It Remains. Before, however, adverting to solely to the outward act. The end of good | But keen as was Coleridge's interest in political and moral subjects, and in whatever affects the wellbeing of man, the full bent of his soul, and its deepest meditations, were given to the truths of the Christian revelation. From none of his works are these of thoughts absent; but the fullest exposition his religious views is to be found in the Aids to Reflection, his maturest work, and in the third and fourth volumes of the Literary and never to get further. This is a danger peculiar to the learned, or to those who think themselves such. The trained intellect is apt to eat out the child's heart, and yet the "except ye become as little children" stand unrepealed. Coleridge knew this well. In his earliest interview with De Quincey, he said highest energy of which the human heart was "that prayer with the whole soul was the capable, and that the great mass of worldly men, and of learned men, were absolutely incapable of prayer." And only two years before his death, after a retrospect of his own life, to his nephew, who sat by his bedside one afternoon, he said, "I have no difficulty in forgiveness... Neither do I find or reckon the most solemn faith in God as a real object the most arduous act of reason and will. O no! it is to pray, to pray as God would have us; this is what at times makes me turn cold to my soul. Believe me, to pray with all your heart and strength, with the reason and the will, to believe vividly that God will listen to your voice through Christ, and verily do the thing He pleaseth thereupon-this is the last, the greatest achievement of a Christian's warfare on earth.' And then he burst into tears, and begged me to pray for him." It has been said that the great object of his theological speculations was to bring into harmony religion and philosophy. This assertion would mislead, if it were meant to imply that he regarded these as two co-ordinate powers, which could be welded together into one reasoned system. It would, perhaps, be more true to say that his endeavour was, in his own words, to remove the doubts and difficulties that cannot but arise whenever the understanding, the mind of the flesh, is made the measure of spiritual things. He laboured to remove religion from a merely mechanical or intellectual, and to place it on a moral and spiritual foundation. His real aim was, notwithstanding that his love for scholastic distinction might seem to imply the contrary, to simplify men's thoughts on these things, to show that spiritual truth is like the light, self-evidencing, that it is preconformed to man's higher nature, as man's nature is preconformed to it.. As he had to contend against Lockeian metaphysics and Paleyan ethics, so he had to do strenuous battle against a theology mainly mechanical. He woke upon an age when the belief in God was enforced in the schools as the conclusion of a lengthened argument; when revelation was proved exclusively by miracles, with little regard to its intrinsic evidence; and when both natural and revealed truths were superinduced from without, as extraneous, extra-moral beliefs, rather than taught as living faiths evidenced from within. In opposition to this kind of teaching, which had so long reigned, Coleridge taught that the foundation truth of all religion, faith in the existence of God, was incapable of intellectual demonstration-that as all religion, so this corner-stone of religion, must have a moral origin. To him that belief was inherent in the soul, as Reason is inherent, indeed a part of Reason, in the sense he gave to that word, as moral in its nature, and the fountain of moral truth. His words are "Because I possess Reason, or a law of right and wrong, which, uniting with the sense of moral responsibility, constitutes my conscience, hence it is my absolute duty to believe, and Ï do believe, that there is a God, that is, a Being in whom supreme Reason and a most holy will are one with infinite power; and that all holy will is coincident with the will of God, and therefore secure in its ultimate consequences by His omnipotence. The wonderful works of God in the sensible world are a perpetual discourse, reminding me of His existence, and shadowing out to me His perfections. all language presupposes, in the intelligent hearer or reader, those primary notions which it symbolizes, even so, I believe, that the notion of God is essential to the human mind; that it is called forth into distinct consciousness But as principally by the conscience, and auxiliarily by the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the outward creation. It is, therefore, evident to my Reason, that the existence of God is absolutely and necessarily insusceptible of a scientific demonstration, and that Scripture so represents it. For it commands us to believe in one God. Now all commandment necessarily relates to the will; whereas all scientific demonstration is independent of the will, and is demonstrative only in so far as it is compulsory on the mind, volentem nolentem." Thus we see that with regard to the first truth of all religion, Coleridge places its evidence in conscience and the intuitive reason. Carrying the same manner of thinking into revealed religion, to its inherent substance he gave the foremost place as evidence, while to historical proofs and arguments from miracles he assigned the same subordinate place, as in reference to the existence of God he assigned to argu ments from design. His view upon this subject also had better be given in his own language. It could hardly be expressed in fewer, and certainly not in better words. The main