyes to heaven, and with all decency wrapping up our right hands in our raiment, then the women are allowed to approach us and give the kiss of peace to our right hand so folded up.’

The expression here used for the sacred virgins is said to be an equivalent of the words ‘daughter of the covenant,’ that is, a person vowed to God.

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Easter Day

• What happened when Christ rose from the dead

• What happened when the Holy Women visited Christ's tomb?

• Why Christ told Magdalene not to touch Him—and what it means for us

• Why Christ appeared to the Holy Women before the Apostles

• How Christ restored faith on the road to Emmaus

• What the risen Christ did when he met all the Apostles together

• Easter’s lasting gift: Confession and the power of absolution

• Why the Church honours St Thomas despite his doubt

Read Next:

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

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Editor’s Notes

In this Part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…

• How the women went to anoint the body of the Lord.

• That divine Providence rewarded St Mary Magdalene’s love with a revelation the Apostles had not yet received.

• Why her tears and constancy drew Christ to manifest himself before even ascending.

He shows us that a heart burning with love will be consoled before all others by the Lord's presence.

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Easter Day

The Passage of Our Lord to the Father—Chapter XIV

St. Matt. xxviii. 2-15; St. Mark xvi. 2-13; St. Luke xxiv. 1-43; St. John xx. 1-29.
Story of the Gospels, § 173-177
Burns and Oates, London, 1892

1. What happened when Christ rose from the dead

2. What happened when the Holy Women visited Christ's tomb?

3. Why Christ told Magdalene not to touch Him—and what it means for us

4. Why Christ appeared to the Holy Women before the Apostles

5. How Christ restored faith on the road to Emmaus

6. What the risen Christ did when he met all the Apostles together

7. Easter’s lasting gift: The power to forgive sin

8. Why the Church honours St Thomas despite his doubt

Easter in the Gospel

We must proceed without more delay to the comparatively short and simple accounts which are furnished to us by the Evangelists, who, especially the two earlier, seem to take the fact of our Lord’s triumph over death and restoration to life almost for granted, as if they lived among a community in which the details of what they wrote were far too well known to their companions to be related at length and repeatedly. St. Matthew’s account of the Resurrection is concise and abrupt in the highest degree, nor is that of St. Mark much less so. The account expands under the hand of St. Luke, and St. John adds some valuable details, not however of the great mystery itself.

We shall take these remains and shreds of information in their order, as far as we can ascertain it. We have spoken of the abruptness of St. Matthew. The last chapter of his Gospel begins with the visit of the two Maries, Mary Magdalene and the mother of James and Joseph, to the sepulchre, on the Friday evening.

But the first Evangelist seems too full of his subject to pause, and he passes on at once to the account of the earthquake on the Sunday morning, when the day had hardly begun, and adds some words of the Angel who then rolled away the stone from the sepulchre and sat upon it. There is in this account a continuity of narrative, as if the women had been present at the earthquake, and in this consists the abruptness of which we speak.

The holy women

We venture to think that the words of this Angel to the holy women are meant to refer to a later time of the morning, as we shall explain. St. Matthew tells us:

‘And behold there was a great earthquake. For an Angel of the Lord descended from Heaven, and coming rolled back the stone and sat upon it. And his countenance was as lightning, and his raiment as snow. And for fear of him, the guards were struck with terror, and became as dead men.’

Here we may make a break in the short narrative, as it seems, for the words of this Angel to the holy women appear to belong to a later hour of the early morning, the special purpose of the presence of the Angel, sitting upon the stone which had been rolled away, being to terrify the guards and secure free access for the holy women.

It must remain uncertain—so fragmentary are the records—whether the Angel remained very long on the stone before the sepulchre before the latter was visited by any of the followers of our Lord. The Evangelists tell us of the visit of Magdalene, to whom first of all our Lord appeared, and she is mentioned by St. John as going alone, and also by St. Luke as going in company with others, intending as soon as possible to accomplish their work of the embalmment, which had been left unfinished, or hardly begun, on the Friday.

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Magdalene

On the whole, as the blessed Magdalene seems to be distinguished in the history of the Resurrection from the other holy women, as having a kind of right of her own to a special mention in that history, we think it safest to conclude that her first-mentioned visit to the sepulchre was alone. St. John tells us it was still dark, and therefore before the sun had risen. She may of course have been, in her eagerness, just a little in advance of her companions.

