the reason is a discovery in
psychology which Coleridge has a good will to make, and that is all;
that he has got no farther than the old vague desire to escape from
the limitations of thought by some extraordinary mystical faculty.
Some of the clergy eagerly welcomed the supposed discovery. In their
difficulties they had often appealed in the old simple way to
sentiment and emotion as of higher authority than the understanding,
and on the whole had had to get on with very little philosophy. Like
M. Jourdain, they were amazed to find that they had been all the time
appealing to the reason; now they might actually go out to meet the
enemy. Orthodoxy might be cured by a hair of the dog that had bitten
it.

Theology is a great house, scored all over with hieroglyphics by
perished hands. When we decipher one of these hieroglyphics, we find
in it the statement of a mistaken opinion; but knowledge has crept
onward since the hand dropped from the wall; we no longer entertain
the opinion, and we can trace the origin of the mistake. Dogmas are
precious as memorials of a class of sincere and beautiful spirits, who
in a past age of humanity struggled with many tears, if not for true
knowledge, yet for a noble and elevated happiness. That struggle is
the substance, the dogma only its shadowy expression; received
traditionally in an altered age, it is the shadow of a shadow, a mere
[Greek: triton eidolon], twice removed from substance and reality. The
true method then in the treatment of dogmatic theology must be
historical. Englishmen are gradually finding out how much that method
has done since the beginning of modern criticism by the hands of such
writers as Baur. Coleridge had many of the elements of this method:
learning, inwardness, a subtle psychology, a dramatic power of
sympathy with modes of thought other than his own. Often in carrying
out his own method he gives the true historical origin of a dogma,
but, with a strange dullness of the historical sense, he regards this
as a reason for the existence of the dogma now, not merely as reason
for its having existed in the past. Those historical elements he could
not envisage in the historical method, because this method is only one
of the applications, the most fruitful of them all, of the relative
spirit.

After Coleridge's death, seven letters of his on the inspiration of
Scripture were published, under the title of _Confessions of an
Inquiring Spirit_. This little book