66

thus it may easily happen that, although religious doctrine may and must be diffused and maintained by men acting in concert, yet they who are laboring to advance the truth, to reform and expand the stock of divine knowledge, may be in continual antagonism and collision with those who are intent only on keeping it from going back. My Father's vocation, if he had any in this province, was to defend the Holy Faith by developing it, and showing its accordance and identity with ideas of reason; he has described himself as one who "feels the want, the necessity of religious support; who can not afford to lose any the smallest buttress; who not only loves Truth even for itself, and when it reveals itself aloof from all interest, but who loves it with an indescribable awe"-which causes him to—“ creep toward the light, even though it draw him away from the more nourishing warmth." Yea, I should do so," he adds, even if the light had made its way through a rent in the wall of the Temple."* But the gravest allegation contained in the passage I have quoted, is, that Mr. Coleridge was once engaged in “ a course of heretical and schismatical teaching:"- —a statement which seems to imply, that he had been at one time pledged to teach a par ticular set of doctrines, as a man is pledged upon undertaking the charge of a spiritual congregation, who expect that he shall confine himself within certain lines in his teaching, and will listen to him no longer than he keeps faith with them on that point. In such a case as this, supposing the doctrines false, to be engaged in a course of teaching them, must tend to confirm the man's mind in alienation from truth; because it weds him to the false doctrines, not by inward love and preference only, but by an outward and formal union. That Mr. Coleridge was never bound to Heresy and Schism by any such bonds as these might be gathered from the present work alone, and would be fully manifest to any one who considered the matter with care. Soon after leaving Cambridge he delivered lectures on revealed religion, in which he set forth such views as he entertained at the time: after this he preached occasionally at Bath, at Taunton, and as an "hireless volunteer" in most of the great towns which he passed through on a tour from Bristol to Sheffield. Once indeed he entertained thoughts of taking upon him the charge of an

* It is best to peruse a fuller exposition of this sentiment in the passage itself, which occurs in the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. Letter I. V

Unitarian congregation; but after preaching one sermon, in which, from the account of an ear-witness, there seems to have been more of poetry and the general principles of religion than of vulgar heresy and schism, he abandoned the prospect that had been held out to him. Not that the offer, by which he was suddenly called away from it, tended to bias his opinions in an opposite direction; it left them free as air, operating solely to detach him from all outward connection with religious bodies, and exempt him from the least temptation to place himself in binding relations with them, or any sort of dependence upon them. To this indeed it is unlikely he would ever have submitted; for, as he mentioned to an acquaintance at the time, had he preached a second sermon at Shrewsbury, it would have been such an one as must "effectually have disqualified him for the object in view;" so little was he disposed to keep the bounds of doctrine marked out by any sect, or to let the body of his opinions live and grow under external form and pressure. It is extravagant to suppose that my Father was impaired for life in the power of religious discernment by a course of teaching, which taught himself to perceive the deficiencies and errors of the creed in which he had sought refuge; that he was perverted by the very process which his mind went through in order to arrive at a more explicit knowledge of the truth. That which to the passive and inert may be a tainting experience, to minds like his, full of activity and resistency, is but a strengthening experiment: he doubted and denied in order to believe earnestly and intelligently. His Unitarianism was purely negative; not a satisfaction in the positive formal divinity of the Unitarians, but what remained with him to the last, a revulsion from certain explanations of the Atonement commonly received as orthodox, together with that insight which he believed himself afterwards to have attained into the whole scheme of Redemption, so far as it can be seen into by man, and its deep and perfect harmony with the structure of the human mind as it it is revealed to the eye of Philosophy.*

Against those, on the one hand, who describe him as "intellectually bold but educationally timid," those on the other who

* See his own remarks on this subject in the middle of the tenth chapter of the Biographia.

+ Quoted from a volume of poetical selections and criticisms by Leigh Hunt, entitled "Imagination and Fancy." Having referred to this agree

