Excerpt from The Kingdom of Christ: Or Hints Respecting the Principles, Constitution, and Ordinances of the Catholic Church

My Dear Mr. Coleridge,

In a note to your volume on the Scriptural character of the English Church, you have alluded to the first edition of these Hints. Your object was to correct one of my many inaccuracies, and this service, which was itself a very kind one, you made more acceptable, by the approbation which you expressed of my general design. Under any circumstances I must have valued such a recognition from one who had bestowed so much serious and intelligent consideration upon the subject of which I had treated; I was still more pleased with it, because there were qualities in your work which might have made me fear that you would be less tolerant of mine. Its calm scholar-like tone and careful English style, were strikingly contrasted with the crudeness and hastiness which were visible in every part of my Letters to a Quaker. Nevertheless, I found with great delight, that neither you nor the accomplished Editor of Mr. Coleridge's works, had been hindered by these defects from taking an interest in my thoughts, or from recognising in them one among a thousand indications of the influence which your fathers writings are exercising over the mind of this generation.

Every one who has felt this influence must, I think, be anxious to acknowledge it. You may well be surprised therefore, that in a book of some length I should have referred to it so seldom. Twenty years ago you might have attributed such an omission to a cowardly and dishonourable dread of being associated with an unpopular name. But at the time I wrote, the basest man could not have been affected by such a motive as this, for the different English parties which, during Mr. Coleridge's life-time, had only differed in the degrees of their dislike to him, were scrambling for a share of his opinions.

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