evidences, he thinks, are "the doctrines of Christianity, and the correspondence of human nature to these doctrines, illustrated, first, historically, as the production of a new world, and the dependence of the fate of the planet upon it; second, individually, from its appeal to an ascertained fact, the truth of which every man possessing Reason has an equal power of ascertaining within himself; viz., a will, which has more or less lost its own freedom, though not the consciousness that it ought to be and may become free; the conviction that this cannot be achieved without the operation of a principle co-natural with itself; the experience in his own nature of the truth of the process described by Scripture, as far as he can place himself within the process, aided by experienced by them, and which he is striving to arrive at. All these form a practical Christian. To such a man one main test of the truth of his faith is its accompaniment by a growing insight the confident assurances of others as to the effects of that belief." Subordinate to this internal evidence in Coleridge's view, buttresses, but not cornerstones, are the facts of the existence and of the history of Christianity, and also of the miracles which accompanied its first appearance. These are necessary results, rather than primary proofs of revelation. For, "as the result of the above convictions, he will not scruple to receive the particular miracles recorded, inasmuch as it is miraculous that an incarnate God should not work what must to mere men appear as miracles; inasmuch as it is strictly accordant with the ends and benevolent nature of such a Being to commence the elevation of man above his mere seuses by enforcing attention first, through an appeal to those senses." Thus, according to him, they are not the adequate and ultimate proof of religion, not the keystone of the arch, but rather "compacting stones in it, which give while they receive strength." goes as into the moral beauty and necessity of the pro- | ridge's religious opinions with which he cess which it comprises, and the dependence of closes his essay, has asserted that he " that process on the causes asserted. Believe, far as the Unitarians in making man's reason and if thy belief be right, that insight, which and moral feelings a test of revelation; but changes faith into knowledge, will be the reward differs toto colo from them in their rejection of its mysteries, which he regards as the highest philosophical truths." It would be strange, indeed, if Coleridge, who certainly ought to have known both his own views and those of the Unitarians, should have so far deluded himself as to protest against them unweariedly for this very fault, that they made man the measure of all things, while in this matter he himself was substantially at one with them. The truth is, that those who speak most strongly about reason being the measure of faith, mean by the word Reason much the same as Coleridge meant by Understanding-the faculty of definite conceptions, the power of clearly comprehending truths. And in their mouths the proposition means that nothing is to be believed in religion, or anything else, which man's understanding cannot fully grasp, clearly conceive, definitely express, satisfactorily explain. Now Coleridge used the term. Reason in a sense different, nay, opposed to. this. He held, whether rightly or no we do. not now inquire, but he held, that thereis in man a power of apprehending universal spiritual truths, something that brings him to close relation, we had almost said con-tact, with supersensible reality, and to this. power he gave the name of Reason. And the intimations of moral and spiritual things,. which he believed that he received through this power, he accepted readily, though he could not understand nor explain them, nor even conceive the possibility of them. Even with regard to the first truth of religion, the existence, personality, and moral nature of God, he held that this is to be received on moral grounds, and regarded as a settled truth "not by the removal of all difficulties, or by any such increase of insight as enables a man to meet all sceptical objections with a fulland precise answer; but because he has convinced himself that it is folly as well as pre-sumption to expect it; and because the doubts and difficulties disappear at the beam when tried against the weight of the reasons in the other scale." Again, of the fall of man, he says. that it is a mystery too profound for human insight; and of the doctrine of the Trinity, that it is an absolute truth, transcending our human means of understanding or demonstrating it. Coleridge's theology was more or less a recoil from one in which miracles had been pushed into undue, almost exclusive prominence, one in which the proof of religion was derived mainly from the outward senses; whereas he was convinced that to subjugate the senses to faith, the passive belief to the moral and responsible belief, was one main end of all religion. Whether Coleridge struck the balance aright between outward and inward evidence, whether he gave to miracles that place which is their due; whether, in his zeal for the inward truths, he estimated as they deserve the miraculous facts, which, whatever they may be to some oversubtilized intellects, have been, and always must be, to the great mass of men, the main objective basis on which the spiritual truths repose, these are questions into which we shall not now inquire. Our aim, especially in this part of our essay, is not so much to criticise, as to set forth, as fairly as may be, what his views really were. We have seen then that Coleridge held the adaptation