Mr. Traill has reminded us, in the interesting volume on Coleridge which he has recently published, how Coleridge’s disciple, Mr. Green, devoted the last years of his life to elaborating, in a work entitled “Spiritual Philosophy: founded on the Teaching of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge,” the great Coleridgian position “that Christianity, rightly understood, is identical with the highest philosophy, and that, apart from all question of historical evidence, the essential doctrines of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of reason—truths which man, by the vouchsafed light of nature and without aid from documents or tradition, may always and everywhere discover for himself.” We shall not find this position established or much elucidated in “Spiritual Philosophy,” We shall not find it established or much elucidated in the works of Coleridge’s immediate disciples. It was a position of extreme novelty to take at that time. Firmly to occupy it, resolutely to establish it, required great boldness and great lucidity. Coleridge’s position made demands upon his disciples which at that time it was almost impossible they should fulfil; it embarrassed them, forced them into vagueness and obscurity. The most eminent and popular among them, Mr. Maurice, seems never quite to have himself known what he himself meant, and perhaps never really quite wished to know. But neither did the master, as I have already said, establish his own position; there were obstacles in his own character, as well as in his circumstances, in the time. Nevertheless it is rightly called _the great Coleridgian position_. It is at the bottom of all Coleridge’s thinking and teaching; it is true; it is deeply important; and by virtue of it Coleridge takes rank, so far as English thought is concerned, as an initiator and founder. The “great Coleridgian position,” that apart from all question of the evidence for miracles, and of the historical quality of the Gospel narratives, the essential matters of Christianity are necessary and eternal facts of nature or truths of reason, is henceforth the key to the whole defence of Christianity. When a Christian virtue is presented to us as obligatory, the first thing, therefore, to be asked is whether our need of it is a fact of nature.