@article{oai:nagoya.repo.nii.ac.jp:00028095, author = {Kazuyoshi, Oishi}, journal = {IVY}, month = {Mar}, note = {When William Hazlitt made his first acquaintance with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, he noticed that the senior poet kept crossing diagonally from one side of the footpath to the other. Its political implication did not become explicit until Coleridge published Lay Sermons in 1816, which Hazlitt found unmistakably reactionary; in Hazlitt's view, Coleridge seemed to have abandoned his former Dissenting principle. Hazlitt thus severely attacked Coleridge's argument for moving "in an unaccountable diagonal between truth and falsehood, sense and nonsense." But Coleridge had already been vacillating between different politico­-religious principles from the very beginning of his radical career in 1795. This paper addresses the contradictory ideological implications of Coleridge's politico-religious discourses in the late 1790s. I am going to argue that the sole principle that connects all his seemingly antithetical views is "philanthropy," the love of mankind based on the belief in the universal benevolence of God. Coleridge's system of philanthropy is rather muddled. It assimilates variegated, often contradictory ideas in politics, religion, and philosophy. It in part derives from, but in the end clashes with the Dissenting virtue of benevolence in believing in the integrity of natural sympathy with the charity of Jesus Christ and the universal love of God. Even while he was deeply committed to the political activities at Bristol, he was oscillating between the Evangelical doctrine and the Unitarian psilanthropism. Amelioration of the state of the poor was the sole point at which Coleridge wholeheartedly concurred with Dissenters. His primary aim, however, was a reform of morality, not of politics, especially among the distressed classes, through the words of Christ. We can see Coleridge's persistent philanthropic concern in his later works including Lay Sermons, which addressed the middle and upper classes for the benefit of the poor, replacing his primitive Christian community with a vision of benign State and Church assisted by cultured "clerisy." We can trace the origin of his ambiguous politico-religious view in the period of 1795-98, when Coleridge established himself as a philanthropist who held his faith in the "omnific, omnipresent Love," yet only with a shadowy vision of "Truth," as he wrote in his 1795 poem "Religious Musings."}, pages = {23--41}, title = {An Unaccountable Diagonal' : Coleridge as a Faltering Unitarian Philanthropist}, volume = {42}, year = {2010} }