of Christianity to man's need, and to his whole moral nature, to be the strongest evidence of its truth. And this naturally suggests the question, How far did he regard man's moral convictions to be the test of revelation as a whole, or of any particular doctrine of revelation? Did he wish to square down the truths of revelation to the findings of human conscience? To answer this question is the more necessary, because Mr. Mill, in the few remarks on Cole These, and numerous other suchlike sayings might be adduced, not to speak of the whole scope of his philosophy, to show that it was no obstacle to his belief in a truth, that it transcended his comprehension. Nay, more, so far was he from desiring to bring down all religious truths to the level of human | any moral standard of ours. All that the comprehension, that he everywhere enforced moral judgment has a right to say to them is it as a thing antecedently to be expected, that to refuse to believe any proposed interpretathe fundamental truths should be mysteries, tion of them which contradicts the plain laws and that he would have found it hard to be- of right and wrong, any interpretation which lieve them if they had not been so. makes God unrighteous on account of such facts, and to wait patiently in full faith that a time will come when we shall see these now inscrutable facts to have been fully consistent with the most perfect righteousness. And the same use which we make of our moral judgment in regard to the facts that meet us in life, we are bound to make of it with regard to the doctrines of revelation. We are not to expect to see moral light through all of these, but we are to refuse any interpretation of them which does violence to the moral sense. In both cases, however, we have reason to expect that, to those who honestly and humbly use the light they have, more light will be given,-a growing insight, or, at least, a trustful acquiescence in facts which at first were too dark and perplexing, There are in this region two extremes, equally to be shunned. One is theirs, who in matters of religion begin by discrediting the natural light,-by putting out the eye of conscience, What then did he mean when he maintained, as he certainly did, that "in no case can true Reason and a right faith oppose each other?" We have seen that Reason with Coleridge was the link by which man is joined on to a higher order, the source whence he draws in all of moral truth and of religious sentiment which he possesses. It was the harmony of revelation with this faculty of apprehending universal spiritual truths which was to him the main ground for originally believing in revelation, and, therefore, he held that no particular doctrine of revelation can contradict the findings of that faculty on the evidence of which revelation as a whole is primarily received. In other words, no view of God's nature and of his dealings with men, no interpretation of any doctrine, nor of any text of Scripture, can be true, which contradicts the clear intimations of enlightened conscience. And the substance of revelation and the dictates of conscience so answer to each other, that the religious student, under the guidance of the Divine Spirit, may expect to find an ever increasing harmony between the two teachings. Opposed to this doctrine of Coleridge, on the one hand, is the teaching of those who, believing in revelation, deny to man any power of apprehending spiritual truths, and hold that the first truths of religion must be received simply as authoritative data from without. Equally opposed, on the other hand, are the views of those who, though admitting in some sense the truth of revelation, yet make man's power of understanding the entire measure of all that is to be received as revealed. The creed which is bounded either theoretically or practically within this limit must needs be a scanty one. The truth seems to be that, both in the things of natural and revealed religion, the test that lies in man's moral judgment seems more of a negative than a positive one. We are not to believe about God anything which positively contradicts our first notions of righteousness and goodness, for, if we were to do so, we should cut away the original moral ground of our belief in His existence and character. Thus far our moral judgments carry us, but not much further. No rational man who believes in God at all will try to square all the facts that meet him in the natural and the moral world to his sense of right and wrong. Life is full of inscrutable facts which cannot be made by us to fit into that they may the more magnify the heavenly light of revelation, or rather their own interpretations thereof. The other is seen in those, who enthroning on the judg ment-seat the first offhand findings of their own, and that perhaps no very enlightened, conscience, proceed to arraign before this bar the statements of Scripture, and to reject all those which do not seem to square with the verdicts of the self-erected tribunal. There is a more excellent way than either of these, a way not definable perhaps by criticism, but to be found by spiritual wisdom. There are those who, loath to do violence to the teachings either of Scripture or of conscience, but patiently and reverently comparing them together, find that the more deeply they are considered, the more do they, on the whole, reflect light one on the other. To such the words of Scripture, interpreted by the experience of life, reveal things about their own nature, which once seemed incredible. And the more they know of themselves and their own needs, the more the words of Scripture seem to enlarge their meaning to meet these. But as