Timothy Whelan

Coleridge, Jonathan Edwards, and the ‘edifice ofFatalism’1

Keywords: Coleridge, Edwards, Fuller, Ryland,Calvinism, Socinianism, Fatalism,Evangelicalism

It is unlikely that any writer of the Romanticperiod in England has been as thoroughlystudied from as many perspectives – literary,philosophical, political, and religious – asSamuel Taylor Coleridge. Yet even in themidst of such scrutiny, omissions occur. Onesuch instance involves Coleridge’s references toJonathan Edwards (1703–58), eighteenth-century America’s most influential and, attimes, controversial theologian andphilosopher. Among the numerous biographiesand critical studies of Coleridge, Edwards ismentioned only a handful of times.2 Edwardsappears on several occasions in the volumes ofthe Collected Works of Samuel TaylorColeridge,3 usually the recipient of some ofColeridge’s harshest theological criticism, butonly once in Coleridge’s correspondence, andthat is in an 1807 letter by Coleridge to JohnRyland, Jr. (1753–1825),4 prominent Baptistminister in Bristol and friend of Joseph Cottle(1770–1853), Coleridge’s early benefactor andpublisher. Though few in number, Coleridge’sreferences to Edwards are far more than passingallusions, for his brief encounters with Edwardsencompass topics central to Coleridge’sreligious thought from the days of his firstlectures in Bristol in 1795 to his final notebooks

in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Most likelyRyland attended Coleridge’s Bristol lectures,for he had arrived in Bristol in December 1793and quickly formed a friendship with Cottle, hisfuture publisher as well. Though today Rylandis a figure largely unknown to Coleridgeans, hisintroduction by Cottle in 1795 led to a young,brash, outspoken student from Cambridgeespousing radical ideas in politics and theologyled to a correspondence and friendship thatlasted for some two decades. Despite hisposition as an evangelical Calvinistic Baptistminister, Ryland’s influence upon Coleridge’stheological transition in his early thirtiestoward orthodox Trinitarianism should not bediscounted. Coeval with his move towardorthodoxy, Coleridge was grappling withcertain theological concepts that wouldcontinue to surface in his writings, bothpublished and unpublished – freedom of thewill, divine sovereignty, grace, and the natureof redemption. These topics were also central tothe evangelical Calvinism Ryland had imbibedfrom the writings of Jonathan Edwards in theearly 1770s. Though Coleridge and Rylandwould divide on these issues, Ryland’s attempt(aided by Cottle) in 1807 to move Coleridgetoward a more favorable interpretation ofCalvin (and by default, evangelical dissent) viathe writings of Edwards and Andrew Fuller andthe work of the Baptist Mission in Indiadeserves closer attention.5

Romanticism 21.3 (2015): 280–300DOI: 10.3366/rom.2015.0244© Edinburgh University Presswww.euppublishing.com/journal/rom

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 281

IColeridge brought with him on his initial visitto Bristol in August 1794 a buddingUnitarianism and a radical political and socialphilosophy he termed Pantisocracy. Thoughnot particularly supportive of hiscommunitarian social theory, Cottle and hisfellow Bristol Baptist friends – John Harwood,Josiah Wade, Isaac James, Joseph Hughes, andJohn Ryland, Jr. – were clearly captivated byColeridge’s energy and brilliance in espousingthe principles of political and religious dissent.6

These were not the first Baptists, however,to notice such qualities in Coleridge. AtCambridge, where Coleridge had been a studentat Jesus College since 1791, he had learnedmuch of his Unitarianism from William Frend,a fellow at Jesus who, along with George Dyer,formerly of Emmanuel College, had both beenattendants at the Baptist church in St Andrew’sStreet during the later years of the ministry ofRobert Robinson (1735–90). Robinson’ssuccessor, Robert Hall (1764–1831), anotherministerial friend of Cottle, left his position asassistant pastor at Broadmead Baptist Churchand classical tutor at Bristol Baptist College tosucceed Robinson in the summer of 1791,shortly before Coleridge’s arrival at JesusCollege. Hall’s Christianity Consistent with aLove of Freedom (1791) quickly established himas a prominent political reformer amongBaptists,7 an area in which Frend and Dyer werein complete agreement. In matters of theology,however, Hall quickly drew the line onSocinianism at St. Andrew’s Street, and his firstseries of sermons in the fall of 1791 were on theAtonement and the nature of Christ, sermonsthat drove Frend, Dyer and about a dozen othermembers and attendants out of thecongregation. Dyer left Cambridge in thefall of 1792, and the next summer Frend wastried and expelled from the University, forcinghis eventual removal to London in 1794, butnot before he had become friends withColeridge.

Shortly after Frend’s trial, another reformer,Benjamin Flower (1755–1829), became the firstpublisher and editor of the radical newspaper,the Cambridge Intelligencer. Flowerimmediately joined Hall’s congregation inSt Andrew’s Street and soon became acquaintedwith Coleridge as well, publishing some ofColeridge’s earliest poems in 1794.8 WhenColeridge returned to Cambridge from Bristol(via London) in September 1794, he broughtwith him a letter of introduction to Hall. Thetwo men had breakfast together (most likely atthe house where Flower resided), but Hall wasnot particularly impressed with the sociallyidealistic Unitarian Coleridge of 1794. In aletter to his brother-in-law Isaac James inBristol, Hall described Coleridge as ‘a veryingenious young man, but intoxicated with apolitical and philosophical enthusiasm, a sophic,a republican, and leveller. Much as I admire hisabilities, I cannot say I feel disposed to cultivatehis intimacy; it is difficult or rather perhapsimpossible to come into contact with suchlicentious opinions without contracting ataint’.9 Hall’s assessment was not without someprejudice, but when Coleridge returned toBristol a few months later to begin a series oflectures in an effort to raise money for hisPantisocratic scheme, he was indeed a ‘politicaland philosophical’ enthusiast. Coleridge metGeorge Dyer in London just prior to hismeeting with Hall, and, if Cottle had not beenpresent in Bristol, Dyer himself could easilyhave provided introductions for Coleridge tosome of Bristol’s most prominent Dissenters,including two of Dyer’s personal acquaintances,the Unitarian minister John Prior Estlin of thePresbyterian (Unitarian) congregation atLewin’s Mead, and the new Baptist minister atBroadmead, John Ryland, Jr., Dyer’s formercolleague at Northampton.10

Neither Coleridge’s radical politics nor hisUnitarianism prevented Cottle from taking hisyoung friend to meet the evangelical Rylandand another Baptist minister, Ryland’s assistant

282 Romanticism

at Broadmead and the Academy, Joseph Hughes(1769–1833). Hughes would leave Bristol in1796 for Battersea, London, where he wouldminister to a Baptist congregation, serve as thefounding Secretary for both the Religious TractSociety (1799) and the British and Foreign BibleSociety (1804), and maintain his friendshipwith Coleridge until his death in 1833.11

Ryland, who had arrived in Bristol fromNorthampton in December 1793, would remainin Bristol until his death in 1825. Trained athis father’s academy in Northampton (hisclassmates included two future leaders amongthe Unitarians, Benjamin Flower and JohnTowill Rutt), Ryland assumed the pastorateof the College Lane Baptist Church inNorthampton in 1785 when his father, JohnCollett Ryland (1723–92), resigned and movedhis academy to Enfield where the poet JohnKeats would later attend.

