Samuel Coleridge - The Complete Essays, Lectures & Letters of S. T. Coleridge (Illustrated)

The following is Coleridge’s Comment on the Letter, to which allusion has been made, and from the date seems to have been written during his residence at Malta:

“February 12, 1805. — Thinking during my perusal of Horsley’s letters in reply to Dr. Priestley’s objections to the Trinity on the part of Jews, Mahometans, and Infidels, it burst upon me at once as an awful truth, what seven or eight years ago I thought of proving with a ‘hollow faith’, and for an ‘ambiguous purpose’, my mind then wavering in its necessary passage from Unitarianism (which, as I have often said, is the religion of a man, whose reason would make him an atheist, but whose heart and common sense will not permit him to be so) through Spinosism into Plato and St. John. No Christ, no God! This I now feel with all its needful evidence of the understanding: would to God my spirit were made conform thereto — that no Trinity, no God! That Unitarianism in all its forms is idolatry, and that the remark of Horsley is most accurate; that Dr. Priestley’s mode of converting the Jews and Turks is, in the great essential of religious faith, to give the name of Christianity to their present idolatry — truly the trick of Mahomet, who, finding that the mountain would not come to him, went to the mountain. O! that this conviction may work upon me and in me, and that my mind may be made up as to the character of Jesus, and of historical Christianity, as clearly as it is of the logos, and intellectual or spiritual Christianity — that I may be made to know either their especial and peculiar union, or their absolute disunion in any peculiar sense.

With regard to the Unitarians, it has been shamelessly asserted, that I have denied them to be Christians. God forbid! For how should I know what the piety of the heart may be, or what quantum of error in the understanding may consist, with a saving faith in the intentions and actual dispositions of the whole moral being, in any one individual? Never will God reject a soul that sincerely loves him, be his speculative opinions what they may: and whether in any given instance certain opinions, be they unbelief, or misbelief, are compatible with a sincere love of God, God only can know. But this I have said, and shall continue to say, that if the doctrines, the sum of which I ‘believe’ to constitute the truth in Christ, ‘be’ Christianity, then Unitarianism’ is not, and vice versâ: and that in speaking theologically and ‘impersonally’, i.e. of Psilanthropism and Theanthropism, as schemes of belief — and without reference to individuals who profess either the one or the other — it will be absurd to use a different language, as long as it is the dictate of common sense, that two opposites cannot properly be called by the same name.

I should feel no offence if a Unitarian applied the same to me, any more than if he were to say, that 2 and 2 being 4, 4 and 4 must be 8.”

Biog. Lit. vol. ii. p. 307.

[Footnote 1: In his ‘Literary Life,’ Mr. Coleridge has made the following observation regarding talent and genius:

“For the conceptions of the mind may be so vivid and adequate, as to preclude that impulse to the realising of them, which is strongest and most restless in those who possess more than mere ‘talent’ (or the faculty of appropriating and applying the knowledge of others,) yet still want something of the creative and self-sufficing power of absolute ‘Genius’. For this reason, therefore, they are men of ‘commanding’ genius. While the former rest content between thought and reality, as it were in an intermundium of which their own living spirit supplies the ‘substance’, and their imagination the ever-varying ‘form’; the latter must impress their preconceptions on the world without, in order to present them back to their own view with the satisfying degree of clearness, distinctness, and individuality.”

Vol. i. p. 31.]

[Footnote 2: In consequence of various reports traducing Coleridge’s good name, I have thought it an act of justice due to his character, to notice several mistatements here and elsewhere, which I should otherwise have gladly passed over.]

[Footnote 3: Coleridge was always most ready to pass a censure on what appeared to him a defect in his own composition, of which the following is a proof: — In his introductory remarks to this Greek Ode, printed in the Sibylline Leaves, he observes:

“The Slaves in the West Indies consider Death as a passport to their native country. This sentiment is expressed in the introduction to the ‘Greek Ode on the Slave Trade,’ of which the Ideas are better than the language in which they are conveyed.”

Certainly this is taking no merit to himself, although the Ode obtained the Prize.]

[Footnote 4:

“At the beginning of the French Revolution, Klopstock wrote odes of congratulation. He received some honorary presents from the French Republic (a golden crown, I believe), and, like our Priestley, was invited to a seat in the legislature, which he declined: but, when French liberty metamorphosed herself into a fury, he sent back these presents with a palinodia, declaring his abhorrence of their proceedings; and since then be has been more perhaps than enough an Anti-Gallican. I mean, that in his just contempt and detestation of the crimes and follies of the revolutionists, he suffers himself to forget that the revolution itself is a process of the Divine Providence; and that as the folly of men is the wisdom of God, so are their iniquities instruments of his goodness.”

‘Biographia Literaria,’ vol. ii. p. 243.]

[Footnote 5: Coleridge in the ‘Friend,’ says:

“My feelings, however, and imagination did not remain unkindled in this general conflagration (the French Revolution); and I confess I should be more inclined to be ashamed than proud of myself if they had. I was a sharer in the general vortex, though my little world described the path of its revolution in an orbit of its own. What I dared not expect from constitutions of government and whole nations, I hoped from Religion.”]

[Footnote 6: This is a mistake. The candidate was Mr. Bethell, one of the members for Yorkshire, and not the Bishop of Bangor, as is commonly supposed. Bishop Bethel himself, not long ago, told me this.]

[Footnote 7: The writer of the article above quoted followed Coleridge in the school, and was elected to Trinity College a year after. As I have before observed, he seems to have been well acquainted with his habits; yet, with regard to his feelings on certain points, as his ambition and desire for a college life, I think he must have misunderstood him. Ambition never formed any part of Coleridge’s character. Honours, titles, and distinctions had no meaning for him. His affections, so strong and deep, were likely to be his only stimulants in the pursuit of them.]

[Footnote 8: Frend’s trial took place at Cambridge, in the Vice-Chancellor’s Court, in the year 1793, for sedition and defamation of the Church of England, in giving utterance to and printing certain opinions, founded on Unitarian Doctrines, adverse to the established Church.—’Vide’ State Trials. Sentence of banishment was pronounced against him: which sentence was confirmed by the Court of Delegates, to which Mr. Frend had appealed from the Vice-Chancellor’s Court. He then appealed from the decision of the Court of Delegates, protested against the proceedings, and moved this cause to the Court of King’s Bench. This Court, after an examination of the case, decided, that the proceedings at Cambridge having been strictly formal, they had no power to interfere, and therefore the sentence against Frend remained in full force. Being a Fellow of Jesus’ College at the time that Coleridge was a student, he excited the sympathies of the young and ardent of that day.]