Letter from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, place not specified, to Sir George Beaumont, 1808 December 14 : autograph manuscript signed.

Discussing his plans for "The Friend" and what he hopes it will be; saying "I have received promises of contribution from writers of high reputation : and for myself, I consider "The Friend" as the Main Pipe, from which I shall play off the whole accumulation and reservoir of my Head and Heart. And truly, as I said to a correspondent, it is high Time. Hitherto I have layed my Eggs with Ostrich Carelessness and Ostrich like Oblivion. The greater part have been crushed under foot : but some have crawled into light to furnish Feathers for other men's Caps - and not a few to plume the Shafts in the Quivers of Calumny;" adding "My first Essay will be on the Nature and the Importance of Principles--i.e. of the pure Reason, which dictates unconditionally, in distinction from the prudential understanding, which employing it's mole Eyes in an impossible calculation of Consequences perverts and mutilates its own Being, untenanting the function which it is incapable of occupying. This is Infidelity, essential Infidelity, however goodly it's Garb, however seemly it's name - and this I have long seemed the Disease, nay, let me speak out - the Guilt of the Age - therefore, and not chiefly because it has produced a spirit of enquiry into the external evidences of instituted Religion, it is an Infidel age; discussing the principles of Socianism as they relate to an English Bishop; relating his discussion of religion to the issue of the "Management of Nations" in Europe; adding "But my Track in "The Friend" confines me to common Life and to Men acting as Individuals in the daily Toils and Pleasures of common Life - and here I see before me an ample Harvest of Facts - and I am well content, that such is the Direction of my Road : for I listen with gladness and an obedient ear to Prudence, while it remains subordinate to, and in harmony with, a loftier and more authoritative Voice - that of Principle. I have dwelt thus on the Subject of my first Essay, because this will be, more or less avowedly, the Object of all the succeeding papers - for reflect only on the enormous power, which for a small time a mere Individual can acquire (an Hatfield for instance) by a total emancipation of the will from all the Laws of general Morality. What then must be the power, when one pre-eminently wicked Man wields the whole strength and cunning of a wicked Nation? Is there any Strength adequate to resist this? Yes! one and only one. Consistency, energy, and unanimity in national wickedness must be counterbalanced by consistency and undistracted Energy in national Virtue, which fully exerted bring with them, from the recesses of their own nature, a greater consistency, a more enduring Energy"; concluding with the importance of faith and principle saying "Without Faith we perish : and without Principle, pure unconditional Principle, there can be no Faith."