their doctrines true or false without reference to the subjective standard of judgment.  Coleridge contended that faith must rest not merely upon objective data, but upon inward experience.  The authority of Scripture is in its truthfulness, its answer to the highest aspirations of the human reason and the most urgent necessities of the moral life.  The doctrine of an atonement is intelligible only in so far as it too comes within the range of spiritual experience.  The apostolic language took colour from the traditions concerning sacrifice.  Much has been taken by the Church as literal dogmatic statement which should be taken as more figure of speech, borrowed from Jewish sources.

Coleridge feared that his thoughts concerning Scripture might, if published, do more harm than good.  They were printed first in 1840.  Their writing goes back into the period long before the conflict raised by Strauss.  There is not much here that one might not have learned from Herder and Lessing.  Utterances of Whately and Arnold showed that minds in England were waking.  But Coleridge’s utterances rest consistently upon the philosophy of religion and theory of dogma which have been above implied.  They are more significant than are mere flashes of generous insight, like those of the men named.  The notion of verbal inspiration or infallible dictation of the Holy Scriptures could not possibly survive after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had made itself felt.  The rabbinical idea was bound to disappear.  A truer sense of the conditions attending the origins and progress of civilisation and of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social ideas advance, brought of necessity a changed idea of the nature of Scripture and revelation.  Its literature must be read as literature, its history as history.  For the answer in our hearts to the spirit in the Book, Coleridge used the phrase:  ‘It finds me.’  ’Whatever finds me bears witness to itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Ghost.  In the Bible there is more that finds me than in all the other books which I have read.’  Still, there is much in the Bible that does not find me.  It is full of contradictions, both moral and historical.  Are we to regard these as all equally inspired?  The Scripture itself does not claim that.  Besides, what good would it do us to claim that the original documents were inerrant, unless we could claim also that they had been inerrantly transmitted?  Apparently Coleridge thought that no one would ever claim that.  Coleridge wrote also concerning the Church.  His volume on The Constitution of Church and State appeared in 1830.  It is the least satisfactory of his works.  The vacillation of Coleridge’s own course showed that upon this point his mind was never clear.  Arnold also, though in a somewhat different way, was zealous for the theory that Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State in its educational and religious aspect and organisation.  If Thomas Arnold’s moral earnestness and his generous spirit could not save this theory from being chimerical, no better result was to be expected from Coleridge.