RELIGION

The works that deal most with Coleridge’s opinions on religious matters are: The Statesman’s Manual, 1816, 1817; the Aids to Reflection, 1825 (comments on passages from Leighton, Jeremy Taylor, Hooker and other English divines); On the Constitution of the Church and State, 1830 (on the Catholic Bill, and the need for a national church); and the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (for a spiritual and imaginative reading of the Bible and against text-bandying), post-humously published in 1840. There are many references in the Table Talk, and the notebooks after 1827 are largely theological.

In 1827, after a serious illness, Coleridge took communion for the first time since Cambridge days, and it is clear that he looked more and more for personal and national spiritual sustenance in an established national church. But John Stuart Mill was hardly correct in labelling him a High Churchman. Nor was he, as is sometimes suggested, a religious mystic, greatly though he admired the Quakers and the Moravian Church. It was just as difficult for him to find a religious affiliation to meet his complicated views, as to find a satisfactory political party.

The best and fullest modern treatment of this aspect of Coleridge is Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement by C. R. Sanders.