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,[29] 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.[30]
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.
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.