Coleridge and the Lay Sermon (with Simon During)

English Studies ISSN: 0013-838X (Print) 1744-4217 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/nest20 Coleridge and the Lay Sermon Simon During & Lisa O’Connell To cite this article: Simon During & Lisa O’Connell (2017) Coleridge and the Lay Sermon, English Studies, 98:7, 747-757, DOI: 10.1080/0013838X.2017.1339992 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2017.1339992 Published online: 18 Jul 2017. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 119 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=nest20 ENGLISH STUDIES, 2017 VOL. 98, NO. 7, 747–757 https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2017.1339992 Coleridge and the Lay Sermon Simon During and Lisa O’Connell IASH, University of Queensland, St Lucia, Australia ABSTRACT This essay, a contribution to the study of secularisation, explores conditions under which a new genre, the lay sermon, emerged early in the nineteenth century. It does so through a reading of the texts that inaugurate the genre, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lay Sermons (1817). In particular, the essay examines Coleridge’s Lay Sermons’ historical context, that is, to the beginnings of liberal politics. And it also pays attention to Coleridge’s relation to the heritage of religious sermons, especially seventeenth- century sermons. It argues that the lay sermon, unlike the religious sermon, tends to be directed to particular social groups or formations rather than, more broadly, to Christians of a particular denomination. In this essay we offer an historical analysis of the “lay sermon” as a genre which found a niche in British intellectual and cultural history for over a century after about 1820. Thus, for example, the working-class Scottish deist, James Hogg, published a series of lay sermons on manners in the mid 1830s. Thirty years later, the British idealists, Edward Caird, W. R. Sorley and T. H. Green chose the genre when they wished to address a public as practising Christians rather than as academic philosophers. (In Caird’s and Green’s cases as Anglicans; in Sorley’s case as a member of the Free Church of Scotland.) It also became a genre in which members of the bourgeoisie could address and advise the working classes on secular matters as for instance in John Brown’s Health: Five Lay Sermons to Working People (1862). The lay sermon could also be used to publish less prescriptive pieces, as by the socialite and one time prime minister’s wife, Margot Asquith, who published a volume baldly entitled Lay Sermons in 1927. Later examples exist, like E. P. Thompson’s 1969 defence of the young Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s politics, provocatively named “Disenchantment or Default: A Lay Sermon”. Perhaps the genre’s most successful example, however, was Thomas Henry Huxley’s Lay Sermons (1870) which consisted mainly of lectures delivered in the mid-1860s. These included the famous “The Physical Basis of Life”, a widely read essay that made the radically secular case that protoplasm constitutes the material substratum for vitality. It was a contribution to popular science, but also a sermon because, enounced from a position of some authority, it envisaged and recommended a profound shift in the understanding of consciousness. However, the genre was first established by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his two Lay Sermons, the first published in 1816, the second in 1817. We concentrate on Coleridge’s CONTACT Simon During [email protected] © 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 748 S. DURING AND L. O’CONNELL contributions here in order to investigate questions relating to the genre’s emergence. In what context did it first appear? Why? Is it to be understood as a secular form of a fundamentally religious or ecclesiastical mode, or should it be understood, rather, as a sui generis form, despite its name? To begin to make headway in these inquiries, it is useful to clarify certain aspects of the sermon form itself, by which we mean the religious sermon—a task that is made easier by the flourishing scholarship on the topic. Perhaps the sermon’s most fundamental feature—so fundamental as almost not to require pointing out—is that it was precisely an ecclesiastical genre. It was typically an oral address given in the practice of an ecclesiastical office—that of the ordained minister—to parishioners as part of a church service (at least in orthodox churches.) And (to confine our remarks to Britain) although its central place had not been secure in Anglican services until the seventeenth century, it was thoroughly sanctioned in Anglicanism’s post1688 regime. That is true even if, from the 1740s on, the sermon was Methodism’s main instrument in an outreach project that the Anglican hierarchy treated with suspicion. Nonetheless, and in particular, Edward Stillingfleet’s widely read 1698 advice to the clergy, which insisted on the sermon’s importance in the primitive Church’s life, and which thus granted it a constitutive status in