ciples of morality spring, and in it find their sanction. This truth Coleridge reiterated in every variety of form.

But while he is thus strong in placing the foundation of individual morality in Reason, in his sense of that word, he repudiates those theories which would draw from the same source the first principles of political government. In opposition to these theories, he held that each form of government is sufficiently justified, when it can be shown that it is suitable for the circumstances of the particular nation. Therefore no one form of government can lay claim to be the sole rightful one. Thus to prudence or expediency Coleridge assigns a place in political questions which he denies to it in moral ones. Full of power is his whole argument against Rousseau, Paine, and others of that day, who maintained the social contract and the rights of man, and, laying the grounds of political right exclusively in Reason, held that nothing was rightful in civil society which could not be deduced from the primary laws of reason. "Who," asked Rousseau," shall dare prescribe a law of moral action for any rational being, considered as a member of a state, which does not flow immediately from that reason which is the fountain of all morality?" Whereto Coleridge replies, Morality looks not to the outward act, but to the internal maxim of actions. But politics look solely to the outward act. The end of good government is to regulate the actions of particular bodies of men, as shall be most expedient under given circumstances. How, then, can the same principle be employed to test the expediency of political rules and the purity of inward motives? He then goes on to show that when Rousseau asserted that every human being possessed of Reason had in him an inalienable sovereignty, he applied to actual man— compassed about with passions, errors, vices, and infirmities what is true of the abstract Reason alone; that all he asserted of "that sovereign will, to which the right of legislation belongs, applies to no human being, to no assemblage of human beings, least of all to the mixed multitude that makes up the people; but entirely and exclusively to Reason itself, which, it is true, dwells in every man potentially, but actually and in perfect purity in no man, and in no body of men.' And this reasoning he clinches by an instance and an argument, often since repeated, though we know not whether Coleridge was the first to employ it. He shows that the constituent assembly of France, whenever they tried to act out these principles

of pure Reason, were forced to contravene them. They excluded from political power children, though reasonable beings, because in them Reason is imperfect; women, because they are dependent. But is there not more of Reason in many women, and even in some children, than in men dependent for livelihood on the will of others, the very poor, the infirm of mind, the ignorant, the depraved? Some reasonable beings must be disfranchised. It comes then to a question of degrees. And how are degrees to be determined? Not by pure reason, but by rules of expedience, founded on present observation and past experience. But the whole of Coleridge's reasoning against Rousseau and Cartwright's universal suffrage is well worth the attention of those advanced thinkers of the present day, who are beginning once again, after a lapse of half a century, to argue about political rights on grounds of abstract reason. They will there find, if they care to see it, the whole question placed not on temporary arguments, but on permanent principles.

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But keen as was Coleridge's interest in political and moral subjects, and in whatever affects the well-being 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 thoughts absent; but the fullest exposition of 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 Remains. Before, however, adverting to these opinions, it may be well to remember, that, much as Coleridge thought and reasoned on religion, it was his firm conviction, founded on experience, that the way to an assured faith, that faith which gives life and peace, is not to be won by dint of argument. Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of the need of it, and you may safely trust it to its own evidence, remembering always the express declaration of Christ himself: 'No man cometh to me, unless the Father leadeth him."" So it was with himself. Much as he philosophized, philosophy was not his soul's haven; not thence did his help come. It may have cleared away outlying hindrances, but it was not this that led him up to the stronghold of hope. Through the wounds made in his own spirit, through the brokenness of a heart humbled and made contrite by the experience of his own sin and utter helplessness, entered in the faith which gave rest, the peace which "settles

where the intellect is meek." Once his soul had reached the citadel, his ever-busy eye and penetrating spirit surveyed the nature of the bulwarks, and examined the foundations, as few before had done. And the world has the benefit, whatever it may be, of these surveys. But though Coleridge was a religious philosopher, let it not be supposed that he put more store by the philosophy than the religion. He knew well, and often insisted, that religion is life rather than science, and that there is a danger, peculiar to the intellectual man, of turning into speculation what was given to live by. He knew that the intellect, busy with ideas about God, may not only fail to bring a man nearer the divine life, but may actually tend to withdraw him from it. For the intellect takes in but the phantom of the truth, and leaves the total impression, the full power of it, unappropriated. And hence it comes that those truths which, if felt by the unlearned at all, go straight to the heart and are taken in by the whole man, are apt, in the case of the philosopher and the theologian, to stop at the outside region of the understanding, 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" stands unrepealed. Coleridge knew this well. In his earliest interview with De Quincey, he said

"that prayer with the whole soul was the highest energy of which the human heart was 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 most the 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 coordinate 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 distinctions 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.

was

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 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 I 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. But as all language

world to his sense of right and wrong. Life is full of inscrutable facts which cannot be made by us to fit into any moral standard of ours. All that the moral judgment has a right to say to them is to refuse to believe any proposed interpretation of them which contradicts the plain laws of right and wrong, any interpretation which 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 acquiesence 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, 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 judgment-seat the first off hand 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 so

lution, 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.

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 the spiritual supports of his soul, he employed his powers of thought upon them, and drew them out into intellectual formulas more satisfactory to himself probably than to others, yet these philosophizings, made for the purpose 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