Chapter II: Part 2

Meanwhile the bells came nearer; then the sound suddenly ceased, as it seemed not far from the cottage. I did not like this at all. What could it mean?

“Would you mind going to see what or whose carriage it is?” I said. She went, and as the door closed behind her, I jumped off my bench and put on my clothes.

In a few minutes she was back with the news that the carriage belonged to the gendarmes, and that they were questioning the _starosta_ and the clerk.

“The gendarmes!” I exclaimed, “who says so—where are they from?”

“From Irkoutsk. It is the coachman himself who told me. He thinks they are after a political runaway.”

“In that case, I had better be going,” I said, laughing. “They may perhaps think I am the man. Now look here—if they ask you any questions, know nothing. If you do it may be worse for you; they may make you pay a fine. Good-by” (putting the last of my kopecks on the table).

“Good-by,” answered my hostess; “don't be uneasy. I shall not say a word.” She was a worthy woman, and a friend in need, that old peasant.

I went out. It was still dark, and I might creep through the village without being seen. The last of the houses passed, I ran at the top of my speed, for I felt sure that the pursuers were at my heels, and the possibility of being retaken enraged me almost past endurance. I had been denounced shortly after leaving the settlement, of that there could be no doubt. But how had the police managed to trace me so soon? I had been very careful, neglected no conceivable precaution, given misleading answers to all who questioned me about my past movements and future plans. I had made long _detours_ to avoid the larger villages, and during the latter part of my journey put up only with the most trusted friends of vagabond wanderers. Yet the gendarmes had followed me step by step to my very last resting-place, and but for the friendly warning of the bells I should certainly have been recaptured, for I could not have left the village by daylight without being seen. Even now I was in imminent danger; my safety absolutely depended on my reaching my friend's house at once, and lying a long time in hiding. Though I had never been there, I knew the place so well by description—its situation and appearance were so vividly impressed on my mind—that I could find it, even in the dark, without asking a question. It was only about seven miles from the village I had just left. But how could I get thither unperceived? For if I was seen by a single person entering my friend's house, it might be the ruin of us both. Something must be decided on the instant. Day was dawning, the gendarmes were behind me, and by the barking of the dogs I reckoned that the village where dwelt my friend could not be more than two miles away. I looked round. On one side of the road were open fields; on the other thick brushwood grew. As yet, I had not met a soul,—nobody could tell the gendarmes in which direction I had gone—but it was now no longer dark, and if I went on, I might encounter a peasant or a wayfarer any moment. Only one thing could be done; I must hide somewhere—even at the risk of being frozen stiff—and remain hidden until sundown, when I might perchance gain my friend's house unperceived. Among the bushes! Yes, that was the place, I could lie _perdu_ there all day. But just as I was about to put this plan into execution, another thought came to trouble me. How about my footsteps? Fresh snow had fallen in the night, and the police could follow me to my hiding-place as easily as a hound tracks a deer to its lair. And then I bethought me of an ingenious artifice, about which I had read in some romance. Turning my face to the road I walked backward toward the bushes, taking care at every step to make a distinct impression on the snow. It was now quite daylight, and a little way off I could see two summer cabins of the Buriats—in winter always empty. Thither I went, always backward, and entering one of the cabins remained there the whole day and far into the night. When I thought all the peasants would be indoors, I stole quietly out, and going stealthily and with many precautions to my friend's house, knocked in fear and misgiving at his door.

To my great relief he opened it himself.

“I should not have recognised you, if I had not just heard all your history,” he said, after we had exchanged greetings.

“I am very curious to see myself,” I returned, approaching a mirror which hung on the wall. “I have not seen a looking-glass since my arrest.”

I was so much altered that I hardly knew myself. I saw before me the reflection of a wild, strange, haggard face, and I could almost have believed I was somebody else.

“When did you hear of my flight?” I asked.

“To-day. There has been quite an inquest here. The gendarmes questioned everybody and searched every house. They followed you step by step to the last village. They found out where you passed the night, and then they seem to have lost the scent entirely. Where have you been?”

I told him.

“Did anybody see you come here?”

“Not a soul.”

“Good. All the same, you must not stay here an hour longer than we can help. It would be too dangerous. The police are baffled; but they have by no means given up the quest, and as likely as not will be here again to-morrow. You must not sleep here.”

“Where then?”

“At my farm. But first of all you must change your skin.”

As he spoke, my friend in need opened a cupboard, and took therefrom some garments in which, when I had arrayed myself and had a good wash, I looked and felt like a new man.

“Is your farm far from here?” I asked, as we sat down to supper.

“About twenty-five versts (fifteen miles), in the depth of the forest, far from any highway. Hunting parties from Irkoutsk visit us there sometimes. Your coming will, therefore, be no surprise for the servants. It is true your hair is just a little short (looking at my head); but that is nothing. You have had typhoid fever, and are going to recruit your strength in the forest. You look haggard enough to have had three fevers.”

An hour later we were _en route_, my friend, who had lived many years in the country, himself taking the reins, and he contrived matters so well that nobody in the house knew either of my coming or my going. The police were thrown completely off the scent.