Christian practice, was often referred back to by Anglican writers.1 Because the sermon was delivered by clergymen as part of their ecclesiastical duties, certain problems of address were bypassed. There was no need to defend its occasion or legitimacy. This is important because in the early modern period, and indeed up until the mid-eighteenth century, lay-writing for the public in an exhortative or critical mode was not always a sanctioned or respectable thing to do. On what authority might an individual address an audience in that way? To go no further: Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub’s mockery of those who set themselves up to lecture the public makes that clear. The sermon’s second key feature was that, despite its being anchored in a particular institutional setting, it was remarkably eclectic in terms of both address and content. Admittedly, sermons usually cohered to the convention of beginning with a “text”—the citation of a verse or two from the Bible—and often ended with another such text. Admittedly, too, the sermon tended to a rhetoric of exhortation which, from about 1700 onward, was usually articulated in a polite version of the old Puritan plain style. Despite this, however, sermons could be intended for a variety of audiences.2 Thus, at one end of the spectrum, “public”, “political”, “parliamentary” or (earlier) “court” sermons, often given by senior churchmen, could be addressed to the nation as a whole basically for instrumental purposes.3 Fast day sermons, for instance, addressed state of the nation issues on days that the sovereign had determined should be committed to penitence and asceticism in moments of national crisis. Their purpose was to draw the nation together and they often made appeal to Providentialism, that is, they often showed how national events could be read as rewards, punishments or tests set by God.4 (In Britain, such Anglican sermons, however, often triggered counter-sermons by Dissenting 1 Stillingfleet, 196–8. See the popular clerical handbook, The Clergyman’s Vade-Mecum (Johnson, 15–16), for recommendations of how clergymen should preach, which indeed refers back to Stillingfleet. Edwards. 3 See Ihalainen, 25–49. 4 On the fast day Sermon, see Ippel. 2 ENGLISH STUDIES 749 ministers.)5 At the other end of the spectrum, local clergyman—whether rectors, curates or Dissenting ministers—preached weekly on Sundays to their parishioners, turning to familiar topics—routinely encouraging charity, piety and clean living—mainly using highly conventionalised rhetoric.6 Parish clergymen often circulated and shared sermons amongst themselves. And in between these extremes of crisis and ordinariness, sermons were given not just to various audiences but on a dazzling array of topics or all kinds of occasions to all kinds of ends.7 The most important sermons were, perhaps, political. One that provoked a political storm was Henry Sacheverell’s Guy Fawkes Day 1709 “In Perils among False Brethren” address, which angrily made the case that the church was in danger from Whigs, deists and Dissenters. It led to Sacheverell’s impeachment and thus, in turn, to widespread rioting and indirectly to the election of a pro-Church Tory administration. Another such case (although, in the first instance, it was concerned with theology) was Benjamin Hoadly’s 1717 sermon, “The Nature of the Kingdom or Church of Christ”, preached in front of the King at the Royal Chapel, which fanned the flames of the so-called Bangorian Controversy on the Church/State relation by taking a radically Erastian position. Some sermons made serious contributions to theological or philosophical issues. There is a case to be made that Joseph Butler’s selection of the sermons that he preached at the Rolls Chapel during the early 1720s, published as plain Fifteen Sermons in 1726, counts among the most significant contributions to Anglican theology over the long eighteenth century. Lawrence Sterne’s popular sermons (published under the fictional name of “Parson Yorick”) mark another significant cultural and theological shift. And recent scholarship has produced some evidence for a late eighteenth-century increase in the number of sermons that addressed philosophical or even scientific topics with the secular intent of assisting human or social improvement.8 By the nineteenth century the sermon could sometimes be, in effect, a technical lecture: we can take as an example Adam Sedgwick’s 1833 sermon, which Boyd Hilton describes as having an impact as great or greater than John Keble’s sermon on National Apostacy (often thought of as inaugurating Tractariansm).9 Here Sedgwick (having learnt something from Coleridge) argued the case for a political economy that was driven by more than just private interests. The third feature of sermons worth remarking on in our context is that they crossed orature and print, ecclesiastical practice and commerce. Sermons were often printed. