"Wright's book establishes, persuasively, that Coleridge's radicalism, both political and theological, was indeed fleeting and that Coleridge made a very significant contribution to what has been called 'the gathering forces of Toryism.' Further, the book traces Coleridge's adaptation of Hooker as he confronted, theologically, the writings of Sacheverell and Warburton and, ultimately, traces his idea of a clerisy and influence on Gladstone and thus the Oxford Movement." --Richard S. Tomlinson, Richland College "This erudite analysis of Coleridge's theology will provide scholars and critics with valuable new perspectives on a difficult subject." --Duncan Wu, Georgetown University This book is the first systematic historical examination of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's prose religious works. Coleridge (1772-1834), the son of a clergyman, "was born and died a communicating member of the Church of England." He was a prolific writer on the subject of the relationship between church and state. At age twenty-three, Coleridge published his first theological work, Lectures on Revealed Religion, which focused on the concept of reason facilitating virtue. Luke Wright maintains that this theme unites Coleridge's theological writings, including the posthumous Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1935). Although he was an advocate of radical politics in the 1790s, by the time Coleridge published The Friend (1809), he had become high Tory. His major contribution to Anglican religious discourse was the revival of the Tory position on church and state, which saw the two as an organic unity rather than separate entities forming an alliance. His writings were vigorously opposed to the Court Whig theory of church and state. After Coleridge's death in 1834, his arguments were taken up by William Gladstone and carried forward. Wright's careful reconstruction of Coleridge's dedication to church-state issues provides a new perspective on the writer himself and on the intellectual history of early nineteenth-century England. "This is an impressively focused work detailing Coleridge's biographical journey through radical politics and high Toryism with an initial and final commitment to Anglicanism, despite encounters and affiliations with other denominations. . . . [A]n original work of scholarship that contributes to an understanding of Coleridge's thought and to the study of church-state theory of the nineteenth century." --Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University

It has long been accepted that when Samuel Taylor Coleridge rejected the Unitarianism of his youth and returned to the Church of England, he did so while accepting a general Christian orthodoxy. Christopher Corbin clarifies Coleridge’s religious identity and argues that while Coleridge’s Christian orthodoxy may have been sui generis, it was closely aligned with moderate Anglican Evangelicalism. Approaching religious identity as a kind of culture that includes distinct forms of language and networks of affiliation in addition to beliefs and practices, this book looks for the distinguishable movements present in Coleridge’s Britain to more precisely locate his religious identity than can be done by appeals to traditional denominational divisions. Coleridge’s search for unity led him to desire and synthesize the "warmth" of heart religion (symbolized as Methodism) with the "light" of rationalism (symbolized as Socinianism), and the evangelicalism in the Church of England, being the most chastened of the movement, offered a fitting place from which this union of warmth and light could emerge. His religious identity not only included many of the defining Anglican Evangelical beliefs, such as an emphasis on original sin and the New Birth, but he also shared common polemical opponents, appropriated evangelical literary genres, developed a spirituality centered on the common evangelical emphases of prayer and introspection, and joined Evangelicals in rejecting baptismal regeneration. When placed in a chronological context, Coleridge’s form of Christian orthodoxy developed in conversation with Anglican Evangelicals; moreover, this relationship with Anglican Evangelicalism likely helped facilitate his return to the Church of England. Corbin not only demonstrates the similarities between Coleridge’s relationship to a form of evangelicalism with which most people have little familiarity, but also offers greater insight into the complexities and tensions of religious identity in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain as a whole.

Few figures who were active in the English Romantic Movement are as fascinating as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Aside from his own visionary verse, Coleridge is famous for his colourful friendships with fellow-poets Wordsworth and Southey, and above all for his well documented drug-taking and creative use of opium. But it is less widely appreciated that he was also a key figure in Anglican thought, whose writings are continually referred to by modern Anglican theologians. Coleridge's journey from the Unitarianism of his father towards a later commitment to Anglican Trinitarianism of a type he had rejected in his youth involved a rigorous philosophical process of imaginative liberal thinking. Over the last 200 years, that thinking has provided Anglicanism with many valedictory tools as well as a measure of robust self-belief. Offering a major contribution both to religious history and the history of ideas, Graham Neville here charts the particular liberal tradition in British religious thought which stems directly from Coleridge. He shows why Coleridge's thought remains so significant, and traces the ways in which his subject's theological ideas profoundly influenced later British writers and scholars like F.D. Maurice, F.J.A. Hort, F.W. Robertson, B.F. Westcott, John Oman and Thomas Erskine (once called the 'Scottish Coleridge'). Dr Neville further relates the pioneering ideas of Coleridge to current developments in theology and scientific method.