LIBERTY.

As I learnt subsequently, my identity and my stratagem were revealed to the authorities by one of my comrades of the convoy shortly after I left Irkoutsk. But when the gendarmes went to the village of Talminsky, I had already vanished. Every effort was, however, made to retake me, the quest being kept up night and day for six weeks. Then it was rumored that a body found in the forest had been identified as mine, and that I had perished of hunger. According to another story, I had been arrested at Nijni Oudinsk, and was being brought back to Irkoutsk. Among the vagabonds who at this time were captured right and left on the high roads throughout the province, were several whom it pleased to call themselves by my name. The deceit was naturally soon detected, but while it lasted the deceivers enjoyed certain advantages, which helped to render their detention tolerable. Instead of walking they rode in carriages, and were accompanied by an escort, and being regarded as important prisoners, they were both better fed and better treated than common malefactors, while their audacity rendered them highly popular with their vagabond and convict comrades. There were at one time no fewer than four false Debagorio Mokrievitches in the jail of Irkoutsk. The police sought me with great diligence among the political exiles of the province; a most stupid proceeding on their part, for to take refuge with the politicals would have been putting my head in the lion's mouth.

Three other men who about the same time attempted to escape were all recaptured.

I stayed in Siberia a year, making during that time several journeys to the eastward of Irkoutsk. At length the police having abandoned all hope of finding me, I resolved to leave the country. A passport being absolutely necessary, I borrowed the name and obtained the papers of a gentleman recently deceased—Ivan Alexandrovitch Selivanoff. It was in the winter of 1880 that I set out on my long journey of 3,600 miles. I travelled post, by way of Irkoutsk, Krasnoiarsk and Tomsk—towns through which, a twelvemonth before, I had passed as a prisoner. Rather a bold undertaking in the circumstances; but as I possessed an itinerary-card signed by the governor of the province, giving me the right to relays of horses, I ran no great danger, and left the home of my hospitable friend with an easy mind.

During the journey I met from time to time gangs of prisoners on the way from Russia to Irkoutsk. The clanking of the irons, the yellow pelisses, the worn faces, the weary walk, and the shorn heads of these unfortunates—how familiar they all were, and how the sight of them thrilled me to the soul! And behind the chain gang came the wagons of the political prisoners, among whom, more than once, I recognized the face of a dear friend. But instead of jumping from my carriage and folding the poor fellows in my arms, I had to look the other way!

All went well with me, but once I had a terribly narrow escape of falling a second time into the toils. It so chanced that I passed through the province of Tobolsk in company with a tchinovnik (government employé), whose acquaintance I had made on the road, a big-paunched, rosy-cheeked fellow, with merry eyes and a mellow voice; and, being on his way home after a long absence, in high good humor and full of fun. Once at the end of a long day's journey, we arrived about midnight at a town in the neighborhood of Tobolsk, and, being tired and sleepy, resolved to pass the rest of the night there. So we went into the travellers' room, ordered tea, and handed our itinerary cards to the starosta of the station, in order that he might make the necessary entries in the travellers' book. Before going to the sleeping room we requested that the horses might be ready at seven o'clock next morning.

I slept the sleep of the just, rose betimes, and called for the starosta.

“Are the horses ready?” I asked. “And be good enough to bring hither our itinerary-cards.”

“The station-master will himself bring your itinerary-cards, and as for the horses they are already yoked up.”

Half-an-hour later the station-master (otherwise director), came into our room, holding in his hand the itinerary-cards.

“I am sorry to trouble you,” he said politely; “but I should like to know which of you young gentlemen is Ivan Alexandrovitch Selivanoff?”

“At your service sir,” I answered, stepping forward.

The station-master looked at me with a ludicrous expression of bewilderment and surprise.

“A thousand pardons,” he said at length, with a low bow. “But really—I don't quite understand. The fact is, I knew Mr. Selivanoff, and here I see the same surname and Christian name; the name of the father is also the same, the tchin (rank) likewise! Yet I was told he had died—more than a year ago—but when I saw his name on the card I thought the news must be false, and I came to assure myself. I see that I am mistaken. A thousand pardons, sir, a thousand pardons,” and again he saluted me still more profoundly than before.

I felt as if the ground were opening under my feet, and was thinking how on earth I should get out of the scrape, when my companion came—without knowing it—to the rescue.

“What a capital joke!” he shouted, clapping me on the back, and laughing so that he could hardly speak. “One might suppose that the worthy director takes you for an escaped prisoner with a dead man's passport. Ha, ha, ha, what a capital joke to be sure!”

And holding his big belly with both hands, he balanced himself first on one foot and then the other, laughing the while, until he could hardly stand.

“You are quite right,” I said, also laughing, though with considerable effort. “It is really an excellent joke. But seriously (turning to the station-master), the thing is easily explained. In the part I come from the Selivanoffs are as plentiful as blackberries. The late Ivan Alexandrovitch, your friend, and I were kinsmen, and had a great affection for each other; the name is so common in the province that I could introduce you to a dozen of my namesakes any day.”

