[BY HENRY NELSON COLERIDGE.]
This corrected Edition of the Aids to Reflection is commended to
Christian readers, in the hope and the trust that the power which the
book has already exercised over hundreds, it may, by God's
furtherance, hereafter exercise over thousands. No age, since
Christianity had a name, has more pointedly needed the mental
discipline taught in this work than that in which we now live; when,
in the Author's own words, all the great ideas or verities of religion
seem in danger of being condensed into idols, or evaporated into
metaphors. Between the encroachments, on the one hand, of those who so
magnify means that they practically impeach the supremacy of the ends
which those means were meant to subserve; and of those, on the other
hand, who, engrossed in the contemplation of the great Redemptive Act,
rashly disregard or depreciate the appointed ordinances of
grace;--between those who, confounding the sensuous Understanding,
varying in every individual, with the universal Reason, the image of
God, the same in all men, inculcate a so-called faith, having no
demonstrated harmony with the attributes of God, or the essential laws
of humanity, and being sometimes inconsistent with both; and those
again who requiring a logical proof of that which, though not
contradicting, does in its very kind, transcend, our reason, virtually
deny the existence of true faith altogether;--between these almost
equal enemies of the truth, Coleridge,--in all his works, but
pre-eminently in this--has kindled an inextinguishable beacon of
warning and of guidance. In so doing, he has taken his stand on the
sure word of Scripture, and is supported by the authority of almost
every one of our great divines, before the prevalence of that system
of philosophy, (Locke's,) which no consistent reasoner can possibly
reconcile with the undoubted meaning of the Articles and Formularies
of the English Church:--
_In causaque valet, causamque juvantibus armis._
The Editor had intended to offer to the reader a few words by way of
introduction to some of the leading points of philosophy contained in
this Volume. But he has been delighted to find the work already done
to his hand, in a manner superior to anything he could have hoped to
accomplish himself, by an affectionate disciple of Coleridge on the
other side of the Atlantic. The following Essay was written by the
Rev. James Marsh, President of the University of Vermont, United
States of America, and prefixed by him to his Edition of the Aids to
Reflection, published at Burlington in 1829. The Editor has printed
this Essay entire;[1]--as well out of respect for its author, as
believing that the few paragraphs in it having a more special
reference to the state of opinion in America, will not be altogether
without an interest of their own to the attentive observers of the
progress of Truth in this or any other country.
Lincoln's Inn, 25th April, 1839.
[1] See pp. xxiii-lxxvi. Mr. H. N. Coleridge gave the first edition of
Dr. Marsh's Essay. The reader has in the present volume the essay as
it appeared in its second and revised edition, 1840.--ED.