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and literature. We are not sure if he had ever thoroughly mastered the original works of the German philosophers, or if his metaphysical reading was of an extensive range; we incline to think that he acquired much of his knowledge of Kant and his brethren from the extempore versions of Coleridge, and that it was with the poets and such moral and religious writers of Germany as Schleiermacher that he was familiar. His historical knowledge was rather wide than accurate, and from severe personal research he shrunk with all the reluctance of a sensitive and nervous nature. With the classics of all polite literature he was intimately conversant. His theological attainments were respectable-there is no evidence that they were more; and latterly, indeed, he became deeply prejudiced against the present pretensions, and forms, and modes of investigating that science. His culture, altogether, was rather elegant than strict, rather recherché than profound; and from this, we think, in part proceeded the uncertainty of his theological views. His clerical profession and his early feelings created an intense interest in theological subjects and a yearning for a deeper insight into them, but his tastes and his powers adapted him for a different pursuit. Theology, if we would find aught new in it, requires digging. Sterling could not dig, he could only fly; his verdicts, therefore, are valuable principally for their sincerity; they are rapid first impressions, not slow, deliberate, last judgments. The very power which rendered him a consummate critic of the fine arts, and often an exquisite artist, disqualified him for those laborious and complicated processes which go to build up the great idea of God's relations to mankind. Here he is a tongueless orator, a blind painter, a dumb musician, his powerlessness of execution being proportionate to the strength of his desire.

work in the list of his writings-this his short
life and his long duel with death sufficiently
explain; and still less from his non-popularity
(in the popular sense) as an author; as he
never spoke to the empty echo of popular
applause, he never expected to receive a
reply. But we imagine that we notice in the
various productions he has left a sort o
tentative process, as of a mind distracted by
various models and attempting different
styles. We observe this not merely in his
earlier but in his later works
We never
from the beginning to the end of his career
find him in a path so peculiar and lonely that
we cry out, "Let him prosecute this, if he
can, till the crack of doom." He never gives
the impression, amid all his individual brillian-
cies of thought, invention, and figure, of a
new, and whole, and undivided thing, leaving
such influence on us as is given by the sight
of a new comet in the heavens, or of a Faust,
a Festus, or a "Rime of the Anciente
Mariner" upon the earth. His genius rather
touches, dances, on a brilliant and shapeless
fire-mist, than constructs it into fine or terrible
forms. He has all the variety, vividness,
truth and eloquence which constitute an
artist who has genius, but not the possession,
the self-abandonment, the gigantic monotony,
slowly evolving itself out of the wide circle
of early sympathies, and wielding them all to
its purpose the one great thing in nature to
tell-the one great thing towards man to
do, which distinguish a prophet whom genius
has.

There are two lights in which to regard Sterling's writings-either as trials of strength or as triumphs of genius. It is in the former light that we are disposed to regard them. They are of almost every variety of style, subject, and merit. We have poems, apologues, allegories, a tragedy, criticisms, novels, and fragmentary relics. Seldom do we remember the steep of fame scaled on so many sides by one so young. He resembled a captain who, waiting for the ultimate order of his general, keeps his troops moving hither and thither in what seems aimless and endless ubiquity. So Sterling hung around all the alleys and avenues of thought, tarrying for the word "march, and secure this or that We one"--a word which never came. Yet assuredly his talent, tactics, and earnestness were of no ordinary kind. How much mild pathos has he condensed into the " Sexton's Daughter!" What fine though dim condensations many of his poetical lines are! How tenderly and truly does he touch what we might deem the yet sensitive and shrinking

A man of genius John Sterling has often been called, nor are we disposed to deny him the precious but indefinite term. His sympathies, his temperament, his mode of thinking, all the moods and tenses of his mind, were those of genius. If not a man of genius, he was a most startling likeness or bust of one. Nevertheless, we have our doubts as to the originality or greatness of his vein. argue this not, as some would absurdly, from his wide and generous sympathies: great genius implies a great genial nature, as necessarily as a great river a great channel for its waters, and a broad nature, like a broad river, must reflect many objects. We argue it not from finding no extensive or profound

corpse of Wentworth! Napoleon, too, he has resuscitated; and it is at the touch of no earth-worm that he springs aloft, gigantic if not triumphant, from the tomb. And throughout the tales and apologues, which principally compose the second volume of his "Remains," there are sprinkled beauties of thought, sentiment, and expression, for which forty volumes of modern novels might be searched in vain.

