great miracles they wrought: the thing which we strive for is, that the truth of the Holy Gospel may stand; for God regardeth not men's reputations nor persons."

Here is Coleridge's note.

Oh, that the dear man Luther had but told us here, what he meant by the term, Gospel! That St. Paul had even seen St. Luke's, is but a conjecture, grounded on a conjectural interpretation of a single text, doubly equivocal; namely, that the Luke mentioned, was the same with the Evangelist Luke; and that the evangelium signified a book; the latter, of itself improbable, derives its probability from the undoubtedly very strong probability of the former. If then not any book, much less the four books, now called the four gospels, were meant by Paul, but the contents of those books, as far as they are veracious, and whatever else was known on equal authority at that time, though not contained in those books; if, in short, the whole sum of Christ's acts and discourses be what Paul meant by the gospel; then the argument is circuitous, and returns to the first point,—What is the Gospel? Shall we be lieve you, and not rather the companions of Christ, the eye and ear-witnesses of his sayings and doings? Now, I should require strong inducements, to make me believe that St. Paul had been guilty of such palpably false logic; and I therefore feel myself compelled to infer, that by the Gospel Paul intended the eternal truths, known ideally from the beginning, and historically realised in the manifestation of the word in Christ Jesus; and that he used the ideal immutable truth, as the canon and criterion of the oral traditions. For example, a Greek mathematician, standing in the same relation of time and country to Euclid, as that in which St. Paul stood to Jesus Christ, might have exclaimed in the same spirit: "What do you talk to me of this, that, and the other intimate acquaintance of Euclid's? My object is to convey the sublime system of geometry which he realised, and by that must I decide." "I,” says St. Paul, "have been taught by the Spirit of Christ, a teaching susceptible of no addition, and for which no personal anecdotes, however reverendly attested, can be a substitute." But dearest Luther was a translator; he could not, must not, see this.

What the above paragraph proves by inference, the next proves more directly. Luther had said "the Fathers were but men, and to speak the truth, their reputes and authorities did undervalue and suppress the books and writings of the sacred apostles of Christ." "We doubtless find," writes hereon Coleridge, "in the writings of the Fathers of the second century, and still more strongly in those of the third, passages concerning the Scriptures, that seem to say the same as we protestants now do. But then we find the very same phrases used of writings not apostolic; or with no other difference than what the greater name of the authors could naturally produce; just as a Platonist would speak of Speusippus's books, were they extant, compared with those of later teachers of Platonism; He was Plato's nephew-had seen Plato-was his appointed successor, &c.' But in inspiration, the early Christians, as far as I can judge, made no generic difference, let Lardner say what he will. Can he disprove that it was declared heretical by the church in the second century, to believe the written words of a dead apostle, in opposition to the words of a living bishop, seeing that the same spirit which guided the apostles, dwells in and guides the bishops of the church? This at least, is certain, that the later the age of the writer, the stronger the expression of comparative

superiority of the Scriptures; the earlier, on the other hand, the more we hear of the Symbolum, the Regula Fidei, the Creed."

The early church recognised, it is clear, a living inspiration, and perpetual miracle, in each individual bishop. Everywhere, in deed, in these volumes, Coleridge is disposed to attribute little or nothing to the priest's act, but all to Christ, in the heart and being of the candidate or penitent.

What Coleridge claimed for St. Paul, he claimed also for himself; and his claim in either case amounted to no less than thisnamely, that he should be admitted to be a Church in his own Person; and, as such, should have authority over the letter of the written word. As to his manner of dealing with the historical portions, Mr. Henry Nelson Coleridge tells us, that "his friends have always known it to be a fact," that he took the liberty of criticism before related.

"And," continues his nephew, "he vindicated this so openly, that it would be folly to attempt to conceal it: nay, he pleaded for it so earnestly, as the only middle path of safety and peace between a godless disregard of the unique and transcendant character of the Bible taken generally, and that scheme of interpretation, scarcely less adverse to the pure spirit of Christian wisdom, which wildly arrays 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 recognised that image of God in which man was made; and he could as little understand how faith, the indivisible 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 useless 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 not elements essentially necessary, everlastingly co-present.