IIAside from attending Coleridge’s lectures in1795, it is probable Ryland subscribed toColeridge’s short-lived periodical, TheWatchman, in 1796. The only survivingevidence, however, of the relationship betweenthe two men, other than allusions in Cottle’sRecollections (1837) to Coleridge’s attendanceat Broadmead during his visits to Bristol,12 isthe letter by Coleridge, composed during thefirst week of November 1807. Coleridge wasnearing the end of an extended visit to the WestCountry that began in May when he and hisson, Hartley, had set off for Bristol fromLondon to see Sara Coleridge, who had arrivedthere some time earlier to visit her mother andother family members. The Coleridges spentpart of the summer with their friend Tom Pooleat Nether Stowey, in whose home Coleridgemet a young Thomas De Quincey. SaraColeridge returned to Bristol with De Quinceyat the end of July 1807, but Coleridge lingeredbehind at Stowey until September. That

October Sara and the children set out forKeswick, escorted again by De Quincey, whileColeridge prepared to leave for London and aseries of lectures that were to begin in January.An illness forced him to stay longer in Bristol,this time with John Morgan, a Unitarian friendColeridge had met in 1795.13 Just days before hecomposed his letter to Ryland, Coleridgereceived (what would later become infamous) a£300 gift from De Quincey, a fact, however,known only at that time to Joseph Cottle.14

At some point during Coleridge’s WestCountry sojourn, Ryland was informed(probably by Cottle) of Coleridge’sre-conversion to Trinitarianism. Coleridge hadbeen expressing doubts about his earlierUnitarian positions for some time, havingconfessed to John Prior Estlin in July 1802 thathe had finally rejected Priestley’s theology, yethe still felt the Trinitarians were too confidentin their assertions. He accepted some form oforiginal corruption and the necessity ofredemption through the work of Christ, but healso confessed that though he believed itnecessary to his faith, he could not yet fullyunderstand it.15 In his Reminiscences, Cottlerecords a conversation with Coleridge a fewyears later (not long before he composed hisletter to Ryland), in which Coleridge renouncedhis former Unitarianism as heretical and asubversion of true Christianity, welcome newsto Cottle who had long desired to see Coleridgerestored to something akin to orthodoxy. Atthis interview, Cottle writes, Coleridgeprofessed his ‘deepest conviction of the truth ofRevelation; of the Fall of Man; of the Divinityof Christ, and redemption alone through hisblood’. ‘To hear these sentiments so explicitlyavowed’, Cottle relates, ‘gave me unspeakablepleasure, and formed a new, and unexpected,and stronger bond of union’.16 Later that yearColeridge wrote to Cottle, denouncing hisformer theological friends, the Socinians, who‘admit the Divine authority of Scripture, withthe superlative excellence of Christ, and yet

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 283

undertake to prove that these Scriptures teach,and that Christ taught his own pure humanity’.If the Socinians are correct, Coleridge writes,then ‘the world and man must be abandoned,with all its consequences, to one universalscepticism’, for in such a material world, Godbecomes indistinguishable from his creation, aform of pantheism that, to Coleridge, could notultimately be separated from atheism.17 Heclosed his letter to Cottle with the affirmationthat the Trinity, though incomprehensible toman’s ‘finite apprehension’, is nevertheless ‘thegrand article of faith, and the foundation of thewhole christian system’.18

Coleridge’s religious transformation mayalso be due to his conversations andcorrespondence with Ryland that same autumn,conversations that provoked Ryland to provideseveral tracts and publications for Coleridge’sperusal, including, as Coleridge’s letter reveals,one by Jonathan Edwards. We also learn fromColeridge’s letter that he may not have beenquite as settled on the Trinity in November1807 as Cottle believed, but without questionColeridge was moving in that direction, hismind focused sharply now on matterspertaining to Christian doctrine, personal faith,and the work of Christian missions, three areasof great concern to his friend John Ryland.Coleridge writes to Ryland as follows:19

Honored SirI have read the Numbers, you lent me,

with deep Interest: sometimes too muchdisturbed by the fear, that little can be doneof permanent effect, unless the Governmentin India by especial favor shewn to the newConverts undermine the heart-witheringInstitution of Casts by creating a new one.Exile would lose part of it’s Terrors, whenthe banished man knows that he is going to aland of Brothers, a land better than thatwhich he quitted. But the injuriousconsequences of our present system ofpretended Toleration, i.e. of shewing to

Infidels & Romanists that we ourselves thinktheir Religion as good as our own orbetter – (for so they must, and to my ownpersonal knowlege so they do, understand &construe our conduct) would furnish matterfor a long Essay.—

Your own pamphlets I have perused withinstruction as well as pleasure – I greatlyadmire President Edwards’s Works20; but amconvinced that Kant in his Critique of thepure Reason, and more popularly in hisCritique of the Practical Reason hascompletely overthrown the edifice ofFatalism, or causative Precedence as appliedto Action. I greatly regret, that my healthhas been such as to make it unfit for me toquit the House, till I leave it – I have nottherefore been able to procure the ShanscritMss – but I mean to write to Mr De Quincyat Oxford,21 unless I see him in London, andhe will give instructions, I doubt not,concerning it’s being sent to you forexamination.

On some points of the system ofRedemption, as distinguished from thedoctrine of Salvation, and concerning theadoration of the second & third Persons ofthe Trinity separately, I had cherished hopesof opening my difficulties to you, alone or byletter – I trust, that I shall be permitted torevisit Bristol in the early Spring. If I can beof the least service to you in any respect inLondon, either as to the Press, or inprocuring any Information, you will makeme a pleasant Hour by commissioningme – for I respect you,

honored Sir!with more than ordinary feelings

S. T. Coleridge

The ‘Numbers’ that Coleridge refers to inthe opening line of the letter are most likelyrecent issues of the Periodical AccountsRelative to the Baptist Missionary Society,printed by the Baptist minister at Dunstable,

284 Romanticism

John Webster Morris (1763–1836). In 1807 theBritish authorities in India passed severalordinances aimed at restricting the preachingactivities of the missionaries and, in particular,their native converts, convinced that theiregalitarian preaching against the caste systemwas partially to blame for the revolt by Indiansoldiers at Vellore in July 1806. Recentnumbers of the Periodical Accounts hadcovered these activities and published first-handaccounts by the missionaries and some nativepreachers as they faced persecution due to theserestrictions. At the end of No. XVII, a note,dated 9 June 1807 from Northampton, andwritten (possibly by Ryland) on behalf of theBMS Committee, complained that a number of‘rumours, and private letters’ were circulatingagainst the mission, representing their workamong the native populations ‘as dangerous togovernment’ and creating dissention amongfamilies and castes.22 Such instances of familialand social rejection on the part of the nativeconverts by their families and castes may haveprompted Coleridge’s opening response,especially the narrative in the same number ofthe Accounts by the Hindu convert DeepChund, who noted that various leaders in someof the villages in which he preached inquired ifthe English were come ‘to destroy our cast’.23

When Chund arrived at his home village ofPanjeea with another convert, Ram Presaud ofPratna, whom he introduced as ‘his brother’,Chund’s relatives were displeased and replied,‘Ah, till this time your cast remained; buthaving brought another with you, it is nowcompletely gone!’24 A series of death threatsensued, forcing Chund to flee his village. Hisnarrative could easily have provokedColeridge’s comments about the ‘Governmentin India’, the ‘new Converts’, ‘theheart-withering Institution of Casts’, and the‘Terrors’ of ‘Exile’. Finally, Coleridge’s linkingof ‘Romanists’ and ‘Infidels’ suggests that hewas not unaware that the kind of perversereligious toleration promoted by the East India

Company might open the door for a similartoleration (or emancipation) of Catholics inEngland, a fear of Ryland’s since 1780, when heand his father contributed to the short-livedanti-Catholic periodical, The ProtestantMagazine.25

About the same time as Coleridge’s letter toRyland, Ryland began corresponding with theEvangelical M.P. William Wilberforce, acorrespondence that continued to 1824.26

Wilberforce was not only a great abolitionistbut also the single greatest force in parliamentacting on behalf of foreign missionaries of alldenominations (except the Unitarians, ofcourse) during the first quarter of thenineteenth century. William Carey, the leaderof the Baptist mission at Serampore, hadwritten to Andrew Fuller and Ryland theprevious year, pleading with them to secure thehelp of Wilberforce and Charles Grant (anotherdevout Evangelical M.P. and Chairman of theEast India Company’s Board of Directors) aswell as any other figure of prominence whomight ‘procure for us’, Carey writes, ’theliberty we want, viz. liberty to preach thegospel throughout India’.27 Based upon hisrecent work as Public Secretary to the BritishCivil Commissioner in Malta in 1805, in whichColeridge had drafted several laws for theGovernment that attempted to gain the supportof the Maltese people for policies primarilydesigned to promote British interests,28 andcoupled with his previous experience as apolitical reporter for the Morning Post,Coleridge may have been viewed now byRyland and other Baptists as such a ‘figure ofprominence’. The popular essayist and Baptistminister at Frome, John Foster (1770–1843),another early admirer of Coleridge, afterhearing of the change in Coleridge’s religiousthinking, had written to Cottle the previousMay, delighted that Coleridge would finally

enrich the works which I trust the public willin due time receive from him, and to which it

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 285

Figure 1. Jonathan Edwards (1703–58), American Calvinist theologian.

