Ian Gilmour on Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Coleridge...became indeed the greatest of Burke's followers. Like Burke, he was intensely religious. Religion, he believed, was always "the centre of gravity in a realm, to which all other things must and will accommodate themselves". Though a metaphysician, he thought metaphysics had no place in politics; and he was as hostile as Burke to abstract political systems allegedly based on pure reason... Hence for Coleridge Jacobinism was a monstrous hybrid, "made up in part of despotism and in part of abstract reason misapplied to objects that belong entirely to experience and the understanding". Jacobinism pandered to the brute passions of the mob in order to erect a society and government based on abstract reason instead of on established institutions and experience. England, in contrast, had the good fortune to possess social institutions that had "formed themselves out of our proper needs and interests..."”

“For Coleridge, the principle of the British constitution was the harmonious balance between permanence and progression or law and liberty. The landed interest and the House of Lords provided permanence and stability, the mercantile classes and the House of Commons ensured progression and personal freedom, and the Monarch supplied unity and cohesion. But all this depended upon a continuing improvement in civilization which was the responsibility of the national Church, "the third great venerable estate of the realm". The Church had a vital educational duty and function. It should through education provide everyone with the chance of bettering their children and impart the knowledge necessary to qualify "every nature" to be "the free subject of a civilised realm". Coleridge pointed out that for nearly 150 years Englishmen had been freer than the citizens of any other known country. This was due to our "insular privilege of a self-evolving constitution".”