The station-master seemed satisfied with this explanation. At any rate, he made no objection to our departure, and shortly afterwards we were once more _en route_. But my companion, the tchinovnik did not cease laughing for a long time. “To take you for a fugitive convict with a false passport!” he would say “it is really too good,” and whenever he remembered the incident he would laugh as if he never meant to stop. I remembered it, as may be supposed, with very different feelings. The escape was a very narrow one, and showed me how much I was still at the mercy of the slightest mishap. But this proved to be my last adventure and my last peril. In May, 1881, I reached Geneva, and felt that I was at last really free.

* * * * *

As most stories of Russian revolutionary life have necessarily, if they be true, a tragical termination, readers of the foregoing narrative may be pleased to know that M. Mokrievitch is still in a land where he feels really free. Though one of the heroes of Russian liberty he has not yet become one of its martyrs. But the time may come when he, as many other fugitives have done, will return to the volcanic soil of his native country, there to take part in the struggle to death which, though unseen, goes always on, and must continue without truce and without surcease until the sun of Freedom shall dawn in the Empire of the Night.—_Contemporary Review._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] As vagabonds are frequently mentioned in this narrative, and Mokrievitch himself became one of them, it may be well to explain that the wanderers so designated are simply tramps unfurnished with passports. A double stream of these waifs is always on the move through Siberia—one towards the east, the other towards the west—the latter free, the former generally in bonds. Many of the involuntary settlers either do not take kindly to work, or find their lot intolerable, and so make off on the first opportunity, begging their way, and living on the charity of the peasants, who never refuse a destitute traveller a crust of bread and a night's lodging. Not a few of these wanderers sink under the hardships to which they are exposed, or freeze to death in the forests, and the survivors are nearly always arrested before they reach the frontier of European Russia; but they cause the police a world of trouble. Having no papers, they are able to give false names, and deny being fugitive transports—which they almost invariably do. There is then nothing for it but to write to whatever address a man may give—generally some remote village—and inquire if he is known there. Should the answer be in the negative, the fact is taken as proof of the paperless one's guilt, and he is sent back in chains to the interior of Siberia. As likely as not, however, it will be in the affirmative, for there prevails among these outcasts a strange yet regular trade in what the vagabonds call “nests.” For instance, Ivan Ivanovitch, being in want of money, sells to Peter Iliouschka, who has a few kopecs to spare, the name and address of some mujik of his acquaintance, who long ago left his native village for parts unknown—or, perhaps, his own name and address. This is Peter's nest, and when he falls into the hands of the police he tells them he is Paul Lubovitch, from, let us say, Teteriwino, in the government of Koursk. On this, a missive is sent to the _starosta_ of Teteriwino, who replies, in due course, to the effect that the village did once possess a Paul Lubovitch, but whether the person in question be the same man he is unable to say. The next proceeding is to send the _soi-disant_ Paul to Teteriwino for identification. This proceeding naturally results in the detection of the imposture, whereupon our friend Peter is condemned to a new term of exile, and sent back whence he came.

COLERIDGE AS A SPIRITUAL THINKER.

BY PRINCIPAL TULLOCH.

Mr. Traill's recent volume has recalled the poet-philosopher who died just fifty years ago, leaving a strongly marked but indefinite impression upon the mind of his time. The volume has done something to renew and vivify the impression both in respect of Coleridge's poetry and criticism. His work as a critic has never, perhaps, been better or more completely exhibited. It is recognised generously in all its largeness and profundity, as well as delicacy and subtlety; and justice is especially done to his Shakesperian commentary, which in its richness, variety, felicity, combined with depth and acuteness, is absolutely unrivalled. But Mr. Traill cannot be said to have even attempted any estimate of Coleridge as a spiritual thinker. It may be questioned how far he has recognised that there is a spiritual side to all his thought, without which neither his poetry nor his criticism can be fully understood, cleverly as they may be judged.

It is not only out of date, but outside of all intelligent judgment to quote at this time of day Mr. Carlyle's well-known caricature from his _Life of Sterling_, and put readers off with this as a “famous criticism.” We now know how to value utterances of this kind, and the unhappy spirit of detraction which lay beneath such wild and grotesque humors. Carlyle will always remain an artist in epithets—but few will turn to him for an intelligent or comprehensive estimate of any great name of his own or of recent time.

We propose to look at Coleridge for a little as a religious thinker, and to ask what is the meaning and value of his work in this respect now that we can calmly and fully judge it. If Coleridge was anything, he was not only in his own view, as Mr. Traill admits, but in the view of his generation, a religious philosopher. It is not only the testimony of men like Hare, or Sterling, or Maurice, or even Cardinal Newman, but of John Stuart Mill, that his teaching awakened and freshened all contemporary thought. He was recognised with all his faults as a truly great thinker, who raised the mind of the time and gave it new and wide impulses. This judgment we feel sure will yet verify itself. If English literature ever regains the higher tone of our earlier national life—the tone of Hooker and Milton and Jeremy Taylor—Coleridge will be again acknowledged, in Julius Hare's words, as “a true sovereign of English thought.” He will take rank in the same line of spiritual genius. He has the same elevation of feeling, the same profound grasp of moral and spiritual ideas, the same wide range of vision. He has, in short, the same love of wisdom, the same insight, the same largeness—never despising nature or art, or literature, for the sake of religion, still less ever despising religion for the sake of culture. In reading over Coleridge's prose works again, returning to them after a long past familiarity, I am particularly struck by their massive and large intellectuality, akin to our older Elizabethan literature. There is everywhere the play of great power—of imagination as well as reason—of spiritual perception as well as logical subtlety.