has an imperious claim. . . . You do not fail,I hope, to urge him to devote himselfstrenuously to literary labor. He is able totake a station amongst the most elevatedranks, either of the philosophers or thepoets.29

Thus, the pamphlets Ryland sent to Coleridgewere clearly by design, for during Coleridge’slong sojourn in the West Country in 1807,Ryland and several of his Baptist friendsbecame convinced that if a reinvigorated,Trinitarian Coleridge were to establish himselfin London as a legitimate Christianjournalist/lecturer, based upon his provenliterary, journalistic, and political credentials,he might prove beneficial not only to Britishculture in general but more particularly toevangelical Baptists, especially the work ofCarey’s mission at Serampore.30

One other allusion worth noting isColeridge’s suggestion that De Quincey mightprocure the ‘Shanscrit Mss’ that Ryland hadinquired about. This is probably a reference tothe 1807 publication in French of a catalogue ofthe Sanskrit manuscripts belonging to theNational Library in Paris,31 a catalogueoriginally compiled in English by AlexanderHamilton (1762–1824), one of the earliestEnglish scholars of Sanskrit who taught thelanguage in Paris between 1803 and 1813 tosuch figures as Friedrich Schlegel and AugustWilhelm Schlegel. Of greater importance,however, are the statements in the letterrelating to theology and philosophy, includingcomments on Kant and Edwards. If Coleridgewas convinced by this date that Socinianismleads to ‘one universal scepticism’, as he hadproclaimed in his letter to Cottle, he was just ascertain in his response to Ryland, based uponwhat he had learned from Kant and rejected in

286 Romanticism

Jonathan Edwards, that Calvinism (and bydefinition, all forms of determinism applied tohuman action) leads to one universal ‘edifice ofFatalism’.

IIIColeridge knew enough about Germanphilosophy to propose to Tom Poole in May1796 that he wished to study at Jena andtranslate a number of German writers,including the ‘Metaphysician’ himself,Immanuel Kant (1724–1804).32 Coleridge’sreading of Kant did not begin in earnest untilhis return from Germany in the summer of1799. He would eventually find Kant’sdistinction between the reason and theunderstanding helpful in leading him awayfrom the scepticism of Hume and thenecessitarianism of David Hartley and JosephPriestley. The latter belief, what Coleridge hadhimself espoused in the West Country in1795–96, was grounded in a mechanisticuniverse governed by an exorable law of causeand effect, a law that Coleridge came to believeeliminated free will and, inevitably, a belief in atranscendent God distinguishable from hismaterial creation. Kant offered Coleridge a wayout of this abyss by replacing his formerempiricist view that the mind conforms toexternal objects with a ‘New Philosophy’ inwhich objects of sense conform to the mind.

According to Coleridge’s interpretation ofKant, each individual possesses an active, not apassive, mind, and is capable of making a priorijudgments based upon an intuitive awareness ofcertain fundamental propositions (such as thereality of God, the free will of man, and theimmortality of the soul), propositions thatcannot be proved empirically by means of theUnderstanding but are nevertheless theinvisible realities of a moral law within manknown through a super-sensuous Reason.Thus, man occupies two worlds simultaneously:the phenomenal world of the senses, and the

noumenal world of ideas. Though the necessityof cause and effect is inevitable in the formerworld, in the latter world man is completelyfree, based upon the presence of a moral lawwithin him known only to the practical reason,the conditions of which require man’s freedomto choose to obey or disobey the dictates of thismoral law. Though our speculative reasoncannot comprehend how this freedom exists ina natural world governed by necessity, ourpractical reason says ‘it must be so’. Coleridgewould eventually find an even stronger groundfor free will in man, one that he believed solvedthis lingering contradiction in Kant (despiteKant’s assertion that ultimately there is nocontradiction) between a phenomenal worldruled inexorably by cause and effect (essentiallythe end point of Socinianism and Calvinism)and a noumenal world in which man operatesvia the Reason in a state of freedom accordingto certain a priori assumptions that he holds tobe true, even though he must recognize thatthese assumptions can neither be proved nordisproved by any traditional method ofmetaphysical or empirical enquiry.33

Less than two years after his letter toRyland, Coleridge would write in The Friendthat all axioms concerning God and man ‘derivetheir evidence from within’ and are grounded ina faith defined by Coleridge as ‘the personalrealization of the reason by its union with thewill’.34 He continued this discussion in theopening issue of the second volume of TheFriend in 1810, declaring that from ‘the fact ofFree-agency’ is derived an awareness of ‘moralresponsibility; and thence the existence of Evil;of Evil essentially such, not by accident oroutward circumstances, not derived from itsphysical consequences, or from any cause, outof itself’. This is in opposition ostensibly to the‘Necessitarians, who assume (for observe bothParties begin in an Assumption, and cannot dootherwise)’, Coleridge writes, ‘that motives acton the Will, as bodies act on bodies; and thatwhether mind and matter are essentially the

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 287

same or essentially different, they are bothalike under one and the same Law ofcompulsory Causation’.35

Though Coleridge believes that man in hisfallen condition is ‘diseased in his Will, in thatWill which is the true and only strict synonimeof the word, I, or the intelligent Self’, this‘diseased weakness of the Will’ has beenexaggerated by ‘Modern’ Calvinists ‘into anabsolute privation of all Freedom, therebymaking moral responsibility, not a mysteryabove comprehension, but a directcontradiction, of which we do distinctlycomprehend the absurdity’.36 Accordingly,these ‘Modern’ Calvinists reduce God’sattributes to nothing more than the rawexercise of ‘infinite Power’, leaving theuniverse ruled by a God who, in his idea ofjustice, erases ‘the sacred distinction betweenThings and Persons’ and operates solely as‘mere Will, acting in the blindness and solitudeof its own Infinity’, subjecting humanity tosuffer under this ‘infinite Power’ without anypower of their own either to prevent it or to actin such a manner as to reduce its effects.37

‘Against these Tenets I maintained’, Coleridgedeclares, ‘that a Will conceived separate fromIntelligence is a Non-entity, and a merePhantasm of Abstraction; and that a Will notfree is an absolute contradiction. . . . I concludedtherefore . . . that the human Will, thoughdiseased, is yet free. . . ’.38 It is this aspect of thefatalism Coleridge associates with EdwardsianCalvinism that most distinguishes Kant fromEdwards. By 1807 Coleridge was convinced, ashe expressed in his letter to Ryland, that ‘Kantin his Critique of the pure Reason, and morepopularly in his Critique of the Practical Reasonhas completely overthrown the edifice ofFatalism, or causative Precedence as applied toAction’. In 1815, after reading EdwardWilliams’s An Essay on the Equity of DivineGovernment, and the Sovereignty of DivineGrace (1809) (another frequent target ofColeridge’s anti-Calvinistic ire), Coleridge

again declares himself on the side of ‘Kant andSchelling, convinced that Sin is not negative ormerely of defect – at least, if degrees oflimitation are meant – in short, if any more bemeant than the self-evident truth that infiniteperfection cannot sin, and that of coursecreatureship is a necessary condition of thepossibility of sin; but this is far, very far, frommaking defect the cause of its reality’.39

The question of the human will being free orin bondage to a human depravity (whatColeridge usually refers to as ‘evil’) thatprecedes all actions was on his mind during hisWest Country visit in 1807 just as much as thedoctrine of the Trinity, both of which emergedfrom his reading at Tom Poole’s of AndrewFuller’s The Calvinistic and Socinian SystemsExamined and Compared, a work that firstappeared in 1793. Fuller (1754–1815) was theParticular Baptist minister at Kettering,Secretary of the Baptist Missionary Society,colleague and friend of John Ryland, and authorof one of the seminal works in the history ofBaptist theology, The Gospel Worthy of AllAcceptation (1785).40 It is likely that Coleridge’sreading of Fuller generated his letter exchangewith Ryland and prompted Ryland to sendColeridge several pamphlets pertaining to thedoctrines of necessity, the will, andSocinianism, including a work by Edwards andprobably two pamphlets by Ryland himself onSocinianism, The First Lye Refuted; or, theGrand Delusion Exposed (1800) and ThePartiality and Unscriptural Direction ofSocinian Zeal (1801).41 Coleridge would finallypublish his thoughts on Socinianism in thesecond Lay Sermon in 1816,42 the foundationsof which had been laid by his earlier reading ofFuller and Ryland. The annotations to Fuller’streatise, however, reveal more than Coleridge’srejection of Socinianism; they also make clearthat Calvinism, especially the version Coleridgebelieved was advocated by Fuller, Ryland, andthe followers of Jonathan Edwards, was toColeridge merely the flipside of Socinianism,

