4thly, it is the experience derived from a practical conformity to the conditions of the gospel--it is the opening eye; the dawning light; the terrors and the promises of spiritual growth; the blessedness of loving God as God, the nascent sense of sin hated as sin, and of the incapability of attaining to either without Christ; it is the sorrow that still rises up from beneath, and the consolation that meets it from above; the bosom treacheries of the principal in the warfare, and the exceeding faithfulness and long-suffering of the uninterested ally;--in a word, it is the actual _trial_ of the faith in Christ, with its accompaniments and results, that must form the arched roof, and the faith itself is the completing keystone. In order to an efficient belief in Christianity, a man must have been a Christian, and this is the seeming argumentum in circulo, incident to all spiritual truths, to every subject not presentable under the forms of time and space, as long as we attempt to master by the reflex acts of the understanding, what we can only 'know' by the act of 'becoming'. 'Do the will of my Father, and ye shall know whether I am of God.' These four evidences I believe to have been, and still to be, for the world, for the whole church, all necessary, all equally necessary; but that at present, and for the majority of Christians born in Christian countries, I believe the third and the fourth evidences to be the most operative, not as superseding, but as involving a glad undoubting faith in the two former. Credidi, ideóque intellexi, appears to me the dictate equally of philosophy and religion, even as I believe redemption to be the antecedent of sanctification, and not its consequent. All spiritual predicates may be construed indifferently as modes of action, or as states of being. Thus holiness and blessedness are the same idea, now seen in relation to act, and now to existence." Biog. Liter. Vol. ii. p. 303. His next publication was the 'Zapolya', which had a rapid sale, and he then began a second edition of the 'Friend'--if, indeed, as he observes, "a work, the greatest part of which is new in substance, and the whole in form and arrangement, can be described as an edition of the former." At the end of the autumn of 1817, Coleridge issued the following prospectus, and hoped by delivering the proposed lectures to increase his utility; they required efforts indeed which he considered it a duty to make, notwithstanding his great bodily infirmities, and the heartfelt sorrow by which he had, from early life, been more or less oppressed:--