ages, opposed as he was to the application of that idea made by Papists. His religious system, according to his own view of it, might be described as exhibiting the universal ideas of Christianity, not those which have been consciously recognized always, everywhere, and by all, but those which the reason and spiritual sense of all men, when sufficiently developed, bear witness to, explained according to a modern philosophy, which purports to be no mere new thinking, but inclusively, all the thought that has been and now is in the world. Such was the aim and design of his doctrine. How far he made it good is not to be determined here.*

They who differ from me on this question may have gone deeper into my Father's mind than myself. I will only say in support of my own impressions, that they are derived from a general survey of his writings, late and early, such as few beside myself can have taken, and that I came to the study of them with no interest but the common interest in truth, which all mankind possess, to bias my interpretation. Indeed I can conceive of no influence calculated to affect my judgment, except the natural wish, in my mind sufficiently strong, to find my Father's opinions as near as may be to established orthodoxy,- -as little as possible out of harmony with the notions and feelings of the great body of pious and reflective persons in his own native land. To me, with this sole bias on my mind, it is manifest, that his system of. belief, intellectually considered, differs materially from "Catholic" doctrine as commonly understood, and that this difference during the latter years of his meditative life, instead of being shaded off,

* Since the chief part of this preface was written I have become acquainted with Archdeacon Hare's Mission of the Comforter, which I dare to pronounce a most valuable work, meaning that I find it so, without the presumption, which in me would be great indeed, of pretending to enter fully into its merits. I have had the satisfaction of meeting with remarks upon my Father in the preface and in the notes of which the second volume consists, confirmatory of some which I have ventured to make myself. Even the dedication coincides with the views given above, for it is this: "To the honored memory of S. T. Coleridge, the Christian philosopher, who through dark and winding paths of speculation was led to the light, in order that others by his guidance might reach that light, without passing through the darkness, these Sermons on the Work of the Spirit are dedicated, with deep thankfulness and reverence, by one of the many pupils, whom his writings have helped to discern the sacred concord and unity of human and divine truth."

became more definite and boldly developed. How should it have been otherwise, unless he had abandoned that modern philosophy, which he had adopted on the deepest and fullest deliberation; and how, without such abandonment, could he have embraced a doctrinal system based on a philosophy fundamentally different? How could he who believed that "a desire to bottom all our convictions on grounds of right reason is inseparable from the character of a Christian," acquiesce in a system, which suppresses the exercise of the individual reason and judgment in the determination of faith, as to its content; would have the whole matter, for the mass of mankind, decided by feeling and habit apart from conscious thought; and bids the soul take refuge in a home of Christian truth, in which its higher faculties are not at home, but reside like slaves and aliens in the land of a conqueror? To his latest hour, though ever dwelling with full faith on the doctrines of Redemption and original sin, in what he considered the deepest and most real sense attainable by man, he yet, to his latest hour, put from him some of the so-called orthodox notions and modes of explaining those doctrines. My Father's whole view of what theologians term grace--the internal spiritual relations of God with man, his conception of its nature in a theoretical point of view, differs from that which most "Catholics" hold themselves bound to receive unaltered from the primitive and mediaval Christian writers; for in my Father's belief, the teachers of those days knew not what spirit was, or what it was not, metaphysically considered; in no wise therefore could he receive their explanations of the spiritual as sound divinity, readily as he might admit that many of them had such insight into the Christian scheme as zeal and the ardor of a new love secure to the student of Holy Writ. Religion must have some intellectual form; must be viewed through the medium of intellect; and if the medium is clouded the object is necessarily obscured. The great aim and undertaking of modern mental philosophy is to clarify this inward eye, rather than to enlarge its sphere of vision, except so far as the one involves the other-to show what spiritual things are not, and thus to remove the obstructions which prevent men from seeing, as mortals may see, what they are.

Those who maintain certain doctrines, or rather metaphysical views of doctrine, and seek to prove them Scriptural, simply because they were doctrines of early Christian writers, ought to look

in the face the plain fact that some of the most influential of those early writers were materialists,—not as holding the soul to be the mere result of bodily organization, but as holding the soul itself to be material;-ought gravely to consider, whether it is reasonable to reject the philosophy of a certain class of divines, and yet cling "limpet-like" to their forms of thought on religious questions, forms obviously founded upon, and conformed to, that philosophy. They believed the soul to be material,-corporeal. Of this assertion, the truth of which is well known to men who have examined into the history of metaphysical and psychological opinion, I can not give detailed proofs in this place; but in passing I refer the reader to Tertullian De Resurr. Carn. cap. xvii. and De Anima, cap. ix. ; to Irenæus, Contra Hæreses, Lib. ii. cap. xix. 6, and to the preface of the learned Benedictine to the latter, p. 161, Artic. XI. De Animarum natura et statu post mortem. What are we to be governed in religious metaphysique and the rationale of belief by men who thought that the soul was poured into the body and there thickened like jelly in a mould ?-that the inner man took the form of the outer, having eyes and ears and all the other members, like unto the body, only of finer stuff?-its corpulency being consolidated by densation and its effigy formed by expression? This was the notion of Cyprian's master, the acute Tertullian, and that of Irenæus was like unto it. He compares the soul to water frozen in a vessel, which takes the form of the vessel in which it freezes,t evidently supposing, with Tertullian, that the firm substantial body moulded the fluent and aerial soul-that organization was the organizer. It appears that in those days the vulgar held the soul to be incorporeal, according to the views of Plato and other

* Mr. Scott, in his impressive Lectures on the evolution of Philosophy out of Religion, maintained the materialism of the early Christian writers. ↑ Contra Hæreses. Lib. ii. cap. xix. 6.