288 Romanticism

Figure 2. Title page to Fuller’s The Calvinistic and Socinian Systems, Examined and Compared (1793), sold byIsaac James of Bristol.

with both views united by a deterministicphilosophy that destroyed man’s freedom andeliminated his guilt. As Coleridge would latersay in a conversation recorded in Table Talk,‘Unitarianism is, in effect, the worst of onekind of Atheism, joined to the worst of one

kind of Calvinism, like two asses tied tail totail’.43

This linking by Coleridge of two doctrinalpositions radically opposed to each other isalready present in his 1807 critique of Fuller.Here Coleridge describes Socinianism as a

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 289

distortion of Calvinism, with both systemspositing a passive will in man. Coleridge cannotunderstand how Fuller could fail to see that

the difference between a Calvinist and aPriestleyan Materialist Necessitarian consistsin this; – The former not only believes a will,but that it is equivalent to the ego ipse, to theactual self, in every moral agent; though hebelieves that in human nature it is anenslaved, because a corrupt, will. In denyingfree will to the unregenerated he no moredenies will, than in asserting the poornegroes in the West Indies to be slaves Ideny them to be men.44

The Calvinism Fuller establishes as the antidoteto Socinianism is characterized by Coleridge asmerely another form of ‘Modern’ Calvinism,by which Coleridge appears to mean the ‘High’Calvinism that dominated the ParticularBaptists for most of the eighteenth century,even though Fuller took great pains todistinguish himself from the High Calvinists.45

In Aids to Reflection (1825), Coleridge woulduse Edwards as his launching pad to attacknecessitarianism, even distinguishing notionsof the ‘will’ as found in Luther and Calvin fromthat of Edwards:

The doctrine of modern Calvinism as laiddown by Jonathan Edwards and the lateDr. Williams, which represents a Willabsolutely passive, clay in the hands of aPotter, destroys all Will, takes away itsessence and definition, as effectually assaying – This circle is square – I should denythe figure to be a circle at all. It was in strictconsistency therefore, that these Writerssupported the Necessitarian Scheme, andmade the relation of Cause and Effect theLaw of the Universe, subjecting to itsmechanism the moral World no less than thematerial or physical. It follows, that all isNature. Thus, though few Writers use theterm Spirit more frequently, they in effect

deny its existence, and evacuate the term ofall its proper meaning. With such a systemnot the Wit of Man nor all the Theodicesever framed by human ingenuity, before andsince the attempt of the celebrated Leibnitz,can reconcile the Sense of Responsibility, northe fact of the difference in kind betweenregret and remorse. The same compulsionof Consequence drove the Fathers of Modern(or Pseudo-) Calvinism to the origination ofHoliness in Power, of Justice in right ofProperty, and whatever other outrages onthe common sense and moral feelings ofMankind they have sought to cover, underthe fair name of Sovereign Grace. . . . Now asthe difference of a captive and enslaved Will,and no Will at all, such is the differencebetween the Lutheranism of Calvin and theCalvinism of Jonathan Edwards.46

The questions posed by the High Calvinistswere simple, and to them, completely logical,but to Coleridge (and, despite his criticism, toEdwards, Ryland, and Fuller), the implicationsfor human redemption were severe: Are theunregenerate, since they have no free will andtheir election or non-election has already beensettled by divine decrees unknown to them,obligated to repent and believe in Christ uponhearing the Gospel? The answer, of course, was‘no’. If so, is it proper then for a gospel ministerto offer the call to repentance and faith tounregenerate sinners, since they may not be ofthe elect? Once again, the answer was ‘no’.

Though Fuller and Ryland had by the late1770s moved away from High Calvinismtowards the more moderate evangelicalCalvinism of Jonathan Edwards, Coleridgerefused to acknowledge the distinction, arguinginstead that Fuller has been misled by Edwardsand has, like his master, hidden from hisreaders

the damnable nature of the [High Calvinist]doctrine – not of necessity (for that in its

290 Romanticism

highest sense is identical with perfectfreedom; they are definitions each of theother); but – of extraneous compulsion. O!even this is not adequate to the monstrosityof the thought. A denial of all agency; – or anassertion of a world of agents that never act,but are always acted upon, and yet withoutany one being that acts; – this is the hybrid ofDeath and Sin, which throughout this letteris treated so amicably!47

The loss of ‘agency’ is compounded, however,by a false sense of the eradication of guilt.‘Guilt’, to Coleridge (and he repeats this nearlyverbatim in the second Lay Sermon48), belongsto ‘time’ and is thus ‘a mechanism of cause andeffect’. In other words, Fuller, like Priestley, isguilty of ‘confounding’ the ever-changingphenomena ‘which belong to time, and cannotbe even thought of except as effects necessarilypredetermined by the precedent causes . . . withthe transsensual ground or actual power’.Consequently, ‘in essentials’ both the CalvinistTrinitarian and the Socinian Materialist ‘are thesame’ in that in each system ‘man isannihilated’.49

Coleridge was certainly not alone, eitheramong Anglicans or Dissenters, in attacking(and, in many cases, caricaturing) the kind of‘High’ Calvinism he was associating with thewritings of Edwards. Henry Crabb Robinson,whom Coleridge would meet in London notlong after his 1807 visit to Bristol, shared asimilar aversion to Edwards. Robinson blamedhis rejection of orthodoxy in his youth on hisreading of the ‘most awefully tremendous of allmetaphysical divines’, the American theologianand ‘Ultra-calvinist’ Jonathan Edwards. Hiswork on ‘Original Sin’, Robinson writes to hisfriend Wilhelm Benecke in Heidelberg in April1835, ‘did me an irreparable mischief’:

But it is the work of transcendent intellectualpower – I am sure you will find it has beentranslated – It’s object was to display the

Calvinistic scheme in all its intensity &merciless severity. The strict justice ofpunishing all men eternally for the sin ofone man was insisted on as a consequence ofthe infinite justice of God. The possibility ofsalvation was deduced from the Sovereigntyof God’s grace. And the absolute & invinciblepredestination to eternal suffering of all towhom that grace was not freely conferred;(For whom alone the atoning sacrifice ofChrist was performed), was mostbarbarously maintained.50

To ascribe such a fatalistic theology to Rylandand Fuller would have shocked their followers,but reactions like those of Coleridge andRobinson to what they considered ‘HighCalvinism’ would have resonated to a degreewith Ryland and Fuller, who in their youthcame to similar conclusions about the extremeview of ‘necessity’ found among the expositorsof High Calvinism.

Just ten days before he received the letterfrom Coleridge, Ryland began work on his ownautobiographical reminiscences, a portion ofwhich has survived in a manuscript nowbelonging to the library at Bristol BaptistCollege and was used by Ryland’s son,Jonathan Edwards Ryland, in his ‘Memoir’ ofhis father in 1826.51 The surviving manuscriptis a summary and informative critique byRyland of his early diaries from the 1760s and1770s, during the time of his conversion to theevangelical Calvinism he gleaned from thewritings of Edwards. In his Preface to SeriousEssays on the Truths of the Glorious Gospel(1771), one of five books of religious poetrycomposed by Ryland during his teenage years,he was quick to demonstrate his High Calvinistproclivities: ‘[F]or nothing can more shew theexceeding riches of His grace’, he humblyboasts, ‘than His chusing such a one as me. I didnot chuse Him, nor ever should; nay, but Iloved idols, and after them I would go; I hadgone after them to hell, if Christ would have let

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 291

Figure 3. Title page to Edwards’s famous treatise on Freedom of Will (London edition of 1790, usedby Coleridge).

me’.52 Sovereign election would have all the sayin this matter, he contends, and ‘Thereforehaving been ordained to eternal life, I wasenabled to believe’. This enabling is the result,Ryland declares, of the ‘almighty sovereign,free operations of God the Spirit, who will inhis own time work certainly, powerfully,effectually and lastingly, upon each of his elect,

creating them anew, giving them a new heartand new spirit; producing in theirunderstanding a perception of the evil of sin,the beauty of holiness, and the fitness of Christto save them’53 – meaning, of course, that theredemption provided through Christ’s deathapplied only to the elect, not the non-elect. Thisindeed was the ‘edifice of Fatalism’ Coleridge

292 Romanticism

had in mind in his letter to Ryland and hisannotations at that time to Fuller’s treatise onSocinianism, asserting in one note thatCalvinism is a ‘denial of all agency; – or anassertion of a world of agents that never act, butare always acted upon, and yet without any onebeing that acts’.54 The young Ryland of 1771would have agreed with that statement, eventhough for some time prior to that date, as heconfesses in his diary, he had been wrackedwith doubts about the veracity of such atheology. Nevertheless, he remained ‘shackledby adherence to a supposed systematicconsistency’, as he wrote in his diary in 1807,so much so that he ‘carefully avoided exhortingsinners to come to Christ for salvation’, sincethey did not possess any ability or ‘will’ to doso, the very heart of Coleridge’s criticismagainst High Calvinism.

