These were the radical data of the religious philosophy of Coleridge. They imply a general conception of religion which was revolutionary for his age, simple and ancient as the principles are. The evangelical tradition brought religion to man from the outside. It took no concern of man's spiritual constitution beyond the fact that he was a sinner and in danger of hell. Coleridge started from a similar but larger experience, including not only sin, but the whole spiritual basis on which sin rests. “I profess a deep conviction,” he says, “that man is a fallen creature,” “not by accident of bodily constitution or any other cause, but as diseased in his will—in that will which is the true and only strict synonyme of the word I, or the intelligent Self.” This “intelligent Self” is a fundamental conception lying at the root of his system of thought. Sin is an attribute of it, and cannot be conceived apart for it, and conscience, or the original sense of right and wrong governing the will. Apart from these internal realities there is no religion, and the function of the Christian Revelation is to build up the spiritual life out of these realities—to remedy the evil, to enlighten the conscience, to educate the will. This effective power of religion comes directly from God in Christ. Here Coleridge joins the Evangelical School, as indeed every school of living Christian Faith. This was the element of Truth he found in the doctrine of Election as handled “practically, morally, humanly,” by Leighton. Every true Christian, he argues, must attribute his distinction not in any degree to himself—“his own resolves and strivings,” “his own will and understanding,” still less to “his own comparative excellence,”—but to God, “the being in whom the promise of life originated, and on whom its fulfilment depends.” Election so far is a truth of experience. “This the conscience requires; this the highest interests of morality demand.” So far it is a question of facts with which the speculative reason has nothing to do. But when the theological reasoner abandons the ground of fact and “the safe circle of religion and practical reason for the shifting sand-wastes and mirages of speculative theology,” then he uses words without meaning. He can have no insight into the workings or plans of a Being who is neither an object of his senses nor a part of his self-consciousness.