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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 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 contra-distinguished 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 fal of man.

You ask. When did this fall take place? Has the will of each man chosen evil for itself; and, if so, when? To this Coleridge would reply that each individual will has so chosen; but as to the when, the will belongs to a region of being, is part of an order of things, 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 ; that I am myself capable of moral evil, but not of myself capable of moral good; and that an evil. ground existed in my will previously to any given act, or assignable moment of time, in my own consciousness. I am born a child of wrath. This fearful mystery I pretend not to understand. I cannot even conceive the possibility of it, but I know that it is so. My conscience, the sole fountain of certainty, commands me to believe it, and would itself be a contradiction were it not so; and what is real must be possible."

And the sequel of the same confession thus goes on:—

"I receive, with full and grateful faith, the assurance of revelation that the Word, which is from eternity with God, and is God, aussmed our human nature, in order to redeem me and

all mankind from this our connate corruption.

My reason convinces me that no other mode of this assumption of humanity by the Son of God I believe that redemption is possible. was revealed and realized to us by the Word made flesh, and manifested to us in Jesus Christ, and that his miraculous birth, his agony, his crucifixion, death, resurrection, and ascension, were all both symbols of our redemption, and necessary facts of the awful process.'

Such was his belief in 1816, marking how great a mental revolution he must have gone through since the days when he was a Unitarian preacher. The steps of that change he has himself but partially recorded. But the abandonment of the Hartleian for a more ideal philosophy, the blight that fell on his manhood, his sufferings, and sense of inner misery, then the closer study of the Bible in the light of his own need, and growing intercourse with the works of the elder divines, all these were parts at least of the process. But whatever may have wrought this change, no one who knows anything of Coleridge can doubt that in this, as in opinions of lesser import, he was influenced only by the sincerest desire for truth. Great as may have been his moral defects-fallen, as he may have fallen, in some of the homeliest duties, even below common men, this at least must be conceded to him, that he desired the truth,

hungered and thirsted for it, pursued it with a life-long earnestness, rare even among the best men. In this search for truth, and in his declaration of it when found, self-interest, party feeling, friendship, had no place with him. He had come to believe in some sort in a Trinity in the Godhead, and admitted more or less the personality of the Logos, for some time before he returned fully to the Catholic faith. The belief in the Incarnation and the Redemption by the Cross, as historical facts, were the stumblingblocks which last disappeared. Therefore his final conviction on this subject, as recorded in the Aids to Reflection, is the more worthy of regard, as being the last result of one who had long resisted, and only after profound reflection submitted himself to, this faith. He there lays down, that as sin is the ground or occasion of Christianity, so Redemption is its superstructure; that Redemption and Christianity are equivalent terms. From this he does not attempt to remove the awful mystery, but only to clear away any objections which may spring out of the moral instincts of man against the common interpretation of the doctrine. These are the only difficulties that deserve

an answer.

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In the Redemption, the agent is the Eternal Word made flesh, standing in the place of man to God, and of God to man, fulfilling all righteousness, suffering, dying, and so dying as to conquer death itself, and for all who shall receive him. The redemptive or atoning act of this divine Agent has two sides one that looks Godward, the other that looks manward. The side it turns Godward—that is, the very essence of this act, the cause of man's redemption — is "a spiritual and transcendent mystery which passeth all understanding; its nature, mode, and possibility transcend man's comprehension. But the side that it turns manward that is, the effect toward the redeemed is most simply, and without metaphor, described, as far as it is comprehensible by man, in St. John's words, as the being born anew; as at first we were born in the flesh to the world, so now born in the Spirit to Christ. Christ was made a quickening, that is, a life-making Spirit. This Coleridge believed to be the nearest, most immediate effect on man of the transcendent redemptive act. Closely connected with this first, most immediate effect, are other consequences, which St. Paul has described by four principal metaphors. These consequences, in reference to the sinner, are either the taking away of guilt, as by a great sin-offering, just as, to the transgressor

