doxy, which was notoriously
inadequate. But after his stay at Malta, Coleridge announced to his
friends that he had given up his "Socinianism" (of which ever afterwards
he spoke with asperity), professing a return to Christian faith, though
still putting on it a mystical construction, as when he told Crabb
Robinson that "Jesus Christ was a Platonic philosopher." At this stage
he was much in sympathy with the historico-rationalistic criticism of
the Old Testament, as carried on in Germany; giving his assent, for
instance, to the naturalistic doctrine of Schiller's _Die Sendung
Moses_. From about 1810 onwards, however, he openly professed Christian
orthodoxy, while privately indicating views which cannot be so
described. And even his published speculations were such as to draw from
J. H. Newman a protest that they took "a liberty which no Christian can
tolerate," and carried him to "conclusions which were often heathen
rather than Christian." This would apply to some of his positions
concerning the Logos and the Trinity. After giving up Unitarianism he
claimed that from the first he had been a Trinitarian on Platonic lines;
and some of his latest statements of the doctrine are certainly more
pantheistic than Christian.

The explanation seems to be that while on Christian grounds he
repeatedly denounced pantheism as being in all its forms equivalent to
atheism, he was latterly much swayed by the thought of Schelling in the
pantheistic direction which was natural to him. To these conflicting
tendencies were probably due his self-contradictions on the problem of
original sin and the conflicting claims of feeling and reason. It would
seem that, in the extreme spiritual vicissitudes of his life, conscious
alternately of personal weakness and of the largest speculative grasp,
he at times threw himself entirely on the consolations of evangelical
faith, and at others reconstructed the cosmos for himself in terms of
Neo-Platonism and the philosophy of Schelling. So great were his
variations even in his latter years, that he could speak to his friend
Allsop in a highly latitudinarian sense, declaring that in Christianity
"the miracles are supererogatory," and that "the law of God and the
great principles of the Christian religion would have been the same had
Christ never assumed humanity."

From Schelling, whom he praised as having developed Kant where Fichte
failed to do so, he borrowed much and often, not only in the
metaphysic