ered it
and never in a human heart was it conceived'. He presses very hard on
the tricks of the 'routiniers of desk and pulpit'; forced and
fantastic interpretations; 'the strange--in all other writings
unexampled--practice of bringing together into logical dependency
detached sentences from books composed at the distance of centuries,
nay, sometimes a millennium, from each other, under different
dispensations, and for different objects.'

Certainly he is much farther from bibliolatry than from the perfect
freedom of the humanist interpreters. Still he has not freed himself
from the notion of a sacred canon; he cannot regard the books of
Scripture simply as fruits of the human spirit; his criticism is not
entirely disinterested. The difficulties he finds are chiefly the
supposed immoralities of Scripture; just those difficulties which fade
away before the modern or relative spirit, which in the moral world,
as in the physical traces everywhere change, growth, development. Of
historical difficulties, of those deeper moral difficulties which
arise, for instance, from a consideration of the constitutional
unveracity of the Oriental mind, he has no suspicion. He thinks that
no book of the New Testament was composed so late as A.D. 120.

Coleridge's undeveloped opinions would be hardly worth stating except
for the warning they afford against retarding compromises. In reading
these letters one never doubts what Coleridge tells us of himself:
'that he loved truth with an indescribable awe,' or, as he beautifully
says, 'that he would creep towards the light, even if the light had
made its way through a rent in the wall of the temple.' And yet there
is something sad in reading them by the light which twenty-five years
have thrown back upon them. Taken as a whole, they contain a fallacy
which a very ardent lover of truth might have detected.

The Bible is not to judge the spirit, but the spirit the Bible. The
Bible is to be treated as a literary product. Well, but that is a
conditional, not an absolute principle--that is not, if we regard it
sincerely, a delivery of judgement, but only a suspension of it. If we
are true to the spirit of that, we must wait patiently the complete
result of modern criticism. Coleridge states that the authority of
Scripture is on its trial--that at present it is not known to be an
absolute resting-place; and then, instead of leaving that to aid in
the formation of a fearless spirit, the spirit whi