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, they constituted a significant part of the commercial book trade, and in a few cases a significant portion of parsons’ incomes too.10 (Which is to say that there were cases where Henry Fielding’s Parson Adams’s hopes to raise some money by having a bookseller take his sermons were indeed fulfilled.) As James Rigney has pointed out, this could cause anxiety for a number of reasons, including the authors’ loss of control over who actually read their sermons once they were distributed in the print market.11 Nonetheless it would seem that the possibility of print motivated many of the period’s most important oral sermons—not just political ones like 5 For Dissenting blowback, see Bradley, 126. See Chamberlain. 7 Farooq’s Preaching in Eighteenth-Century London offers a detailed description of the sermon’s variousness. 8 Ibid., 267. 9 Hilton, 49. 10 Somerville, 10; and Feather, 37–9. 11 Rigney, 200–20. 6 750 S. DURING AND L. O’CONNELL Sacheverell’s or Hoadly’s, and not just philosophical ones like Butler’s or literary ones like Sterne’s, but exemplary exhortative and meditative ones like John Tillotson’s, perhaps the most widely read sermons of them all in the eighteenth century.12 This background is important to Coleridge’s Lay Sermons because it reveals the sermon genre’s flexibility, complexity and reach, as well as its secure institutional underpinnings at the time he came to publish them. When Coleridge conceived a new kind of sermon, one detached from an ecclesiastical base, one without institutional religious sanction, he was still, we would suggest, expecting to draw on the sermon-genre’s received social, moral, rhetorical and commercial status. Few figures of the period have received more scholarly attention than Coleridge. Few have divided opinion so strongly. But it is useful here to try to rise above the scholarly debate to offer a brief conspectus of the situation in which he came to establish the new genre. Born into an Anglican family (his father was a scholarly country parson), he joined the Unitarians in 1794 as a twenty-two year old. By 1796, he was preaching mainly extempore sermons which he himself described as “political”, and were indeed expressions of radicalism.13 In one of his later dismissive responses to the Lay Sermons in The Examiner, William Hazlitt remembers attending a sermon by the young Coleridge, and testifies not just to the enthusiasm with which it was uttered and received, but also to its intellectual ambitions, combining as it did, philosophy, politics and religion.14 From around 1800, Coleridge moved away from radical politics, even the kind that had parliamentary representation in the form of the “New Whig” leaders such as Charles Fox and Richard Sheridan. This was clear by the time he began to publish his short-lived essay journal, The Friend, in 1809, which introduced the methods and concepts of his later work, including the Lay Sermons. Here, for the first time, he fused a version of German philosophical idealism and Anglican thought (especially seventeenth-century Anglican thought) in a manner which was utterly his own, but also, surprisingly, extraordinarily influential.15 By the time he came to write The Friend, however, the structural difficulties of the position in which Coleridge found himself as a thinker and writer were clear. He held no office in any church (which was still the most supportive institution for English intellectuals in the period). He had now both broken with rational Dissent and political radicalism. He was not a counter-revolutionary in the high Tory mode represented most influentially by John Wilson Croker in the recently established Quarterly Review. Contra Alfred Cobban and a tradition in Coleridge criticism, he was not even quite a Burkean of the kind that his friend Robert Southey was proving to be.16 (He was, as we might say, too theoretical for that.) And he had absorbed elements of post-Kantian German academic philosophy whose lexicon, methods, interests and analytic schema were all but incomprehensible to most Anglophone readerships. Furthermore, he was beginning to renegotiate Anglican theological history in quite a new way. 12 Dixon, 465–7. White, 138–9. 14 [Hazlitt], “Mr. Coleridge’s Lay Sermons”. 15 The literature on Coleridge and German philosophy is forbidding, and the literature on Coleridge and Anglicanism is not far behind. For an excellent recent account of the former, see Hamilton. For the latter, see, for instance, Hedley. 16 For the classic argument that Coleridge (and the other Lake Poets) were Burkeans, see Cobban. For a sensitive revisioning of this case, see Craig, 5–12. 