men 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 studied 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 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 a 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 judgments 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 recognised 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 ages, opposed as he was to the application of that idea made by Papists. His religious system, according to his own view of it, might be described as exhibiting the universal ideas of Christianity, not those which have been consciously recognised always, everywhere, and by all, but those which the reason and spiritual sense of all men, when sufficiently developed, bear witness to, explained according to a modern philosophy, which purports to be no mere new thinking, but inclusively, all the thought that has been and now is in the world. Such was the aim and design of his doctrine. How far he made it good is not to be determined here."

They who differ from me on this question may have gone deeper into my Father's mind than myself. I will only say in support of my own impressions, that they are derived from a general survey of his writings, late and early, such as few be

13 Since the chief part of this Preface was written, I have become acquainted with Archdeacon Hare's Mission of the Comforter, which I dare to pronounce a most valuable work,—meaning, that I find it so,—without the presumption which, in me, would be great indeed, of pretending to enter fully into its merits. I have had the satisfaction of meeting with remarks upon my Father, in the preface and in the notes of which the second volume consists, confirmatory of some which I have ventured to make myself. Even the dedication coincides with the views given above, for it is this: "To the honored memory of S. T. Coleridge, the Christian philosopher, who, through dark and winding paths of speculation, was led to the light, in order that others, by his guidance, might reach that light without passing through the darkness, these Sermons on the Work of the Spirit are dedicated, with deep thankfulness and reverence, by one of the many pupils, whom his writings have helped to discern the sacred concord and unity of human and divine truth."

sides myself can have taken, and that I came to the study of them with no interest but the common interest in truth, which all mankind possess, to bias my interpretation. Indeed I can conceive of no influence calculated to affect my judgment, except the natural wish, in my mind sufficiently strong, to find my Father's opinions as near as may be to established orthodoxy,as little as possible out of harmony with the notions and feelings. of the great body of pious and reflective persons in his own native land. To me, with this sole bias on my mind, it is manifest, that his system of belief, intellectually considered, differs materially from "Catholic" doctrine as commonly understood, and that this difference during the latter years of his meditative life, instead of being shaded off, became more definite and boldly developed. How should it have been otherwise, unless he had abandoned that modern philosophy, which he had adopted on the deepest and fullest deliberation; and how, without such abandonment, could he have embraced a doctrinal system based on a philosophy fundamentally different? How could he who believed that "a desire to bottom all our convictions on grounds of right reason is inseparable from the character of a Christian," acquiesce in a system, which suppresses the exercise of the individual reason and judgment in the determination of faith, as to its content; would have the whole matter, for the mass of man. kind, decided by feeling and habit apart from conscious thought; and bids the soul take refuge in a home of Christian truth, in which its higher faculties are not at home, but reside like slaves and aliens in the land of a conqueror? To his latest hour, though ever dwelling with full faith on the doctrines of Redemption and original sin, in what he considered the deepest and most real sense attainable by man, he yet, to his latest hour, put from him some of the so-called orthodox notions and modes of explaining those doctrines. My Father's whole view of what theologians term grace-the internal spiritual relations of God with man, his conception of its nature in a theoretical point of view, differs from that which most "Catholics " hold themselves bound to receive unaltered from the primitive and mediæval Christian writers; for in my Father's belief, the teachers of those days knew not what spirit was, or what it was not, metaphysically

considered; in no wise therefore could he receive their explana tions of the spiritual as sound divinity, readily as he might admit that many of them had such insight into the Christian scheme as zeal and the ardor of a new love secure to the student of Holy Writ. Religion must have some intellectual form; must be viewed through the medium of intellect; and if the medium is clouded the object is necessarily obscured. The great aim and undertaking of modern mental philosophy is to clarify this inward eye, rather than to enlarge its sphere of vision, except so far as the one involves the other-to show what spiritual things are not, and thus to remove the obstructions which prevent men from seeing, as mortals may see, what they are.

Those who maintain certain doctrines, or rather metaphysical views of doctrine, and seek to prove them Scriptural, simply because they were doctrines of early Christian writers, ought to look in the face the plain fact that some of the most influential of those early writers were materialists,-not as holding the soul to be the mere result of bodily organization, but as holding the soul itself to be material;-ought gravely to consider, whether it is reasonable to reject the philosophy of a certain class of divines, and yet cling "limpet-like" to their forms of thought on religious questions, forms obviously founded upon, and conformed to, that philosophy. They believed the soul to be material,corporeal. Of this assertion, the truth of which is well known. to men who have examined into the history of metaphysical and psychological opinion," I cannot give detailed proofs in this place; but in passing I refer the reader to Tertullian De Resurr. Carn., cap. xvi. ; and De Anima, cap. ix. ; to Irenæus, Contra Hareses, Lib. ii., cap. xix., 6, and to the preface of the learned Benedictine to the latter, p. 161, Artic. XI., De Animarum na tura et statu post mortem." What are we to be governed in religious metaphysique and the rationale of belief by men who thought that the soul was poured into the body and there thickened like jelly in a mould ?—that the inner man took the form of the outer, having eyes and ears and all the other members, like unto

14 Mr. Scott, in his impressive Lectures on the evolution of Philosophy out of Religion, maintained the materialism of the early Christian writers

the body, only of finer stuff?-its corpulency being consolidated by densation and its effigy formed by expression? This was the notion of Cyprian's master, the acute Tertullian, and that of Irenæus was like unto it. He compares the soul to water frozen in a vessel, which takes the form of the vessel in which it freezes," evidently supposing, with Tertullian, that the firm substantial body moulded the fluent and aerial soul"—that organization was the organizer. It appears that in those days the vulgar held the soul to be incorporeal," according to the views of Plato and other stupid philosophers, combated in the treatise De Anima; but that orthodox Christian divines looked upon that as an impious unscriptural opinion. Justin Martyr argues against Platonic notions of the soul in his Dialogue with Trypho." As for the vulgar, they have ever been in the habit of calling the soul incorporeal, yet reasoning and thinking about it, as if it had the properties of body. The common conception of a ghost accords exactly with Tertullian's description of the soul-a lucid aerial image of the outward man. Thus did these good Fathers change soul into body, and condense spirit into matter; thus did they reverse the order of nature, contradict the wisdom of ages, and even run counter to the instinctive belief of mankind, in recoiling from Gnosticism; thus deeply did they enter into the sense of St. Paul's high sayings about the heavenly body and the utter incompatibility of flesh and blood with the Kingdom of Heaven! As they conceived the soul to be material, so

15 Contra Hæreses, Lib. ii., cap. xix., 6.

16 A primordio enim in Adam concreta et configurata corpori anima, ut totius substantiæ, ita et conditionis istius semen efficit. Tertull., De Anima. Cap. ix., ad finem.

17 Tertull. De Res. Car., Cap xvii., in initio,—aliter anima non capiat passionem tormenti seu refrigerii, utpote incorporalis : hoc enim vulgus existimat. Nos autem animam corporalem et hic profitemur et in suo volumine probamus, &c. On this passage, Dr. Pusey observes, in a note, that it attests "the immateriality of the soul" to have been "the general belief." I think it attests it to have been the belief of the common people, but not that it was the prevailing opinion with Christian divines of that age.

18 Ven., 1747, pp. 106 and 111. Justin Martyr and Tatian denied the original immortality of the soul, on religious grounds; and the former af firms that it is not simple, but consists of many parts, p. 271.