the same disposition which led him to heighten the lights of every object, while its bright side was turned toward himself, inclining him to deepen its shadows, when the chances and changes of life presented to him its darker aspect, the same temper which led him to over-estimate marks of regard, rendering him too keenly sensible of, or quick to imagine, short-comings of love and esteem, his claims to which he not unnaturally reckoned by his readiness to bestow, which was boundless, rather than his fitness to receive, which he ever acknowledged to be limited. He was apt to consider affection as due simply to affection, irrespectively of merit in any other shape, and felt that such a "fund of love" as his, and that too from one so highly endowed as few denied him to be, ought "almost" to "supply desert." He too much desired to idolize and be idolized, to fix his eye, even in this mortal life, only on perfection, to have the imperfections which he recognised in himself severely noted by himself alone. "For to be loved is all I need,

And whom I love, I love indeed."

This turn of mind was at least partly the cause of such change and fluctuation in his attachments through life as may have subjected his conduct to unfavourable construction; another cause he himself indicated, at an early period of his career, when, after speaking of the gifts assigned him by heaven, he sadly exclaims,

and from my graspless hand Drop friendship's precious pearls like hour-glass sand!

Some of these precious pearls he let fall, not from wanting a deep sense of their value, or any lightness of feeling, but because he lacked resolution to hold them fast, or "stoop" to recover what he yet "wept"

to lose. Still it was but a cruel half truth, when one strangely converted from a friend into an enemy, ever shooting out his arrows even bitter words, spoke of him thus: "There is a man all intellect but without a will!" Sometimes indeed to will was present with him when he found not how to perform; all the good that he would he did not; but his performance, taken upon the whole, his involuntary defects considered, inspired his many friends with the belief that he was not only a wise, but humanly speaking, a good man." Good and great" some say: whether or no he was the latter, and how far, let others declare, time being the umpire; it signifies, comparatively, nothing to the persons most interested in and for him what the decision on this point may be; but the good qualities of his heart must be borne witness to by those in the present day who knew him best in private. Thus much may be Isaid for the correctness of his intuitions and the clearness of his moral sense, that, through life, his associates, with few exceptions, were distinguished by high qualities of head and heart; from first to last of his course here below he was a discoverer and a proclaimer of excellence both in books and men.

Mr. Coleridge's Religious Opinions; their formation; misconceptions and misrepresentations on the subject.

UCH imputations as those I have had the painful

SUCH

task of discussing, are apt to circulate rapidly and meet a ready credence from part of the public, when they concern a writer whose opinions are obnoxious to various parties in politics and religion, and who has never secured the favour and admiration of the light reading and little thinking world. For one man who

I

will, fully and deeply examine any portion of the opinions, religious or philosophical, of a full and deep thinker, there are hundreds capable of comparing the run of sentences and paragraphs and being entertained by a charge of plagiarism: if some are grateful to him for light thrown, as their eyes tell them, upon truth, far more are offended because this same light reveals to them the untruth which they would fain not see in its proper hues and proportions; who not being prepared to overthrow his reasonings by a direct attack are glad to come at them obliquely, by lowering his personal character and thereby weakening his authority. The whole Romish world was bent on convicting Luther of Antinomianism, and as they could not discover it in his writings, they were resolved, if possible, to find it in his life, and as it was not forthcoming in either, they put it into both; they took all his rhetoric the wrong way up and hunted for unsoundness in his mind and libertinism in his conduct, as vultures hunt for things corrupt in nature. The spirit evidenced in this procedure, that "ancient spirit is not dead;" religious writers, even at the present day, are far too prone to discredit a man's opinions at second-hand by

1 I believe that Bayle's article caused a dead silence on the subject of the great Reformer's personal "carnality" for ages. Of late years it has been revived and there is a faint attempt to bring up some of the old stories circulated against him to the effect that he made liberty a cloak for licentiousness. (See on Luther's Life and opinions Hare's Mission of the Comforter, vol. ii. pp. 656-878.) It was an "easy feat' to put Pantheism into the "bottom of Luther's doctrine and personal character," (Essay on Developement, p. 84.) because the bottom of doctrine is one knows not where, and Pantheism, as modern polemics employ the term, one knows not what; but to fasten dissoluteness on his conduct is by no means easy.

tracing them to some averred evil source in his character, or perverting influence in the circumstances of his life. This seems exceptionable however gently done, first because it is a very circuitous and uncertain mode of arriving at truth; a man's opinions we know on his own statements of them; but in attempting to discover the means through which they have been formed, we are searching in the dark, or the duskiest and most deceptive twilight, and, having no clear light to guide us, are apt to be led astray by some ignis fatuus of our own prejudices and delusions. Let the opinions be tried on their own merits, and if this is beside the inquirer's purpose, and he chooses to assume the truth of those he himself holds, considering them too certain and too sacred to be made a question of, in the same spirit let him disdain to snatch an argument in their favour, out of themselves, from doubtful considerations. Alas! how many of those who hold this lofty tone, calling their own belief the truth, and other men's belief mere opinion, only because they have an opinion of the validity of a certain test of truth which others cannot assent to, will yet resort to questionable methods of recommending this their unquestionable creed, and bring elaborate sophisms and partial representations, fit only to impose upon prepossessed and ductile readers, to the aid of "practical infallibility!"

But the second and even stronger objection to this mode of proceeding is, that the desire to find the origin of a man's way of thinking in the facts of his history, brings the inquirer under great temptation to depart from strict truth in regard to the facts themselves,to mould them, often perhaps unconsciously, into such a shape as best suits his purpose.

Now in order to show that these inconveniences do

attach to the principle itself, I will take my example of its operation from a respectable quarter, where no unkindly spirit is manifested in tone or language. The seventh number of the Christian Miscellany of July 1842 contains fifteen or sixteen pages of short extracts from Mr. Coleridge's writings, which are entitled "Contributions of S. T. Coleridge to the Revival of Catholic Truths." I would suggest, by the way, that if my Father had taught only as such eclectics from his works would have him appear to have taught, his contributions to catholic truth would have been meagre enough, and might even have told in favour of much that he considered most uncatholic falsehood; had his views been compressed within the bounds into which an implicit faith in the formal theology of early times must have compressed them, his system would have been lifeless. and unreal as that which he was ever seeking to enliven and organize; he would have done little toward enlightening his generation, though he might have aided others to strengthen particular parties by bringing up again for current use obsolete religious metaphysics and neglected arguments-a very different process from that of a true revival, which, instead of raising up the dead body of ancient doctrine, calls forth the life and substance that belong to it, clothed in a newer and more spiritual body, and gives to the belief of past ages an expansion and extension commensurate with the developed mind of our progressive race. Such was the revival of catholic truth at which he aimed, with whatever success, and to bring him in as an assistant in one of an opposite character, is, in my opinion, to do him injustice.

My immediate purpose, however, was not to notice the extracts themselves, but certain observations, re