History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology

by J. F. Hurst

The war which had agitated England, with the rest of Europe, came to a close in 1815. Immediately afterward domestic polities needed adjustment. "The disabilities were swept away," says a writer, "the House of Commons was reconstituted, the municipalities were reformed, slavery was abolished."[142] In due time the nation became adjusted to peace; the popular mind lost its nervousness; the universities returned to their sober thinking; and the Church took a careful survey to ascertain what had been lost in the recent conflict, what gained, and what new fields lay ready for her enterprise. But very soon fresh political combinations attracted the attention of all classes. The revolutionary changes and counter-changes in France were watched with eager attention lest Waterloo might be avenged in some unexpected manner. At home, church parties were reviving the old antagonisms described by the pen of Macaulay. The popular mind has thus been continually directed toward some exciting theme. England has not had a day of leisure during the whole of the last half-century, when she could come to a judicious conclusion concerning that class of her thinkers who, though they make theology their profession, are so intensely independent as to attach themselves to no creed or ecclesiastical organization. But they have been thinking all the time, and the outgrowth of their thought is now visible.

English Rationalism consists of three departments: Philosophical, Literary, and Critical Rationalism. Whenever infidelity has arisen, whether within or without the Church, it has usually developed these forms. Philosophy has furnished undevout reason with a fund of speculative objections to revelation; literature has dazzled and bewildered the young and all lovers of romance; and criticism has seized the deductions of science, language, and ethnology, and by their combined aid aimed at the overthrow of the historical and inspired basis of faith. Each of these three agents is in constant danger of arrogance and error. The first, by a single false assumption, may lose its way; the second, by making too free use of the imagination, can easily forget when it is dealing with faith and facts; and the third, by one act of over-reaching, is liable to become puerile, fanciful, and unreliable. The philosopher, the littérateur, and the exegete need to be less observant of the surrounding world than of the purity of their own inner life and the teachings of the Holy Spirit.

Philosophical Rationalism in England commenced with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A comprehensive view of that metaphysician produces a painful impression. Though gifted with capacity for any sphere of thought, he did not excel in either so far as to enable us to assign him a fixed place in literature. He is known as poet, theologian, and philosopher. But his own desire was that posterity might regard him as a theologian. In addition to this indeterminateness of position, which always seriously detracts from a great name, Coleridge presents the unfortunate example of a man who, instead of laboring with settled convictions, and achieving success by virtue of their operation, seems to have only striven after them. His indefinite status was the result of that theological difficulty which proved his greatest misfortune. His sentiments never partook of an evangelical character until the latter part of his life. His habits of thought had become confirmed, and it was quite too late to counteract the influence of many views previously expressed.

So far as we are able to collect the opinions of Coleridge by fragments from his writings, we discover two elements, which, coming from totally different sources, and originating in different ages, harmonized in his mind and constituted the mass of his speculations. One was Grecian, taking its rise in Plato and afterward becoming assimilated to Christianity at Alexandria. The other was German, derived directly from Kant, and undergoing no improvement by its processes of transformation at the hands of that philosopher's successors. "From the Greek," says Dr. Shedd, "he derived the doctrine of Ideas, and fully sympathized with his warmly-glowing and poetic utterance of philosophic truths. From the German he derived the more strictly scientific part of his system—the fundamental distinctions between the Understanding and the Reason (with the sub-distinction of the latter into Speculative and Practical), and between Nature and Spirit. With him also he sympathized in that deep conviction of the absolute nature and validity of the great ideas of God, Freedom, and Immortality—of the binding obligation of conscience—and generally of the supremacy of the Moral and Practical over the purely Speculative. Indeed, any one who goes to the study of Kant, after having made himself acquainted with the writings of Coleridge, will be impressed by the spontaneous and vital concurrence of the latter with the former—the heartiness and entireness with which the Englishman enters into the method and system of this, in many respects, greatest philosopher of the modern world."[143]

The Platonic element in the speculations of Coleridge is of earlier date than the German. It was his reliance until introduced to the captivating opinions of the philosopher of Königsberg. But it never wholly left him,—it was the enchantment of his life.

