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embodied in a Historical Inquiry into the Causes of the Rationalist Character lately predominant in the Theology of Germany, which appeared in 1828. He was aware that his book might excite some disapproval; 'I expect to be thought one-third mystic, one-third sceptic, and one-third (which will be thought the worst imputation of all) a Methodist, though I am none of the three.'1 On one side he sympathised with the pietists of the seventeenth century in opposition to the dryness of orthodoxy ; on another he had a good word for the critics and philosophers. He commended Lessing for his services to Christianity, and declared that he had restored the key to the right understanding of the Old Testament as the preliminary education of the human race. He affirmed the influence of the Kantian teaching to have been for the time, indeed, injurious, yet permanently beneficial, for it led many to listen to the voice of Nature, the revelation of God within them (language which no thorough-going Evangelical could have used). To this was added a hint bearing on the advance of the literary and historical investigation of the Bible. The faith of the Christian, he asserted, depends not on the reception of the one or the other book of Scripture ; and it has been a suggestion pregnant with mischief that any doubt respecting any portion of the sacred volume necessarily implies a diminished value for its whole contents, or a weakened reverence and gratitude for its divine Giver. Sentiments such as these

1 Life, vol. i., p. 152.

exposed Pusey to accusations which he had to meet again and again in later years. The book and its sequel (1830) were subsequently withdrawn. As he looked back on the whole controversy after another decade, he defined his position thus:1

'I ever believed the plenary inspiration of the whole Bible, and every sentence in it, as far as any doctrine or practice can be elicited from it. I ever believed the human instruments to have been guided by God's Holy Spirit, and that the Holy Spirit never failed them only I did not think that while He guided them "into all truth," this guidance extended into such minute details and circumstances as in no way affected the truth.'

It was not surprising that Pusey's opponents should draw inferences from his language which he was not prepared to admit. The clerical mind was morbidly sensitive to the smallest symptoms of departure from the most rigid standards of orthodoxy. In 1829 the well known house of Mr. John Murray issued, in a series entitled 'The Family Library,' three little volumes of the History of the Jews, by Henry Hart Milman (afterwards Dean of St. Paul's, 1849-68). Scholar and, poet-he had made some successful translations from Sanskrit-he wrote as a historian rather than as a theologian The characters of the Old Testament were treated not as supernatural saints but as human beings. Abraham became an eastern sheikh. The passage of the Red Sea was explained by natural causes. The numbers of the wandering Israelites were minimised; and the incidents of their long march were viewed through the veil of allegory spread over the distant past 1 In a letter of 1841: Life, vol. i., p. 174.

by oriental imagination. It was more than public opinion could then bear. Anger and alarm stopped the sale of the book, and the issue of the Family Library ceased.

The most important influence of this age, however, was not exercised by the historian, the critic, or the theologian, but by the genius of Coleridge (1772-1834), which expatiated freely in the regions of poetry, literature, and philosophy, at home in them all, yet limited to none. Reaction against the rationalist necessarianism of Priestley and Hartley which he had embraced at Cambridge, led him through his study of German to the philosophy of Kant and Schelling. Confronted with the prevailing Evangelicalism, he could not reconcile its doctrine of the ruin of human nature with his view of the significance of the higher Reason; and this led to a complete reconstruction of his conception of religion. It was no longer a conviction of supernatural grace borne in upon the sinner from without by the irresistible force of the Spirit; nor was it the appropriation by faith of the merits of the Redeemer in the historic atonement of the Cross. It was already involved in the moral consciousness of man; it lay in the spiritual trusts and affections which constituted the very essence of the soul. These could not be justified by any literary or historic evidences. They were their own witnesses, and there was no higher court of appeal except to an utterance still more persuasive in sympathy or clearer in command. Like Herder and Schleiermacher, therefore,

Coleridge declared that Christianity was a life, not a theological system, and it must be known or realised by living. In other words, the real testimony to it was not an external demonstration but an internal experience. The truth revealed through Christ has its evidence in itself, and the proof of its divine authority in its fitness to our nature and needs, the clearness and cogency of this proof being proportionate to the degree of self-knowledge in each individual hearer.' This kind of experience cannot, however, be everywhere uniform and constant. It is apprehended in different forms and with changing intensity according to the specific powers of different persons, or the characteristic influences of different periods. A distinction was accordingly drawn between the intellectual forms of religious belief, which vary from age to age, and the permanent contents of the religious consciousness in aspiration, endeavour, and trust. Even within the New Testament itself, the symbols and metaphors by which the apostolic teachers described the effects of the death of Christ, must be interpreted in the light of the Jewish theology whence they were sometimes derived, or the controversies both within and without the early Church. Coleridge projected vast plans which he never executed, and his philosophy of religion nowhere received systematic or coherent expression. But some years after his death seven letters on inspiration from his pen were issued under the title of Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840). They

1 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, p. 60.

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contained an impassioned protest against the mechanical conceptions of inspiration. The doctrine that every part of the Bible was the direct speech of God turned all these heart-awakening utterances of men of like faculties and passions with ourselves, mourning, rejoicing, suffering, triumphing, into 'a Divina Commedia of a superhuman ventriloquist.'1 The real evidence of inspiration lay in its power over the human soul. 'Whatever finds me, bears witness that it has proceeded from a Holy Spirit,even from the same spirit which remaining in itself, yet regenerateth all other powers, and in all ages entering into holy souls maketh them friends of God, and prophets.' The action of the Spirit could not be shut up within the limits of a book: nor on the other hand could it be discerned there everywhere and always. Such an assumption converted the whole body of holy writ into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but one voice, and the same.'

3

The question which Coleridge set out to answer'Is it necessary, or expedient, to insist on the belief of the divine origin and authority of all, and every part of the Canonical books as the condition, or first principle, of Christian Faith?'-received a no less emphatic answer from Dr. Arnold (1795-1842) on the historical side. Trained at Oriel under Coplestone, Whately, and Hampden, who did not allow Ibid. p. 10, quoting Wisd, of Sol., 77.

1 Ibid. p. 35.

$ Ibid. p. 32.