of the Mosaic law, his civil stain was cleared away by the ceremonial offering of the priest; or the reconciliation of the sinner to God, as the prodigal son is reconciled to the parent whom he has injured; or the satisfying of a debt by the payment of the sum owed to the creditor; or the ransoming, the bringing back from slavery, by payment of the price for the slave. These four figures describe, each in a different way, the result of the great redemptive act on sinful man. This is their true meaning. They are figures intended to bring home to man in a practical way the nature and the greatness of the benefit. Popularly they are transferred back to the mysterious cause, but they cannot be taken as if they really and adequately described the nature of that cause, without leading to confusions. Debt, satisfaction, payment in full, are not terms by which the essential nature of the atoning act, and its necessity, can be literally and adequately expressed. If, forgetting this, we take these expressions literally, and argue from them, as if they gave real intellectual insight into the nature and mode of that greatest of all mysteries, we are straightway landed in moral contradictions. The nature of the redemptive act, as it is in itself, is not to be compassed nor uttered by the language of the human understanding. Such, as nearly as we can give it, was Coleridge's thought upon this awful mystery. Whatever may be thought of these views, one thing is to be observed, that Coleridge did not propound them with any hope of explaining a subject which he believed to be beyond man's power of explanation, but from the earnest desire to clear away moral hindrances to its full acceptance. Such hindrances he believed that human theolo gies, in their attempts to systematize this and other doctrines of Scripture, were from time to time piling up. It was his endeavour, whether successful or not, in what he wrote on this and on every other religious subject, to clear away these hindrances, and to place the truth in a light which shall commend itself to every man's conscience, a light which shall be consistent with such fundamental Scriptures as these : "I, the Lord, speak righteousness, I declare things that are right;" ""God is light, and

in him is no darkness at all." Since his day, men's thoughts have been turned to consider the nature of the atonement, as perhaps they never did before. There is one view, of late years advocated in various forms, which regards the atonement as merely the declaration or exhibition of God's love to sinners, which by its moral

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power awakens them to repentance, and takes away the estrangement of their hearts. This is no doubt part of the truth, but it falls far short of satisfying either man's deeper moral instincts, or those many passages of Scripture which declare Christ's death to be the means of the forgiveness of man's sin. Such interpretations, if taken for the whole, leave out of account the more behind," which Scripture seems to bear witness to, and man's conscience to feel. They take no account of that bearing which Christ's death has toward God, and which Coleridge, while he held it to be incomprehensible, fully believed to exist. On this great question, the nature of the atoning act in its relation to God, some meditations have, since Coleridge's time, been given to the world, which, if they go farther, seem yet in harmony with that which Coleridge thought. We allude to Mr. Campbell's profound work On The Atonement, which, though it does not fully meet all the difficulties, goes further toward satisfying at once the expressions of Scripture and the requirements of conscience than any other theologian we know of has done.

Such are a few samples of Coleridge's theological method and manner of thinking. In the wish to set them forth in something of a systematic order, we have done but scanty justice to the fulness and the practical earnestness which pervades the Aids to Reflection, and have given no notion at all of the prodigality of thought with which his other works run over. It were vain to hope that any words of ours could give an impression of that marvellous range of vision, that richness, that swing, that lightning of genius. Besides his works already noticed, his Lay Sermons with their Appendices, and his Literary Remains, are a very quarry of thought, from which, more than any other books we know, young and reflecting readers may dig wealth of unexhausted ore. Time forbids us to enter on them here. Neither can we do more than merely allude to those remarkable letters, published after his death, in which Coleridge approaches the great question of the inspiration of Scripture. Arnold recognized their appearance as marking an era in theology the most important that had occurred since the Reformation; and the interval that has since passed has fully verified the prediction. To the views of Scripture there propounded Coleridge himself attached much importance. In the words of his nephew, "he pleaded for them so earnestly, as the only middle path of safety

and peace between a godless disregard of the unique and transcendent character of the Bible taken generally, and that scheme of interpretation, scarcely less adverse to the pure spirit of Christian wisdom, which wildly arrays our faith in opposition to our reason, and inculcates the sacrifice of the latter to the former, that to suppress this important part of his solemn convictions would be to misrepresent and betray him."