As she approached she perceived that the stone was rolled away. The Angel was not seen by her, and she ran away instantly to tell the Apostles. Peter and John were close at hand, having passed the night, probably, close to the little abode where our Lady and Magdalene herself were lodged, not far from the sepulchre. She saith to them:

‘They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid Him.’

On this the two Apostles ran off to the sepulchre, and St. John, the youngest and strongest of the two, reached the sepulchre first. Everything seems to have passed very swiftly—the words of Magdalene, and the actions of the Apostles. St. John tells us that he stayed outside till St. Peter came up, who saw the linen cloths lying in which the Head had been wrapped, and the napkin which had been about His Head, not with the linen cloths, but apart in a place of its own. St. John went in after St. Peter, and saw the linen cloths and the napkin. St. John tells us of himself, that he saw and believed,’ that is, as we must understand the words, he rose to the full height of faith in the Resurrection of our Lord. He adds with regard to the whole body of the Apostles:

‘For as yet,’ up to that time, ‘they knew not the Scripture, that He must rise from the dead.’ St. Luke tells us, with regard to St. Peter, that after seeing the linen cloths, he ‘went away wondering in himself at that which had come to pass.’

‘The disciples,’ says St. John, ‘departed again to their home.’

We may as well place here the simple narrative of St. John, giving the account of the manifestation to the blessed Magdalene.

‘And on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene cometh early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and she saw the stone taken away from the sepulchre. She ran, therefore, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and saith to them, They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid Him!

‘Peter therefore went out, and that other disciple, and they came to the sepulchre. And they both ran together, and that other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre. And when he stooped down, he saw the linen cloths lying, but yet he went not in. Then cometh Simon Peter, following him, and went into the sepulchre, and saw the linen cloths lying, and the napkin that had been about His Head, not lying with the linen cloths, but apart, wrapt up into one place.

‘Then that other disciple also went in, who came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and believed. For as yet they knew not the Scripture, that He must rise again from the dead. The disciples therefore departed again to their home.

‘But Mary stood at the sepulchre without, weeping. Now as she was weeping she stooped down and looked into the sepulchre. And she saw two Angels in white sitting, one at the head, and one at the feet, where the Body of Jesus had been laid. They say to her, Woman, why weepest thou? She saith to them, Because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.

‘When she had thus said, she turned herself back and saw Jesus standing, and she knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith to her, Woman, why weepest thou? Whom seekest thou? She, thinking that it was the gardener, saith to Him, Sir, if Thou hast taken Him hence, tell me where Thou hast laid Him, and I will take Him away. Jesus saith to her, Mary! She turning saith to Him, Rabboni! (which is to say, Master).

‘Jesus saith to her, Do not touch Me, for I am not yet ascended to My Father. But go to My brethren, and say to them, I ascend to My Father and to your Father, to My God and your God. Mary Magdalene cometh, and telleth the disciples, I have seen the Lord, and these things He said to me.’

But what did this strange instruction mean? This is the subject of the next part.

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Easter Day

1. What happened when Christ rose from the dead

2. What happened when the Holy Women visited Christ’s tomb?

3. Why Christ told Magdalene not to touch Him—and what it means for us

4. Why Christ appeared to the Holy Women before the Apostles

5. How Christ restored faith on the road to Emmaus

6. What the risen Christ did when he met all the Apostles together

7. Easter’s lasting gift: The power to forgive sin

8. Why the Church honours St Thomas despite his doubt

Read Next:

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

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Editor’s Notes

Fr Coleridge’s account of the Cruxifixion covers two long chapters, and so it is necessary to start it before Good Friday, and to continue it after Easter Sunday.

In this part, he considers the way in which Christ was nailed to the Cross – along with the first of the “Seven Words from the Cross”, namely his prayer for the forgiveness of those who were acting out of ignorance.

For more context, see Part I. For more on Good Friday itself, see here:

As a further aid for meditation, , and last year produced a recording of Fr Coleridge’s harmonisation of the Passion narratives:

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Calvary

The Passage of Our Lord to the Father

Chapter XII
St. Matt. xxvii. 35–44; St. Mark xv. 24–32; St. Luke xxiii. 34–43; St. John xix. 13–27; Story of the Gospels, § 170.
Burns and Oates, London, 1892

1. INRI: Pilate’s Revenge

2. How Jesus was nailed to the Cross

Manner of the Crucifixion

We may proceed now to the actual incidents of the Crucifixion.