13 ENGLISH STUDIES 751 In what terms, then, should he address the public? Which public should he address? What media, and what genres to use? From the beginning, The Friend, conceived as an experiment, risked the charge of obscurity. In its first number, it explicitly demanded a new kind of attention from his readers while sketching out a concept of “reason” which, at least on the face of it, owed more to Kant’s Vernunft than it did to, say, the more familiar early eighteenth-century “right reason”.17 And The Friend was indeed met with indifference: it did not sell and was not understood. Lay Sermons, published eight years later, was an attempt to rethink and deal with these issues on new terms by introducing a new genre on the back of an old one. To some degree the choice of the sermonic mode was explained in the Lay Sermons themselves: that choice allowed Coleridge to affect an oral delivery which avoided (as he put it) the “usual softenings suggested by worldly prudence, of all compromise between truth and courtesy”, softenings that he associated with the rapid increase in the reading (not listening) public, but also, implicitly, with the polite plain style of homiletics, post-Tillotson.18 His lay sermons aimed to occupy a place between the public and the private, as if delivered in a parish church, even as they addressed larger readerships and broached new conceptual and tonal ground. To that end, simulating orality, they were written in the first person as if from time now; they made appeals to a known and knowable “we”; and switched across a range of tones from the conversational to the erudite to the poetic to the vatic.19 And they spilled beyond themselves: paratexts were added to the sermons (an introduction, footnotes, a suite of appendixes) in acceptance of the fact that the project could not be contained within the sermonic mode. Indeed, Appendix C of the first sermon, itself entitled A Statesman’s Manual, bears a significant proportion of the argument as a whole. Some further context is helpful here: Coleridge chose to establish the lay sermon as a genre under circumstances which marked a significant change of direction for British society. The end of the war with France in 1815 had had devastating economic consequences. Inflation was rampant between 1815 and 1818, in part fuelled by the wheat crop’s failure in 1816 and in part by protectionist policies on corn put in place by the landed interest. The national debt was unprecedently high, not least because, under the younger Pitt, Britain had abandoned the gold standard in 1797 so as to finance the war. And this debt, alongside the new floating currency, triggered a general sense of national insecurity, despite the nation’s recent victories. Britain’s first-ever income tax (which had replaced land taxes) was repealed in 1816, leaving indirect taxes, with their regressive effects, to take up most of the burden of interest repayments. This was one cause of widespread social and political unrest. At the same time, industrialisation and the factory system was expanding, and with them, as Robert Owens seems to have been the first to notice, a “new character in its inhabitants … quite unfavourable to individual or general happiness”.20 As we might anachronistically say: an immiseration which changed the working-class ethos was understood to be the consequence of new relations of production. For this reason, too, political efforts towards parliamentary reform which had started in the 1760s were now 17 Coleridge, The Friend, 1:11–17. For a good account of obscurity in The Friend see the first chapter of Epp’s “Coleridge and the Project of The Friend,”. See also Coleman. Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 31. 19 Ibid., 110. 20 Cited in Williams, 44. 18 752 S. DURING AND L. O’CONNELL drawing energy from previously barely politicised groups. Another result of this expansion of manufacturing and increase of political engagement was a renewed sense of vulnerability in the Anglican church itself, as instanced by Richard Yates’s widely read The Church is in Danger of 1815. Since 1688, the Church’s structures and revenue streams had expanded with England’s agrarian and urban economies. Yet radicalism and industrialisation took hold simultaneously, encouraging both Irish Catholic immigration and Evangelicalism. In this situation, as P. G. Cain and A. G. Hopkins have remarked, there was a widespread sense that the “gentlemanly order” itself was threatened, and radical proposals for reform were mounted even among the propertied interest.21 These included calls to reform the received British confessional state. The Lay Sermons were Coleridge’s response to this unstable situation. They were delivered in an effort to strengthen, spiritually and intellectually, the state and Anglican Christianity. They did not, however, constitute a change of direction in Coleridge’s own thinking. Indeed, his understanding of what the times required had already been expressed in its most basic form not just in The Friend, but in his famous letter of May 1815 to William Wordsworth in which he outlined his disappointment with The Excursion. Wordsworth’s magnum opus was not the “philosophic poem” he had expected it to be. He had hoped, he wrote, that the poem might conclude by a grand didactic swell on the necessary identity of a true Philosophy with true Religion, agreeing in the results and differing only as the analytic and synthetic process, as discursive from intuitive, the former chiefly useful as perfecting the latter—in short, the necessity of a general revolution in the modes of developing & disciplining