‘But do you require some one or more particular passage from the Bible that may at once illustrate and exemplify its application to the changes and fortunes of empires? Of the numerous chapters that relate to the Jewish tribes, their enemies and allies, before and after their division into two kingdoms, it would be more difficult to state a single one, from which some guiding light might _not_ be struck.’ [Oh, very well, we shall have a few of them. The passage goes on.] ‘And in nothing is Scriptural history more strongly contrasted with the histories of highest note in the present age, than in its freedom from the hollowness of abstractions.’ [Mr. Coleridge’s admiration of the inspired writers seems to be very much mixed with a dislike of Hume and Gibbon.]—‘While the latter present a shadow-fight of Things and Quantities, the former gives us the history of Men, and balances the important influence of individual minds with the previous state of national morals and manners, in which, as constituting a specific susceptibility, it presents to us the true cause, both of the influence itself, and of the Weal or Woe that were its consequents. _How should it be otherwise?_ The histories and political economy of the present and preceding century partake in the general contagion of its mechanic philosophy.’ [“still harping on my daughter”] ‘and are the _product_ of an unenlivened generalizing understanding. In the Scriptures they are the living _educts_ of the Imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in Images of the Sense, and organising (as it were) the flux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths, of which they are the _conductors_. These are the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld when the hand of the Lord was upon him, and he saw visions of God as he sat among the captives by the river of Chebar. _Whither soever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go; for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels also._ The truths and the symbols that represent them move in conjunction, and form the living chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity. _Hence by a derivative, indeed, but not a divided influence, and though in a secondary, yet in more than a metaphorical sense, the Sacred Book_ is worthily entitled the Word of God,’ p. 36.