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Thus minded, he sought to justify the ways of God to man, in the only way in which they can be justified to any one who deals honestly with his conscience, namely, by shewing, where possible, their consequence from, and in all cases their consistency with, the ideas or truths of the pure reason, which is the same in all men. With what success he laboured for thirty years in this mighty cause of Christian philosophy, the readers of his other works, especially

the Aids to Reflection, will judge: if measured by the number of resolved points of detail, his progress may seem small; but if tested by the weight and grasp of the principles which he has established, it may be confidently said, that since Christianity had a name, few men have gone so far. If ever we are to find firm footing in Biblical criticism between the extremes (how often meeting!) of socinianism and popery; if the indisputable facts of physical science are not for ever to be left in a sort of admitted antagonism, to the supposed assertions of Scripture; if ever the Christian duty of faith in God, through Christ, is to be reconciled with the religious service of a being, gifted by the same God with reason and a will, and subjected to a conscience,-it must be effected by the aid, and in the light of those truths of deepest philosophy, which in all Mr. Coleridge's works, published or unpublished, present themselves to the reader with an almost affecting reiteration. But to do justice to those works, and adequately to appreciate the Author's total mind upon any given point, a cursory perusal is insufficient; study and comprehension are requisite to an accurate estimate of the relative value of any particular denial or assertion; and the apparently desultory and discontinuous form of the observations now presented to the Reader, more especially calls for the exercise of his patience and thoughtful circumspection.

Such are the words of Mr. Henry Nelson Coleridge, by way of preface, to the 3rd and 4th volumes-wise words, and worthy of being digested.

The following note on Luther by S. T. C. is exceedingly valuable: we quote it as a warning and a talisman.

Patres, (says Luther,) quamquam sæpe errant, tamen venerandi propter testimonium fidei. Chapter xxix. p. 349.

Although I learn (comments Coleridge), from all this chapter, that Luther was no great patrician, (indeed he was better employed,) yet I am nearly, if not wholly of his mind respecting the works of the Fathers. Those which appear to me of any great value are valuable chiefly for those articles of Christian faith which are, as it were, ante Christum JESUM, namely, the Trinity, and the primal Incarnation spoken of by John i. 10. But in the main I should go even further than Luther; for I cannot conceive any thing more likely than that a young man of strong and active intellect, who has no fears, or suffers no fears of worldly prudence to cry, Halt! to him in his career of consequential logic, and who has been innutritus et juratus in the Grotio-Paleyan scheme of Christian evidence, and who has been taught by the men and books, which he has been bred up to regard as authority, to consider all inward experiences as fanatical delusions ;-I say, I can scarcely conceive such a young man to make a serious study of the Fathers of the first four or five centuries without becoming either a Romanist or a Deist. Let him only read Petavius and the different Patristic and Ecclesiastico-historical tracts of Semler, and have no better philosophy than that of Locke, no better theology than that of Arminius and Bishop Jeremy Taylor, I should tremble for his belief. Yet why tremble for a belief which is the very antipode of faith? Better for such a man to precipitate himself on to the utmost goal: for then perhaps he may in the repose of intellectual activity feel the nothingness of his prize or the wretchedness of it; and then perhaps the inward yearning after a religion may make him ask. -have I not mistaken the road at the outset? Am I sure that the reformers, Luther and the rest collectively, were fanatics?

Our Monthly Nurse, this number, has raised a question respecting the Saviour's conception, and met it in her own way. There are several notes in Coleridge on this point-and as his opinion on the subject is somewhat peculiar, it is but fair that the student should be informed of the fact in the note before

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us, concerning a passage quoted by Luther from Helvidius, who alleged that the "mother of Christ was not a virgin; so that," adds the great Reformer "according to his wicked allegation, Christ was born in original sin"-Coleridge exclaims, " O what a tangle of impure whimsies has this notion of an immaculate conception, an Ebionite tradition, as I think, brought into the Christian Church! I have sometimes suspected that the Apostle John had a particular view to this point, in the first half of the first chapter of his Gospel. Not that I suppose our present Matthew then in existence, or that, if John had seen the Gospel according to St. Luke, the Christopædia had been already prefixed to it; but the rumour might have been whispered about, and as the purport was to give a psilanthropic explanation and solution of the phrases, 'Son of God,' and 'Son of Man,' -so St. John met it by the true solution, namely the Eternal Filiation of the Word."