A primordio enim in Adam concreta et configurata corpori anima, ut totius substantiæ, ita et conditionis istius semen efficit. Tertull. De Anima. Cap. ix. ad finem.

§ Tertull. De Res. Car. Cap. xvii. in initio.-aliter anima non capiat passionem tormenti seu refrigerii, utpote incorporalis: hoc enim vulgus existimat. Nos autem animam corporalem et hic profitemur et in suo volumine probamus, &c. On this passage Dr. Pusey observes in a note, that it attests “the immateriality of the soul" to have been "the general belief.” I think it attests it to have been the belief of the common people, but not that it was the prevailing opinion with Christian divines of that age.

stupid philosophers, combated in the treatise De Anima; but that orthodox Christian divines looked upon that as an impious unscriptural opinion. Justin Martyr argues against Platonic notions of the soul in his Dialogue with Trypho. As for the vulgar, they have ever been in the habit of calling the soul incorporeal, yet reasoning and thinking about it, as if it had the properties of body. The common conception of a ghost accords exactly with Tertullian's description of the soul-a lucid aerial image of the outward man. Thus did these good Fathers change soul into body, and condense spirit into matter; thus did they reverse the order of nature, contradict the wisdom of ages, and even run counter to the instinctive belief of mankind, in recoiling from Gnosticism; thus deeply did they enter into the sense of St. Paul's high sayings about the heavenly body and the utter incompatibility of flesh and blood with the Kingdom of Heaven! As they conceived the soul to be material, so they may very naturally have conceived it capable of receiving and retaining the Spirit, as a material vessel may receive and retain a liquid or any other substance; and, in their conception, within the soul may no more have implied any affection of the soul itself, than within the box or basin implies any change in the stone or metal of which the receptacle was made. Indeed this sensuous way of conceiving spiritual subjects is apparent in some of the passages from old writers that are appealed to in support of what Archdeacon Hare happily calls, "baptismal transubstantiation;" as, for instance, one cited in the Tract for the Times called, by a misnomer, as I think, Scriptural views of Holy Baptism,† the

* Ven. 1747, pp. 106 and 111. Justin Martyr and Tatian denied the original immortality of the soul on religious grounds, and the former affirms that it is not simple, but consists of many parts, p. 271.

"If the sun being without, and fire by being near or at a little distance from bodies, warmeth our bodies, what must we say of the Divine Spirit, which is indeed the most vehement fire, kindling the inner man, although it dwell not within but be without? It is possible then, in that all things are possible to God, that one may be warmed, although that which warmeth him be not in himself." From Ammonius. Scriptural Views, p. 264, 4th edit. This writer evidently supposes the proper Indwelling to be distinct from influence. My Father, in his MS. remains, declares against the opinion of those who make "the indwelling of the Spirit an occupation of a place, by a vulgar equivoque of the word within, inward, &c." "For example," says he, "a bottle of water let down into the sea.-The water contained and the surrounding water are both alike in fact outward or without the glass,

author whereof is so fervent, so scriptural in spirit and intention, that he almost turns all he touches into Scripture, as Midas turned all he touched into gold. How the gold looked when Midas was away I know not; but to me Dr. Pusey's Scriptural views, apart from his persuasive personal presence, which ever pervades his discourses and constitutes their great effect upon the heart,—seem but brass beside the pure gold of Holy Writ; his alien piety gilds and hides them. The more we polish brass the more brassy it appears; and so, these views only seem to my mind the more discrepant from Holy Writ, the more clearly and learnedly they are set forth. In Scripture faith is required as the condition of all spiritual influence for purely spiritual and moral effects, and that primary regeneration, which precedes a moral one in time, and is not necessarily the ground of a change of heart and life, was never derived from the Word of God, but has been put into it by a series of inferences, and is supported principally by an implicit reliance on the general enlightenment of the early Christian writers. The doctrine may not be directly injurious to morality, since it allows actual faith to be a necessary instrument in all moral renovation; but the indirect practical consequences of insisting upon shadows as if they were realities, and requiring men to accept as a religious verity of prime importance a senseless dogma, the offspring of false metaphysics, must be adverse to the interests of religion. Such dogmatism has a bad effect on the habits of thought by weakening the love and perception of truth, and it is also injurious by producing disunion and mutual distrust among Christians.

The subtlest matter has all the properties of matter as much as the grossest. Let us see how this notion, that the soul consists of subtle matter, affects the form of doctrine, by trying it on that of baptism. The doctrine insisted on as primitive by a large party in the Church, nay set forth as the very criterion stantis vel cadentis Ecclesiæ Anglicana, by some of them, is this, that, in the moment of baptism, the soul receives the Holy Spirit within it; that the Holy Spirit remains within the soul,

but the antithetic relation of the former to the latter is expressed by the preposition in or within: and this improper, sensuous, merely relative sense of within, indwelling, &c. it is alas! but too plain that many of our theological Routiniers apply, though without perhaps any distinct consciousness of their Thought, to spiritual Presence!"