"Not a secret community": Coleridge's restatement of the High Church vision
synthesiz[ing] elements of the English Common Law tradition going back to Richard Hooker with the Romanticism and historical idealism of post-Kantian German philosophy. It also means he shares with Edmund Burke, Johann Gottfried von Herder and others much of the wider Romantic critique of the Enlightenment philosophy which had found expression in the French Revolution.
In itself, the work points to how the High Church tradition could be restated and given (forgive the term) fresh expression in a radically changed constitutional context and with reference to the cultural influence of Romanticism. Hughes invoked it as, alongside T.S. Eliot, a key expression of an Anglican defence of "the traditional Christian belief in the possibility of baptizing culture against the rising individualistic political culture from the late 18th century onwards".
Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of Coleridge's restatement of the High Church tradition is his call for its understanding of the Church to be "re-issued", the Church as body corporate:
The Christian Church is not a secret community. In the once current (and well worthy to be re-issued) terminology of our elder divines, it is objective in its nature and purpose, not mystic or subjective, i.e. not like reason or the court of conscience, existing only in and for the individual. Consequently the church here spoken of is not "the kingdom of God which is within, and which cometh not with observation" (Luke xvii. 20, 21), but most observable (Luke xxi. 28-31). "A city built on a hill, and not to be hid" - an institution consisting of visible and public communities. In one sentence, it is the Church visible and militant under Christ.
... the Christian Church is to exist in every kingdom and state of the world, in the form of public communities, is to exist as a real and ostensible power.
In other words, Coleridge was reasserting the significance of the High Church vision of the Church and its relationship to "the Idea of a National Church". To be a National Church was not essential for the Church of Christ, but:
As the olive tree is said in its growth to fertilize the surrounding soil, and to invigorate the roots of the vines in its immediate neighbour hood, and improve the strength and flavour of the wines—such is the relation of the Christian and the National Church ... the perfection of each may require the union of both in the same person.
At this point we might quote Addleshaw's classic study of the High Church tradition:
... the separateness of Church and State in the pre-Constantine era was not normative of the Church's being. Only as the Church envelops and absorbs civil society and lifts it up into the divine life does it fulfil the historical process marked out for it since creation.
Perhaps we here get a sense of the significance of On the Constitution of the Church and State, a sign of the theological, philosophical, and cultural vibrancy of the High Church tradition both after the 'constitutional revolution' and in light of the cultural influence of Romanticism. This might, then, lead us to question the need for the Oxford Movement's rejection of traditional High Church political theology, and the Movement's embracing of the anti-establishmentism of the Non-Jurors and US Episcopalians in the face of High Church warnings that this would lead to marginalisation. Coleridge had shown that another path was possible, the path of restating the insights and virtues of High Church political theology in a changed political and cultural context.
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