time when the mind of man shall play
freely on every subject, when no question shall be thought too sacred
to be investigated, when reason shall be the sovereign arbiter of all
disputes, when priestly authority shall have perished, when every man's
thought shall decide his own belief, and his conscience determine the
way in which he shall walk.

DEAN STANLEY'S LATEST.

(August, 1880.)

At one of Charles Lamb's delightful Wednesday evenings Coleridge had,
as usual, consumed more than his fair share of time in talking of some
"regenerated" orthodoxy. Leigh Hunt, who was one of the listeners,
manifested his surprise at the prodigality and intensity of the poet's
religious expressions, and especially at his always speaking of Jesus
as "our Savior." Whereupon Lamb, slightly exhilarated by a glass of
gooseberry cordial, stammered out, "Ne--ne--never mind what Coleridge
says; he's full of fun." This jocular and irreverent criticism is
perhaps, after all, the most pertinent that can be passed on the
utterances of this school of "regenerated orthodoxy." Coleridge, who had
unbounded genius, and was intellectually capable of transforming British
philosophy, went on year after year maundering about his "sumject"
and "omject," mysteriously alluding to his great projected work on
the Logos, and assuring everybody that he knew a way of bringing all
ascertained truth within the dogmas of the Church of England. His
pupil, Maurice, wasted a noble intellect (as Mill says, few of his
contemporaries had so much intellect to waste) in the endeavor to
demonstrate that the Thirty-Nine Articles really anticipated all the
extremest conclusions of modern thought; afflicting himself perpetually,
as has been well said, with those "forty stripes save one." And now
we have Dean Stanley, certainly a much smaller man than Maurice, and
infinitely smaller than Coleridge, continuing the traditions of the
school, of which let us hope he will be the last teacher. What his
theology precisely is no mortal can determine. He subscribes the
doctrines of the Church of England, but then he interprets them in an
esoteric sense; that is, of course, in a Stanleyan sense; for when the
letter of doctrine is left for its occult meaning every man "runs" a
private interpretation of his own. The _Nineteenth Century_ for August
contains a characteristic specimen of his exegesis. It is entitled "The
Creed of the Early Christians," but is really a sermon on the