of the Christian church. The necessity for making the narrative
complete compels us to pass within its limits, and to indicate, though it
be by a brief notice and with a delicate hand, the forms of the movement
of free thought therein which have given rise to the charge of
rationalism. This movement of thought is separated from those just
described, in that it loyally holds that God has revealed His will to man;
but it varies from the general view of the church of Christ in reference
to the extent and manner in which He has been pleased to reveal Himself;
and, under the pressure of the difficulties, doctrinal or literary, which
the progress of knowledge or of speculation has suggested, proposes to
separate in the holy scripture, or in the immemorial teaching of the
church, that which it regards to be the eternal element of revealed truth
from that which it ventures to conceive to be temporary; the heavenly
treasure from the earthen vessels in which it is contained. The literary
parallel to this tendency is not to be found in the deism of the last
century, but in some of the schools of free thought in Germany and France
in the present. Like them it professes to be conservative of revelation,
desiring to surrender a part in order to save the remainder.(973)

The movement is characterised by two forms; the one philosophical, the
other critical. We shall indicate their general character, without
specifying individual writings.(974)

It is perhaps to the influence of Coleridge, more than to that of any
other single person, that the origin of this philosophical movement can be
traced.(975) We have already(976) had occasion to mention the general
design of his philosophy. At a time when the world was wishing to break
with the past, in politics, in literature, and in religion, his spirit was
conservative of older truth, while sympathetic with that which was new. In
looking backwards, he sought to discover what mankind had meant by their
beliefs; in looking around, he asked what were the elements which the
present generation disapproved: and, wishing to eliminate the error of the
past and appropriate the truth of the present, he looked inwards into the
human heart, and thought that he perceived a faculty there which unveiled
to man the eternal, absolute truth,--the true, the beautiful, and the good;
which had been the object of search in all systems, the end for which all
earnest spirits had ever yearned. This faculty, "the reaso