However, a resignation to ‘Fatalism’ is notthe Calvinism of Ryland in 1807 or Fuller in1793 or either man as early as 1780, after theyhad read Edwards and embraced a radicallydifferent understanding of Calvinism. Nor didthey imbibe anything remotely similar toColeridge’s critique of Edward’s A Careful andStrict Enquiry into the Modern PrevailingNotions of that Freedom of Will (Boston, 1754;London, 1762), one of the chief foundationstones, according to Coleridge, of the ‘edifice ofFatalism’.55 In his treatise on the will, Edwardsposited two faculties in man: the understandingand the will, defining the latter as ‘That bywhich the mind chooses any thing’.56 The mind,however, never chooses contrary to thestrongest desire or motive, and it is that,Edwards contends, ‘that determines the Will’.57

By motive, Edwards means ‘the whole of thatwhich moves, excites, or invites the mind tovolition, whether that be one thing singly, ormany things conjunctly’.58 Motives createdesire and induce the mind to act through thewill. The will, as an expression of the mind’sdesire, judges the strongest motive, that whichappears to be the highest good (not in a moral

sense, but as in what is most pleasurable oragreeable) and acts accordingly. ‘Nothing caninduce or invite the mind to will’ apart frommotive, and ‘the will is always determined bythe strongest motive’, or, as Edwards famouslyput it, ‘the Will always follows the last dictateof the understanding’.59 Thus, for Edwards thedetermination of the will is the cause of thewill’s choice. The choice itself is the effect ofwhatever determined the will. Any discussionof the will as being uncaused, self-caused, orindifferent to motive Edwards considersnonsensical and absurd. Edwards also connectsthe emotions, or ‘affections’, with the will(a point that will later be of great importanceto Fuller and Ryland), both of which aredistinguished from the mind, but not entirelyseparated from it.60 Though every event has acause, man freely chooses according to hisdesire, with no natural impediments to thatchoice. Such a view of necessity ‘is notinconsistent with liberty’, Edwards contends,which he defines as the ‘power, opportunity, oradvantage, that any one has, to do as hepleases’.61 Accordingly, human beings are not‘machines’, for the presence of the will makeseach person ‘capable of volition and choice’, achoice that, since it is guided by the ‘dictates orviews’ of the understanding, also makes eachperson ‘capable of moral habits and moralacts’.62 Nevertheless, ‘The will, in everyinstance, acts by moral necessity’, Edwardsargues.

Fuller and Ryland believed that Edwardsposited a more moderate view of divinesovereignty and human responsibility andelevated the role of the ‘religious affections’ infaith and sanctification; they were alsoconvinced that Edwards’s distinction between‘natural’ and ‘moral’ ability struck anirremediable blow to the foundations of HighCalvinist determinism. Everyone, Edwardsargued, has the natural ability to choose and actunless hindered by a ‘defect or obstacle extrinsicto the will’, yet no one is free to overcome the

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 293

impediment of their moral inability, a ‘want ofinclination, or . . . sufficient motives in view, toinduce and excite the act of the will’63 towardspiritual concerns. Thus, unbelievers do notforego salvation because they cannot believe(they possess sufficient natural ability) butbecause they will not believe (the result of theirlack of moral ability). Edwards grants man afreedom in the phenomenal world that herefuses to allow in the noumenal world, for thelatter is only accessed through the ‘divine andsupernatural light’ that comes immediatelyupon the individual from God at the moment ofregeneration, a regeneration or ‘election’ that isnevertheless activated through each individual’snatural ability to freely choose what isperceived to be his or her ‘greatest good’.

Coleridge had a long-running battle withEdwards’s definition of ‘motive’ and his linkingof an inherent ‘nature’ to the concept of ‘will’,commenting once that

[t]he phrase “motive” is has likewise beenmuch abused by the philosophicalNecessitarians, as if a motive were a Thing,that by impact communicated motion,instead of being a mere generic Term. Forwhat is a motive, but a determiningThought? and what is a Thought but themind thinking in this or that direction? andwhat is thinking but the mind acting onitself? A motive therefore = the mind in theact of self-determination: and thus the wholemachinery that was to batten down FreeAgency proves to be actually a definition ofFree Agency.64

Coleridge saw a similar weakness in the logic ofJeremy Taylor concerning the will, despite thelatter’s ‘admirable’ attempt to distinguish hisviews from the ‘falsehood or semblance offalsehood in the Calvinistic scheme’. Coleridgewrites in Aids to Reflection:

Had [Taylor] next concentered his thoughtsin tranquil meditation, and asked himself:

What then is the truth: If a Will be at all,what must a will be? – he might, I think haveseen that a Nature in a Will implies already aCorruption of that Will; that a Nature is asinconsistent with freedom, as free choicewith an incapacity of choosing aught butevil. And lastly, a free power in a Nature tofulfil a Law above Nature! . . . I find it aParadox as startling to my Reason as any ofthe hard sayings of the Dorp Divines were tohis Understanding.65

As he read through Fuller’s The Calvinistic andSocinian Systems Examined and Compared inthe summer of 1807 at Tom Poole’s house atNether Stowey, Coleridge became convincedthat Fuller had been ‘misled by JonathanEdward’s [sic] book’ and had ‘hidden fromhimself and his readers the damnable nature ofthe doctrine – not of necessity (for that in itshighest sense is identical with perfect freedom;they are definitions each of the other); but – ofextraneous compulsion’.66

Contrary to Coleridge, Fuller and Rylandbelieved Edwards not only preserved thedoctrine of God’s sovereignty and election butalso allowed for redemption to be, in theory,‘general’ or ‘universal’, something HighCalvinists could not allow. Such a ‘duty faith’,as Fuller’s position was later characterized bythe High Calvinists, not only established thatall who hear the gospel have the natural abilityto respond but also that, potentially, a provisionfor their election had already been satisfied bythe sacrificial death of Christ, enabling thepreacher to offer the call to salvation to anyone,without hesitation or restriction. Thus, toEdwards and his followers, human volition(free choice) and God’s sovereignty ordetermination (a necessary choice) exist side byside, a situation Fuller and other evangelicalCalvinists accepted as a divine ‘mystery’.67

Coleridge, on the other hand, believed thatEdwards’s view of the will left man in suchbondage as to become, in essence, ‘all evil’. This

294 Romanticism

was completely unacceptable to Coleridge, for‘Evil cannot become actual but by participationof the Good. Real, fearfully real, it is – but Evil,solum per se, is essentially potential’.68 Edwardsfreed Fuller and Ryland from this kind offatalistic view of man’s depravity, proffering a‘potential’ salvation for all who hear the Gospel(not Coleridge’s inescapable ‘potential’ evil),opening the floodgates of a worldwideevangelical crusade led by the efforts of theBaptist Missionary Society, of which Rylandand Fuller were among its founders in 1792.Fuller’s last letter to Ryland, composed ten daysbefore his death on 7 May 1815, captures theimportance of their first discoveries of Edwardssome forty years earlier. ‘We have heard some’,Fuller writes, ‘who have been giving out of late’that if he and Ryland and other prominentBaptist figures, such as William Carey, thegreat missionary to India, ‘had preached moreof Christ and less of Jonathan Edwards, theywould have been more useful’, to which Fullerretorted: ‘If those who talk thus, preachedChrist half as much as Jonathan Edwards did,and were half as useful as he was, theirusefulness would be double what it is’.69

To Ryland and many other Calvinists whohad been languishing under the oppressiveweight of High Calvinism, Edwards offeredhope that man was not bereft of allability – limited, yes, but not completely barren.Instead of ‘fatalism’, the writings of Edwardsoffered freedom from a self mired without awill in a determined universe, a self desperatelyin need of spiritual ‘regeneration’ and divine‘election’ but ultimately disheartened by anelection unknowable to the mind andindiscernible by human actions. Theconsequences for High Calvinists (and, inColeridge’s mind, even the Socinians) of such adetermined view of the self were anything butpositive, leading to incessant introspection(Ryland, Fuller, and the Calvinist Baptists),intellectual hubris (Priestley and theUnitarians), or unwarranted licentiousness (the

Antinomians). Since High Calvinism wasgrounded on the notion that it is ‘absurd andcruel to require of any man what is beyond hispower to comply with’, as Fuller put it, itbecame ‘a kind of maxim with such persons’, headds, ‘that “none can be obliged to actspiritually, but spiritual men”’.70 Fuller andRyland were convinced that this was not theteaching of Calvin and the Reformers andproposed instead a theology based upon themore moderate Calvinism of Edwards, adistinction Coleridge refused to recognize.