the human mind by the substitution of Life, and Intelligence (considered in it’s [sic] different powers from the Plant up to that state in which the difference of degree becomes a new kind (man, self-consciousness) but yet not by essential opposition) for the philosophy of mechanism, which, in everything that is most worthy of the human Intellect strikes Death, and cheats itself by mistaking clear Images for distinct Conceptions, and which idly demands Conceptions where Intuitions alone are possible or adequate to the majesty of the Truth—In short, Facts elevated into Theory—Theory into Laws—and Laws into living and intelligent Powers—true Idealism necessarily perfecting itself in Realism, & Realism refining itself into Idealism.22 From this perspective, the Lay Sermons can be understood as Coleridge’s attempt, using a new genre, to fulfil the requirements of the poem that Wordsworth should, in his opinion, have written but did not; a poem that proved that true philosophy and true religion were identical. More generally it proposed a reformist programme based more on spiritual and intellectual than on social and political transformation. And it did so, of course, not in poetry, but by reformatting and redirecting sermonic modes of address. The first difficulty facing such a project was that not all readers could be expected to receive Coleridge’s arguments with the same degree of comprehension. As we have seen, The Friend had proved that, if indeed it needed proving. So Coleridge took a bold and innovative step. He decided to write three lay sermons, each directed towards a different readership. The first (which appeared in December 1816) was to be addressed to the oligarchy or what he called “the Higher Classes of Society” and more exclusively still “ad clerum” (i.e., to the learned). The second (which appeared in March 1817) was to be 21 Cain and Hopkins, 83. Coleridge, Collected Letters, 4:575. 22 ENGLISH STUDIES 753 addressed to “Higher and Middle Classes”. And the last (which, however, never appeared at all, perhaps because he found it difficult to strike the right tone) to the “Lower and Labouring Classes of Society”.23 This division is crucial: it breaks with a traditional feature of the religious sermon, namely, its being addressed to church members of whatever social status or degree. One reason why these sermons are “lay” is because they do not (or cannot) appeal to the indivisibility of a Christian community. Coleridge’s sermons were not denominational or ecclesiastical. They were, rather, publications that addressed a national public, albeit one that was not unified. On the face of it, the classes (as we today say) into which this national public was segmented were divided by their respective level of educational attainment. But the division was also economic and political: after all, the Lay Sermons were written in a situation in which sectors of the labouring and middle classes were being politicised against the oligarchy. There was nothing especially original in this political-economic concept of class. To cite the title of one of the chapters of Francis Steuart’s path-breaking An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767) (a work Coleridge admired) economists were routinely interested in “the Distribution of Inhabitants into Classes”.24 So too were Anglican moralists. John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), one the earliest texts by an Anglican divine to address a national public on the state of the nation from a perspective that grasped how important the economy was to social moods and structures, already understood that there was no single nation but rather different classes—which Brown thought of as (1) the landed interest, (2) the commercial interest and (3) the people. As did Coleridge. By absorbing social divisions into his lay sermonising, Coleridge was also compelled to confront a traditional problem for Christian apologia—the problem of accommodation. The problem, that is, of how to tune one’s message to different readerships, perhaps by reserving the full truth from some readerships or even by telling them “noble lies”. Coleridge (drawing on Lessing) had expressed himself strongly against accommodation (or “pious frauds”) in The Friend and did so again here, but he now avoided the problem in effect by accepting spiritual differentiation.25 In a good society, he averred, the learned and the commercial classes each had their own religio-intellectual concerns and ends. The learned and aristocratic, whose incomes were secure, were able to concern themselves with deeper and more abstract philosophical and theological issues, while the commercial classes had an immediate interest in politics and the economy. So, for Coleridge, it was not a matter of concealing truths from those who needed to be protected from them but of addressing different kinds of interests through analytical frames, each directed towards a particular class with a particular social function. Yet the profoundest truths, those reserved for the higher classes, would, so Coleridge believed, never be understood by the other classes. Nonetheless, Coleridge had an overarching purpose in the Lay Sermons. It was not just to insist that the challenge faced by the received social, ecclesiastical order was indeed profound, encompassing what he called a “change … in external relations” (that is, a change in the relations between things, vital energies and people), but to insist that this challenge 23 Coleridge, Lay Sermons, xxxi and 3. Coleridge was influenced by Steuart. See Gallagher, 25–6. 