On his "Thoughts" and "Letters," as in some respects the most interesting of his writings, we propose to pause for a little. Always are such writings, if from a sincere man, the most direct and genuine issues of his spirit; they are just the mind turned inside out. The naked man that can bear inspection must be handsome; the naked thought which delights must be beautiful and true. A very good and very clever divine has written, "Adams's Private Thoughts." We are thankful to him; but what would we give for the private thoughts of Shakspeare, Milton, and especially of Burke, since he, less than most men, "hung his heart upon his sleeve for daws to peck at." Were but some one wiser and greater than Rousseau to shrive himself as honestly as he! An honest account of his inmost sentiments and his entire history, held up in the hand of any intellectual man, not insane, would stop almost the motions of society till it had been read and pondered. Autobiographies being in general the falsest of books, the exception would be the more prized. And thus, too, we should find that one fearless man had uttered feelings and thoughts participated in by the whole human race, and was the mouth of a dumb humanity.

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Sterling's Thoughts" are evidently sincere, but as evidently a selection. They are the collected cream of his mind. He does not open his soul ad aperturam libri. He gives us elegant extracts, and some of them might have been better entitled, "How I ought to have thought at such and such a time." The whole collection is not so much of "thoughts" as of "after-thoughts." They were published, let us remember, before his death, in "Blackwood's Magazine." Had they been thorough-going utterances and written in blood, no periodical would have printed them. As it is, many of them are very beautiful and profound. We quote a few :

"There is no lie that many men will not believe; there is no man who does not believe many lies; and there is no man who believes only lies.

One dupe is as impossible as one twin. To found an argument for the value of Christianity on external evidence, and not on the condition of man and the pure idea of God, is to hold up a candle before our eyes that we may better see the stars.

The religion of all Pagans indiscriminately has often been written of by zealous Christians in the worst spirit of Paine and Voltaire.

Lies are the ghosts of truths, the masks of faces.

The firm foot is that which finds firm footing. The weak falters although it be standing on a rock.

Goethe sometimes reminds us of a Titan in a court-dress.

The prose man knows nothing of poetry, but poetry knows much of him.

No man is so born a poet but that he needs to be regenerated into a poetic artist.

There are countenances far more indecent than

the naked form of the Medicean Venus.

Those who deride the name of God are the most unhappy of men except those who make a trade of honoring him.

An unproductive truth is none. But there are products which cannot be weighed even in patent scales, nor brought to market.

There is a tendency in modern education to cover the fingers with rings, and at the same time cut the sinews at the wrist.

Better a cut finger than no knife.

The worst education which teaches self-denial

is better than the best which teaches everything else, and not that."

Sterling's letters are plain, unexcited, and unpretending. Their style, so much simpler than that of his essays and tales, suggests the thought that he must have elaborated the latter. They interest more from their good sense and information than as discoveries of character. They are full of generous and quiet criticism. Thus, of Lamb he says "I have been looking over the two volumes of his letters, and I am disposed to consider them the pleasantest in the language, not excepting the best of Cowper's, nor Horace Walpole's. He was a man of true genius, though on a small scale, as a spangle may be gold as pure as a doubloon." Speaking of his own poems, he says"When I think of Christabel, and Herman, and Dorothea, I feel a strong persuasion that I deserve the pillory for ever writing verses at all. The writings of Schelling, Fichte, and some others, give the same uneasy belief as to prose." Again-"Lately I have been reading some of Alfred Tennyson's second volume, and with profound admiration of his truly lyric and idyllic genius. There seems to me to have been more epic power in Keats, that fiery, beautiful meteor; but they are