suppose him to have been indebted to his early education for ali that is consonant with the true faith and fear of the Lord in his religious creed, and lay to the account of after circumstances all that they disapprove in it, I must firmly maintain, that what they are so anxious, from the way in which their own spirit has been moulded, to cast upon outward things in the formation of his opinions, was, in the main, the result and product of his own intellect and will. When the years of childhood were past, he left behind him the Eden, as some consider it, of implicit faith: the world of belief was all before him where to choose, and for a time he sojourned with the Unitarians, beholding in them only the firm and honest rejectors of a creed, which, as yet, he could not receive explicitly. When he had once entered their ranks no circumstances existed to prevent him from remaining a Psilanthropist and becoming more and more confirmed in opposition to the sum of tenets and opinions commonly called Catholic; many men so situated, even if they had been nurtured as he was in the bosom of the Church, would either have abode finally within those precincts or left them only to proceed in an opposite direction to that which he took, and combined German metaphysics with an atheistic Pantheism, instead of bringing them to the service of revealed religion. On the other hand, when he had quitted the Unitarians, what outward influence was there to prevent him from adopting High Church doctrine, as it is taught either by Anglican or by Romish divines? Some men have passed from a deeper and earlier training in "heresy and schism" than his to that Church theory which exhibits an earthly and visible system and proclaims it the shrine of a mystic and heavenly one, not simply as God's instrument, whereby the spirit is awakened in man's heart and mind by communion with Him, but as being in itself, independently of all such effects and prior to them, a receptacle of the divine Spirit; and calls upon men to receive it able book I can not refrain from expressing my belief that, had the author gone as deep into Coleridge's theosophy as into his poetry, or made himself as well acquainted with his religious writings as with his poems, he could never have said that "nine tenths of his theology would apply equally to their own creeds in the mouths of a Brahmin or a Mussulman." On the contrary, nothing more characterizes the religious conceptions of Coleridge than the ever-present aim and endeavor to show that Christianity is religion itself, religion in its deepest, highest and fullest expression, the very ground as well as the summit of divine truth.

as thus divine not principally on internal evidence, the harmony of the whole scheme within itself, attested by its proper moral and spiritual effects, but on an outward historic proof, reaching no higher than probability, yet assumed to be that which only the unspiritual mind can reject.

That he did neither the one nor the other, that he came to consider the notions of the Church entertained by ordinary Protestants inadequate and unspiritual, without adopting the Romish doctrines respecting the clergy and the nature of their intervention betwixt God and man in the mode of salvation; that he exalted the spirituality of sacraments without admitting the primitive materialism, by many styled Catholic, that he saw the very mind of St. Paul, in the teaching of Luther on the Law and Jus tification by Faith, yet was open-eyed to the misuse of that teaching and the practical falsities deduced out of it by modern Methodists-all this and much more in his system of religious opinion, distinguishing it equally from over-sensualized, and from minimifidian" Christianity, ought not to be traced to peculiar circumstances and to accident as its principal cause. Doubtless it was a blessing to "the Christian philosopher" that he had a good Christian for his father-that he had in him the pattern of "an Israelite without guile." But of his Churchmanship I believe that he was himself almost wholly the Father; and I verily think, that even if he had been born in the Church of Rome, or in the bosom of some Protestant sect, he would have burst all bonds asunder, have mastered the philosophy of his age, and arrived at convictions substantially the same as those which now appear on the face of his writings.

There are some, perhaps, among the intelligent readers of Coleridge, who take a different view of the character of his opinions from that which I have expressed: who believe that, during his latter years, he became in the main what High Churchmen consider Catholic and orthodox, whilst any notions he still held of a different character were anomalies, remnants of his early creed, which would have been worked out of his mind had his years been prolonged. There are others amongst the proselytes to the Oxford theology, who see nothing more in his teaching than a stunted Anglo-catholicism; some of these aver that, in the beginning of their course they were conducted for a little way by the writings of Mr. Coleridge; that he first led them out of

C*

the dry land of negative Protestantism; but that now, by help of newer guides, they have advanced far beyond him, and can look down on his lower station from a commanding eminence. They view the Aids to Reflection as a half-way house to Anglocatholic orthodoxy, just as others, who have got beyond them, in a certain direction, consider their Anglo-catholic doctrine a halfway house to what they consider the true Catholicism,—namely that of the Church of Rome. My own belief is, that such a view of my Father's theological opinions is radically wrong; that although an unripe High Church theology is all that some readers have found or valued in his writings, it is by no means what is there; and that he who thinks he has gone little way with Coleridge, and then proceeded with Romanizing teachers further still, has never gone along with Coleridge at all, or entered deeply into any of his expositions of Christian doctrine; though there may be in many of them a tone and a spirit with which he has sympathized, and an emphatic condemnation of certain views of religion, which has gratified his feelings. But, though I conceive my Father's religious system, considered as to its intellectual form, to be different throughout from that of Anglo or Roman Catholic, as commonly expounded, that it coincided in substance with that which these parties both agree to consider Catholic doctrine, I entirely believe. If they are steering Northward, his course is to the North as much as theirs, but while they seek it by the West he reaches it by an Easterly voyage; I mean that he is as consistently and regularly opposed to them in his rationale of doctrine as consentient with them respecting the great objects of faith, viewed in their essence; at least in his own opinion, though not in theirs; for he was accustomed to make a distinction between religious ideas and the intellectual notions with which they have been connected, or the dogmas framed in relation to them, to which they appear strangers. His Christian divinity agreed more with "Catholicism" than with the doctrines of any sect, since according to his judgment and feelings that contains, whether in a right or wrong form, the spiritual ideas in which the true substance of Christianity consists, more completely on some points it coincided with the "Catholicism" of Rome rather than with that of Anglicans; he recognized for instance the idea of the immanence of spiritual power and light in the Church, independently of the authority of a revelation completed in past