Dedication

To the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, Stanley Grove, Chelsea.

My Dear Mr. Coleridge,

In a note to your volume on the Scriptural character of the English Church, you have alluded to the first edition of these Hints. Your object was to correct one of my many inaccuracies, and this service, which was itself a very kind one, you made more acceptable, by the approbation which you expressed of my general design. Under any circumstances I must have valued such a recognition from one who had bestowed so much serious and intelligent consideration upon the subject of which I had treated; I was still more pleased with it, because there were qualities in your work which might have made me fear that you would be less tolerant of mine. Your scholarlike tone and careful English style, were strikingly contrasted with the crudeness and hastiness which were visible in every part of my Letters to a Quaker. Nevertheless, I found with great delight, that neither you nor the accomplished Editor of Mr. Coleridge’s works had been hindered by these defects from taking an interest in my thoughts, or from recognizing in them one among a thousand indications of the influence which your father’s writings are exercising over the mind of this generation.

Every one who has felt this influence must, I think, be anxious to acknowledge it. You may well be surprised therefore, that in a book of some length I should have referred to it so seldom. Twenty years ago you might have attributed such an omission to a cowardly and dishonourable dread of being associated with an unpopular name. But at the time I wrote, the basest man could not have been affected by such a motive as this, for the different English parties which, during Mr. Coleridge’s lifetime, had only differed in the degrees of their dislike to him, were scrambling for a share of his opinions. It seemed to me that the only danger of another reaction lay in the ambition of his admirers to make him responsible for their statements of his views or their inferences from them. To this evil I wished not to be accessory. I had never enjoyed the privilege of intercourse with him. I had no means therefore of correcting the impressions of him which I had derived from his works. I was of course liable to the greatest mistakes of judgment in my interpretation of these, as well as to the moral temptation of perverting them to my own purposes. I thought it better therefore, to seem even to myself ungrateful and a plagiarist, than to incur the risk of abusing his name to the support of sentiments which he might have disapproved, and perhaps, of hindering some from profiting by his wisdom, because I had taught them to connect it with my follies.

This caution, however, was of little avail. The only two reviews which, so far as I know, bestowed any attention upon my book,—the one treating it with extreme kindness, the other with unbounded contempt,—brought my name into flattering but most undeserved juxtaposition with Mr. Coleridge’s. And I could not help fancying that one of these critics would have been well pleased that its readers should have attributed to the master the monstrous absurdity, self-sufficiency, love of priestcraft, hatred of the rights of conscience, preference of Fathers and Councils to Scripture, which were affirmed to be characteristic of the disciple. Every person, I conceive, who has been thus spoken of, should be ready to explain, as well as he can, how far the charge is true, that he has derived his method of thought from his supposed teacher, and if it be true, to what extent that teacher is answerable for his application of the method. Such an explanation I am anxious to make now for the relief of my own mind, and that I may rescue your father’s memory from any injury which I may have done it. I might have addressed my confession to many dear friends who are admirers of his writings; but I would rather make it to one of his family, first, because I rejoice to think that those who have most profited by what he has taught them, do not and cannot form a school, and because it is most desirable that the English public, with its party notions and tendencies, should not suppose that they form one; and secondly, because my feeling towards him—though, as I have said, not founded upon any personal acquaintance in the ordinary sense of the word—is yet so strictly and vividly personal, that I cannot bear to think of him chiefly as a writer of books, and that I am always delighted to connect him with any human representative.

There are persons who can feel no affection for a book unless they can associate it with a living man. I am not sure whether I labour under this incapacity, but I own that the books of Mr. Coleridge are mainly interesting to me as the biography of one who passed through the struggles of the age to which we are succeeding, and who was able, after great effort and much sorrow, to discover a resting-place. His juvenile poems which exhibit him to us when he was seeking in Unitarianism a refuge from the flatness and the falsehood of a mere State Christianity: the fierce and magnificent ode in which he sees the old European world of convention and oppression falling to pieces, and rejoices in the sight; the noble recantation of his hopes from republican ascendency; his ode to Despondency, embodying so perfectly the feelings of a man who, after the disappointment of all practical hopes, had sought in meditation for deliverance and rest, and then on returning to the actual world had found its glory departed and his capacities of enjoyment dead;—these poems have always seemed to me so intensely and painfully real, and so expressive of what thousands of minds in different measures must have been experiencing, that I do not suppose I have ever done justice to any of them, merely as a work of art. I do not think there is anything inconsistent in this acknowledgment with the belief that in him, as in every great poet, the exercise of the creative faculty implied self-forgetfulness, and the power of passing beyond the region of personal experience. No one can utter the thoughts of other men as well as his own, can be in any degree the spokesman of his time, to whom this quality does not belong. But it consists, I should imagine, nearly always with much of inward suffering. The person who enters most into what a number of others are experiencing, does, in the strictest and liveliest sense, experience it himself. On these points, however, I have no right to speak, and if I speak ignorantly, you must remember, that I merely pretend to tell you what my own impressions have been, not to make them a standard for other readers. Your father’s greater poems, such as the Ancient Mariner, and Christabel, seem undoubtedly to belong to the region of the pure imagination. But I question whether I should be as much interested as I am even in these, if I did not discover in them many veins and fibres which seem to me to connect them with his personal being; if they did not help me to read more clearly the history of his mind, and therein the history of our time.