25 Coleridge, The Friend, 1:37–8 and Lay Sermons, 58–9. 24 754 S. DURING AND L. O’CONNELL could only be properly resisted and absorbed by a change in the “mind of the Nation”.26 It was not, for Coleridge, a matter of constitutional fixes. And it was to insist, further, that the separate and various forces that constituted this challenge were in fact linked, these forces being, of course, (1) the commercial spirit, (2) the mechanical philosophy that had been introduced by John Locke in particular and (3) political radicalism. And Coleridge presented a critical response to each of these. He was not simply dismissive of the “spirit of commerce”. Indeed, against traditional civic republicanism, he mounted a defence of both public debt and redistribution by taxation. His argument was, rather, that the commercial spirit had become dominant in ways that allowed “worth” to be replaced by “value”.27 The commercial spirit was necessary to the nation but it could not be allowed to subsume or shape fundamental ethical and epistemological categories. In relation to post-Lockean empiricism, Coleridge argued, in a broadly Kantian manner, that its epistemology was based on the passive “senses”.28 For that reason, it could not account for its own categories and energies. In particular, it neglected the vital forces that flowed through the universe—through both subjects and objects—recognition of which was necessary to any “living and spiritual philosophy”. This in turn itself ultimately required Faith. The key turn in Coleridge’s philosophy, then, was to transcendentalise Faith in broadly Kantian terms, that is to posit Faith as the condition of possibility for knowing the world properly, and then to spiritualise it by conceiving of it not epistemologically but as an energy, ultimately the energy of Holy Spirit, which was capable of fully developing Human Consciousness. Without Faith one could not know the world as it is. An underdeveloped ontological argument is appealed to here since, for Coleridge, Faith, as revealed to us by God, is also an a priori condition of human consciousness. Coleridge’s relation to radicalism was also nuanced since he was both critical and supportive of the status quo. As he saw it, what was required in 1817 was a new religious and philosophical regime, covering both thought and affect, but which would remain dependent, in particular, on Anglican hegemony, a hegemony which would itself require a strong state. So Coleridge set himself against two specific groups. First, Dissent, and especially Unitarians or what we today call Rational Dissent. And second, political radicals—he called them “Demagogues”—as most represented by Thomas Paine, William Cobbett and Henry Hunt.29 And it is against radicalism that Coleridge appeals not just to Anglicanism, not just to philosophic idealism, but also to a form of liberalism, a term that was just then beginning to be attached to a political position. Coleridge’s is the liberalism implied in the verses from the King James version of Isaiah that he cites in the first Lay Sermon: “But the Liberal deviseth Liberal things, and by Liberal things shall he stand.30 It denotes no political programme but an expansive generosity of thought and action able to be nurtured by both Church and State. Here liberal thought also implies a willingness to take an intellectual stance that is not confined to mechanical, literal and instrumental modes of analysis but which is willing to 26 Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 191–2. Ibid., 211. Ibid., 89. 29 Ibid., 149, 144. 30 Ibid., 142. Isaiah, 32:8. 27 28 ENGLISH STUDIES 755 engage hermeneutically. In other words: which is ready to interpret, to think allegorically and to take imaginative risks. Certainly Coleridge’s first lay sermon, A Statesman’s Manual, requires all these capacities. And it is there too that the full weight of the sermon-genre’s heritage is brought to bear, for it makes an argument that was standard, banal even, for the Protestant sermon. It urges that Christian life should be guided by the Bible, or rather (and somewhat more unusually) by the Old Testament. But the first lay sermon also displaces this convention. Here the Bible is treated not so much as a guide for personal devotion and morality but as “the best guide to political skill and foresight” as the book’s subtitle puts it. This assertion is startling given the outpouring of technical and secular analysis of government, economics and politics in the period, both from the press and from pulpits. Let the names Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham, Robert