two most true and great poets. When one thinks of the amount of recognition they have received, one may well bless God that poetry is in itself strength and joy, whether it be crowned by all mankind or left alone in its own magic hermitage. It is true that what new poetry we have is little cared for; but also true that there is wonderfully little deserving any honor. Compare our present state with twenty years ago, when Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Scott as a a novelist, were all vigorously productive. Carlyle is the one great star that has arisen since, and he is far more prophet than singer." He gives a striking anecdote of Thorwaldsen: "Did you ever hear the story of his being at a party at Bunsen's, whose house was on the Capitolian Hill, on the site of the temple of Olympian Jove, and where the conversation, as often, under Bunsen's guidance, took a very Christian turn, till Thorwaldsen remarked through the window commanding a noble prospect of Rome, the modern city, the planet Jupiter in great glory, and, filling his glass, exclaimed, "Well, here's in honor of the ancient gods!"

It is an extremely important and serious aspect of Sterling's history at which we must now look. It is at his religion.

So far as religion can be called constitutional, John Sterling was constitutionally religious. The union of ardent temperament, high intellect, and pure morals, generally in this country generates a strong religious appetency, which was manifest in him. Dr. Hare has not traced so minutely and clearly as had been desirable the entire progress of his thoughts and feelings on this momentous topic. Indeed, there is throughout all his memoir a shrinking, skulking, and want of plain speaking on the subject, unworthy of such a man writing on such a man, and this, we know, some of Sterling's warmest friends feel; but we think we can map it out with considerable accuracy, and in very few and very plain words. From the early piety of genius, he seems to have passed into the carly scepticism of genius. While sounding on his dim and perilous way in those troubled waters, the great beacon-light of Coleridge attracted and seemed to save him. He became in theory, as he had been in feeling, a Christian. Influenced by his marriage and other circumstances, disciplined by various grave events, and not, he trusts, unguided by the Holy Spirit, he entered the work of the Christian ministry, labored for six months with exemplary diligence, and was only prevented by illness from prosecuting the calling.

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Afterwards, the change began gradually to pass over his mind. Loosened from professional ties-burning with a hectic speculation impatient of the cant, and commonplaces, and bigotry of ordinary theologians-sick of the senseless controversies of his churchand attracted ever more and more by the learning and genius of Germany, his orthodox belief in Christianity was shattered, though his childlike love for it remained the same. At last he died, it must be told, more than doubtful of the divine origin of Judaism, unsatisfied of the evidences of Christianity, and yet ravished with the unutterable beauty and moral grandeur of the latter; and his almost last words were a request to his sister to hand him the old Bible he was wont to use in Herstmonceux (where he had been curate) among the cottages.

Such is the plain, unvarnished tale of Sterling's religious career. It is a very painful, very interesting, and very instructive narrative. We must be permitted to methodize our impressions of it under the following remaks :-First, it is not, alas! a singular case. Secondly, its causes are not very recondite. And thirdly, it teaches some momentous lessons.

Without

First, the case is not uncommon. alluding to innumerable private instances, the process through which Sterling was passing is almost the same with that less fully undergone by Foster and Arnold, and which, in Newman and Parker, in Carlyle and Emerson, may be considered perfected. In Shelley, it was different. In the first place, he unfortunately never enjoyed, we fear, the opportunity of seeing real religion incarnated in living examples; with that noble moral poem, sublimer far than a "Paradise Lost," a meek and humble disciple of Jesus, he seems never to have come in contact. Secondly, he was early repelled from just views of the subject by the savage stupidity of university tests and treatment. And, thirdly, the motion of his mind was accelerated by that morbid heat and misery which made his life an arm of Styx and rendered his entire character and history anomalous. Shelley is the caricature of the unsatisfied thinker of the times; and while, as a poet, admired by all for his potential achievements, his creed, which creed was none, unless a feverish flush on the brow be a fixed principle of the soul, has only influenced those who are weak and morbid through, nature, or raw and incondite through youth. Sterling, on the other hand, was the express image of such a thinker, in his highest and purest form.