To speak of Coleridge in this manner as a great spiritual power, an eminently healthy writer in the higher regions of thought, may seem absurd to some who think mainly of his life, and of the fatal failure which characterised it. It is the shadow of this failure of manliness in his conduct, as in that of his life-long friend, Charles Lamb, which no doubt prompted the great genius who carried manliness, if little sweetness, from his Annandale home, to paint both the one and the other in such darkened colors. We have not a word to say on behalf of the failings of either. They were deplorable and unworthy; but it is the fact, notwithstanding, that the mind of both retained a serenity and a certain touch of respectfulness which are lacking in their great Scottish contemporary. They were both finer-edged than Carlyle. They inherited a more delicate and polite personal culture; and delicacy can never be far distant from true manliness. Neither of them could have written of the treasures of old religion as Carlyle did in his _Life of Sterling_. Whether they accepted for themselves those treasures or not, they would have spared the tender faith of others and respected an ancient ideal. And this is the higher attitude. Nothing which has ever deeply interested humanity or profoundly moved it, is treated with contempt by a good and wise man. It may call for and deserve rejection, but never insult. Unhappily this attitude of mind, reserved, as well as critical, reverent as well as bold, has been conspicuously absent in some of the most powerful and best known writers of our era.

There is a striking contrast between the career of Coleridge and that of his friend Wordsworth. Fellows in the opening of their poetic course, they soon diverged widely. With a true instinct, Wordsworth devoted himself, in quietness and seclusion, to the cultivation of his poetic faculty. He left aside the world of politics and of religious thought, strongly moved as he had been by the interests of both. It may be said that Wordsworth continued a religious thinker as well as poet all his life. And to some extent this is true. The “Wanderer” is a preacher and not only a singer. He goes to the heart of religion, and lays again its foundations in the natural instincts of man. But while Wordsworth's poetry was instinct with a new life of religious feeling, and may be said to have given a new radiancy to its central principles,[2] it did not initiate any movement in Christian thought. In religious opinion Wordsworth soon fell back upon, if he ever consciously departed from, the old line of Anglican traditions. The vague Pantheism of the _Excursion_ implies rather a lack of distinctive dogma than any fresh insight into religious problems or capacity of co-ordinating them in a new manner. And so soon as definite religious conceptions came to the poet, the Church in her customary theology became a satisfactory refuge. The _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_ mark this definite stage in his spiritual development. Wordsworth did for the religious thought of his time something more and better perhaps than giving it any definite impulse. While leaving it in the old channels, he gave it a richer and deeper volume. He showed with what vital affinity religion cleaves to humanity, in all its true and simple phases, when uncontaminated by conceit or frivolity. Nature and man alike were to him essentially religious, or only conceivable as the outcome of a Spirit of life, “the Soul of all the worlds.”[3] Wordsworth, in short, remained as he began, a poet of a deeply religious spirit. But he did not enter the domain of theological speculation or attempt to give any new direction to it.

In all this Coleridge is his counterpart. He may be said to have abandoned poetry just when Wordsworth in his retirement at Grasmere (1799) was consecrating his life to it. Whether it be true, according to De Quincey, that Coleridge's poetical power was killed by the habit of opium-eating, it is certainly true that the harp of Quantock[4] was never again struck save for a brief moment. The poet Coleridge passed into the lecturer and the poetical and literary critic, and then, during the final period of his life, from 1816 to 1834, into the philosopher and theologian. It is to this latter period of his life in the main that his higher prose writings belong, and especially the well-known _Aids to Reflection_ which—disparaged as it is by Mr. Traill—may be said to contain, as his disciples have always held to contain, all the finer substance of his spiritual thought. It is true that it is defective as a literary composition. We are even disposed to allow that it has “less charm of thought, less beauty of style,” and in some respects even less “power of effective statement,”[5] than is common with Coleridge; but withal it is his highest work. These very defects only serve to bring out the more its strong points, when we consider the wonderful hold the book has taken of many minds, and how it has been the subject of elaborate commentary.[6] It is a book, we may at the same time say, which none but a thinker on divine things will ever like. All such thinkers have prized it greatly. To many such it has given a new force of religious insight; for its time, beyond all doubt, it created a real epoch in Christian thought. It had life in it; and the living seed, scattered and desultory as it was, brought forth fruit in many minds.

What, then, were its main contributions to religious thought, and in what respects generally is Coleridge to be reckoned a spiritual power?

