even though the baptized, as soon as he becomes capable of moral acts, proves faithless and wicked, until it is expelled forever by a large but indefinite amount of wickedness, entitled utter reprobacy. How intolerable this doctrine is in its moral and spiritua aspect, how it evacuates the Scriptural phrase, Christ in us, of its emphatic meaning, it is useless to urge upon those, who believe it to have been taught by the Apostles. I now only allege that no man originally could have framed such a conception as this, who had our modern conceptions of spirit, or had considered what is the idea involved in the words, presence of the Holy Spirit to our spirit. When the doctrine is unfolded and presented to the masters and doctors of it, they fly off to the notion of an inward potential righteousness. But this mere capability of being saved and sanctified, we have from our birth, nor can it be increased, because it is essentially, extra gradum,—not a thing of degrees. Our capability of being spiritualized by divine grace is unlimited. Who are they that explain away the bap tismal gift into a shadow ?"*

My Father, in his latter years, looked upon baptism as a formal and public reception into a state of spiritual opportunities (at least so I understand him), which is equivalent, I suppose, to the doctrine of some of our divines, Waterland among others, that it is a consignment of grace to the soul. It is conceivable that in consequence of such consignment, the soul, by the will of God, may have more outward means of receiving spiritual influence than it would otherwise have had; if prayer can affect the course and complex of events in favor of those who are not praying, so may the rite of baptism influence it in favor of the bap tized, though he be passive in baptism. The objection to the Antiquitarian doctrine is not that it implies a mystery, not that it implies the reception of a spiritual opportunity independently of the will of the receiver, but that, as it is commonly stated, it contradicts the laws of the human understanding, and either affirms what can not be true,-what brings confusion into our moral and spiritual ideas,- —or else converts the doctrine into an effectual vapor-" a potentiality in a potentiality or a chalking of chalk to make white white." My Father, as I understand

* See remarks on this subject in the Mission of the Comforter, pp. 476–7

him, continued to deny that the gift of baptism is a spiritual recreation preceding actual faith or any moral capability,—an introduction of the spirit into the soul, which it passively undergoes as the dead cage receives the living bird, or a lodgment of the Spirit within it irrespectively of its own moral state; a total change wrought all in a moment conferring upon it no positive moral melioration but only a power unto righteousness,—a capability of being renewed by grace in addition to that which inheres in man from the first; or on the other hand a partial and incipient spiritual change; since regeneration ex vi termini is something total and general; to be born again, re-natus, implies a new nature; is so described in Scripture and was so understood in the early Church. He looked upon it as an external grant, called regeneration in virtue of that which it is its object to promote and secure, a grant which comes into effect gradually, as the will yields to the pressure of the Spirit from without, but which may be made of none effect by the will's resistance. Such a view of the effect of baptism is well expressed by George Herbert in these lines

Two fallacies are current on the subject of momentary baptismal tran substantiation. First-men say, that as we are passive in our original cre ation, so we are passive in our spiritual re-creation. The answer may be given from the Angelical Doctor, who teaches that we are not passive in our original creation; and indeed it needs not the wisdom of an angel to see, that neither man nor any other animal can become alive without a corresponsive act on his part-a sub-co-operation. If we throw a stone into the still unmoving pool, the waters leap up: the pool has not stirred itself, but it co-operates in the production of motion. The second commonplace fallacy is this:-as a seed is set in the ground and remains inert and latent for a time, then germinates, shoots up and bears fruit, so grace may be poured into the soul of a child incapable of moral acts, may remain latent for a time, then, when reason and the moral sense have come into play, may produce good thoughts and good works, the fruit of the Spirit. The objec tion to this is that a spiritual being is not in a spiritual being as a material thing is in a material thing; it is in it or present to it only inasmuch as it acts upon it. It is the heart itself which, by the power of the Spirit, must bear the fruit of virtue, not a something lodged within it, as the seed in the ground. Spiritual effects in the soul may exist unperceived by men,-may not produce outward works of holiness till long after they have been produced; but when the deeds are evil, as they are in many who were baptized in infancy, we may fairly say that the effects were not produced-in other words, that the person who shows such an unspiritual mind, was not spiritually regenerated in baptism.

'O blessed streams! either ye do prevent

And stop our sins from growing thick and wide,
Or else give tears to drown them as they grow—"

and is explained by himself in this passage from some of his
manuscript remains:

"I see the necessity of greatly expanding and clearing up the chapter on Baptism in the Aids to Reflection, and of proving the substantial accordance of my scheme with that of our Church. I still say, that an act of the Spirit in time, as that it might be asserted, at the moment of the uttering of the words, I baptize thee in the name, &c.-now the Spirit begins to act—is false in Philosophy and contrary to Scripture, and that our Church service needs no such hypothesis. Further, I still say, that the communication of the Spirit as of a power or principle not yet possessed, to an unconscious agent by human ministry, is without precedent in Scripture, and that there is no Scripture warrant for the doctrine—and that the nature of the Holy Spirit communicated by the Apostles by laying on of hands is a very difficult questionand that the reasons for supposing it to be certain miraculous gifts of the Spirit peculiar to the first age of Christianity and during the formation of the Church, are neither few nor insignificant.