He had severe struggles. His conquest of the habit of opium-eating, contracted to soothe physical suffering, is an index of the persistent purpose of the man. At first an ardent Unitarian, he was once about to assume charge of a congregation at Shrewsbury. But he finally declined the offer, by saying that, "Active zeal for Unitarian Christianity, not indolence or indifference, has been the motive of my declining a local and solid settlement as preacher of it."[144]

The media through which he passed in search of light were numerous. He seems to have gone to Germany under the impression that he would there find what he had fruitlessly sought in England. No one will deny that the philosophy of Kant was better than the English empirical system of the eighteenth century, which was the best metaphysical pabulum he had received at home. He applied himself to the assiduous study of Kant's disciples, but the master satisfied him best. Nevertheless, Coleridge was not mentally adapted to the Kantian system. He had a psychical affinity for Schelling. He loved him as a brother. He was charmed with his vivid imagination, warm admiration of all natural forms, and ardent, impulsive temperament. Schelling's philosophy was Spinozism in poetry, and there can be no question of Coleridge's former adoption of some parts of the Hollander's naturalism. But his tenacity to them, as well as his subsequent affiliation with Schelling, was short-lived. When he awoke to the unmistakable stratum of Pantheism underlying Schelling's system, he hastily forsook it, and his diatribes indignantly hurled against one whom he had so enthusiastically admired are the more notable because of his former intense sympathy. From Schelling he returned once more to Kant as the thinker who had more closely approximated the truth. His mind must have undergone a total revolution when he could write such words as these: "Spite of all the superior airs of the Natur-Philosophie, I confess that in the perusal of Kant I breathe the air of good sense and logical understanding with the light of reason shining in it and through it; while in the Physics of Schelling I am amused with happy conjectures, and in his Theology I am bewildered by positions which, in their first sense, are transcendental (überfliegend), and in their literal sense scandalous."[145]

Coleridge became firmly settled in theistic faith. Occupying that as his final position, he is destined to wield a great salutary power over English thought. Dr. Shedd, in estimating the probable future influence of his theistic system, says: "Now as the defender and interpreter of this decidedly and profoundly theistic system of philosophy, we regard the works of Coleridge as of great and growing worth, in the present state of the educated and thinking world. It is not to be disguised that Pantheism is the most formidable opponent which truth has to encounter in the cultivated and reflecting classes. We do not here allude to the formal reception and logical defense of the system, so much as to that pantheistic way of thinking, which is unconsciously stealing into the lighter and more imaginative species of modern literature, and from them is passing over into the principles and opinions of men at large. This popularized Naturalism—this Naturalism of polite literature and of literary society—is seen in the lack of that depth and strength of tone, and that heartiness and robustness of temper, which characterize a mind into which the personality of God, and the responsibility of man cut sharply, and which does not cowardly shrink from a severe and salutary moral consciousness.... The intensely theistic character of the philosophy of Coleridge is rooted and grounded in the Personal and the Spiritual, and not in the least in the Impersonal and the Natural. Drawing in the outset, as we have remarked above, a distinct and broad line between these two realms, it keeps them apart from each other, by affirming a difference in essence, and steadfastly resists any and every attempt to amalgamate them into one sole substance. The doctrine of creation, and not of emanation or of modification, is the doctrine by which it constructs its theory of the Universe, and the doctrine of responsible self-determination, and not of irresponsible natural development, is the doctrine by which it constructs its systems of Philosophy and Religion."[146]

The Platonic portion of the views of Coleridge is more apparent in his theology than in his philosophy. In his Confession of Faith, written November 3, 1816, he avows his adherence to some of the prime doctrines of revealed truth. He declares his free agency; defines God to be a Being in whom supreme reason and a most holy will are one with infinite power; acknowledges man's fallen nature, that he is "born a child of wrath;" and holds Christ Jesus to be the Word which was with God from all eternity, assumed human nature to redeem man, and by his merits secured for us the descent of the Holy Spirit and the impartation of his free grace. In the Preface to the Aids to Reflection he thus states his object in writing that work: "To exhibit a full and consistent scheme of the Christian Dispensation, and more largely of all the peculiar doctrines of the Christian faith; and to answer all the objections to the same, which do not originate in a corrupt will rather than an erring judgment; and to do this in a manner intelligible for all who, possessing the ordinary advantages of education, do in good earnest desire to form their religious creed in the light of their own convictions, and to have a reason for the faith which they profess. There are indeed mysteries, in evidence of which no reasons can be brought. But it has been my endeavor to show that the true solution of the problem is, that these mysteries are reason, reason in its highest form of self-affirmation."[147]