IVAs evangelical Calvinists and disciples ofJonathan Edwards, Fuller and Ryland preachedthat each individual’s need for divine grace wasmade efficacious through the substitutionarydeath of Christ, accepting such salvationthrough an act of will made possible by divinegrace, an acknowledgment that salvific graceaffects both the heart and the mind. To the trueCalvinist, they argued, this is the effectualcalling of God upon the individual, an enablingof the heart in conjunction with the will (a willthat was before totally ‘unable’ to effect anyspiritual good) to embrace Christ. By themid-1780s, Ryland and Fuller had found a wayto harmonize their desire for an experimentalfaith, verified by religious affections anddemonstrated by a virtuous life, with atheology grounded in the sovereignty of divinegrace, as filtered through the writings ofJonathan Edwards. During Coleridge’s visit tothe West Country in 1807, he could neitherintellectually nor doctrinally accept this view ofEdwards or Calvinism, lumping Edwards,Fuller, and Ryland under the pejorative term‘Ultra-Calvinists’ or ‘Modern’ Calvinists. It isclear, however, that Coleridge’s understandingof Edwards in 1807 diverged greatly from thatof Fuller and Ryland, Edwards’s two chiefadvocates in England at that time.

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 295

In his later years, however, Coleridge seemsto have edged closer to some of the positions ofhis evangelical Calvinist friends. On 15 March1828, Coleridge composed a notebook entrythat declared it to be a ‘truth of unspeakableConsolation’,

that we cannot be saved by our ownrighteousness but only by the alreadyperfected Righteousness of the Son ofMan – Yet it is no less true, that the Son ofGod . . . both did according to the Will of theFather endow Man with the Capability ofbeing raised to the Knowledge and Desire ofthe Creator as his ultimate End – andlikewise in as many as are chosen in actualCapacity of the Righteousness of Christ, apotenziation of the Will by the Leading ofthe Father – for whom the Father leadeth tothe Son, in him God is both to will and todo – and this actual Capacity, if to be distmentally distinguished from, is howevernecessarily inductive to, a nascent state orgerminal state, in the language of theApostles a Seed, a Graft-bud . . . not indeedas the Believer’s own Righteousness, but theRighteousness of Christ in him. . . .71

In a second entry, on 4 May 1829, he writesthat he believes

that by Faith alone can I be justified, and thatif I live at all, except the life-in-death underthe curse of a most holy but for meimpracticable Law, it is not I, but Christ thatliveth in me . . . and that this faith is notmine but of Grace – the faith of the Son ofGod, Who communicates it to me, and whoserighteousness is the alone righteousness bywhich I can be saved – and yet there must bean act of receiving on my part – but this veryact is the effect of Grace – What shall I saythen? Am I no longer responsible? Godforbid! My Conscience would scream a Lie inmy face if I but tried to think it. No! – butthat I am applying the petty Logic of

Cause & Effect, where they are utterlyinapplicable. But does there exist anypractical difficulty? Can I not with my wholeheart abjure my own righteousness and feelthat I must be transferred & transplanted toanother Ground of my Individuality, ahigher Nature, that is indeed aboveNature – and can I not feel & know thathowever ardently I may desire this, I have nopower to bring it about?72

These comments do not seem too far removedfrom the admission by Edwards, Fuller, andRyland of a great divine ‘mystery’ in theinteraction of human volition and divine gracein the act of salvation, and are certainly notindicative of the fatalism Coleridge believed tobe inherent in the doctrine of grace as presentedby these moderate Calvinists. EquatingEdwards with ‘fatalism’ will never explain therise of evangelical Calvinism among EnglishParticular Baptists after 1780, a phenomenonthat significantly increased the number and sizeof their congregations both at home and abroad,aided not only by the work of the BaptistMissionary Society but also by JosephHughes’s evangelical friends at the ReligiousTract Society and the Bible Society. Coleridgewould even speak on behalf of Hughes at eventssponsored by the Bible Society, anotherindication that his disapproval of their theologycontinued to soften after 1807.73 DespiteColeridge’s brusque dismissal of Edwards asone of the chief architects of the ‘edifice ofFatalism’ in his 1807 letter to Ryland, near theend of his life he may have been closer to thetheology of his Baptist friend than his earliercomments on Edwards, Fuller, and HighCalvinism might imply.

Georgia Southern University,Statesboro

296 Romanticism

Notes1. A version of this article was presented at the

Centre for Advanced Studies, Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität, Munich, in April 2012.

2. For instance, see Basil Willey, Samuel TaylorColeridge (London, 1972), 220; ThomasMcFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition(Oxford, 1969), 215; and Jeffrey W. Barbeau,Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion (New York,2008), 173. Only McFarland cites both the letter toRyland and its mention of Edwards.

3. These include: Aids to Reflection, ed. John Beer,Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 9(Princeton, 1993), hereafter Beer, Aids; On theConstitution of the Church and State, ed. JohnColmer, Collected Works of Samuel TaylorColeridge 10 (Princeton, 1976), hereafter Colmer,Constitution; Shorter Works and Fragments, ed.H. J. Jackson and J. R. de J. Jackson, CollectedWorks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 11 (2 vols,Princeton, 1995), hereafter Jackson, ShorterWorks; Marginalia, i., ed. George Whalley, TheCollected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 12(4 vols, Princeton, 1984), hereafter Whalley,Marginalia, ii., and vol. v., ed. H. J. Jackson andGeorge Whalley (Princeton, 2000); The Notebooksof Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn(4 vols, London, 1957–1990), hereafter Coburn,Notebooks, ii. and iv; and vol. v., ed. KathleenCoburn and Anthony John Harding (London,2002), hereafter Coburn and Harding, Notebooks.

4. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed.E. L. Griggs (6 vols, Oxford, 1956–71), iii. 35–36,hereafter Griggs, Collected Letters.

5. Cottle would publish and sell in his bookshopeight works by Ryland between 1793 and 1801. Healso composed an elegy, ‘On the Death of the latevenerable and excellent Dr. Ryland’, that appearedin J. E. Ryland’s memoir of his father, PastoralMemorials (2 vols, London, 1828), ii. 60–61.

6. See Timothy Whelan, ‘Coleridge and Some BristolBaptists, 1794–96’, English Romantic Poets andthe West Country, ed. Nicholas Roe (Basingstoke,2010), 99–114.

7. Hall’s An Apology for the Freedom of the Press(1793) added to his political renown, a work thatpraised the French revolution and attackedEdmund Burke and Bishop Horsley for theiradvocacy of ‘passive obedience’ and‘non-resistance’ to government policies andactions.

8. Flower’s early reputation as a reformer rested onhis book, The French Constitution: With Remarkson Some of its Principal Articles . . . and theNecessity of a Reformation in Church and Statein Great Britain, Enforced (1792). For more onFlower’s experience at Ryland’s academy, seeTimothy Whelan, ‘John Ryland at School: TwoSocieties in Northampton Boarding Schools’,Baptist Quarterly, 40 (2003), 90–116.

9. See R. H. W., The Hall Family (Bristol, 1910),60–61.

10. Dyer taught at Northampton under John CollettRyland between 1782 and 1785; Gilbert Wakefieldhad recommended Dyer as Estlin’s assistant in1791, a position that never materialized. For moreon Dyer’s dissenting connections, see TimothyWhelan, ‘George Dyer and Dissenting Culture,1777–1796’, Charles Lamb Bulletin, N.S. 155(2012), 9–30.