The first thing that the executioners would do after the proffer of the cup of wine mingled with myrrh or gall, would be the stripping off of the garments of our Lord, which became their property, as the reward of the trouble which they had to take in the process of nailing Him naked to the Cross.

There may have been some countries in the Old World where—as in Japan in more recent times—the criminals were executed without being unclothed, but it does not seem to have been the Roman custom to spare them this humiliation of being previously stripped. It might seem a light thing in the eyes of common spectators, whether this ignominy were inflicted or not. But to our Lord, the most modest of men, the Prince of purity and decency, this fresh outrage must have been very sensible, and it must not be omitted in our reckoning of all that He suffered for us.

The numberless and most various sins against modesty for which He had to suffer for us, would doubtless present themselves to His Heart as He made this final sacrifice to the justice of His adorable Father, in the presence too of His Blessed Mother, who felt most poignantly all that it was costing Him. It is to be added also that there would be, besides the shame of the outrage on His modesty, a renewal of the pain of the many wounds with which His Body was now covered, to which His garments must in many places have become glued, so as to pain Him, as if the wounds had been torn open afresh.

It seems also that the crown of sharp thorns had not been taken off His Head at any stage of His sufferings. There must have been much fear of its now becoming entangled with the clothes as they were drawn over the Sacred Head. This would have led to fresh wounds from the thorns of which it was woven, and in many cases to the loss of fresh blood. Indeed we cannot give ourselves any full account of the sufferings now endured by our Saviour, though we can see that they must have been very great indeed.

Not described in the Gospels

But great as they may have been, there was much more and much worse still to come. The Evangelists do not tell us of the details of the actual Crucifixion, which may have been carried out in a variety of ways.

For our Lord may have been thrown on the ground with the Cross below His naked Body, and then fastened to it by the driving into the tenderest parts of His hands and feet of the large nails which were required in order to support its weight. In that case, the Cross must have been afterwards fixed in some cavity which had been made for it, and He must have had to suffer the pain which would have been caused by the jolting and jarring of the heavy wood as it was settled into its position, sometimes with a violent shock which would make itself felt through the whole of the Victim’s Body.

Another way in which the Crucifixion may have been performed would have been the fixing of the Cross in the ground at the outset, and the nailing of the hands and feet thereto, by the standing of our Lord close to it, being first mounted on a stool that raised Him a little above the ground, while the nails were driven in, the stool being removed when the hands and feet had been fixed in the places prepared for them. In this case, besides the pain caused by the driving in of the nails into the flesh, there would come a sudden shock when the weight of the Body of our Saviour was first left to bear entirely on the nails, from which it was to hang until life was extinct.

In whatever way we may suppose the execution of the sentence to have been carried out (and it would be contrary to our purpose to discuss the various opinions which are to be found in the authorities on the subject), it is clear that in any case the sufferings must have been intense and excessive. That is probably one reason why on this part of the Passion, as on the scourging also, the four Evangelists have been guided to be so brief and reticent—content to leave what they are relating to the silent feelings of those for whom they were writing.

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The soldiers and their work

We have no reason for being sure that the Roman executioners in our Lord’s case were men more than usually cruel and brutal. They were probably accustomed to their task, and neither better nor worse than other men might have been.

There are some statements made about the scourgers, who are supposed to have been directed, either by Pilate or the priests, to do their work with unusual cruelty—the priests out of hatred to our Lord, the Governor because he wished Him to be made an object of great pity to the people. But there is little of the kind said about the soldiers who crucified Him. They may be supposed to have done what they had to do to our Lord, as to any other whom they had to treat in the same way.

But, on the other hand, we have no reason for supposing that they spared Him a single pang or torment from any special tenderness of heart, or because—at this stage at all events—they were much moved by what they witnessed of His adorable patience.

At the end of the three hours it may have been different. By that time a great change may have come over them—the silence, the darkness, the great prodigies, the prayers made by our Lord and the saints who stood at the foot of the Cross, and the example of His great patience, must have softened many hearts. And the only persons who have a hard word to say of Him are the priests, who in their inveterate malice, speaking in their last recorded words to Pilate, tell him how ‘that seducer’ had said that after three days He would rise again.

