him as a man, the words that he reads are spirit and truth, and could only proceed from Him who made both heart and soul.

Understand the matter so, and all difficulty vanishes: you read without fear, lest your faith meet with some shock from a passage here and there which you cannot reconcile with immediate dictation, by the Holy Spirit of God, without an absurd violence offered to the text. You read the Bible as the best of all books, but still as a book, and make use of all the means and appliances which learning and skill, under the blessing of God, can afford towards rightly apprehending the general sense of it — not solicitous to find out doctrine in mere epistolary familiarity, or facts in clear ad hominem et pro tempore allusions to national traditions.

Tertullian, I think, says he had seen the autograph copies of some of the apostles' writings. The truth is, the ancient Church was not guided by the mere fact of the genuineness of a writing in pronouncing

it canonical; its catholicity was the test applied to it. I have not the smallest doubt that the Epistle of Barnabas is genuine; but it is not catholic; it is full of the yvwois, though of the most simple and pleasing sort. I think the same of Hermas. The Church would never admit either into the canon, although the Alexandrians always read the epistle of Barnabas in their churches for three hundred years together. It was upwards of three centuries before the Epistle to the Hebrews was admitted, and this on account of its yvwois; at length, by help of the venerable prefix of St. Paul's name, its admirers, happily for us, succeeded.

So little did the early bishops and preachers think their Christian faith wrapped up in, and solely to be learned from, the New Testament, indeed, can it be said that there was any such collection for three hundred years?—that I remember a letter from

-

*

* I have lost the name which Mr. Coleridge mentioned.-ED.

to a friend of his, a bishop in the East, in which he most evidently speaks of the Christian Scriptures as of works of which the bishop knew little or nothing.

April 4. 1832.

UNITARIANISM.

I MAKE the greatest difference between ans and isms. I should deal insincerely with you, if I said that I thought Unitarianism was Christianity. No; as I believe and have faith in the doctrine, it is not the truth in Jesus Christ; but God forbid that I should doubt that you, and many other Unitarians, as you call yourselves, are, in a practical sense, very good Christians. We do not win Heaven by logic.

By the by, what do you mean by exclusively assuming the title of Unitarians? As if Tri-Unitarians were not necessarily Uni

tarians, as much (pardon the illustration) as an apple-pie must of course be a pie! The schoolmen would, perhaps, have called you Unicists; but your proper name is Psilanthropists-believers in the mere human nature of Christ.

Upon my word, if I may say so without offence, I really think many forms of Pantheistic Atheism more agreeable to an imaginative mind than Unitarianism as it is professed in terms: in particular, I prefer the Spinosistic scheme infinitely. The early Socinians were, to be sure, most unaccountable logicians; but, when you had swallowed their bad reasoning, you came to a doctrine on which the heart, at least, might rest for some support. They adored Jesus Christ. Both Lælius and Faustus Socinus laid down the adorability of Jesus in strong terms. I have nothing, you know, to do with their logic. But Unitarianism is, in effect, the worst of one kind of Atheism, joined to the worst of one kind of Calvinism, like two asses tied tail to tail. It has no covenant with God; and

looks upon prayer as a sort of self-magnetizing

a getting of the body and temper into a certain status, desirable per se, but having no covenanted reference to the Being to whom the prayer is addressed.

April 5. 1832.

MORAL LAW OF POLARITY.

It is curious to trace the operation of the moral law of polarity in the history of politics, religion, &c. When the maximum of one tendency has been attained, there is no gradual decrease, but a direct transition to its minimum, till the opposite tendency has attained its maximum; and then you see another corresponding revulsion. With the Restoration came in all at once the mechanico-corpuscular philosophy, which, with the increase of manufactures, trade, and arts, made every thing in philosophy, religion, and poetry objective; till, at length, attachment to mere external