Coleridge did find posthumously an attentive audience among Anglican thinkers: theirs were the ‘young minds’ he ‘kindled’. John Sterling wrote in a letter of 1836: ‘To Coleridge I owe education’ (AR, p. cxiv). It is perhaps surprising that the passage from the Biographia Literaria quoted at the end of the previous chapter should assert that the truths of Reason accord with the rituals of the Church. We saw from The Ancient Mariner at the start that the ideal of the community was stronger than that of the kirk and Coleridge's movement from the Unitarianism of ‘Religious Musings’ to the high Anglicanism of his last years seemed to some to be of a piece with a movement from early radicalism to High Toryism.

In a pair of important essays published in 1838 and 1840, Mill called Coleridge with Jeremy Bentham ‘the two seminal minds of the nineteenth century’, not in terms of the direct influence of either but as ‘the teachers of the teachers’. Platonic and Kantian terms such as ‘Reason’ and ‘Idea’ are in Coleridge always explicitly Christian too, and his influence on immediately succeeding generations was primarily as a teacher of Churchmen. Coleridge was teacher of the whole of the liberal Anglican school of John Sterling, Julius Hare, Connop Thirlwall, and Frederick Denison Maurice. In the dedication to his Kingdom of Christ (1842) Maurice salutes Coleridge for applying to theology the principle of Reason independent of experience which had succeeded ‘the atheism of Hume’ in the previous century:

A secular writer, Walter Pater, saw the same things but valued them almost oppositely: Coleridge affirmed an ‘absolute spirit ’ that was dying out in the nineteenth century to be replaced by an ethos of relativism, and this made him both heroic and comic.