to the large outlying region of the inexplicable that will still remain in the world, in man, and in Holy Writ, they can leave all this, in full confidence that when the solution, soon or late, shall come, it will be seen to be in profound harmony with our highest sense of righteousness, and with that word which declares that "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." Such, though not expressed in Coleridge's words, we believe to be the spirit of his teaching. power, having the original ground of its own determination in itself; and if subject to any cause from without, such cause must have acquired this power of determining the will, by a previous determination of the will itself. This is the very essence of a will. And herein it is contradistinguished from nature, whose essence it is to be unable to originate anything, but to be bound by the mechanism of cause and effect. If the will has by its own act subjected itself to nature, has received into itself from nature an alien influence which has curtailed its freedom, in so far as it has done so, it has corrupted itself. This is original sin, or sin originating in the only region in which it can originate-the Will. This is a fall of man. What then is to be said of those passages in his works in which he speaks of the mysteries of faith, and the highest truths of philosophy, as coincident; in which he says that he received the doctrine of the Logos not merely on authority, but because of its to him exceeding reasonableness; in which he speaks as if he had an intellectual insight into the doctrine of the Trinity, and draws out formulas of it in strange words hard to understand? Whatever we may think of these sayings and formulas, it is to be remembered that Coleridge never pretended that he could have discovered the truths apart from revelation. If, after practically accepting these truths, and finding in them You ask, When did this fall take place? the spiritual supports of his soul, he employed Has the will of each man chosen evil for itself; his powers of thought upon them, and drew and, if so, when? To this Coleridge would them out into intellectual formulas more reply that each individual will has so chosen; satisfactory to himself probably than to others, but as to the when, the will belongs to a reyet these philosophizings, made for the pur-gion of being,-is part of an order of things, pose of speculative insight, he neither represented as the grounds of his own faith, nor obtruded on others as necessary for theirs. He ever kept steadily before him the difference between an intellectual belief and a practical faith, and asserted that it was solely in consequence of the historical fact of redemption that the Trinity becomes a doctrine, the belief in which as real is commanded by our conscience. In the Aids to Reflection, the earlier half of the work is employed in clearing away preliminary hindrances; the latter part deals mainly with the moral difficulties that are apt to beset the belief in Original Sin and in the Atonement. With regard to the former doctrine, he shows that the belief of the existence of evil, as a fact, in man and in the world, is not peculiar to Christianity, but is common to it with every religion and every philosophy that has believed in a personal God; in fact, to all systems but Pantheism and Atheism. The fact then needs no proof, but the meaning of the fact does. As to this, Coleridge rejected that interpretation of original sin, which makes original' mean 'hereditary,' or inherited like our bodily constitution from our forefathers. Such, he held, might be disease or calamity, but could not be sin, the meaning of which is, the choice of evil by a will free to choose between good and evil. This fact of a law in man's nature which opposes the law of God, is not only a fact, but a mystery, of which no other solution than the statement of the fact is possible. For consider: Sin to be sin is evil originating in, not outside of the will. And what is the essence of the will? It is a self-determining in which time and space have no meaning; that "the subject stands in no relation to time, can neither be called in time or out of time; but that all relations of time are as alien and heterogeneous in this question as north or south, round or square, thick or thin, are in the affections." Again you ask, With whom did sin originate? And Coleridge replies, The grounds of will on which it is true of any one man are equally true in the case of all men. The fact is asserted of the individual, not because he has done this or that particular evil act, but simply because he is man. It is impossible for the individual to say that it commenced in this or that act, at this or that time. As he cannot trace it back to any particular moment of his life, neither can he state any moment at which it did not exist. As to this fact, then, what is true of any one man is true of all men. For, "in respect of original sin, each man is the representative of all men." Such, nearly in his own words, was the way in which Coleridge sought, while fully acknowledging this fact, to construe it to himself, so as to get rid of those theories which make it an infliction from without, a calamity, a hereditary disease; for which, however much sorrow there might be, there could be no responsibility, and therefore no sense of guilt. And he sought to show that it is an evil self-originated in the will; a fact mysterious, not to be explained, but to be felt by each man in his conscience as his own deed. Therefore, in the confession of his faith, he said: "I believe (and hold it a fundamental article of Christianity) that I am a fallen creature |