see, that it is by the power of vision he has conferred that the really
philosophic writers of the present day are enabled to give views so
clear and deep on the many subjects that now interest the human mind.
All those among modern authors who combine deep learning with an
enlarged wisdom, a vivid and poetical imagination with an acute
perception of the practical and the true, have evidently educated
themselves in the school of Coleridge. He well deserves the name of the
Christian Plato, erecting as he does, upon the ancient and long-tried
foundation of that philosopher's beautiful system of intuitive truths,
the various details of minor but still valuable knowledge with which the
accumulated studies of four thousand intervening years have furnished
us, at the same time harmonizing the whole by the all-pervading spirit
of Christianity.

Coleridge is truly a Christian philosopher: at the same time, however,
though it may seem a paradox, I must warn you against taking him for
your guide and instructor in theology. A Socinian during all the years
in which vivid and never-to-be-obliterated impressions are received, he
could not entirely free himself from those rationalistic tendencies
which had insensibly incorporated themselves with all his religious
opinions. He afterwards became the powerful and successful defender of
the saving truths which he had long denied; but it was only in cases
where Arianism was openly displayed, and was to be directly opposed. He
seems to have been entirely unconscious that its subtle evil tendencies,
its exaltation of the understanding above the reason, its questioning,
disobedient spirit, might all in his own case have insinuated themselves
into his judgments on theological and ecclesiastical questions. The
prejudices which are in early youth wrought into the very essence of our
being are likely to be unsuspected in exact proportion to the degree of
intimacy with which they are assimilated with the forms of our mind.