11. He may have attended Coleridge’s lectures at theRoyal Institution in 1808, and we know for certainthat he attended at least one of Coleridge’s lectureson drama presented in the Willis’s Rooms inLondon during May and June of 1812 (Coburn andHarding, 1957–2002, 4159). Coleridge and Hughescorresponded on several occasions, even critiquingeach other’s writings and activities, including theirideas about the formation of London University inthe mid-1820s (Griggs, Collected Letters, iv. 965;v. 300, 447, 455; vi. 1048–50, 1053–56). AtManchester Harris College is a copy of The Friend(1818) with the following inscription by Coleridgeto Hughes: ‘On testimony of Esteem and Regard,and in the humble hope that the Bread cast on thefluctuating waters of the Author’s mind byMr. Hughes in early manhood and years longgone by, will be here found again, neitherinnutritious nor unmultiplied’. Hughes’ funeraldiscourse on Robert Hall, The Believer’s Prospectand Preparation (1831) was annotated byColeridge not long before his death, his commentsindicative of his near thirty-year appreciation ofand disagreement with a select group of Baptistministers, all associated at one time or anotherwith Bristol: John Ryland, Jr., Joseph Hughes, andRobert Hall (Whalley, Marginalia, ii. 1184–87).

12. Cottle includes a note by Coleridge from 1814 inwhich he promises to see him at church atBroadmead. Coleridge, however, appears to haveattended services more often at the Pithay church(where Cottle previously attended) during the

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 297

ministry of Thomas Roberts (1780–1841). SeeJoseph Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel TaylorColeridge and Robert Southey (London, 1847),360, hereafter Cottle, Reminiscences; Griggs,Collected Letters, iii. 462–63.

13. See Valerie Purton, A Coleridge Chronology(Basingstoke, 1993), 79–81.

14. For more on the Indian curiosities in the BristolCollege Library, see Daniel White, ‘ “A little Godwhom they had just sent over”: Robert Southey’sThe Curse of Kehama and the Museum of theBristol Baptist College’, Nineteenth-CenturyContexts, 32 (2010), 99–120.

15. Griggs, Collected Letters, ii. 820–24.16. Cottle, Reminiscences, 309.17. Cottle, Reminiscences, 316, 318.18. Cottle, Reminiscences, 325–26.19. Griggs, Collected Letters, iii. 35–36.20. In his list of books read in 1803, Coleridge wrote

‘Jonathan Edwards’ Works’, but without listingany of the individual titles (Jackson, ShorterWorks, i. 142). A signed copy by Coleridge ofEdwards’s A Careful and Strict Enquiry into theModern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom ofWill (London, 1790), belonging to the collectionsof the Pratt Library, Victoria College, Universityof Toronto (Coleridge No. 111), contains notes byJ. H. Green (1791–1863) but none by Coleridge.Coleridge may have skimmed the volume, but itseems unlikely he read it through, for more than adozen leaves have never been cut. Thus, hisimpressions of Edwards may have come primarilyfrom secondary sources known to Coleridge, fromwhich he imbibed general assumptions ofEdwards’s ideas concerning the will.

21. Thomas De Quincey entered Worcester College inDecember 1803, but never completed a degree.De Quincey’s uncle spent 25 years in India.

22. Periodical Accounts Relative to the BaptistMissionary Society (London, 1806), 374.

23. Ibid., 269.24. Ibid.25. The magazine emerged in the aftermath of the

Gordon Riots in 1780. For Ryland’s matureposition on Catholic Emancipation, see his letter toWilberforce, 26 March 1821, Wilberforce Papers,David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & ManuscriptLibrary, Duke University.

26. For analysis of the correspondence betweenRyland and Wilberforce, now belonging to theBristol Baptist College Library, see Timothy

Whelan, ‘An Evangelical Anglican Interactionwith Baptist Missionary Society Strategy: WilliamWilberforce and John Ryland, 1807–1824’,Interfaces: Baptists and Others, ed. DavidBebbington and Martin Sutherland (MiltonKeynes, 2013), 56–85.

27. Carey to the BMS, 2 September 1806, BMSArchives, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College,Oxford; also quoted in Daniel Potts, BritishBaptist Missionaries in India 1793–1837: TheHistory of Serampore and its Missions(Cambridge, 1967), 178.

28. For Coleridge in Malta, see Barry Hough andHoward Davis, Coleridge’s Laws: A Study ofColeridge in Malta (Cambridge, 2010).

29. J. E. Ryland, ed., The Life and Correspondence ofJohn Foster (2 vols, Boston MA, 1860), i. 226,hereafter Ryland, Life.

30. Coleridge’s interest in missionary activity in India(Anglican and Baptist) and his general distrust of aCatholic presence there continued into the 1820s,as evidenced in his annotating of the Jesuitmissionary Abbé J. A. Dubois’s Description of theCharacter, Manners and Customs of the People ofIndia, and of their Institutions, Religious andCivil (1817). Coleridge appears to have also readDubois’s Letters on the State of Christianity inIndia (1823), a work in which Dubois contendedthat the natives of India would never make realconverts to Christianity nor was it a fruitfulenterprise to translate the Bible into theirlanguage, two of the chief objectives of the Baptistmission from its beginning there in the 1790s.Coleridge read and lightly annotated a copy ofA Reply to the Letters of the Abbé Dubois, on thestate of Christianity in India (London, 1824) bythe Rev. James Hough, Chaplain to the East IndiaCompany, Madras, a copy that eventually settledwithin the library of the Baptist Mission House inLondon, possibly a gift from Ryland himself toColeridge but more likely an acquisition at a laterdate by someone associated with the BaptistMission, possibly Joseph Angus, who was an avidautograph collector. Nevertheless, Coleridge’sannotations reveal his interest c. 1825 with thework in India and the same theological concernwith the doctrine of election he had expressed inhis 1807 letter to Ryland. Just opposite the titlepage, Coleridge wrote ‘that on the whole I amhighly gratified by the perusal of this work,instructed, and . . . I do not hesitate in declaring it

298 Romanticism

the ablest work on the Subject, I have hithertoseen’. Coleridge’s annotation of Hough’s work ispreviously unknown, the book having beenrebound and kept as part of the library of theBaptist Mission in London sometime in themid-nineteenth century. The volume currentlyresides in the Baptist Missionary SocietyCollection, Angus Library and Archive, Regent’sPark College, shelfmark III/272. My thanks toEmily Burgoyne, assistant librarian, who firstdiscovered Coleridge’s signature in the front of thevolume, and to Emma Walsh, Librarian, Regent’sPark College, Oxford, for further assistance inrecovering these important annotations.

31. Catalogue des manuscrits samskrits de laBibliothèque impériale (Paris, 1807), trans. LouisLanglès. Hamilton learned Sanskrit in India underthe tutelage of William Jones. After the death ofJones, Hamilton went to Paris to collate theSanskrit manuscripts in the Biblioteque Nationale.Following the renewal of hostilities betweenEngland and France in 1803, Hamilton was brieflyjailed as an enemy alien, but through theassistance of Constantine Volney, was releasedand continued his work in Paris until 1813.

32. Griggs, Letters, i. 209.33. Monika Class notes that Coleridge was reading

Kant in 1806, primarily grappling with the latter’sdistinction between the Reason and theUnderstanding; this was a year before hisencounter with Ryland. See Monika Class,Coleridge and Kantian Ideas in England,1796–1817: Coleridge’s Responses to GermanPhilosophy (London, 2010), 3; James Vigus,Platonic Coleridge (London, 2009), 35–62; on Kantand free will, see James Vigus, Henry CrabbRobinson: Essays on Kant, Schelling, and GermanAesthetics (London, 2010), 9–16.

34. The Friend (1809–10), ed. Barbara E. Rooke, TheCollected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 4(2 vols, Princeton, 1969), i. 430–31.

35. Ibid., ii. 279.36. Ibid., ii. 279, 280.37. Ibid., ii. 280.38. Ibid., ii. 280.39. Jackson, Shorter Works, i. 397.40. Ryland and Fuller worked closely on behalf of the

Baptist Missionary Society from its inception in1792. After Fuller’s death, Ryland published thefirst complete memoir of his friend, The Work ofFaith, the Labour of Love, and the Patience of

Hope, Illustrated; in the Life and Death of theRev. Andrew Fuller (London, 1816), hereafterRyland, Work of Faith. Fuller’s Gospel Worthy ofAll Acceptation created considerable controversyamong Particular Baptists, dividing High andModerate Calvinists and ushering in the term‘Fullerism’ to describe his modified view of thecollaboration of human responsibility and divinesovereignty in the act of regeneration, althoughFuller’s moderate position seems lost onColeridge.

