In the generation following Coleridge's death in 1834, he was widely recognized as a religious thinker of the greatest significance. True, in the early nineteenth century the apologetic evidence – theology, which had been spurred to renewal (though not reform) by David Hume's essay on miracles, still so preoccupied the English theological scene that Coleridge's Aids to Reflection (1825) at first received little notice in either the religious or the popular press. And not a few were then and later to complain of his lack of system and to accuse him variously of being confused, eclectic, muddle – headed, inconsistent, incoherent, a rationalist, a pusillanimous drug – addicted dreamer, and even a papist.

Yet in the much – quoted essays on Bentham and Coleridge (1838 and 1840), John Stuart Mill, certainly no Coleridgean himself, could say that ‘there is hardly to be found in England an individual of any importance in the world of the mind, who … did not first learn to think from one of these two’; and again that ‘every Englishman of the present day is by implication either a Benthamite or a Coleridgean; holds views of human affairs which can only be proved true on the principles either of Bentham or of Coleridge’. And in 1860 Mark Pattison, in Essays and Reviews, could write that ‘theology had almost died out when it received a new impulse and a new direction from Coleridge’.