(1.) First, and chiefly, in the _Aids to Reflection_, Coleridge may be said to have transformed and renewed the current ideas of his time about religion. He was, we know, a man of many ambitions never realised; but of all his ambitions, the most persistent was that of laying anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. This was “the great work” to which he frequently alluded as having given “the preparation of more than twenty years of his life.”[7] Like other great tasks projected by him, it was very imperfectly accomplished; and there will always be those in consequence who fail to understand his influence as a leader of thought. We are certainly not bound to take Coleridge at his own value, nor to attach the same importance as he did to some of his speculations. No one, indeed, knew better than Coleridge himself that there was nothing new in his Platonic Realism. It was merely a restoration of the old religious metaphysic which had preceded “the mechanical systems,” that became dominant in the reign of Charles the Second. He himself constantly claims to do nothing more than re-assert the principles of Hooker, of Henry More, of John Smith, and Leighton, all of whom he speaks of as “Platonizing divines!” But the religious teaching of Coleridge came upon his generation as a new breath, not merely or mainly because he revived these ancient principles, but because he vitalised anew their application to Christianity, so as to transform it from a mere creed, or collection of articles, into a living mode of thought, embracing all human activity. Coleridge was no mere metaphysician. He was a great interpreter of spiritual facts—a student of spiritual life, quickened by a peculiarly vivid and painful experience; and he saw in Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of the facts of our spiritual being and the true remedy for their disorder. He brought human nature, not merely on one side, but all sides, once more near to Christianity, so as to find in it not merely a means of salvation in any limited evangelical sense, but the highest Truth and Health—a perfect philosophy. His main power lies in this subjective direction, just as here it was that his age was most needing stimulus and guidance.

The Evangelical School, with all its merits, had conceived of Christianity rather as something superadded the highest life of humanity than as the perfect development of that life; as a scheme for human salvation authenticated by miracles, and, so to speak, interpolated into human history rather than a divine philosophy, witnessing to itself from the beginning in all the higher phases of that history. And so Philosophy, and no less Literature, and Art, and Science, were conceived apart from religion. The world and the Church were not only antagonistic in the Biblical sense, as the embodiments of the Carnal and the Divine Spirit—which they must ever be; but they were, so to speak, severed portions of life divided by outward signs and badges: and those who joined the one or the other were supposed to be clearly marked off. All who know the writings of the Evangelical School of the eighteenth and earlier part of the nineteenth century, from the poetry of Cowper and the letters of his friend Newton, to the writings of Romaine, John Forster, and Wilberforce, and even Chalmers, will know how such commonplaces everywhere reappear in them. That they were associated with the most devout and beautiful lives, that they even served to foster a peculiar ardor of Christian feeling and love of God, cannot be disputed. But they were essentially narrow and false. They destroyed the largeness and unity of human experience. They not merely separated religion from art and philosophy, but they tended to separate it from morality.

Coleridge's most distinctive work was to restore the broken harmony between reason and religion, by enlarging the conception of both, but of the latter especially,—by showing how man is essentially a religious being having a definite spiritual constitution, apart from which the very idea of religion becomes impossible. Religion is not, therefore, something brought to man, it is his highest education. Religion, he says, was designed “to improve the nature and the faculties of man, in order to the right governing of our actions, to the securing the peace and progress, eternal and internal, of individuals and communities.” Christianity is in the highest degree adapted to this end; and nothing can be a part of it that is not duly proportioned thereto. In thus vindicating the rationality of religion, Coleridge had a twofold task before him, as every such thinker has. He had to assert against the Epicurean and Empirical School the spiritual constitution of human nature, and against the fanatical or hyper-evangelical school the reasonable working of spiritual influence. He had to maintain, on the one hand, the essential divinity of man, that “there is more in him than can be rationally referred to the life of nature and the mechanism of organisation,” and on the other hand to show that this higher life of the spirit is throughout rational—that it is superstition and not true religion which professes to resolve “men's faith and practice” into the illumination of such a spirit as they can give no account of,—such as does not enlighten their reason or enable them to render their doctrine intelligible to others. He fights, in short, alike against materialistic negation and credulous enthusiasm.

The former he meets with the assertion of “a spirituality in man,” a self-power or Will at the root of all his being. “If there be aught spiritual in man, the will must be such. If there be a will, there must be a spirituality in man.” He assumes both positions, seeing clearly—what all who radically deal with such a question must see—that it becomes in the end an alternative postulate on one side and the other. The theologian cannot prove his case, because the very terms in which it must be proved are already denied _ab initio_ by the materialist. But no more can the materialist, for the same reason, refute the spiritual thinker. There can be no argument where no common premiss is granted. Coleridge was quite alive to this, yet he validly appeals to common experience. “I assume,” he says, “a something the proof which no man can give to another, yet every man may find for himself. If any man assert that he has no such experience, I am bound to disbelieve him, I cannot do otherwise without unsettling the foundation of my own moral nature. For I either find it as an essential of the humanity common to him and to me, or I have not found it at all.... All the significant objections of the materialist and necessitarian,” he adds, “are contained in the term morality, and all the objections of the infidel in the term religion. These very terms imply something granted, which the objector in each case supposes not granted. A moral philosophy is only such because it assumes a principle of morality, a will in man, and so a Christian philosophy or theology has its own assumptions resting on three ultimate facts, namely, the reality of the law of conscience; the existence of a responsible will as the subject of that law; and lastly, the existence of God.... The first is a fact of consciousness; the second, a fact of reason necessarily concluded from the first; and the third, a fact of history interpreted by both.”

