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.
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