Observe, I do not deny (God forbid !) the possibility or the reality of the influence of the Spirit on the soul of the infant. His first smile bespeaks a Reason (the Light from the Life of the Word), as already existent, and where the Word is, there will the Spirit act. Still less do I think lightly of the Graces which the child receives as a living Part of the Church, and whatever flows from the Communion of Saints, and the sizógnois of the Spirit.

"The true import is this. The operations of the Spirit are as little referable to Time as to Space; but in reference to our principles of conduct toward, and judgment concerning, our neighbor, the Church declares, that before the time of the baptism there is no authority for asserting, and that since the time there is no authority for denying, the gift and regenerative presence of the Holy Spirit, promised, by an especial covenant, to the members of Christ's mystical Body-consequently, no just pretence for expecting or requiring another new Inition or Birth into the state of Grace."

My Father denied not that the Spirit may influence the soul of an infant, but he still refused to separate the presence of the Holy Spirit from spiritual effects, and these from reason and the moral being. Those whom he differed from are wont to argue, not that the infant is capable of moral effects in virtue of its awakening reason, but that it may be spiritually renovated in its whole soul before it is morally renewed at all; to this opinion he was ever wholly opposed. The new birth, as the change of the soul itself, is out of time; viewed phenomenally in its manifestations, it takes place, as my Father conceived, gradually, as a man becomes gradually a new creature, different from what he was by nature (or, in other words, a good Christian), the new birth indicating the spiritual ground, the new creature the effect and change produced.

Mr. Coleridge's view of the Eucharist with his view of Sacraments generally has been adopted and explained by his younger son.* Would that all my labors in explaining our Father's views and clearing them from misrepresentations could be so superseded! But my brother's present avocations are all-engrossing, and more indispensable than the defence of opinions, however serviceable those may be deemed to the cause of truth. In connection however with the subject just touched upon, of primitive religious metaphysique, I am desirous, in times like these, to specify what my Father's notion of the real presence was not: that was not the notion of a real presence in bread and wine. My Father has been called a Pantheist by the blunderers of the day, because he believed in the real presence of God throughout the Creation animate and inanimate; that He is present to every blade of grass and clod of the valley, as well as to all things that breathe and live; that were He to hide his face, that is, withdraw his power, the World would vanish into nothing, But the in the Eucharist is a spiritual presence or agency for the presence production of spiritual effects. God sustains mere material things by his power, but is he present to them as the Spirit of Holiness, the life-giving Word? Can bread and wine become holy and spiritual and be nourished to everlasting life? What do we gain by this strange self-contradictory dogma, except an

* See the Scriptural Character of the English Church, &c., by the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, M.A., now Principal of St. Mark's College, Chelsea. Last six sermons, passim. See also Coleridge's Remains

articulation of air? The sacrament is not for the bread and wine, but for the soul of the receiver, and if we hope to receive the Spirit by means of the hallowed elements, have we not all that the doctrine can give us in the way of spiritual advantage? When I have urged this consideration upon a maintainer of the ancient view, the reply has been, "We must not rationalize— must not reason à priori on these matters, but receive faithfully what the voice of God has declared." Alas! that men should thus separate the voice of God from reason and the moral sensc, which God has given us as an inward Holy of Holies, wherein He may appear to us, if we repair thither meetly prepared, our souls being washed with pure water! Alas! that they should so absolutely identify it with the voice of early Christian writers, men zealous and simple-hearted, but nursled for the most part in Paganism, and all kinds of sensuous and dark” imaginations on the subject of religion! One of these early writers, if not more, believed in transubstantiation, that doctrine so condemned in our Church as not only irrational, but impious. Waterland interprets the passage in the ancient Father,* to which I refer, in his own way, only allowing him to be "inaccurate in superinducing the Logos upon the symbols themselves, rather than upon the recipients;"† but I think if we attend, as the Benedictine editor requires, to the series of the holy Doctor's whole argumentation, we can not fail to perceive that the conception present to his mind was at least nearer to trans than to any kind of con substantiation. He teaches that the Eucharist con

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* Irenæus Contra Hæreses, L. iv. c. 18, p. 251. Ed. Bened. Waterland's Review of the Doctrine of the Eucharist, chap. vii. p. 221-et seq.

The same Divine, after explaining the holiness of the consecrated sym. bols to be "a relative holiness," and declaring himself to be of the opinion judiciously expressed by Mr. Hooker, that grace is not to be sought in the sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the sacrament, presently adds, "Not that I conceive there is any absurdity in supposing a peculiar pres ence of the Holy Ghost to inanimate things, any more than in God's appearing in a burning bush." Surely this is no parallel case. Who imagines that Jehovah was joined or united with the burning bush, or that the Omnipresent Creator was present there as a man is present in a place? The luminous appearance in the bush and in the pillar of fire and in the Holy of Holies was a sensuous sign of a supersensuous reality, of the special agency. favor, and protection of Almighty God to the chosen people. Has this any thing to do with a spiritual presence in bread and wine?

Diss. Præv. in Iren. Lib. Art. xiv. 83-84-85. The Benedictine refers