‘Many of the most vivid and impressive instances of the religious sublime […] are in fact tuned much more receptively to a theism that stresses the mystery and ineffability, and sees the universe as “in God” than to what may be the “onesided” concept of God in classical theism. Theological orthodoxy, in the Romantic period, was often anxious about some of these, lest they topple over into pantheism. They can, however, equally well be interpreted as theistic religious experience outgrowing its anthropomorphic stage, and the presuppositions that went with it. As good an instance as any is furnished by Wordsworth’s lines intended for The Prelude but not incorporated in it:
“… the one interior life / That lives in all things, sacred from the touch / Of that false secondary power by which / In weakness we create distinctions, then / Believe that all our puny boundaries are things / Which we perceive and not which we have made: / – In which all beings live with god, themselves / Are god, existing in the mighty whole, / As indistinguishable as the cloudless East / At noon is from the cloudless West, when all / The hemisphere is one cerulean blue.”
One factor of importance which we have not so far acknowledged in these samplings of the religious sublime is readily illustrated in Coleridge. Even given favourable external circumstances – objects with capacity to “baffle the imagination”, complex and obscure, and able to suggest infinite forces working in unseen incomprehensible way, there was no guarantee that the necessary active power of the mind would be available to transform what might be perceived as “an immense heap of little things” into a unified sublime vision. Within the myth of The Ancient Mariner, near-infinite multiplicity was present in the “thousand, thousand slimy things”, the “creatures of the calm”. But only an upsurging of love for the created world prompted the unifying religious vision when the mariner blessed the water-snakes. Sheer multiplicity and vastness can evoke, for Coleridge, not sublimity but chill desolation and despair.’
Ronald W. Hepburn: The Concept of the Sublime: Has It any Relevance for Philosophy Today? Dialectics and Humanism 15 (1988): 137–155, 152–153.