fast, unpresuming gaze
Him, nature's essence, mind, and energy;
And gazing, trembling, patiently ascend,
Treading beneath their feet all visible things
As steps, that upward to their Father's throne
Lead gradual.[647]

If we would further understand how far removed must have been
Coleridge's tone of thought from that which for so long a time had
regarded enthusiasm in all its forms as the greatest enemy of sober
reason and sound religion, we should only have to consider what a new
world of thought and sentiment was that in which Coleridge was living
from any of which the generation before him had experience. The band of
poets and essayists represented by Coleridge and Wordsworth, Southey,
Lamb, De Quincey, and we may add Blake, were in many respects separated
by a wider gulf, except only in time, from the authors of twenty years
before, than they were from the writers of the Elizabethan age. New
hopes and aspirations as to the capabilities of human life, new and more
spiritual aspects of nature, of art, of poetry, of history, made it
impossible for those who felt these influences in all the freshness of
their new life to look with the same eyes as their fathers on those
questions above all others which related to the intellectual and
spiritual faculties of the soul. It was a worthy aim for a
poet-philosopher such as Coleridge was--a mystic and enthusiast in one
aspect of his mind, a devoted 'friend of reason' in another--to analyse
reason and unite its sublimer powers with conscience as a divinely given
'inner light,' to combine in one the highest exercise of the
intellectual and the moral faculties. Emotional religion had exhibited
on a large scale alike its powers and deficiencies. Thoughtful and
religious men could scarcely do better than set themselves to restore
the balance where it was unequal. They had to teach that faith must be
based, not only upon feeling and undefined impulse, but on solid
intellectual apprehension. They had to urge with no less earnestness
that religious truth has to be not only outwardly apprehended, but
inwardly appropriated before it can become possessed of true spiritual
efficacy. It is most true that vague ideas of some inward illumination
are but a miserable substitute for a sound historical faith, but it is
no less true that a so-called historical faith has not become faith at
all until the soul has received it into itself, and made of it an inward
light. In