The distinctions and definitions of Coleridge occasion the most serious difficulty in the study of his opinions. His mode of statement more frequently than his conception subjects him to the charge of Rationalism. His life-long error of mistaking theology for metaphysics resulted in his application of philosophical terminology to theological questions; but making every reasonable allowance, we cannot doubt that he had defective views of some of the essential truths of Christianity. He clothes reason with authority to determine what is inspiration, by saying that there can be no revelation "ab extra." Therefore, every man should decide for himself the character of the Scriptures. The power which Coleridge thus places in the hand of man is traceable to his distinction between reason and understanding. He makes the latter the logical, and the former the intuitive faculty. Even beasts possess understanding, but reason, the gift of God to no less creature than man, performs the functions of judgment on supersensual matters. "Reason," says he, "is the power of universal and necessary convictions, the source and substance of truths above sense, and having their evidence in themselves."[148] This admission to Rationalism has been eagerly seized by the Coleridgean school, and elaborated in some of their writings.
Sin, according to Coleridge, is not guilt in the orthodox sense. When Adam fell he merely turned his back upon the sun; dwelt in the shadow; had God's displeasure; was stripped of his supernatural endowments; and inherited the evils of a sickly body, and a passionate, ignorant, and uninstructed soul. His sin left him to his nature, his posterity is heir to his misfortunes, and what is every man's evil becomes all men's greater evil. Each one has evil enough, and it is hard for a man to live up to the rule of his own reason and conscience.[149] Redemption is not salvation from the curse of a broken law, and Christ did not pay a debt for man, because the payer must have incurred the debt himself.[150] But the fruit of his death is the reconciliation of man to God. Man will have a future life, but it was not the specific object of the Christian dispensation to satisfy his understanding that he will live hereafter; neither is the belief of a future state or the rationality of its belief the exclusive attribute of the Christian religion, but a fundamental article of all religion.[151]
All attempts to determine the exact theological position of Coleridge from his own definitions are unsatisfactory. We must derive his real convictions from the spirit and not from the letter of his works. He was devout and reverent, never prosecuting his investigations from a mere love of speculation, but as a sincere inquirer after truth. But his statements have had their natural result in producing a large and vigorous school of thinkers. Never bracing himself to write a philosophical or theological system, but merely stating his views in aphoristic form—as in the Aids to Reflection—he scattered his thoughts as a careless sower, and left them to germinate in the public mind. But many of his opinions have been perverted, and speculations have been based upon them by numerous admirers who, proudly claiming him for authority, thrust upon the world those sentiments which bear less the impress of the master than the counterfeit of the weaker disciple.
A large cluster of important and familiar names appears in testimony of the deep and immediate impression produced by the opinions of Coleridge. Julius Charles Hare, not the least worthy of the number, has been one of the prominent agents in communicating to the English people the principles of that thinker, who was not superior to him in moral earnestness and profound reverence. When lecturing as Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, Hare was attentively heard by John Sterling, Maurice, and Trench. He drank deeply of the spirit of Coleridge, of whom he was ever proud to call himself a "pupil," and who, in connection with Wordsworth, was the instrumentality by which he and others "were preserved from the noxious taint of Byron."[152]
From whatever side we view Hare's life, it is full of interest. When very young he traveled on the Continent, and became delighted with the literature of Germany. He informs us that, "in 1811 he saw the mark of Luther's inkstand on the walls of the Castle of Wartburg, and there first learned to throw inkstands at the devil." His view of sacrifice was very superficial, and similar to that of Maurice. The Jewish offerings were typical "of the slaying and offering up of the carnal nature to God.... The lesson of the cross is to draw nigh to God, not by this work or that work, not by the sacrifice of this thing or that, but by the entire sacrifice and resignation of their whole being to the will of God."[153] Christ did not perform his important mission so much by his death as by his entire life, and his sufferings were only the completion of his task. "His great work was to be completed and made perfect, as every truly great work must be, by suffering. For no work can be really great unless it be against the course of the world.... It was by losing his own life in every possible way—by the agony in the garden; by the flight and denial of those whom he had chosen out of the world to be His companions and friends; by the mockery and cruelty of those whom his goodness and purity rendered more bitter against him; by the frantic and murderous cries of the people, whom he had loaded with every earthly benefit, and whom he desired to crown with eternal blessings; and by the closing sufferings on the cross—that Jesus was to gain his own life, and the everlasting life of all who will believe in Him. All this, then, the whole work of the redemption of mankind, does our Lord in the text declare to be finished."[154]
Hare declares the necessity of faith to Christian life, but he renders it more passive than active by saying that it is a receptive moral endowment capable of large development. Happy is the man who becomes inured to the exalted "habit of faith." Sin is more a matter of regret than of responsibility; inspiration is a doctrine we should not slight, but the language of the Scriptures must not be regarded too tenaciously; due allowance ought to be made for all verbal inaccuracies and discrepancies; miracles are an adjunct to Christian evidence, but their importance is greatly exaggerated, for they are a beautiful frieze, not one of the great pillars in the temple of our faith.