And as I have never learnt to separate his poetical genius from himself, so I fear I have been as little able to appreciate him formally and abstractedly in the character of a philosopher. In his “Friend” I seem to discover the very same man whom I had known amidst the storms of the revolutionary period. Nor do I find him less impatient of mere rules and decrees than he was then; only the impatience has taken a new form. He has been convinced that society is a reality, that it would not become at all more real by being unmade and reconstructed, and therefore he has begun to inquire what are the grounds of its reality, and how we may be preserved from making it into a fiction and a falsehood. That this inquiry is complete and satisfactory I do not affirm, I rejoice to think that it is not; I believe, if it had been more complete, it would not be half so profitable as it has been and is likely to be for generations to come. Its merit is, that it is an inquiry, that it shews us what we have to seek for, and that it puts us into a way of seeking. Hence it was and is particularly offensive to more than one class of persons. The mere Destructive complains, that it recognizes the worth of that which ought to be swept away. The mere Conservative is indignant, because it will not assume existing rules and opinions as an ultimate basis, but aims at discovering their meaning and their foundation. The man of Compromises is most bitter, because it assumes that the statesman has some other law of conduct than that of sailing with the wind. The mere Englishman is angry to find the common topics of the day, taxes, libels, bombardments of Copenhagen, not treated of as they are treated in his favourite journals. The man of Abstractions cannot understand what such topics have to do with a scientific book. This combination of enemies, with the advantage which each derives from being able to speak of the book as “neither one thing nor the other,” is quite sufficient to explain any measure of unpopularity which it may have met with. To account for the power which it has exerted in spite of these disadvantages, and many others of an outward kind which I need not hint at in writing to you; to explain how a book, which is said to be utterly unpractical, has wrought a change in men’s minds upon the most practical subjects, how a book, which is said to have no sympathy with the moving spirit of this age, should have affected the most thoughtful of our young men; this is a work of greater difficulty, which I hope that some of our Reviewers will one day undertake. I am not attempting to solve any such problems, but am merely accounting for its influence upon my own mind, an influence mainly owing to those very peculiarities which seem to have impaired or destroyed its worth in the opinions of wiser people. For this, at least, I am thankful, that this book, so far from diminishing my interest in those which treat of the same subject, or tempting me to set Mr. Coleridge up as the one teacher upon it, has enabled me to honour others of the most different kind, belonging to our own and to former times, which I otherwise should not have understood, and might, through ignorance and self-conceit, have undervalued; above all, to reverence the facts of history, and to believe that the least perversion of them, for the sake of getting a moral from them, is at once a folly and a sin.