Having given the fullest scope to his own inquiries on all subjects, yet in a spirit of reverence, he wished others to do the same, believing this to be a condition of arriving at assured convictions of truth. He was full of wise and large-hearted tolerance - not that tolerance, so common and so worthless, which easily bears with all opinions, because it earnestly believes none-but that tolerance, attained but by few, which, holding firmly by convictions of its own, and making conscience of them, would neither coerce nor condemn those who most strongly deny them. Heresy he believed to be an error, not of the head, but of the heart. He distinguished between that internal faith which lies at the base of religious character, and can be judged of only by God, and that belief with regard to facts and doctrines, in which good men may err without moral obliquity. His works abound with such maxims as this: "Resist every false doctrine; but call no man heretic. The false doctrine does not necessarily make the man a heretic; but an evil heart can make any doctrine heretical."

These are a few of the contemplations with which Samuel Taylor Coleridge busied himself during the threescore years of his earthly existence. For more than thirty years now he has been beyond them, inheritor of higher visions, but these he has left behind for us to use them as we may. And since, while men are here, they must needs, if they think at all, sometimes look up to those heights of thought, it may be doubted whether, for persons philosophically disposed, our age and country has produced any abler guide. Those who remember what Coleridge was to their youth, may fear lest in their estimate of him now they should seem to be mere praisers of the past, and yet, if they were to call him the greatest thinker whom Britain has during this century produced, they would be but stating the simple truth. For if any should gainsay this, we should ask, Whom would you place by his side? What one man would you name who has thrown upon the world so great a mass of original thinking, has contributed so many new thoughts

can doubt this, when he regards either the spirit of his works, so deep-thoughted and reverent, so little suited for popularity, or the attitude in which he stood towards all the arbiters of praise in his own generation?

on the most important subjects? His mind work mainly where Coleridge left it. In was a very seed-field of ideas, of which the foundations laid, and the materials colmany have gone to enrich the various de- lected by Coleridge, he will find the best partments of thought, literary, philosophical, helps which British thought affords towards political, and religious; while others still lie building up the much-needed edifice of a embedded in his works, waiting for those spiritual philosophy. And not for the who may still turn them to use. And all philosophy only, but for the general literahe wrote was in the interest of man's higher ture and the politics of our time, what nature, true to his best aspirations. The words of admonition would he have had, if one effort of all his works was to build up he had been still present with us! In his truth from the spiritual side. He brought own day the oracles of Liberalism reserved all his transcendent powers of intellect to for him their bitterest raillery, and he rethe help of the heart, and soul, and spirit paid them with contempt. He would of man against the tyranny of the under- hardly, we imagine, have been more popustanding, that understanding which ever lar with the dominant Liberalism of our strives to limit truth within its own definite time, nor would he have accorded to it much conceptions, and rejects whatever refuses greater respect. Before the intellectual to square with these. This side of philoso- idols of the hour, whatever names they phy, as it is the deepest, is also the most bear, he would not, we conceive, very difficult to build up. Just as in bridging readily have bowed down. Rather he some broad river, that part of the work would have shown to them their own shortwhich has to be done by substructions and comings, as seen in the light of a more piers beneath the water is much more catholic and comprehensive wisdom. Who laborious and important, while it strikes much less upon the senses, than the arches which are reared in open daylight; so the side of truth which holds by the seen and the tangible, which never quits clear-cut conceptions, and refuses to acknowledge whatever will not come within these, is much Above all, Coleridge was a great religious more patent and plausible, and, in this philosopher, and by this how much is country, at least, is more likely to command meant! Not a religious man and a the suffrages of the majority. The advo- philosopher merely, but a man in whom cates of this doctrine experienced for a these two powers met and interpenetrated. time a brief reaction, caused by the influ- There are instances enough in which the ence of Coleridge; for one generation he two stand opposed, mutually denouncing turned the tide against them; but again each other; instances too there are in they are mustering in full force, and bid fair which, though not opposed, they live apart, to become masters of the position. Their the philosophy unleavened by the religion. chief teachers have for some time, by the How rare have the examples, at least merits, it must be owned, of their works, in modern times, been, in which the most become all but paramount in the most original powers of intellect and imagination, ancient seats of learning. In Oxford, for the most ardent search for truth, and the instance, the only two living authors, a largest erudition, have united with reveknowledge of whose works is imperatively rence and simple Christian faith-the required of candidates for highest honours, heart of the child with the wisdom of the belong to this school. And there is no sage! He who has left behind him a counteracting authority speaking from the philosophy, however incomplete in which opposite, that is, the spiritual side of philos- these elements harmoniously combine, has ophy, because no such living voice is done for his fellow-men the highest service amongst us. Whenever such a thinker human thinker can, has helped to lighten shall arise, he will have to take up the the burden of the mystery.