41. Both works were published and sold in Bristol byCottle, who in 1801 moved his attendance (andeventually his membership), along with hismother and sisters, from the Baptist church in thePithay to Ryland’s congregation at Broadmead.

42. Coleridge’s opinions on Socinianism were notappreciated by the Unitarians, one of whomoffered a critique of the Sermon in two letters tothe editor of the Monthly Repository in April andMay 1817, reminding Coleridge of his Unitarianpast (in Bristol) and his defence of Priestleyanviews in ‘Religious Musing’. More importantly,however, he believes that Coleridge’s linking of afatalistic form of Calvinism to Socinianism isunfair and inaccurate (much like Ryland musthave felt in Coleridge’s linking of moderate andHigh Calvinism in the theology of Edwards andFuller). It is true, the writers asserts, thatnecessitarianism ‘has been maintained byDr Priestley and is held by Mr Belsham; but it hasalso been powerfully enforced by Edwards, and isimplied in the dogmas of Calvin. It is a doctrinepeculiar to no sect; but much more essential to thesupport of the orthodox than of the hereticalcreed. From the opinions of those who entertainmilder views of the Divine intentions towardsman, it naturally acquires a gentler colouring. But,in itself, it is a doctrine of philosophy and not ofreligion, much less of any particular sect ofbelievers’. Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, TheCollected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 6(Princeton, 1972), 255, hereafter White, LaySermons.

43. Specimens of the Table Talk of the Late SamuelTaylor Coleridge, ed. Henry Nelson Coleridge(2 vols, London, 1835), ii. 35.

44. Whalley, Marginalia, ii. 801.45. The term ‘Modern’ in reference to Calvinism

actually originated around 1750 during a pamphletwar among Calvinists within the Baptist and

Coleridge and Jonathan Edwards 299

Independent denominations, influenced by thewritings of two of London’s most prominentBaptist High Calvinist ministers, John Gill(1697–1771) and John Brine (1703–65). Thedebate became known as ‘the Modern Question’.Though Coleridge equates ‘Modern’ withEdwards, Fuller, and Ryland, his criticism seemsmore apropos to the ‘High’ Calvinists than themore ‘moderate’ ‘Modern’ Calvinists.

46. Beer, Aids, 158–59, 160.47. Whalley, Marginalia, ii. 802.48. Coleridge writes: ‘They believe men’s actions

necessitated, and consistently with this affirm thatthe Christian Religion (i.e. their view of it)precludes all remorse for our sins, they being apresent calamity, but not guilt’. White, LaySermons, 182.

49. Whalley, Marginalia, ii. 802, 803. In his laterwork, On the Constitution of the Church andState (1829), Coleridge still maintains this linkingof Calvinism and Socinianism, once again usingEdwards as his prop: ‘In close, though not perhapsobvious connection, with this, is the idea of moralfreedom, as the ground of our properresponsibility. Speak to a young Liberal, freshfrom Edinburgh or Hackney or the Hospitals, ofFree-will, as implied in Free-agency, he willperhaps confess to you with a smile, that he is aNecessitarian; – proceed to assure you that theliberty of the will is an impossible conception, acontradiction in terms, and finish byrecommending you to read Jonathan Edwards, orDr. Crombie: or as it may happen, he may declarethe will itself a mere elusion, a non-entity, and askyou if you have read Mr. Lawrence’s Lecture.Converse on the same subject with a plain,single-minded, yet reflecting neighbour, and hemay probably say . . . I know it well enough whenyou do not ask me’. Colmer, Constitution,17–18.

50. Crabb Robinson to Wilhelm Benecke, 27 April1835, Crabb Robinson Correspondence,1834–1835, letter 101; quoted by permission ofthe Director and the Trustees of Dr. Williams’sLibrary, London.

51. See John Ryland, Jr., Autograph Reminiscences,MS, Bristol Baptist College Library, G97a.

52. John Ryland, Serious Essays on the Truths of theGlorious Gospel (London, 1771), vii.

53. Ibid., viii.54. Whalley, Marginalia, ii. 802.

55. Between 1773 and 1775 Ryland devoured fourother works by Edwards besides Freedom of theWill. These include A Treatise concerningReligious Affections (Boston, 1746; Edinburgh,1772), An Account of the Life of the late ReverendMr. David Brainerd (Boston, 1749; Edinburgh,1765), as well as Edwards’s memoir, The Life andCharacter of Jonathan Edwards (Boston, 1765).

56. Jonathan Edwards, The Works of JonathanEdwards (2 vols, Carlisle PA, 1992), i. 5.

57. Ibid.58. Ibid., i. 6.59. Ibid.60. Ibid., i. 13.61. Ibid., i. 9, 11.62. Ibid., i. 68.63. Ibid., i. 11.64. Jackson, Shorter Works, i. 399.65. Beer, Aids, 278–79. Coleridge would later write in

one of his notebooks, ‘Indeed from Edwards’ Bookon Necessity it is certain (unless he had recantedand reversed his whole system of Theology) thathis World is a Machine: and that his Convictionsand mine can have no other than an apparent andaccidental Resemblance’. Coburn, Notebooks,iv. 30.42.

66. Whalley, Marginalia, ii. 802.67. In a fragment on Spinoza, Coleridge suggests that

when confronting the dilemma of necessity andfree will, most people think first of ‘Dr JonathanEdwards’. Coleridge admits that ‘Many trulypious and good men have contended for absoluteDecrees/and irresistible impulse; and it may be outof our power to answer the arguments for thisDoctrine; but there is a voice within that assuresus of the contrary convicts it of falsehood. Whilewe apply think it only of past actions, we maywork ourselves into a temporary belief of theDoctrine; but as soon as we apply it to the Future,to any thing we are either doing or about to do, wefeel that we know the contrary’. Jackson, ShorterWorks, i. 612.

68. Whalley, Marginalia, ii. 879.69. Ryland, Work of Faith, 545–46. For more on

Fuller and Edwards, see Chris Chun, The Legacyof Jonathan Edwards in the Theology of AndrewFuller (Leiden and Boston, 2012).

70. The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller, ed.Andrew Gunton Fuller (8 vols, Philadelphia,1820), i. 93, 66.

71. Coburn and Harding, Notebooks, 37.65.

300 Romanticism

72. Coburn and Harding, Notebooks, 40.48. For acompelling look at Coleridge’s late notebooksand several crucial theological issues, especiallyhis struggle with Pauline dualism, see Susanne E.Webster, Body and Soul in Coleridge’sNotebooks, 1827–34: ‘What is Life’ (Basingstokeand New York, 2010); see also Barbeau,Coleridge, the Bible, and Religion, for a differentlook at Coleridge’s theology in his matureyears.

73. John Foster, writing to a friend in Chichester on22 August 1815, comments on a recent appearanceby Coleridge at a Society meeting: ‘Hughes tellsme in mingled language of admiration andcompassion, that he [Coleridge] made, a week ortwo since in Wiltshire, at a Bible Society meetingwhere Hughes was, a speech of profoundintelligence; only, as was to be expected, tooabstract for a popular occasion’ (Ryland,Life,

i. 293–4). Coleridge had recently spent time atCalne, Wiltshire, and had just finished EdwardWilliams’s An Essay on the Equity of DivineGovernment, and the Sovereignty of Divine Grace(1809). Coleridge equates Williams with Edwardsand the other ‘Modern’ Calvinists, by which healways means a version of High Calvinism.Coleridge wrote to Richard Brabant from Calneabout Williams, concluding, ‘If Dr W’s Opinionsbe indeed those of the Modern Calvinistscollectively, I have taken my last Farewell ofModern Calvinism. It is in it’s inevitableconsequences Spinosism, not that whichSpinosism, i.e. the doctrine of the Immanence ofthe World in God, might be improved into, butSpinosism with all it’s Skeleton unfleshed, bareBones and Eye-holes, as presented by Spinozahimself’. See Jackson, Shorter Works, i. 396–400;Griggs, Collected Letters, iv. 548.

Copyright of Romanticism is the property of Edinburgh University Press and its content maynot be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder'sexpress written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles forindividual use.