ABSTRACT
In a series of notes that he made on an anti-Methodist pamphlet by the “Barrister” John Sedgwick in 1810, Samuel Taylor Coleridge suggests that he accepted a view of justification by faith consistent with that commonly held by evangelicals. Not only does Coleridge align himself closely with Evangelical belief but also he sees them as offering a theological schema that buttressed the Church of England’s true Reformation character against the corrosive influences of a popular Arminianism that brought with it a semi-Romanism and gateway to Socinianism. In 1799, frustrated by growing dissatisfaction with what he saw as Unitarianism’s arid and passionless “rationalism” together with a seemingly equal reluctance about Methodism’s “enthusiasm” unmoored from reason, Coleridge jotted down this observation in one of his notebooks: “Socinianism Moonlight—Methodism &ct A Stove! O for some Sun that shall unite Light & Warmth!”. Coleridge’s distinctive marks of Christianity concur with the various doctrinal formulations put forward by Wesley and other evangelicals.