The first Word on the Cross – the excuse of ignorance

It does not seem inconsistent with the language of St. Luke, who is the only Evangelist who records the first Word spoken on the Cross by our Saviour, that He should have meant to imply that the Word was said at the very time that the executioners were engaged in the act of crucifixion.

For so the narrative runs—‘They crucified Him there and the robbers, one on the right hand and the other on the left. And Jesus said’—or He was saying, or kept saying—‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’

This, as has been said, is the first Word uttered by our Lord on the Cross, and it seems as if the very act of crucifixion, which was the beginning of the suffering which was intended to cause His death, brought to His Heart and lips this prayer, which He repeated more than once while the nails were being driven home.

Instead of any complaint, instead of any expression of pain, He thought of the poor soldiers who were the instruments of the wicked men who had brought about His condemnation, and by that injustice led to the abuse of the lawful power which God had entrusted to human society of applying the punishment of death, in certain cases, for the vindication of the law.

The executioners were first in the list of those for whom He prayed, for they were the most ignorant of all. But the prayer of our Lord included also the poor miserable judge who had acted, under a strong compulsion, against his own sense of right. It included the people misled by their natural guides and teachers, some even of the latter, who had taken an active part against our Lord in their blindness and timidity under the strong human considerations and influence brought to bear on them.

Only God can tell how many it did not include, for whom the excuse alleged by our Lord in this prayer could not be pleaded and allowed, in the infinite mercy of God. We find the compassionate mercifulness of our Lord soon making itself felt in the numbers of souls who were most deeply affected by the spectacle on Calvary, which made so many return from that holy mountain beating their breasts with sorrow, which wrought on the centurion and his soldiers, and which, after the Resurrection and the Day of Pentecost, increased the number of the faithful in a marvellous manner in so short a time.

This prayer of our Lord was the beginning of all the conversions, and His charity as embodied in it became ever afterwards the pattern for all who had to suffer death or persecution for the sake of His name, as we find it echoed in the last words of the first martyr, St. Stephen, and hundreds of others in all generations of the Church. Many great triumphs of grace won by prayer which is founded on this intercession of our Lord for His executioners are recorded in well-known histories, but how many have there been of which no record has come down to us, the charity embodied in the petition having been unknown to those who profited by it, and who will only know in the next world who have been their greatest benefactors in this!

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Calvary

1. INRI: Pilate’s Revenge

2. How Jesus was nailed to the Cross

Read Next:

Here’s why you should subscribe to The Father Coleridge Reader and share with others:

• Fr Coleridge provides solid explanations of the entirety of the Gospel

• His work is full of doctrine and piety, and is highly credible

• He gives a clear trajectory of the life of Christ, its drama and all its stages—increasing our appreciation and admiration for the God-Man.

If more Catholics knew about works like Coleridge’s, then other works based on sentimentality and dubious private revelations would be much less attractive.

But sourcing and curating the texts, cleaning up scans, and editing them for online reading is a labour of love, and takes a lot of time.

Will you lend us a hand and hit subscribe?

Subscribe now

Share The Father Coleridge Reader

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Editor’s Notes

Fr Coleridge’s account of the Cruxifixion covers two long chapters, and so it is necessary to start it before Good Friday, and to continue it after Easter Sunday.

There is no problem here, because there is no time in which it is unfitting to recall the Passion of Christ. Even in Eastertide, the Church traditionally commemorated the Cross in the Divine Office. The Cross is evergreen – and each season derives its meaning from the Cross, and sheds its own light upon it. In Eastertide, this commemoration reminds us that the Passion was not a defeat or something to be forgotten, but the glorious triumph of Christ.

In this first part, he considers the setting – and Pilate’s humiliation of the High Priest and authorities that sought Christ’s death.

For more on Maundy Thursday itself, see here:

As a further aid for meditation, , and last year produced a recording of Fr Coleridge’s harmonisation of the Passion narratives:

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Calvary

The Passage of Our Lord to the Father

Chapter XII
St. Matt. xxvii. 35–44; St. Mark xv. 24–32; St. Luke xxiii. 34–43; St. John xix. 13–27; Story of the Gospels, § 170.
Burns and Oates, London, 1892

1. INRI: Pilate’s Revenge

Pilgrims finding what they do not expect

We have already tried to trace the footsteps of our Lord from the Prætorium of Pilate, along the Sacred Way of the Cross, up to the summit of the hill of Calvary. He was already at no great distance from the remaining spots, rendered venerable to us by their connection with the last incidents of His Life and Death and Burial—the place, where for the last time He was stripped of His garments, where He was nailed to or raised on the Cross, where He breathed His last, where His Body was taken down from the Cross on which it had hung, and where finally it was placed in the new tomb, hewn for himself in the rock by St. Joseph of Arimathea.