And it seems to me that I have found help of a similar kind to this in a different department of thought from that still more irregular work, the Biographia Literaria. If a young man in this age is much tormented by the puzzles of Society, and the innumerable systems by which men have sought to get rid of them, he is haunted almost as much by the different problems of Criticism, by a sense of the connexion between his own life and the books which he reads, by theories about the nature and meaning of this connexion, by authoritative dogmas respecting the worth or worthlessness of particular poems and paintings, by paradoxical rebellions against these dogmas, by questions as to the authority of antiquity and the distinct province of our time, by attempts to discover some permanent laws of art, by indignant assertions of its independence of all laws. A person cannot have observed himself or his contemporaries with any attention, nay, he can scarcely read over the rude statement of these difficulties which I have just made, without feeling how intricately they are involved with our thoughts upon some of the very highest subjects. To say that we do not need to understand ourselves upon these critical questions, that it is of no importance to have principles in reference to them, is merely to say that we ought not to meddle with them at all. A person who is not brought into contact with such topics is certainly not bound to think about them; if he be, he will find the absence of thought respecting them a more serious impediment to him in matters directly concerning his personal life than he may at first suppose. Now, if anyone reads Mr. Coleridge’s literary life, taking him to be a great poet, and therefore able to supply the principles of his art ready made and fit for immediate use and exportation, he will, I should think, be much disappointed. I cannot discover here, more than in his political work, a system. I have lately heard that there is one, and that it has been taken whole and alive out of the works of a great German author. But I am speaking only of what I saw there myself, and I am bound to say that it escaped my notice. I seemed to see a writer, who was feeling his way into the apprehension of many questions which had puzzled me, explaining to me his own progress out of the belief that all things are dependent upon association, into the acknowledgment of something with which they are associated; into a discovery that there is a keynote to the harmony. I learnt from him, by practical illustrations, how one may enter into the spirit of a living or a departed author, without assuming to be his judge; how one may come to know what he means without imputing to him our meanings. I learnt that beauty is neither an accidental nor an artificial thing, that it is to be sought out as something which is both in nature and in the mind of man, and which, by God’s law, binds us to nature. But all this comes out in a natural experimental method, by those tests and trials in which a man may be greatly assisted by the previous successes or failures of another, just as Faraday may be assisted by Davy, but which he cannot adopt from another, and which we cannot adopt from him, except by catching his spirit of investigation and applying it to new facts.

The “Aids to Reflection” is a book of a different character from either of these, and it is one to which I feel myself under much more deep and solemn obligations. But the obligation is of the same kind. If I require a politician or a critic who has indeed worked his own way through the region in which he pretends to act as my guide, I certainly should be most dissatisfied with one who undertook to write moral and spiritual aphorisms, without proving that he was himself engaged in the conflict with an evil nature and a reluctant will, and that he had received the truths of which he would make me a partaker, not at second hand, but as the needful supports of his own being. I do not know any book which ever brought to me more clear tokens and evidences of this kind than the one of which I am speaking. I have heard it described both by admirers and objectors as one which deals with religion philosophically. In whatever sense that assertion may be true, and in a very important sense I believe it is quite true, I can testify that it was most helpful in delivering me from a number of philosophical phrases and generalisations, which I believe attach themselves to the truths of the Creed, even in the minds of many who think that they receive Christianity with a most childlike spirit—most helpful in enabling me to perceive that the deepest principles of all are those which the Peasant is as capable of apprehending and entering into as the Schoolman. I value and love his philosophy mainly because it has led me to this discovery, and to the practical conclusion, that those who are called to the work of teaching must cultivate and exercise their understandings, in order that they may discriminate between that which is factitious and accidental, or belongs to our artificial habits of thought, and that which is fixed and eternal, which belongs to man as man, and which God will open the eyes of every humble man to perceive. I have learnt in this way the preciousness of the simple Creeds of antiquity; the inward witness which a gospel of facts possesses, and which a gospel of notions must always want; how the most awful and absolute truths, which notions displace or obscure, are involved in facts, and through facts may be entertained and embraced by those who do not possess the faculty for comparing notions, and have a blessed incapacity of resting in them.

It is inevitable that the person who first applies this principle to religious questions, should sometimes be involved in the obscurity from which he is seeking to deliver us. Any one who begins the work of encountering notions and theories, will himself be accounted the greatest notionalist and theorist. To get rid of crudities and confusions, he will sometimes be obliged to adopt or invent a nomenclature. His rigid adherence to this will be called pedantry; his followers repeating his words, instead of carrying the meaning of them into their studies and their life, will deserve the charge; his enemies will have a plausible pretence for saying that he has made simple truths complex by his way of handling them. The “Aids to Reflection” have been exposed to all these misfortunes. Nevertheless, I have heard them generally denounced as unintelligible by persons whom I had the greatest difficulty in understanding, who were continually perplexing me with hard words to which I could find nothing answering among actual things, and with the strangest attempts to explain mysteries by those events and circumstances which were to me most mysterious, and which, as they lay nearest to me, it was most important for my practical life that I should know the meaning of. On the other hand, I have heard the simplest, most childlike men and women express an almost rapturous thankfulness for having been permitted to read this book, and so to understand their own hearts and their Bibles, and the connexion between the one and the other, more clearly. It is a book, I believe, which has given offence, and will always give offence to many, not for its theories, but for its essentially practical character. Its manly denunciation of the sentimental school must be painful to many in our day who have practically adopted the Rousseau cant, though they have changed a little the words that express it; who praise men for being good, though they do the most monstrously evil acts, and account it a vulgar worship of decency to say, that one who is the slave of his own passions, and enslaves others to them, may not be a very right and true man notwithstanding. And yet those who do really exalt decency above inward truth and conformity to a high standard, will not at all the more own Mr. Coleridge for an ally because the school which pretends to oppose them reject him. The whole object of his book is to draw us from the study of mere worldly and external morality, to that which concerns the heart and the inner man. But here, again, he is so unfortunate, that those who have turned “heart-religion” into a phrase—who substitute the feelings and experiences of their minds for the laws to which those feelings and experiences may, if rightly used, conduct us—will be sure to regard him as peculiarly their enemy. So that if there were no persons in the land who did not belong to one or other of these classes, if there were not many who have tried them all, and are weary of them all, it would indeed be very difficult to understand how it is that this volume has found its way into so many studies, and has gained access to so many hearts.

