But I can truly say, that the grief with which I read this rhapsody of predetermined insult, had the rhapsodist himself for its whole and sole object."

9" Mr. Coleridge's Description of a Green Field."

[With these words the Edinburgh Reviewer announces and holds up to ridicule the following passage from the notes to the Lay Sermon. After the quotation he concludes with, "This will do. It is well observed by Hobbes, that it is by words only that a man becometh excellently wise or excellently foolish.'"

"I have at this moment before me, in the flowery meadow, on which my eye is now reposing, one of its most soothing chapters, in which there is no lamenting word, no one character of guilt or anguish. For never can I look and meditate on the vegetable creation without a feeling similar to that with which we gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at its mother's bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of obscure yet happy sensations. The same tender and genial pleasure takes possession of me, and this pleasure is checked and drawn inward by the like aching melancholy, by the same whispered remonstrance, and made restless by a similar impulse of aspiration. It seems as if the soul said to herself: From this state hast thou fallen! Such shouldst thou still become, thy self all permeable to a holier power! thy self at once hidden and glorified by its own transparency, as the accidental and dividuous in this quiet and harmonious object is subjected to the life and light of nature; to that life and light of nature, I say, which shines in every plant and flower, even as the transmitted power, love, and wisdom of God over all fills, and shines through, nature! But what the plant is by an act not its own and unconsciouslythat must thou make thyself to become-must by prayer and by a watchful and unresisting spirit, join at least with the preventive and assisting grace to make thyself, in that light of conscience which inflameth not, and with that knowledge which puffeth not up!" Pp. 267-8., ed. 1839.

I cannot help thinking how Mr. Hazlitt (if Mr. C. was right in ascribing the review of the Lay Sermon in the Edinburgh Review to his pen) must have smiled to himself, as he thus concluded his article, at the anticipated gullibility of his readers, who, if the Northern Oracle had cried out in derision at the Cupid of Praxiteles, would straightway have begun to throw stones at the statue. For he in his heart admired, as he has eloquently described, the poetic fervor of my Father's mind, so characteristically displayed in this excerpt, which seems to me as emblematic of the soft, rich, radiant imagination of its author as the red-hot cones of the city of Dis are emblematic of the fiery genius of Dante. And in him only the will was wanting to appreciate the sense of the passage; for surely it conveys sound sense, as true poetry ever does, and teaches the highest doctrine of the spirit in language not unworthy of such a theme. True enough is it that by words a man becometh excellently wise or excellently

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I refer to this review at present, in consequence of information having been given me, that the innuendo of my "potential infidelity," grounded on one passage of my first Lay Sermon, has been received and propagated with a degree of credence, of which I can safely acquit the originator of the calumny. I give the sentences, as they stand in the sermon, premising only that I was speaking exclusively of miracles worked for the outward senses of men. "It was only to overthrow the usurpation exercised in and through the senses, that the senses were miraculously appealed to. REASON AND RELIGION ARE THEIR OWN EVIDENCE. The natural sun is in this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he is fully arisen, and while his glories are still under veil, he calls up the breeze to chase away the usurping vapors of the night-season, and thus converts the air itself into the minister of its own purification: not surely in proof or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to prevent its interception."

"Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances co-exist with the same moral causes, the principles revealed, and the examples recorded, in the inspired writings, render miracles superfluous : and if we neglect to apply truths in expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the cessation of the latter, we tempt God, and merit the same reply which our Lord gave to the Pharisees on a like occasion."

10

In the sermon and the notes both the historical truth and the necessity of the miracles are strongly and frequently asserted. "The testimony of books of history (that is, relatively to the signs and wonders with which Christ came) is one of the strong and stately pillars of the church; but it is not the foundation !"'" Instead, therefore, of defending myself, which I could easily effect by a series of passages, expressing the same opinion, from

foolish; and perhaps there is no one thing in which the power of folly in words is more thoroughly manifested, than in that sort of designing shallowness and clever crafty superficiality, assumed for the sake of sneering depreciation, and even of insidious defamation, of which this review of the Lay Sermon is a notable specimen. S. C.] Last edit. S. C.] S. C.]