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Ere inquiring into the causes of that strange doubter now looks at it from the lofty ground new form of scepticism, which has seized so of the ideal and the spiritual. "It contramany of our higher minds, let us more dis- dicts the laws of matter," said the one. "I tinctly enunciate what it is not, and does not cannot, in all its parts," says the other, "respring from. It is not, as some imagine, a concile it with the principles of mental truth." mere disguise which the scepticism of Hume It is something greater than matter," said and Voltaire has assumed, better accommothe one. "It is something less than mind," dated to the tastes and the progress of the says the other. "I cannot grasp it," said the present age. It is not the same with it, even one. "I can but too easily account for much as Satan towering to the sky was the same of it," says the other. It surpasses my with Satan lurking in the toad. It differs standard," said the one. "It does not come from it in many important respects. 1st. It up to mine," says the other. "Its miracles to admits much which the uubelief of Paine me seem monstrous things, which I cannot and Voltaire denied; it grants the beauty, swallow," said the one. To me," says the the worth, and the utility of our religion- other, "they appear petty tricks, not imposnay, contends that, in a sense, it is a divine sible to, but unworthy of a God." "Its emanation; the divinest ever given to man. It prophecies seem to me all written after the does not sheathe, but tosses away the old event," said the one. "To me," says the poisoned terms imposture, fraud, priesteraft, other, "the objection is that they tell so little cunningly devised fable. 2dly. It approaches that is really valuable. What comparison religion with a different feeling and motive. between the fate of a thousand empires and It desires to find its very highest claims true. one burst of pure truth ?" "The whole It has no interest that they should be false. thing," said the one, "is too supernatural and The life of such an one as we describe is unearthly for me.' "To me," says the modelled on the life of Christ; his language other, "it bears but too palpable marks of is steeped in the Bible vocabulary, as in an earthly though unparalleled birth-God's burning gold. Prayer and its cognate duties highest, it may be, but not his only or ultihe practices, and his heart is ever ready to mate voice.' "I wish I could convince rise to the swells of Christian oratory and everybody that it was an imposture," said the feeling, as the war-horse to the sound of the "I wish," says the other, "that I trumpet. He teaches his children to prattle could convince myself that it is what the of Christ, and weeps at eventide as they world professes to believe it." "It is strange," repeat their little hymns. He gives to the said the one, "that, superstition as it is, it cause of the Gospel, and his cheek glows at wont die." It is far stranger," says the the recital of the deeds of a Williams or a other, "how, if it be par excellence true, it Waddell. The sceptic of the eighteenth is dying, and has become little else than a century first hated religion, because it scowled caput mortuum." "But, then, it must be on his selfishness-then wished it untrue-- confessed," said the one, "that its external evand then, generally with the bungling haste idences are imposing, though not irresistible." of over-eagerness, tried to prove it untrue. "To me," says the other, "these seem its Thus Paine felt the strong right-hand, which, weakness, not its strength; and as to its vitals in the "Rights of Man," had coped worthily-its internal evidences-is it not, like Cato, with the giant Burke, shivered to splinters when he stretched it forth in the "Age of Reason," against the "ark of the Lord." The doubter of our day (we speak, of course, of one class) loves religion, wishes it true, reverences every pin and fringe of its tabernacle, tries to convince himself and others of its paramount and peculiar divinity, and if, at last, the shadow of a cloud continues to hang over his head, it fails to disguise the fast-flowing tears wrung from his disappointed spirit. 3dly. It approaches religion, not only with a different feeling, but from a different direction. The sceptic of the eighteenth century approached it from the platform of matter-a platform in itself mean, even when including the whole material universe; the

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day after day, tearing them out with its own suicidal hands-is it not rapidly becoming a worldly and mechanical, if not a carnal, sensual and devilish thing?"