The idea of the first “Lay Sermon,” that the Bible is the Statesman’s Manual, is less developed, I think, than any of those to which I have alluded hitherto. But the bare announcement of it has been of more value to me than any lengthened exposition that I know of. There is no topic which has more engaged my attention in these volumes than the national history of the Bible, but I have said very little indeed of which that thought was not the germ.

The little book upon Church and State you will suppose, from the title and character of these volumes, that I am likely to have studied still more attentively. And indeed, if you watch me closely, you will discover, I doubt not, many more thoughts which I have stolen from it than I am at all aware of, though I think I am conscious of superabundant obligations. It seems to me that the doctrine which I have endeavoured to bring out in what I have said respecting the relations between Church and State, is nothing but an expansion of Mr. Coleridge’s remark respecting the opposition and necessary harmony of Law and Religion, though in this, as in many other cases, I have departed from his phraseology, and have even adopted one which he might not be inclined to sanction.

The robberies which I have confessed are such in the truest sense; they are conscious and deliberate robberies. If any one had chanced to discover in my book twenty or thirty pages which he could trace to some English or foreign author, I should think his common sense, though he might allow no scope for charity, would induce him to hesitate before he imputed to me a wilful fraud. It is so much more likely that I should mistake what has been for years mixed with my own compositions for one of them, than that I should take such a very stupid and blundering way of earning a reputation, which a few years must destroy altogether, that a court of justice, on the mere ground of evidence, would be inclined, I should suppose, to take the tolerant side. If it had any hesitation, the reason would be, that an insignificant author might do many things with impunity, which a writer of eminence, who had enemies in every direction, would be a madman to venture upon; or else it would be from a feeling of this kind, that, if I had merely forgotten myself, I should have had some vague wandering impression of having read a similar passage somewhere else, and, therefore, that I should, being honest, have at least thrown out some hint, though it might not be exactly the right one, as to the place whence I might have derived it, thus making my reader anxious to see what had been said by the writer to whom I referred: if I did that, of course all suspicion of evil design would vanish immediately from the mind of anyone who was capable of judging, or did not industriously pervert his judgment for the purpose of making me out to be an offender. But the use I have made of your father’s writings is of entirely a different kind from this. I could not be convicted of it by a mere collating of paragraphs, and, therefore, if I were anxious to conceal it, I should be really, and not apparently, dishonest. And this is not the less true because it is also true that the main subject of my book is one which (so far as I know) he has not distinctly treated of, that the thoughts which he has scattered respecting it, though deeply interesting, are not always satisfactory to me, that I have, therefore, very commonly found myself without his guidance, and that I have sometimes wilfully deserted it. I shall not fulfil the purpose of this letter, if I do not shew how these two apparently opposite statements are reconciled.

