r Unitarian
influence. He then reverted to the relation in which his ecclesiastical
instincts were satisfied. We read his _Aids to Reflection_ and his
_Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_, and wonder how they can ever have
exerted a great influence. Nevertheless, they were fresh and stimulating
in their time. That Coleridge was a power, we have testimony from men
differing among themselves so widely as do Hare, Sterling, Newman and
John Stuart Mill. He was a master of style. He had insight and breadth.
Tulloch says of the _Aids_, that it is a book which none but a thinker
upon divine things will ever like. Not all even of these have liked it.
Inexcusably fragmentary it sometimes seems. One is fain to ask: What
right has any man to publish a scrap-book of his musings? Coleridge had
the ambition to lay anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. The
_Aids_ were but of the nature of prolegomena. For substance his
philosophy went back to Locke and Hume and to the Cambridge Platonists.
He had learned of Kant and Schleiermacher as well. He was no
metaphysician, but a keen interpreter of spiritual facts, who himself
had been quickened by a particularly painful experience. He saw in
Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of our
spiritual being and the remedy for its disorder. The evangelical
tradition brought religion to a man from without. It took no account of
man's spiritual constitution, beyond the fact that he was a sinner and
in danger of hell. Coleridge set out, not from sin alone, but from the
whole deep basis of spiritual capacity and responsibility upon which sin
rests. He asserts experience. We are as sure of the capacity for the
good and of the experience of the good as we can be of the evil. The
case is similar as to the truth. There are aspects of truth which
transcend our powers. We use words without meaning when we talk of the
plans of a being who is neither an object for our senses nor a part of
our self-consciousness. All truth must be capable of being rendered into
words conformable to reason. Theologians had declared their doctrines
true or false without reference to the subjective standard of judgment.
Coleridge contended that faith must rest not merely upon objective data,
but upon inward experience. The authority of Scripture is in its
truthfulness, its answer to the highest aspirations of the human reason
and the most urgent necessities of the moral life. The doctrine of an
atonem