10 [First Lay Sermon, pp. 210-11. [Note N. to First L. S., p. 258.

the Fathers and the most eminent Protestant Divines, from the Reformation to the Revolution, I shall merely state what my belief is concerning the true evidences of Christianity. 1. Its consistency with right reason, I consider as the outer court of the temple-the common area within which it stands. 2. The miracles, with and through which the Religion was first revealed and attested, I regard as the steps of the vestibule, and the portal of the temple. 3. The sense, the inward feeling, in the soul of cach believer of its exceeding desireableness-the experience, that he needs something, joined with the strong foretokening, that the redemption and the graces propounded to us in Christ are what he needs-this I hold to be the true foundation of the spiritual Edifice. With the strong à priori probability that flows in from 1 and 3 on the correspondent historical evidence of 2, no man can refuse or neglect to make the experiment without guilt. But, 4, it is the experiencc derived from a practical conformity to the conditions of the Gospel-it is the opening eye; the dawning light; the terrors and the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises up from beneath and the consolation that meets it from above; the bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare and the exceeding faithfulness and long suffering of the uninterested ally ;-in a word it is the actual trial of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the completing key-stone. In order to an efficient belief in Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual Truths, to every subject not presentable under the forms of Time and Space, as long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the Understanding, what we can only know by the act of becoming. Do the will of my Father, and ye shall know whether I am of God.12 These four evidences I believe to have been and still to be, for the world, for the whole church, all necessary, all equally necessary but at present, and for the majority of Christians born in

12 [John vii., 17. S. C]

Christian countries, I believe the third and the fourth evidences to be the most operative, not as superseding but as involving a glad undoubting faith in the two former. Credidi, ideoque intellexi, appears to me the dictate equally of Philosophy and Religion, even as I believe Redemption to be the antecedent of Sanctification, and not its consequent. All spiritual predicates may be construed indifferently as modes of action or as states of Being. Thus Holiness and Blessedness are the same idea, now seen in relation to act and now to existence. The ready belief which has been yielded to the slander of my "potential infidelity," I attribute in part to the openness with which I have avowed my doubts, whether the heavy interdict, under which the name of Benedict Spinoza lies, is merited on the whole or to the whole extent. Be this as it may, I wish, however, that I could find in the books of philosophy, theoretical or moral, which are alone recommended to the present students of theology in our established schools, a few passages as thoroughly Pauline, as completely accordant with the doctrines of the Established Church, as the following sentences in the concluding page of Spinoza's Ethics. Deinde quo mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine magis gaudet, eo plus intelligit, hoc est, eo majorem in affectus habet potentiam, et eo minus ab affectibus, qui mali sunt, patitur; atque adeo ex eo, quod mens hoc amore divino, seu beatitudine gaudet, potestatem habet libidines coërcendi ; et quia humana potentia ad coërcendos affectus in solo intellectu consistit ; ergo nemo beatitudine gaudet, quia affectus coërcuit, sed contra potestas libidines coërcendi ex ipsa beatitudine oritur. 13

With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I know, what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in the understanding may consist with a saving faith in the intentions and actual dispositions of the whole moral being in any one individual? Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him, be his speculative opinions what they may; and whether in any given instance certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are compatible with a sincere love of God, God can only know. But this I have said, and shall continue to 13 [Ethices, Pars V. De Libertate humana. S. C.]

say that if the doctrines, the sum of which I believe to constitute the truth in Christ, be Christianity, then Unitarianism is not, and vice versâ and that in speaking theologically and impersonally, i. e. of Psilanthropism and Theanthropism as schemes of belief, without reference to individuals, who profess either the one or the other, it will be absurd to use a different language as long as it is the dictate of common sense, that two opposite scannot properly be called by the same name. I should feel no offence if a Unitarian applied the same to me, any more than if he were to say, that two and two being four, four and four must be eight.

ἀλλὰ βροτῶν

τὸν μὲν κενεύφρονες αὖχαι

ἐξ ἀγαθῶν ἔβαλον

τὸν δ ̓ αὖ καταμεμφθέντ ̓ ἄγαν

ἰσχὺν οἰκείων παρέσφαλεν καλῶν,

χειρὸς ἕλκων ὀπίσσω, θυμὸς ἄτολμος ἐών14

This has been my object, and this alone can be my defenceand O! that with this my personal as well as my LITERARY LIFE might conclude !—the unquenched desire I mean, not without the consciousness of having earnestly endeavored to kindle young minds, and to guard them against the temptations of scorners, by showing that the scheme of Christianity, as taught in the liturgy and homilies of our Church, though not discoverable by human reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of reason has reached its own horizon; and that Faith is then but its continuation even as the day softens away into the sweet twilight, and twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the darkness. It is night, sacred night! the upraised eye views only the starry heaven, which manifests itself alone; and the outward beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the awful depth, though suns of other worlds, only to preserve the soul steady and collected in its pure act of inward adoration the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from eternity to eternity, whose choral echo is the universe.

ΘΕΩ. ΜΟΝΩ. ΔΟΞΑ.

14 [Pindar, Nem. Carm, xi., l. 37. S. C.]