they seek it by the West he reaches it by an Easterly voyage; I mean that he is as consistently and regu larly 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 con nected, 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 judg ment 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.13

13 Since the chief part of this preface was written I have become acquainted with Archdeacon's Hare's Mission of the

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 beside 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

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 honoured 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."

lxxiv How his Christian Philosophy differs from

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 mankind, 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 explanations 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 ardour 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 shew 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. xvii. and De Anima, cap. ix.; to Irenæus, Contra Hæreses, Lib. ii. cap.

14

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

lxxvi He did not admit the religious Psychology

xix. 6. and to the preface of the learned Benedictine to the latter, p. 161. Artic. XI. De Animarum natura et statu post mortem. What are we to be governed in religious metaphysique and the ra tionale 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 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 b water frozen in a vessel, which takes the form of the vessel in which it freezes, 15 evidently supposing, with Tertullian, that the firm substantial body moulded the fluent and aerial soul 16-that organization was the organizer. It appears that in those days the vulgar held the soul to be incorporeal,1 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

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.