No man, I think, will ever be of much use to his generation, who does not apply himself mainly to the questions which are occupying those who belong to it. An antiquary, I daresay, leads a much easier and quieter life than one who interferes with his contemporaries, and takes part in their speculations. But his quietness is his reward: those who seek another, must be content to part with it. Oftentimes, I doubt not, every man is tempted to repose in some little nook or dell of thought, where other men will not molest him, because he does not molest them; but those to whom any work is assigned are soon driven, by a power which they cannot resist, out of such retirement into the dusty highways of ordinary business and disputation. This, it seems to me, was your father’s peculiar merit and honour. The subjects to which he addressed himself were not those to which he would have been inclined, either by his poetical or his metaphysical tendencies. But they were exactly the questions of the time: exactly those which other men were discussing in the spirit of the time. And as we who belong to a younger generation have inherited these questions, we inherit also the wisdom which dealt with them. But there are, it seems to me, questions which we have not inherited—questions which belong more expressly to us than they did to our immediate predecessors. These, I suspect, we must humbly study for ourselves, though the difference will be very great to us, whether we invent a way of investigation for ourselves, or try to walk in a path which better men who have been before us have with great labour cleared of its rubbish, and by footmarks and signposts have made known to us.

One of the questions to which I allude is that which your father was led, I believe by the soundest wisdom, to banish, in a great measure, from his consideration, after the events of the French Revolution had taught him the unspeakable importance of a distinct National life. I mean the question whether there be a Universal Society for man as man. I have stated some reasons in these volumes why I think every one in this day must be more or less consciously occupied with this inquiry; why no other topics, however important, can prevent it from taking nearly the most prominent place in our minds. There is another question belonging apparently to a different region of thought, yet I believe touching at more points than one upon this: how all thoughts, schemes, systems, speculations, may contribute their quota to some one which shall be larger and deeper than any of them. If I am indebted to your father on one account more than another, it is for shewing me a way out of the dreadful vagueness and ambition which such a scheme as this involves, for leading me not, merely to say, but to feel, that a knowledge of The Being is the object after which we are to strive, and that all pursuit of Unity without this is the pursuit of a phantom. But at the same time I cannot help believing that there is a right meaning hid under this desire; that it will haunt us till we find what it is; that we cannot merely denounce or resist this inclination in ourselves or in others; that we shall do far more good, yea, perhaps the very good which we are meant in this age to accomplish, if we steadily apply ourselves to the consideration of it. Again, there is a question which thrusts itself before us continually, and which is the mover of more party feelings just at this time than any other, respecting the reception of those doctrines which are expressed in old Creeds, and which concern the nature of God himself: whether these are to be taken upon trust from the early ages, or whether we are to look upon them as matters for our own inquiry, to be acknowledged only so far as they accord with what seems to us either the declaration of Scripture or the verdict of reason. In preparing for the consideration of this great subject, I have felt, with many others, that Mr. Coleridge’s help has been invaluable to us. Nearly every thoughtful writer of the day would have taught us, that the highest truths are those which lie beyond the limits of Experience, that the essential principles of the Reason are those which cannot be proved by syllogisms, that the evidence for them is the impossibility of admitting that which does fall under the law of experience, unless we recognize them as its foundation; nay, the impossibility of believing that we ourselves are, or that anything is, except upon these terms. The atheism of Hume has driven men to these blessed discoveries, and though it was your father’s honour that he asserted them to an age and a nation which had not yet discovered the need of them, he certainly did not pretend, and no one should pretend, that he was the first reviver or expositor of them. But the application of these principles to Theology, I believe, we owe mainly to him. The power of perceiving that by the very law of the Reason the knowledge of God must be given to it; that the moment it attempts to create its Maker, it denies itself; the conviction that the most opposite kind of Unity to that which Unitarianism dreams of is necessary, if the demands of the reason are to be satisfied—I must acknowledge, that I received from him, if I would not prove myself ungrateful to the highest Teacher, who might certainly have chosen another instrument for communicating His mercies, but who has been pleased in very many cases, as I know, to make use of this one. This instruction, I say, seems to me a most precious preparation for the inquiry which belongs more strictly to our age, but still it is only a preparation. I cannot help feeling, while I read the profound, and, to a theological student invaluable, hints respecting the doctrine of the Trinity, which occur in Mr. Coleridge’s writings: “This is not enough. If the reason be, as he said it was, expressly the human faculty, belonging to rich and poor alike—not merely those personal truths which belong to each individual’s state and condition, but this highest truth, which he presents to us as demanding the highest efforts of thought and abstraction, must belong to the very humblest man; must be a sacred part of his inheritance; must in some way or other be capable of being presented to him.” Any one who has entertained this thought will find that this theological subject very soon becomes involved with the other two of which I was speaking. The hope that some day

“Wisdom may teach her lore
In the low huts of them that toil and groan,”

must wax much brighter, if we can really believe that the deepest lore is the most universal. The hope that diverse sides of thought may some day be brought into reconciliation, may begin to disconnect itself with the dreary vision of a comprehensive System, from which all life is excluded, if the central Unity be that of the living Being.

