Coleridge's most distinctive work was to restore the broken harmony between reason and religion, by enlarging the conception of both, but of the latter especially,—by showing how man is essentially a religious being having a definite spiritual constitution, apart from which the very idea of religion becomes impossible. Religion is not, therefore, something brought to man, it is his highest education. Religion, he says, was designed “to improve the nature and the faculties of man, in order to the right governing of our actions, to the securing the peace and progress, eternal and internal, of individuals and communities.” Christianity is in the highest degree adapted to this end; and nothing can be a part of it that is not duly proportioned thereto. In thus vindicating the rationality of religion, Coleridge had a twofold task before him, as every such thinker has. He had to assert against the Epicurean and Empirical School the spiritual constitution of human nature, and against the fanatical or hyper-evangelical school the reasonable working of spiritual influence. He had to maintain, on the one hand, the essential divinity of man, that “there is more in him than can be rationally referred to the life of nature and the mechanism of organisation,” and on the other hand to show that this higher life of the spirit is throughout rational—that it is superstition and not true religion which professes to resolve “men's faith and practice” into the illumination of such a spirit as they can give no account of,—such as does not enlighten their reason or enable them to render their doctrine intelligible to others. He fights, in short, alike against materialistic negation and credulous enthusiasm.