our faith in opposition to our reason, and inculcates the sacrifice of
the latter to the former,--that to suppress this important part of his
solemn convictions would be to misrepresent and betray him. For he threw
up his hands in dismay at the language of some of our modern divinity on
this point;--as if a faith not founded on insight were aught else than a
specious name for wilful positiveness;--as if the Father of Lights could
require, or would accept, from the only one of his creatures whom he had
endowed with reason the sacrifice of fools! Did Coleridge, therefore,
mean that the doctrines revealed in the Scriptures were to be judged
according to their supposed harmony or discrepancy with the evidence of
the senses, or the deductions of the mere understanding from that
evidence? Exactly the reverse: he disdained to argue even against
Transubstantiation on such a ground, well knowing and loudly proclaiming
its utter weakness and instability. But it was a leading principle in
all his moral and intellectual views to assert the existence in all men
equally of a power or faculty superior to, and independent of, the
external senses: in this power or faculty he recognized that image of
God in which man was made; and he could as little understand how faith,
the indivisibly joint act or efflux of our reason and our will, should
be at variance with one of its factors or elements, as how the Author
and Upholder of all truth should be in contradiction to himself. He
trembled at the dreadful dogma which rests God's right to man's
obedience on the fact of his almighty power,--a position falsely
inferred from a misconceived illustration of St. Paul's, and which is
less humbling to the creature than blasphemous of the Creator; and of
the awless doctrine that God might, if he had so pleased, have given to
man a religion which to human intelligence should not be rational, and
exacted his faith in it--Coleridge's whole middle and later life was one
deep and solemn denial. He believed in no God in the very idea of whose
existence absolute truth, perfect goodness, and infinite wisdom, were