s the Gospel to take
deep root in their hearts.

* * * * *

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

AIDS TO REFLECTION

This famous book, of which the full title is "Aids to
Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the
several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion," was
published in 1825, nine years before the author's death. Its
influence on thoughtful minds was very great, and many of the
first divines of that period owed to it their profoundest
religious ideas. It has been said that the fame of Coleridge
(see LIVES AND LETTERS) as a philosophic thinker is not so
great as it was during the twenty years immediately after his
death; but one imagines that this statement merely means that
not so many people now read Coleridge as did fifty years ago.
The book, at any rate, has not yet been written which exposes
a fallacy in his argument or demolishes his system. It should
be remembered that this poet and searching thinker, to whom
men like Wordsworth and Haslitt listened with reverence, was
for some time in his life a Unitarian, and won to faith in the
divinity of Christ by the use of his reason.

_I.--INTRODUCTORY APHORISMS_

It is the most useful prerogative of genius to rescue truths from the
neglect caused by the very circumstance of their universal admission.
Truths, of all others the most awful and interesting, are too often
considered as so true that they lose the power of truth, and lie
bedridden in the dormitory of the soul.

There is one sure way of giving freshness and importance to the most
commonplace maxims--that of _reflecting_ on them in direct reference to
our own state and conduct, to our own past and future being. A
reflecting mind, says an ancient writer, is the spring and source of
every good thing. As a man without forethought scarce deserves the name
of man, so forethought without reflection is but a metaphorical phrase
for the instinct of a beast.

In order to learn, we must attend; in order to profit by what we have
learnt, we must think; he only thinks who reflects.

To assign a feeling and a determination of their will as a satisfactory
reason for embracing or rejecting an opinion is the habit of many
educated people; to me, this seems little less irrational than to apply
the nose to a picture, and to decide on its genuineness by the sense of
smell.

In