These were the radical data of the religious philosophy of Coleridge. They imply a general conception of religion which was revolutionary for his age, simple and ancient as the principles are. The evangelical tradition brought religion to man from the outside. It took no concern of man's spiritual constitution beyond the fact that he was a sinner and in danger of hell. Coleridge started from a similar but larger experience, including not only sin, but the whole spiritual basis on which sin rests. “I profess a deep conviction,” he says, “that man is a fallen creature,” “not by accident of bodily constitution or any other cause, but as diseased in his will—in that will which is the true and only strict synonyme of the word I, or the intelligent Self.” This “intelligent Self” is a fundamental conception lying at the root of his system of thought. Sin is an attribute of it, and cannot be conceived apart for it, and conscience, or the original sense of right and wrong governing the will. Apart from these internal realities there is no religion, and the function of the Christian Revelation is to build up the spiritual life out of these realities—to remedy the evil, to enlighten the conscience, to educate the will. This effective power of religion comes directly from God in Christ. Here Coleridge joins the Evangelical School, as indeed every school of living Christian Faith. This was the element of Truth he found in the doctrine of Election as handled “practically, morally, humanly,” by Leighton. Every true Christian, he argues, must attribute his distinction not in any degree to himself—“his own resolves and strivings,” “his own will and understanding,” still less to “his own comparative excellence,”—but to God, “the being in whom the promise of life originated, and on whom its fulfilment depends.” Election so far is a truth of experience. “This the conscience requires; this the highest interests of morality demand.” So far it is a question of facts with which the speculative reason has nothing to do. But when the theological reasoner abandons the ground of fact and “the safe circle of religion and practical reason for the shifting sand-wastes and mirages of speculative theology,” then he uses words without meaning. He can have no insight into the workings or plans of a Being who is neither an object of his senses nor a part of his self-consciousness.

Nothing can show better than this brief exposition how closely Coleridge in his theology clung to a base of spiritual experience, and sought to measure even the most abstruse Christian mysteries by facts. The same thing may be shown by referring to his doctrine of the Trinity, which has been supposed the most transcendental and, so to speak, “Neo-Platonist” of all his doctrines. But truly speaking his Trinitarianism, like his doctrine of Election, is a moral rather than a speculative truth. The Trinitarian idea was, indeed, true to him notionally. The full analysis of the notion “God” seemed to him to involve it. “I find a certain notion in my mind, and say that is what I understand by the term God. From books and conversation I find that the learned generally connect the same notion with the same word. I then apply the rules laid down by the masters of logic for the involution and evolution of terms, and prove (to as many as agree with my premisses) that the notion 'God' involves the notion 'Trinity,'” So he argued, and many times recurred to the same Transcendental analysis. But the truer and more urgent spiritual basis of the doctrine of the Trinity, even to his own mind, was not its notional but its moral necessity. Christ could only be a Saviour as being Divine. Salvation is a Divine work. “The idea of redemption involves belief in the Divinity of our Lord. And our Lord's Divinity again involves the Trinitarian idea, because in and through this idea alone the Divinity of Christ can be received without breach of faith in the Unity of the Godhead.” In other words, the best evidence of the doctrine of the Trinity, is the compulsion of the spiritual conscience which demands a Divine Saviour; and only in and through the great idea of Trinity in Unity does this demand become consistent with Christian Monotheism.[8]

These doctrines are merely used in illustration, as they are by Coleridge himself in his _Aids to Reflection_. But nothing can show in a stronger light the general character of the change which he wrought in the conception of Christianity. From being a mere traditional creed, with Anglican and Evangelical, and it may be added Unitarian alike, it became a living expression of the spiritual consciousness. In a sense, of course, it had always been so. The Evangelical made much of its living power, but only in a practical and not in a rational sense. It is the distinction of Coleridge to have once more in his age made Christian doctrine alive to the reason as well as the conscience—tenable as a philosophy as well as an evangel. And this he did by interpreting Christianity in the light of our moral and spiritual life. There are aspects of Christian truth beyond us—_Exeunt in mysteria_. But all Christian truth must have vital touch with our spiritual being, and be so far at least capable of being rendered in its terms, or, in other words, be conformable to reason.

