Only in the world's last lethargy can such things be done,and accounted safe and pious!Fools!"Do you think the Living God is a buzzard idol,"sternly asks Milton,that you dare address Him in this manner?--Such darkness,thick sluggish clouds of cowardice and oblivious baseness,have accumulated on us:thickening as if towards the eternal sleep!It is not now known,what never needed proof or statement before,that Religion is not a doubt;that it is a certainty,--or else a mockery and horror.That none or all of the many things we are in doubt about,and need to have demonstrated and rendered probable,can by any alchemy be made a "Religion"for us;but are and must continue a baleful,quiet or unquiet,Hypocrisy for us;and bring--_salvation_,do we fancy?I think,it is another thing they will bring,and are,on all hands,visibly bringing this good while!--The time,then,with its deliriums,has done its worst for poor Sterling.Into deeper aberration it cannot lead him;this is the crowning error.Happily,as beseems the superlative of errors,it was a very brief,almost a momentary one.In June,1834,Sterling dates as installed at Herstmonceux;and is flinging,as usual,his whole soul into the business;successfully so far as outward results could show:but already in September,he begins to have misgivings;and in February following,quits it altogether,--the rest of his life being,in great part,a laborious effort of detail to pick the fragments of it off him,and be free of it in soul as well as in title.
At this the extreme point of spiritual deflexion and depression,when the world's madness,unusually impressive on such a man,has done its very worst with him,and in all future errors whatsoever he will be a little less mistaken,we may close the First Part of Sterling's Life.