Such is a fair statement of the difference between the two scepticisms. As we proceed, we shall have occasion to refute the conclusions of the second variety. We now come to its causes. 1st. We may name the overstress which was long laid by the defenders of Christianity upon its external evidences. The effects of this have been pernicious in various ways. It could not, in the first place, be disguised that many who defended with the most success the external evidences were, if not secret sceptics, strangers to the living influence, and disbelievers in the peculiar

doctrines of the Gospel. Such were Lardner, Watson, Priestley, Wakefield, and Paley. They first threw away the kernel of Christianity, and then did desperate battle in defense of the empty shell. Never were walls and bulwarks containing nothing more heroically defended. The school of Warburton and Hurd, indeed, were of a more Christian class, but their polemical bitterness and personal arrogance were intolerable. 2dly. Even the successful defense of the evidences seemed a poor exploit, when it was confessedly considered inadequate to impress the vital principles of Christianity upon the mind-stopping, it might be, the mouths, but not opening the hearts of its adversaries, whom it drove away from, instead of drawing into the city of God; and the loud cheers, which followed each victory over a desperate but unconvinced foe, sounded harsh and horrible, as were one to encore the plunge of a lost spirit into the abyss. 3dly. If external evidences were the principal, if not sole proof of Christianity, what became of the belief of the majority of Christians, to whom these evidences were unknown, or who, at least, were quite incapable of estimating the true nature and weight of the argument founded upon them? If their belief was worthless, must not their Christianity be baseless and worthless too? If it was not, what a slur on those elaborate evidences, which in no instance could reach a result which was daily attained by thousands without any external evidence at all! 4thly. What was the utmost value of external evidences? Not to produce demonstrative conviction of the truth of Christianity, but only a very high degree of probability. But is the soul, with all its eternal issues, to depend upon a question of degrees, of less and more, of a few grains above or scruples below? Is there no straighter, higher, nobler road to conviction? May there not be a voice within us, corresponding with a voice in Christianity, changing a faltering "perhaps" into a loud, confident, and commanding "it is, it must be so ?" Thus felt Pascal, and this is the true history of his faith. He did not, as Cousin pretends, in order to avoid the gulf of universal scepticism, to which his thoughts and researches were leading him, and where he knew perdition weltered at the bottom, turn back and throw himself into the arms of implicit faith, which like a nurse a child, had followed him to the brink. No, but dissatisfied with the common evidences of Christianity, as demonstrative, he leaned down and listened to the hidden river of his own spirit, echoing the voice of inspiration, and it

became to him an oracle-a proof unutterable, an argument unstateable in human terms, only to be fully written out in soul-cypher, and to be fully read by the eye of the soul. Pascal, we must observe, felt the utmost value of external evidence; he believed that it made the truth of Christianity highly probable-nay, probable in the highest degree, though the highest degree of probability is still, of course, remote from absolute mathematical certainty. But there are others who look upon the evidences pro and con as nearly balancing each other, and what for them is to turn the scale? Nay, there are some who conscientiously think that, after all Paley and Watson have written, the eviden

ces

con outweigh the evidences pro; and what can our boasted external argumentations do any more for them?

Thus has external evidence in a great measure failed of securing its object, and has by this felt failure produced in many of our present thinkers the form of scepticism we now describe and deplore. In our humble judgment, instead of miracles being the principal proof of Christianity, Christianity is a much stronger proof of miracles. A book intrinsically so divine, so simple, so far superior to all others, and so adapted to the wants of human nature, cannot be imagined to be deceived, or to deceive others in the relation of facts. The quantity and singularity of such facts is itself an additional circumstance in their favor. A wise imposture would have sprinkled them more sparingly and artistically, and brought down, in no case save in that of necessity, its Deus ex machina. The great purpose of miracles at first was to compel attention to the new system, by the glare of grandeur it threw around it—a finger of supernal light must touch the head of the bashful boy-God and mark him out to the world; their main use now is to corroborate a belief which has been formed upon quite independent grounds. " Culture," cries Strauss, "cannot believe in miracles. Culture however can and has believed in Christianity, and will not recall its belief, because she wears on her breast and forehead those mysterious ornaments which speak, not more forcibly than her whole dress and bearing, of a foreign and unearthly origin. Miracles must not be considered as splendid tricks-as mere mighty bravados, which whoso could not equal or explain was compelled to believe, as well as to believe whatever was said in the lecture that should follow or accompany those experiments. They were rather, in Foster's grand thought, the simple tolling of the great

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