There was nothing absolutely new in this luminous conception, but it marked a revolution of religious thought in the earlier part of our century. The great principle of the Evangelical theology was that theological dogmas were true or false without any reference to a subjective standard of judgment. They were true as pure data of revelation, or as the propositions of an authorised creed settled long ago. Reason had, so far, nothing to do with them. Christian truth, it was supposed, lay at had in the Bible, an appeal to which settled everything. Coleridge did not undervalue the Bible. He gave it an intelligent reverence. But he no less reverenced the spiritual consciousness or divine light in man; and to put out this light, as the Evangelical had gone far to do, was to destroy all reasonable faith. This must rest not merely on objective data, but on internal experience. It must have not merely authority without, but _rationale_ within. It must answer to the highest aspiration of human reason, as well as the most urgent necessities of human life. It must interpret reason and find expression in the voice of our higher humanity, and so enlarge itself as to meet all its needs.

If we turn for a moment to the special exposition of the doctrines of sin and redemption which Coleridge has given in the _Aids to Reflection_, it is still mainly with the view of bringing out more clearly his general conception of Christianity as a living movement of thought rather than a mere series of articles or a traditionary creed.

In dealing first with the question of sin, he shows how its very idea is only tenable on the ground of such a spiritual constitution in man as he has already asserted. It is only the recognition of a true will in man—a spirit or supernatural in man, although “not necessarily miraculous”—which renders sin possible. “These views of the spirit and of the will as spiritual,” he says more than once, “are the groundwork of my scheme.” There was nothing more significant or fundamental in all his theology. If there is not always a supernatural element in man in the shape of spirit and will, no miracles or anything else can ever authenticate the supernatural to him. A mere formal orthodoxy, therefore, hanging upon the evidence of miracles, is a suspension bridge without any real support. So all questions between infidelity and Christianity are questions here, at the root, and not what are called “critical” questions as to whether this or that view of the Bible be right, or this or that traditionary dogma be true. Such questions are, truly speaking, inter-Christian questions, the freest views of which all Churches must learn to tolerate. The really vital question is whether there is a divine root in man at all—a spiritual centre, answering to a higher spiritual centre in the universe. All controversies of any importance come back to this. Coleridge would have been a great Christian thinker if for no other reason than this, that he brought all theological problems back to this living centre, and showed how they diverged from it. Apart from this postulate, sin was inconceivable to him; and in the same manner all sin was to him sin of origin or “original sin.” It is the essential property of the will that it can originate. The phrase original sin is therefore “a pleonasm.” If sin was not original, or from within the will itself, it would not deserve the name. “A state or act that has not its origin in the will may be a calamity, deformity, disease, or mischief, but a sin it cannot be.”

Again he says: “That there is an evil common to all is a fact, and this evil must, therefore, have a common ground. Now this evil ground cannot originate in the Divine will; it must, therefore, be referred to the will of man. And this evil ground we call original sin. It is a mystery, that is, a fact which we see, but cannot explain; and the doctrine a truth which we apprehend, but can neither comprehend nor communicate. And such by the quality of the subject (namely, a responsible will) it must be, if it be truth at all.”

This inwardness is no less characteristic of Coleridge's treatment of the doctrine of atonement or redemption. It is intelligible so far as it comes within the range of spiritual experience. So far its nature and effects are amply described or figured in the New Testament, especially by St. Paul. And the apostle's language, as might be expected, “takes its predominant colors from his own experience, and the experience of those whom he addressed.” “His figures, images, analogies, and references,” are all more or less borrowed from this source. He describes the Atonement of Christ under four principal metaphors: 1. Sin-offering, sacrificial expiation. 2. Reconciliation, atonement, καταλλάγη. 3. Redemption, or ransom from slavery. 4. Satisfaction, payment of a debt. These phrases are not designed to convey to us all the Divine meaning of the atonement, for no phrases or figures can do this; but they set forth its general aspect and design. One and all they have an intelligible relation to our spiritual life, and so clothe the doctrine for us with a concrete living and practical meaning. But there are other relations and aspects of the doctrine of atonement that transcend experience, and consequently our powers of understanding. And all that can be said here is, “exit in mysteria.” The rationalism of Coleridge is at least a modest and self-limiting rationalism. It clears the ground within the range of spiritual experience, and floods this ground with the light of reason. There is no true doctrine can contradict this light, or shelter itself from its penetration. But there are aspects of Christian doctrine that outreach all grasp of reason, and before which reason must simply be silent. For example, the Divine act in redemption is “a causative act—a spiritual and transcendent mystery _that passeth all understanding. 'Who knoweth the mind of the Lord, or being his councillor who hath instructed him?' Factum est._” This is all that can be said of the mystery of redemption, or of the doctrine of atonement on its Divine side.

And here emerges another important principle of the Coleridgian theology. While so great an advocate of the rights of reason in theology, of the necessity, in other words, of moulding all its facts in a synthesis intelligible to the higher reason he recognises strongly that there is a province of Divine truth beyond all such construction. We can never understand the fulness of Divine mystery, and it is hopeless to attempt to do so. While no mind was less agnostic in the modern sense of the term, he was yet with all his vivid and large intuition, a Christian agnostic. Just because Christianity was Divine, a revelation, and not a mere human tradition, all its higher doctrines ended in a region beyond our clear knowledge. As he himself said, “If the doctrine is more than a hyperbolical phrase it must do so.” There was great pregnancy in this as in his other conceptions; and probably no more significant change awaits the theology of the future, than the determination of this province of the unknown, and the cessation of controversy, as to matters which come within it, and therefore admit of no dogmatic settlement.

