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 early skepticism 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. Afterwards, a change began gradually to pass over his mind. Loosened from professional ties -burning with a hectic speculation-impatient of the cant, and common-places, and bigotry of ordinary theologians— sick of the senseless controversies of his church-and 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 remarks:-First, It is not, alas! a singular case. Secondly, Its causes are not very recondite. And, thirdly, It teaches some momentous lessons.

1st, The case is not uncommon. Without 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 see

ing 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 2dly, He was early repelled from just views of the subject by the savage stupidity of university tests and treatment. And, 3dly, 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 its highest and purest form.

Ere inquiring into the causes of that strange new form of skepticism, which has seized so many of our higher minds, let us more distinctly enunciate what it is not, and does not spring from. It is not, as some imagine, a mere disguise which the skepticism of Hume and Voltaire has assumed, better accommodated to the tastes and the progress of the present age. It is not the same with it, even as Satan towering to the sky was the same with Satan lurking in the toad. It differs from it in many important respects. 1st, It admits much which the unbelief of Paine and Voltaire denied; it grants the beauty, the worth, and the utility of our religion -nay, contends that, in a sense, it is a divine emanation, the divinest ever given to man. It does not sheathe, but tosses away the old poisoned terms imposture, fraud, priesteraft, cunningly devised fable. 2dly, It approaches religion with a different feeling and motive. It desires to find its very highest claims true. It has no interest that they should be false. The life of such an one as we describe is modelled on the life of Christ; his language is steeped in the Bible vocabulary, as in burning gold. Prayer and its cognate duties he practises, and his heart is ever ready to rise to the swells of Christian oratory and feeling, as the war-horse to the sound of the trumpet. He teaches his children to prattle of Christ, and weeps at eventide as they repeat their little hymns. He gives to the cause of the Gospel, and his cheek

"It

glows at the recital of the deeds of a Williams or a Waddell. The skeptic of the eighteenth century first hated religion, because it scowled on his selfishness-then wished it untrue-and then, generally with the bungling haste of overeagerness, tried to prove it untrue. Thus Paine felt the strong right hand, which, in the "Rights of Man" had coped worthily 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 skeptic of the eighteenth century approached it from the platform of matter-a platform in itself mean, even when including the whole material universe; the doubter now looks at it from the lofty ground of the ideal and the spiritual. contradicts the laws of matter," said the one. "I cannot, in all its parts," says the other, "reconcile it with the principles of mental truth." "It is something greater than matter," said the one. "It is something less than mind," says the other. "I cannot grasp it," said the one. "I can but too easily account for much of it," says the other. "It surpasses my standard," said the one. "It does not come up to mine," says the other. "Its miracles to me seem monstrous things which I cannot swallow," said the one. "To me," says the other, "they appear petty tricks, not impossible to, but unworthy of, a God.” "Its prophecies seem to me all written after the event," said the one. "To me," says the other, "the objection is that they tell so little that is really valuable. What comparison between the fate of a thousand empires and one burst of pure truth?" "The whole thing," said the one, "is too supernatural and unearthly for me." "To me," says the other, "it bears but too palpable marks of an earthly though unparalleled birth-God's highest, it may be, but not his only or ultimate voice." "I wish I could convince every body that it was an imposture," said the one. I wish," says the other, "that I could convince myself that

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it is what the world professes to believe it. "It is strange," said the one, "that, superstition as it is, it won't die.” is far stranger," says the other, "how, if it be par excellence true, it is dying, and has become little else than a caput 'But, then, it must be confessed," said the one, "that its external evidences are imposing, though not irresistible." "To me," says the other, "these seem its weakness, not its strength; and as to its vitals-its internal evidences is it not, like Cato, 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 skepticisms. 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 over stress 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 skeptics, 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 defence 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 defence 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 proba bility. But is the soul, with all its eternal issues, to depend upon a question of degree, 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 skepticism, 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, as 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 soulcypher, 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 evidences 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