Introduction: “Revealed” Religion and Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit

Abstract

James Marsh’s influential “Preliminary Essay” to the first American edition of Aids to Reflection (AR; 1829) offers a penetrating assessment of Coleridge’s religious system:

Instead of adopting, like the popular metaphysicians of the day, a system of philosophy at war with religion … he boldly asserts the reality of something distinctively spiritual in man, and the futility of all those modes of philosophizing, in which this is not recognized, or which are incompatible with it … It is in his view the proper business and the duty of the Christian philosopher to remove all appearance of contradiction between the several manifestations of the one Divine Word, to reconcile reason with revelation, and thus to justify the ways of God to man. (In AR 497)

That All may know the Truth; And that the Truth may make us FREE!!

John 8:32 (in Watchman 3)

So hold up your head, Master Coleridge … and speak up like a Man.

S. T. Coleridge (CN V 5840)