Spencer, John.

folio, 2 volumes, first edition, samuel taylor coleridge's copy with his ownership signature on title pages to both volumes ("S.T. Coleridge"), general title in red and black, woodcut head-pieces and initials, contemporary mottled calf, rebacked, wear to edges of binding, new endpapers, some very minor soiling to some leaves 

S.T. Coleridge, ownership signatures; his son Derwent Coleridge, bookplates

Wing S4946

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The major work of the college head and Hebraist John Spencer (bap.1630, d.1693), an account of the ritual laws of the Hebrews which "may justly be said to have laid the foundations of the science of Comparative Religion" (W. Robertson Smith, quoted by William Horbury, Oxford DNB).  Spencer urged that on investigation these laws and customs "could be seen in every case to derive from the surrounding paganism, especially that of Egypt. This bold historical conclusion was invaluable theologically, Spencer argued, for even the greatest writers who had contended for the rationality of Old Testament law—Spencer instanced Maimonides among the Jews and Aquinas among the Christians—had judged the reasons for many particular laws to be irrecoverable. Now, however, Spencer claimed, the ritual laws could be fully understood as a divine concession to human frailty, and a kind of inoculation against paganism..." (Horbury, op.cit.).

Coleridge of course spent many years revising and re-working his own views on religion. In his early years he was drawn to the pantheism of Spinoza, then to a combination of the thinking of Plato and St. John, then to a belief that only Quakers and Unitarians were  pure Christians free of idolatry. His reading of the present copy of Spencer's work, with its tracing back of Jewish religious customs to possible pagan roots, no doubt contributed to the development of his religious ideas.  By 1805 Coleridge had come to believe in "the centrality of the Trinity: not the inanity of Jehovah, Christ and the Dove",  but 'the adorable Tri-unity of Being, Intellect, and Spiritual Action' (Notebooks, 2.2444, quoted by John Beer, Oxford DNB)). On 12 February the same year he summed up his new position in the phrase 'no Trinity, no God' (ibid., 2.2446).

After further revising his outlook, Coleridge published his Aids to Reflection in the formation of a manly character on the several grounds of prudence, morality and religion in June 1824. Encouraged by the reception of this he proposed to his publishers six new disquisitions on faith, the eucharist, the philosophy of prayer, the Hebrew prophets, the church and the use of the scriptures. Only the last was ever completed, published after his death as Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840).