Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge is warning that piety can be a gateway drug to self-regard. The sentence moves like a moral domino line: swap Truth for Christianity at the start, and you don t get more devotion, you get a slow corruption of devotion. Love, in his framing, is not a warm glow but a hierarchy of loyalties. Put the wrong thing at the top and the whole stack tilts toward the most convenient idol: the self.

The subtext is sharper than a generic plea for honesty. Coleridge is diagnosing how institutions metabolize belief. Once Christianity becomes something you love more than truth, it stops being a set of demands on you and becomes a badge for you. From there, narrowing is inevitable: doctrine becomes tribal identity (my sect, my church), and tribal identity becomes personal vanity (my righteousness, my status, my safety). He s mapping the emotional logic of factionalism: the less truth matters, the more allegiance matters, and allegiance always has a mirror in it.

As a Romantic-era poet and theologian-adjacent public intellectual, Coleridge is writing in a Britain thick with denominational squabbles and post-Enlightenment anxiety about reason versus revelation. The line carries that moment s pressure: religion trying to defend itself against skepticism can end up defending itself against reality. Its brilliance is that it critiques hypocrisy without exempting believers; it suggests that the real heresy is not doubt, but treating faith as protection from the inconvenience of being wrong.