(2.) But it is more than time to turn to the second aspect, in which Coleridge appears as a religious leader of the thought of the nineteenth century. The _Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit_ was not published till six years after his death, in 1840; and it is curious to notice their accidental connection with the _Confessions of a Beautiful Soul_, which had been translated by Carlyle some years before.[9] These _Confessions_, in the shape of seven letters to a friend, gather together all that is valuable in the Biblical criticism of the author scattered through his various writings; and although it may be doubtful whether the volume has ever attained the circulation of the _Aids to Reflection_, it is eminently deserving—small as it is, nay, because of its very brevity—of a place beside the larger work. It is eminently readable, terse and nervous, as well as eloquent in style. In none of his writings does Coleridge appear to greater advantage, or touch a more elevating strain, rising at times into solemn music.

The _Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit_ were of course merely one indication of the rise of a true spirit of criticism in English theology. Arnold, Whately, Thirlwall, and others, it will be seen, were all astir in the same direction, even before the _Confessions_ were published. The notion of verbal inspiration, or the infallible dictation of Holy Scripture, could not possibly continue after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had begun. As soon as men plainly recognised the organic growth of all great facts, literary as well as others, it was inevitable that they should see the Scriptures in a new light, as a product of many phases of thought in course of more or less perfect development. A larger and more intelligent sense of the conditions attending the origin and progress of all civilisation, and of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social ideas advance, necessarily carried with it a changed perception of the characteristics of Scriptural revelation. The old Rabbinical notion of an infallible text was sure to disappear. The new critical method besides is, in Coleridge's hands, rather an idea—a happy and germinant thought—than a well-evolved system. Still to him belongs the honor of having first plainly and boldly announced that the Scriptures were to be read and studied, like any other literature, in the light of their continuous growth, and the adaptation of their parts to one another.

The divinity of Scripture appears all the more brightly, when thus freely handled. “I take up the work,” he says, “with the purpose to read it as I should read any other work—so far as I can or dare. For I neither can nor dare throw off a strong and awful prepossession in its favor, certain as I am that a large part of the light and life in and by which I see, love, and embrace the truths and the strengths organised into a living body of faith and knowledge have been directly or indirectly derived to me from the sacred volume.” All the more reason why we should not make a fetish of the Bible, as the Turk does of the Koran. Poor as reason may be in comparison with “the power and splendor of the Scriptures,” yet it is and must be for him a true light. “While there is a Light higher than all, even the _Word that was in the beginning_;—the Light of which light itself is but the Schechinah and cloudy tabernacle;—there is also a 'Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world;' and the spirit of man is declared to be 'the candle of the Lord,'” “If between this Word,” he says, “and the written letter I shall anywhere seem to myself to find a discrepance, I will not conclude that such there actually is. Nor, on the other hand, will I fall under the condemnation of those that would _lie for God_, but, seek as I may, be thankful for what I have and wait.”

Such is the keynote of the volume. The supremacy of the Bible as a divinely inspired literature is plainly recognised from the first. Obviously it is a book above all other books in which deep answers to deep, and our inmost thoughts and most hidden griefs find not merely response, but guidance and assuagement. And whatever there _finds_ us “bears witness for itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Spirit.” “In the Bible,” he says again, “there is more that _finds_ me than I have experienced in all other books put together; the words of the Bible find me at greater depths of my being, and whatever finds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.”

But there is much in the Bible that not only does not find us in the Coleridgian sense, but that seems full of contradictions, both moral and historical; the psalms in which David curses his enemies; the obviously exaggerated ages attributed to the patriarchs; and the incredible number of the armies said to be collected by Abijah and Jeroboam (2 Chron. xiii. 3), and other incidents familiar to all students of Scripture. What is to be made of such features of the Bible? According to the old notion of its infallibility such parts of Scripture, no less than its most elevating utterances of “lovely hymn and choral song and accepted prayer of saint and prophet,” were to be received as dictated by the Holy Spirit. They were stamped with the same Divine authority. Coleridge rightly enough emphasises this view as that of the fathers and reformers alike; but he no less rightly points out that not one of them is consistent in holding to their general doctrine. Their treatment of the Scriptures in detail constantly implies the fallacy of the Rabbinical tradition to which they yet clung. He no less forcibly points out that the Scriptures themselves make no such pretension to infallibility, “explicitly or by implication.” “On the contrary, they refer to older documents, and on all points express themselves as sober-minded and veracious writers under ordinary circumstances are known to do.” The usual texts quoted, such as 2 Tim. iii. 16, have no real bearing on the subject. The little we know as to the origin and history of many of the books of the Bible, of “the time of the formation and closing of the canon,” of its selectors and compilers, is all opposed to such a theory. Moreover, the very nature of the claim stultifies itself when examined. For “how can infallible truth be infallibly conveyed in defective and fallible expression?”