But how can such a dream ever be realized? To me the promise of its realization came in sounds which belong to our nursery, in the words in which our infants are baptized. Here, it seemed to me, lay the assurance that this truth belongs to no esoteric region; that it is one of those all-embracing mysteries which is about us at every moment, which is gradually drawing us into itself, and which becomes ours most truly when we attain most of the privilege of men by becoming most like little children. Thus I was led to consider the meaning of this ordinance of Baptism as a key to the nature of ordinances generally. I found that they had been much prized by Luther, and by the most earnest of those who, like him, regarded Christianity almost exclusively in its reference to their own personal life. They felt the extreme danger of substituting their belief for the object of it, and so destroying the reality of both. Their testimony was of the highest practical value, and it was abundantly confirmed to me by the experience of those who had rejected ordinances for the sake of attaining to a more spiritual state of mind. Still I could not discover how one contemplating the subject from their point of view, could ultimately escape from the conclusion which the disciples of the Reformers have so generally adopted, that he who first entertains a reverence for inward Truth, and then acquires a reverence for outward Signs, begins in the spirit and is made perfect in the flesh. And I could entirely sympathize with the feeling of Mr. Coleridge, that those who for the sake of exalting Ordinances turn them into Charms, are not making a harmless addition to that which was before sufficient, but are actually destroying its meaning and reality. But supposing them to be signs to the Race—signs of the existence of that universal body which we were inquiring after, they become invested with a very different importance. They become indispensable in a higher sense than those dream of, who seem to value them chiefly as means of exclusion; they are the very voice in which God speaks to His creatures; the very witness that their fellowship with each other rests on their fellowship with Him, and both upon the mystery of His Being; the very means by which we are meant to rise to the enjoyment of the highest blessings which He has bestowed upon us. In this way there rose up before me the idea of a Church Universal, not built upon human inventions or human faith, but upon the very nature of God himself, and upon the union which He has formed with His creatures: a Church revealed to man as a fixed and eternal reality by means which infinite wisdom had itself devised. The tokens and witnesses of such a Church, it seemed to me, must be Divine, but the feeling of its necessity, apprehensions of the different sides and aspects of it, must, if it be a reality, be found in all the different schemes which express human thought and feeling. No amalgamation of these can create a real harmony, but each may find its highest meaning in that harmony which God has created, and of which He is Himself the centre.

These are the leading thoughts which in this book I have been trying to express, and you will therefore understand what I mean when I say that I may have uttered innumerable sentiments for which your father would not have chosen to be responsible, even while I have wished to study and apply the lessons which he has taught me. He would, I conclude, not have agreed with me in my views respecting Baptism, he would probably have thought that I over-exalted the Ministry, he would not have acquiesced in every one of my statements respecting the Eucharist, he would have judged me wrong in some of my opinions respecting the Scriptures. Upon all these subjects I have deviated from what I think would have been his judgment, without losing the least of my reverence and affection for his memory, perhaps without approximating nearer than he did to the sentiments of any one of the parties which divide the Church. I am sure that I should not have had courage to differ from them or him, if he had not assisted me to believe that Truth is above both, most of all above myself and my own petty notions and apprehensions, that it is worthy to be sought after and loved above all things, and that He who is Truth, is ready, if we will obey Him, to guide us into it.

I have been so much occupied with a subject which I am sure must be interesting to you above all others, that I have left myself no time to express as I should wish my gratitude for your personal kindness, and for the advantage which I have received from my opportunities of intercourse with you. But I cannot conclude without wishing you God-speed in the noble undertaking in which you are engaged. If you are permitted to raise up a body of wise and thoughtful teachers out of our trading classes, you will do more for the Church than all the persons together who are writing treatises about it. Proportionate, however, to the importance and the novelty of the work will be the trials and the discouragements attending it. In these I trust you will be sustained by the highest consolations which a Christian man and a Christian priest can experience. But there are times in which you will need lower helps also, if they be but of the right kind. I can scarcely think of any which will be more cheering to you than the recollection that you are carrying into effect principles which were years ago urged upon our countrymen by your father, and that you are doing what in you lies to prove, that one who has been called a theorist and a dreamer, was in truth labouring to procure the most practical benefits for his country and for mankind.

Believe me, My dear Mr. Coleridge, Yours very sincerely, F. Maurice.