Notwithstanding these evidences of Hare's digression from orthodoxy, we cannot forget that consecration and purity of heart revealed in some of his sermons, and especially in the glowing pages of the Mission of the Comforter. His ministerial life was an example of untiring devotion, and we know not which to admire the more, his labor of love in the rustic parish of Herstmonceaux, or those searching rebukes of Romanism contained in the charges to his clergy. Independent as both his friends and enemies acknowledge him to have been, his misfortune was an excessive reliance upon his own imagination and upon the opinions of those whom he admired. Nature made him capable of intimate friendships, both personal and intellectual. No one can examine his life without loving the man, nor read his fervent words without concluding that the Church has been honored by few men of his noble type. That self-sacrifice and sympathy of which he often spoke feelingly in connection with the humiliation of Christ, were the controlling principles of his heart. Let not the veil with which we would conceal his theological defects obscure, in the least, the brightness of his resplendent character and pure purposes.
No view of Hare's position can be complete without embracing that of his brother-in-law, Maurice; both of whom were ardently sympathetic with Coleridge. But while the former gave a more evangelical cast to his master's opinions than they originally possessed, the latter perverted them by unwarranted speculations. Maurice is now one of the most influential of the Rationalistic teachers of England. He has not employed himself, like Kingsley and others of the Broad Church, in publishing his theological sentiments in the form of religious novels, but has had the commendable frankness to state his opinions without circumlocution, and to furnish us with his creed in a single volume of essays.[155]
Maurice's notion of an ideal creation betrays the media through which he has received it,—from Coleridge to Neo-Platonism, and thence to Plato. The creation of herbs, flowers, beasts, birds, and fishes, as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis, was the bringing forth of kinds and orders, such as they were according to the mind of God, not of actual separate phenomenal existences, such as they present themselves to the senses of man.[156] The creation of man is disposed of in the same ideal way; so that we are inclined to ask the critic if man is not, after all, only a Platonic idea? "What I wish you particularly to notice," says he, "is that the part of the record which speaks of man ideally, according to his place with reference to God, is the part which expressly belongs to the history of creation; that the bringing forth of man in this sense, is the work of the sixth day.... Extend this thought, which seems to rise inevitably out of the story of the creation of man, as Moses delivers it, to the seat of that universe of which he regards man as the climax, and we are forced to the conclusion that in the one case, as in the other, it is not the visible, material thing of which the historian is speaking, but that which lies below the visible material thing, and constitutes the substance which it shows forth."[157]
Maurice assumes also, with Neo-Platonism, that Christ is the archetype of every human being, and that when a man becomes pure, he is only developing the Christ who was within him already. "The Son was really in Saul of Tarsus, and he only became Paul the converted when that Son was revealed in him.... Christ is in every man.... All may call upon God as a reconciled Father. Human beings are redeemed, not in consequence of any act they have done, of any faith they have exercised; their faith is to be grounded on a foregone conclusion; their acts are to be the fruits of a state they already possess."[158]