Owen, David Ricardo (whose Principles of Political Economy and Taxation appeared in 1817) and Thomas Chalmers (whose An Enquiry into the Extent of and Stability of National Resources (1808) had made his name as a Christian economist) stand as evidence for this. But Coleridge was arguing that the Old Testament counted for more than all these writers’ works as a practical guide to politics and society. What Coleridge was asking for, of course, was not a literal application of biblical texts to current circumstances. The Bible did not provide transparent normative rules for contemporary government and society. Rather it was an inspiring storehouse of stories, poetry and symbols, focused on narratives about individuals, which, nonetheless, continually referred back to the Universal, that is to say both to the one true God and to Reason in its higher sense.31 The Bible “passeth all Understanding”, of course, and thus simultaneously encourages and requires liberalism and faith.32 Coleridge confines this mode of receiving the Bible to the higher classes, but that qualification by no means restricts its intellectual daring. He is, in effect, not so much combining the two names (“lay” and “sermon”) of the genre he is establishing, as using the tension between them to break epistemic limits. By making a homiletic commonplace (the Bible is the Christian’s guide to life) apply to situations that required and received technical analysis, he was able to urge his readers to understand the Bible’s epistemic, affective and devotional qualities in quite new ways. The second lay sermon, by contrast, confines itself to secular matters. As already noted, its primary purpose was to persuade readers to resist all pressures, and especially from the commercial spirit, to think about and judge social conditions on merely instrumental and economic grounds. Or, as Coleridge also put it, in a Kantian fashion, not to treat people as things.33 Implicitly, the ethos he promotes for the upper classes in the first lay sermon will help shape all society in this way. But his most concrete proposals here in the second lay sermon concern the state and education. Against laissez faire economics, he argues not just that “our manufacturers must consent to regulations”, but that the state should be empowered to act against the misery caused by industrialisation and development (which, however, he concedes improves the national standard of living taken as a whole).34 The state’s final purpose is to provide the conditions for all its citizens to develop “those faculties which are essential to … Humanity, i.e., to rational and moral 31 Coleridge, Lay Sermons, 79. Ibid., 67. 33 Ibid., 206. 34 Ibid., 229, 208–16. 32 756 S. DURING AND L. O’CONNELL Being”.35 The rational and moral being that Coleridge proposes for the middle classes is not that which he proposes for the higher classes, of course. And he is not (à la Helvetius) suggesting that education will even out intellectual capabilities and orientations, or that the higher classes have a responsibility to educate those beneath them to their level. Nor should education provide a path to equality or the conditions for a meritocracy. As was invariably the case for conservative thought of this time, class difference is a good. It is, indeed, what enables spiritual and intellectual liberalism by not putting the whole system under pressure to restructure its institutions for secular and instrumental reasons. Let us conclude by summarising our argument. Coleridge invented a new genre—the lay sermon—by drawing on the religious sermon’s rhetorical and homiletic registers. He did so not just to address a national audience in a time of crisis but to propose ambitious conceptual and theological innovations. As we know, Coleridge’s lay sermons were immensely influential in their appeal to the state to play a role in the population’s spiritual and material well-being—they can even be understood as founding texts for the welfare state itself as it emerged in Britain over a century later. But their most adventurous and religious aspects fell by the wayside. If we were to wonder about where Coleridge’s lay sermon hermeneutic was to end up, one might well say, in the mid-twentieth-century English department with its nourishing of interpretative practices that often combined social critique and literary readings. On the face of it, of course, that is an institution that lies at some distance from Coleridge’s ambitious plans for a hierarchical Christian society. But making this link may remind us that contemporary literary academics in fact routinely write what might just be able to be thought of as lay sermons. Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. References Bradley, James E. Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Non-conformity in EighteenthCentury Politics and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Cain, P. G. and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism 1688–2000. London: Routledge, 1993. 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