These instances may suffice to shew the materials of which these remarkable volumes are composed. In such assertions as some of those we have stated, Coleridge must not be understood as denying the opposite, but simply as emphatically pronouncing the truth which should always accompany it as the corresponding pendant. In doing this, he seems sometimes, as in the last extract, to utter an extreme opinion, but only seems to do it-such seeming being expedient as a mean of counteracting the too exclusive scientifico-historical spirit of these times. The genius of Coleridge must not be understood as exclusively philosophical-he contends, whenever occasion calls, for historical results also; but insists always on these being accepted as the symbols and consequences of "a primary unity, which gives itself forth into two things, from whose union results a representative unity, as a third something."

Since it would be utterly impossible to go through the miscellaneous matter of these volumes in any review, we pass on at once, by way of conclusion, to a diagram of Coleridge, illustrative of his religious views in connexion with the affirmation just quoted. The diagram occurs on p. 399 of the 4th volume, and is as follows :—

The Scriptures.

"Christ the Word.
I

-The Spirit.- -The Church.
The Preacher.

"Such seemeth to me," to be the scheme of the Faith in Christ. The written Word, the Spirit and the Church, are co-ordinate-the indispensable conditions and the working causes of the perpetuity and continued renascence and spiritual life of Christ still militant, The Eternal Word, Christ from everlasting, is the prothesis or identity;-the Scriptures and the Church are two poles, or the thesis and antithesis; the Preacher, in direct line under the Spirit, but likewise the point of junction of the written Word and the Church, being the synthesis. And here is another proof of a Principle elsewhere by me asserted and exemplified :--that divine truths are ever a tetractys, or a triad equal to a tetractys; 4 1 or 3=4=1, But the entire scheme is a PENTAD-God's hand in the world."

In the formulæ thus exampled the whole of Coleridge's philosophy is involved. There is nothing more or less in it. We say, emphatically, nothing less in it for all systems except his and, perhaps, Plato's, stop miserably short. We know of none that confesses to more than a bipolarity, and which proceeds, therefore, much according to the rules and analogies of modern chemical science, in the solution of moral questions. But no science, not even chemistry, can rightly divorce itself from a prior principle, manifested in two forces. Positive and negative are only terms-but the things they express, have not an independent status-they are not selfsupported; they require an antecedent power or being, or rather, an Ineffable Source of both.

THE GREEN ROOM.

COVENT GARDEN THEATRE.

MR. Macready has at length (Monday, 10th June) produced the HENRY V. of Shakspere, with Stanfield's dioramas to illustrate the descriptions of the chorus. This he has done with exceeding magnificence, and we cannot but sympathise with the homage thus rendered to the poet. Doubts have been expressed in a leading Journal, whether thus accompanying the regular drama with gorgeous spectacle, be as much benefit to dramatic literature as it is to theatrical interests. The imaginative, says the critic alluded to, is sacrificed to the sensuous. The same strain of argument is taken up by the writer of a pamphlet on "The Past and Present State of Dramatic Art and Literature," which is now lying before us. The writer reminds us of the great number of theatres in the reign of Elizabeth, and that in 1586 there were said to be two hundred performers in London. Inferior actors, also, frequently doubled and trebled their parts, so that the quantum for each company was about ten men, and two or three youths to enact both male and female character: this state of things rendered it possible to produce a great number of pieces. One hundred and ten new plays were produced by four companies in six years, and in the following six years, one hundred and sixty. From 1587 to 1647 (when an ordinance of parliament put an end to dramatic representations), more plays were produced than in the hundred and seventy-nine years since the restoration. The occasion of their production, was the opportunity of their being acted.

What a contrast now exists! One theatre only, in fact, and that compelled to resort to an immense outlay of capital, to induce the public to witness the representation of some half dozen plays in a season. Compelled, we say: in evidence of which, take the fact, that last season Henry V. was performed twice at Covent Garden, with Macready for the hero (and he enacted the part admirably well), to empty benches. A spectacle is added this year, and the world crowds into the house. Is it Shakspere or Stanfield that fills it? The answer must be the latter.

The author of the pamphlet alluded to traces, with impartial pen, the decline of the drama to this miserable necessity. The stage, at length, he tells us, became the actor's, not the author's. The play, from being every thing, was soon nothing; and all general interest, power, and propriety were finally sacrificed to the vanity of the popular actor, and the perverted taste of a vitiated audience. In fact, the greater improvement of the art of acting precluded the efforts of the poet. The equilibrium wants righting again—perhaps the balance was never correctly maintained. It may be as bad an extreme for the poet to be all, as for the actor to be all. However, it behoves us to bear in mind that Mr. Macready did not introduce this state of things, he only found