A careful examination of the Sacred Texts will satisfy any one who makes it, that they prepare us to find all these spots very close one to another, and the surprise which we naturally feel at the fact is only a result of a want of such an examination. The modern pilgrim whose chief object is the feeding of his devotion, will do well to be prepared to find many things as he had not expected. Such is inevitably the case when we visit, for the first time, spots of which we have read and thought very much, and about which our imagination has often drawn pictures of its own. The greatest wonder of all would be if we found nothing to perplex us at first sight.

Another thing to be noted here, is the comparative fewness of the details, and indeed of the words themselves, in which the Evangelists have spoken of the incidents with which the present chapter has to deal. Brevity, indeed, is their characteristic all through their words; but we expect, when we approach the story of the last hours of our Saviour, that we shall find them less succinct and more inclined to expand their narratives. If it had been so, they would hardly be Evangelists at all, and to those who can read them most devoutly, they are in fact the most eloquent of historians, with a Divine eloquence which becomes those who have to speak of the greatest acts of God since the creation of the universe.

Arrival at Calvary

Our Blessed Lord arrived at Calvary, as far as we can speak with an approximation to accuracy, some time before noon. St. Mark tells us that it was the third hour, by which we understand him to mean, as has been said, that it was not yet the time when the space of three hours, beginning from nine in the morning, was entirely finished. The delivery of our Lord by the priests to Pilate had been about six o’clock, and three hours may very well have been occupied by the events of the interval since that time, which had involved, moreover, not a few passages from place to place, which could hardly have been very rapid, as well as the procession from the Prætorium to Calvary.

The little hill-top was not a frequented place, but if it was the common place for the execution of criminals, it would ordinarily be shunned and avoided. On this morning, however, it would naturally have become thronged by people, even before the little procession which escorted our Saviour to His Death had appeared outside the gate.

The crowd would naturally go on increasing, and by the time that the procession itself reached the spot, the throng would be immense. Our Lord was met on the place of execution by the two malefactors, who were to be crucified with Him. The fact can hardly have been accidental, especially as we find St. Mark, the reporter of St. Peter’s reminiscences, who but very seldom goes out of his way to bring in the fulfilment of prophecy, mentioning carefully that our Lord’s crucifixion between the thieves was such a fulfilment, Isaias having predicted of Him that ‘with the wicked He was reputed.’

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The title on the Cross

We have also already mentioned the title of the Cross, written by Pilate in three languages, that all might be made aware that our Lord was officially declared the King of the Jews.

It may have been said to have been written before the procession to Calvary set forth. It is also possible that it was not put before the eyes of the public till the time for the Crucifixion came. Then it appears the priests made their objection to it, and may have thought that it was a ruse of Pilate, intended to humiliate them, and as a triumph of his own over their national pride, which certainly ought to have been affronted by the title he had written.

The right time for attaching the title may have been when it was to be fixed on the Cross after our Lord had been raised upon it, but it does not appear that Pilate himself was present at the Crucifixion. The title may have been written, as has been said, some time before it was thus publicly manifested, and the remonstrances of the Chief Priests made when they discovered the apparent trick which had been played upon them.

To the same preliminary stage of the actual execution would belong also the cup mixed of wine and gall or myrrh, which our Blessed Lord having tasted, would not drink. It is thought that this cup was ordinarily presented to persons who were to be executed, and that it might be expected to have a two-fold effect, first in strengthening them under the pain they were to suffer, and then in numbing the senses so as to make the feeling of pain less.

Our Lord may have been willing to help His natural forces somewhat by the strength supplied by the wine mingled with the bitter ingredients mentioned, but not to any great extent, that He might suffer as much as possible, but He would not wish for any deadening or drowning effect in Himself, as He would not care for any drugging, as it might seem.

All these little things were received by Him with gratitude, as far as they came from sympathy and compassion, but He can hardly be thought of as willing to have His sense of suffering clouded.

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Calvary

1. INRI: Pilate’s Revenge

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