ABSTRACT
Mill has depicted in a masterly way the condition of politics in England when Coleridge wrote the essay on the Constitution of the Church and State according to the Idea of Each, in which he developed the hints already contained ill The Friend and Lay Sermons. "We had a Government which we respected too much to attempt to change it, but not enough to trust it with any power or look to it for any services that were not compelled." On the one hand tllere were the Tory believers in authority, whose cry was "hands off the sacred ark of the COIlstitution," and the power and privilege it brought to a class. On the other hand were the Radical believers in Liberty and laissez faire, to whom government was at best a necessary evil: "Their cry was not 'Help us'; 'Guide us'; 'Do for us the things we cannot do; and instruct us that we may do well those which we can' (and truly such requirements from such rulers \vould have been a bitter jest): the cry was 'Let us alone' ." There was a similar conflict in men's minds about the Church. On the one side were those who supported it in a spirit of blind conservatism or with more or less hypocrisy, as necessary for social order. On the other were those who would sweep it away as a centre of superstition and reaction "got up originally and all along maintained for the sole purpose of picking -people's pockets without aiming or being found conducive to any honest purpose during the whole process". Into this welter of opinion Coleridge introduced an entirely new note by
calling on men to return to the Idea or ultimate aim of both State and Church and reorient themselves in the light of it on the problem of their present duties.