From Fraser's Magazine.
FICTION AND ITS USES.

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know, has confessed that his earliest ambition was to be a coachman. And if this fantastic dream budded and blossomed A FRIEND of the writer's is engaged on a (never to come to fruitage) in the brain of work of great importance, entitled The a future mathematician and college-fellow, Philosophy of Fiction, which he has declar- shall we wonder if gentle maidens dream ed it will take at least three thousand years sometimes of that wonderful prince to come to complete, with a century or two more to from fairy land, on whom leaning they may be allowed for unforeseen delays in the pub- go across the purple mountain-rims into the lication. The proportion of fiction to truth, great world beyond? These are fictions he maintains, in the philosophies, religions, beautiful and pure. Alas for many in no amusements, employments, conversations, way beautiful! Imaginary characters we speeches, newspapers, and advertisements make out for our acquaintance, which form of the world, justifies this calculation. He the hypotheses explaining all their words has often asserted that all the great truths and deeds, characters not to be admiredof life were long ago discovered, and were the nod or hint pregnant with its malignant known as well to Plato as to Descartes or lie-cowardly assentation and idle and Locke, while it still remains to understand slanderous tongues which bring that cloud and generalize the great falsehoods; and between faces, and that hollowness into he believes that the happiness of mankind friendly voices in place of the glad, confiwould be furthered by bringing clearly into dent morning-feeling trust. Well, these the light those "vain opinions, flattering fictions assuredly have their uses, for they hopes, false valuations, unrestrained imagina- are something that may be put under foot, tions and groundless fears" which obscurely and crushed; they may also beget a noble occupy the minds of men. Without following autarkeia, self-sufficiency, or nobler sufficienthese ingenious speculations to an extreme, cy of duty. may we not perceive how much they contain But this essay is not to be a Philosophy of truth? Did we not all begin the world as of Fiction. It merely hints at the vastness romancers, and compose each of us a par- of the subject, and retreats to its own narlour library of novels, domestic, naval, or row plot of ground. There are certain books military, before we had even seen afar off beloved at watering-places, by home the stern realities of long division, orthog- firesides, and even in the "pensive citadels” raphy, or syntax? We began authorship of students which, though forming a less when the pinafores and frocks were very important branch of fiction than many othsmall indeed, and it was not till the silver ers (than the fables convenues of social life, age of our childish imaginings that we could or of history, for instance), have yet been not trust in our dreams without the tangi- bolder than the others, have appropriated ble confirmation of drum or boat or doll. the name, and professed themselves to be not Those works of ours are shelved now, and true, but what at least is very pleasantsomewhat dusty, in the Bodleian Library new: fictions but withal novels. Let the of dreamland, but our places have been ta- reader who would hear something about ken by the little lads and lasses of to-day, these read on. and they are doubtless as full of literary activity as we, their superannuated predecessors, ever were. Two serious eyes fixed on the red hollows of the fire, and two still hands gathered together on the boy's lap; that slight, girlish figure, motionless in the window for half an hour while the shadows are falling these tell us that the romances are making rapid progress, and that the chapters are of enthralling interest. How much we should like to hear one of these tales quite through! You should not wish to know the man who could laugh in a contemptuous way at any of them. They would come to us like echoes of half-forgotten melodies, or like a friend's reminder of the pictures that hung upon the walls of the house where we were children. A writer of certain grave and notable books, which all men of science

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It was Sydney Smith who required for perfect happiness an arm-chair and slippers, a kettle singing its undersong on the fire, a paper of sugar-plums on the mantel-piece, and in his hand a novel. And he rightly enounced the principle on which the novel, at least under such circumstances, should be chosen, when he declared that its first function was to entertain us, to amuse us, to give us agreeable relaxation. Nor let such entertainment be counted a trivial gain. Our health and sanity depend on it. Half an hour's overwork often is enough to make your entire evening an unhappy one. It leaves you fretful and impatient, morbidly sensitive, cross. You find the remarks of your friends and relatives for that evening miserably unphilosophic, paltry, personal; the gossip of your sisters-in-law

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