the opinion of my Father on the subject in question; or why he should be accused of disregarding authority, because, though he thought the consentient teaching of the early Christian writers worthy of deep consideration, he did not hold it to be absolutely conclusive upon theological questions, or certainly the voice of God. Something very different was, to his mind, implied in the promise of Christ to his Church; for without His presence in any special sense, as the life-giving Light, a fully developed system of doctrine, capable of being received implicitly, might have been transmitted from age to age. He saw the fulfilment of it, partly at least, in the power given to individual minds to be what the prophets were of old, by whom the Holy Ghost spake, religious instructors of their generation.*

Literature, liberally pursued, has no other bearing on a man's religious opinions than as it leaves him more at liberty to form them for himself than any other. Looking at the matter in another point of view, I readily admit that, so far as it is the want of any regular profession at all, it may be in some degree injurious to the man, and consequently to the thinker. But if a regular calling tends to steady the mind, restraining it from too tentative a direction of thought, and what may prove to be a vain activity, it tends, perhaps, in an equal degree to fix and petrify the spirit, of which I believe abundant evidence may be found in the writings of professional men. Perhaps there is no occupation which does not in some measure tend to disturb the balance of the soul; the want of one permits a man to commune

4 I find the same argument in Dr. Arnold's Fragment on the Church. He words it thus: "The promise of the Spirit of Truth to abide for ever with his Church, implies, surely, that clearer views of truth should be continually vouchsafed to us; and if the work were indeed fully complete when the Apostles entered into their rest, what need was there for the Spirit of Wisdom, as well as of Love, to be ever present even unto the end of the world?"

After speaking in warm eulogy, according to his wont, of S. T. C. Dr. Arnold says: "But yet there are marks enough that his mind was a little diseased by the want of a profession, and the consequent unsteadiness of his mind and purposes; it always seems to me, that the very power of contemplation becomes impaired or diverted, when it is made the main employment of life." See Arnold's Life and Correspondence, vol. ii, p 57.

with human nature more variously and freely than is possible for those to whom a stated routine presents persons and things with a certain uniformity of aspect; it is not mere experience that gives knowledge, but a diversified experience, and the power of beholding the diversity it contains through the absence of a particular bias and leisure for contemplation. So far, therefore, as it presents facilities for the acquirement of the philosophic mind, even the want of a regular calling may in some measure facilitate the acquirement of truthful views in religion. "It is scarcely possible," said my Father himself, addressing Mr. Frere," to conceive an individual less under the influence of the ordinary disturbing forces of the judgment than your poor friend; or from situation, pursuits, and habits of thinking, from age, state of health, and temperament, less likely to be drawn out of his course by the under-currents of hope or fear, of expectation or wish. But least of all by predilection for any particular sect or party; for wherever I look, in religion or in politics, I seem to see a world of power and talent wasted on the support of half truths, too often the most mischievous because least suspected of errors.""

It was the natural consequence of his having no predilection for any sect or party that parties and party organs have either neglected or striven against him; they were indeed his natural opponents, as they must ever be of any man, whose vocation it is to examine the truth of modes of thought in general, while an assumption of the truth of certain modes of thought is the ground of their existence as parties, and the band that keeps them together. It has been observed by Mr. Newman, in condemnation of "the avowed disdain of party religion;" that "Christ undeniably made a party the vehicle of his doctrine, and did not cast it at random on the world, as men would now have it ;" and undeniable it surely is, that there is nothing radically wrong in the union of members for the support or propagation of truth. But then, from the weakness of human hearts and fallibility of human understandings it comes to pass, that while party union is right in

6 Church and State. Advertisement, pp. 4, 5.

7 Sermons preached before the University of Oxford. Serm. viii., p. 165.

the abstract, parties are generally more or less wrong, both in principle and conduct, and do more or less depart from truth in their resolution to maintain some particular portion or representation of it. The party that has our Lord at its head, and fights for Him, and Him only, is one with the Church of Christ, considered as still militant; but this host, like the fiery one that surrounded Elisha, is invisible. The party which Christ instituted was not invisible, but it differs essentially from all parties within the precincts of Christendom, for this very reason, that it was undeniably instituted by Him, and that they who composed it had to defend the moral law in its depth and purity, theism itself in its depth and purity-(the acknowledgment of God as a Spirit, one and personal, with the relations to each other of the Creator and the Creature-a faint distorted shadow of which was alone preserved by Polytheists)-against a popular religion, which, though pious and spiritual in comparison with utter want of faith in the things that are above, was the very world and the flesh, as opposed to Christianity. Thus they were striving for the life and soul which animates the religion of Christ, whereas I would fain believe, that the contentions among parties of Christians are less for this life and soul than for the forms in which they severally hold that it is most fitly clothed, and with which they identify it."

8

• Heathenism, in Scripture, is represented as one with sensuality, profaneness, and disregard of the life to come; to work the will of the Gentiles was to run to every kind of evil excess; and almost the same, I suppose, may be said of the monstrous heresies, against which the Apostles and their successors spoke in terms of unqualified reprobation. In his Fragment on the Church, Dr. Arnold remarks, that "the heresies condemned by the Apostles were not mere erroneous opinions on some theoretical truth, but absolute perversions of Christian holiness; that they were not so much false as wicked. And further, where there was a false opinion in the heresy, it was of so monstrous a character, and so directly connected with profligacy of life, that it admits of no comparison with the so-called heresies of later ages," pp. 89, 90. Does it appear that our Lord ever rebuked either unbelief or misbelief, except as one and the same with worldliness and wickedness, or, at least, as in the case of Thomas, subjection of the mind to the flesh ?

To take the extreme case, Socinianism, I have long thought that a man may-that many a man does, athwart the negative lines of this creed, which, in some cases, appear to be quite negative in operation, behold in

And this is no unworthy subject of contention, because the life and spirit are best preserved and most fully expressed in the truest forms, a correct and distinct intellectual system is the best preservative of the essential portion of faith; but yet, because they are forms, the strife concerning them will be more apt to degenerate into an unholy warfare than a struggle pro aris et focis, for the very ideas of a spiritual religion, and for a pure and pregnant morality, the testimony to which every soul may find at home, if it looks deep into its own retirements.

In reference to the present subject, however, I need only observe that party compact operates chiefly for the preserving and extending of truth, considered as already established, while the discovery or development of it is only to be achieved by indivídual efforts; it even tends to retard such progress in the beginning, because, as essentially conservative, it ventures upon no experiments, but is bound to consider every departure from that form of teaching, which has hitherto served to convey and preserve spiritual truth, as endangering its purity and stability; and 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

heart and spirit every deep truth on which Christians around them are dwelling, every truth meet to bring forth the fruit of good living, and to fit the soul for a higher life than the present. I hope and believe that such persons do practically embrace the divinity of Christ, because they worship, serve, and obey Him-they address their religious thoughts to Him habitually-they attribute to Him that which is properly divine, the work of Creation and Redemption, although they have wrong conceptions of the method of this work. On the other hand, I should suppose that many Romanists must practically impute divinity to the blessed mother of Jesus, from the addresses which they make to her, and the extent to which they seem to devote their religious minds to her. At best they appear to make her one with our Saviour,-and not merely with the man, Christ Jesus, but with the Eternal son of the Father extending his attributes to her, and making of the twain two persons and one God. How awfully dangerous would it be to address Christ as the Mediator betwixt God and man, if he were not himself both God and man! It will not, I trust, be supposed that I am here instituting any general comparison between Socinianism and Romanism, with a preference of the former. I am merely considering what either may possibly be to the heart and mind of the professor.

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 cannot 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 towards 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."

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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 particular 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 en

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