nied
of comfort to the heart and systematic development to the mind, the men
who, with girded loins and scrips in their hands, had long wandered
disconsolately on the shores of a seething ocean, now saw its waters
parted, and crossed upon dry ground. Before them stretched the vast
wilderness of German Philosophy. To their bewildered gaze, each system
was an Arabia Felix, and every axiom a graceful palm.

Meanwhile, a second influence was at work among the orthodox, an
influence that tended to the same great result, no longer an accident,
but a necessity of the age. The _Biographia Literaria_ and _The Friend_
of Coleridge, embodying a dwarfed but not distorted version of the
metaphysical system of Kant, which had created a profound sensation in
England, met with an even more enthusiastic reception in this country.
The Christian character of their author was beyond reproach, his genius
undisputed; as a poet he ranked among those to whom Great Britain owed
the laurel; and as an essayist, even the bitterest critics yielded him
the palm. When, therefore, this man, one of the most evangelical of his
time in the Established Church, brought to the aid of a time-honored and
beloved theology the principles of that very philosophy which was deemed
by others its fiercest antagonist, not a few who had been hitherto
deterred from its investigation by a dread of the accusation of heresy,
eagerly availed themselves of his labors. His _Aids to Reflection_ was
presented to the American public under the patronage of Dr. Marsh, late
president of Burlington College, Vt. An elaborate preliminary essay by
this eminently pious clergyman established the claims of the work to
favor, and it was even taken up as a text-book in Amherst and one or two
liberal Congregational universities in New England.

The effort of Coleridge, rendered obscure by his turgid and florid
style, was to explain the religious doctrines of Archbishop Leighton and
the early Puritans, which he held as orthodox, by means of the momentous
distinction between Reason and the Understanding, which he borrowed from
the _Critik der Reinen Vernunft_ of Kant. However plausible, when
disencumbered of its poetical drapery, the theory of Coleridge may be,
and however convincing, _so far as it goes_, of the truth of his
principles, we can not forget that the final tendency of the critical
philosophy of Kant is, if not a positive approach to skepticism, at
least to afford a scientific ba