"Concerning this attempt of Sterling's to find sanctuary in the old Church, and desperately grasp the hem of her garment in such manner, there will at present be many opinions; and mine must be recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere pitying condemnation of it, as a rash, false, unwise and unpermitted step. Nay, among the evil lessons of his time to poor Sterling, I cannot but account this the worst; properly indeed, as we may say, the apotheosis, the solemn apology and consecration, of all the evil lessons that were in it to him. Alas! if we did remember the divine and awful nature of God's Truth, and had not so forgotten it as poor doomed creatures never did before,--should we, durst we in our most audacious moments, think of wedding it to the world's untruth, which is also, like all untruths, the devil's? 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!----"
Herein consists the whole difference between Hare and Carlyle in their views of Sterling's career. They looked at it from such opposite points that what is the zenith to one is the nadir to the other. What Sterling himself thought of it, was strikingly expressed to his brother, Captain Anthony Sterling, by a comparison, of his case "to that of a young lady who has tragically lost her lover, and is willing to be half-hoodwinked into a convent, or in any noble or quasi-noble way to escape from a world which has become intolerable." The truth seems to be, that Sterling went into orders under the combined influence of remorse for the share he had inadvertently had in causing the disastrous fate of a near relative (Mr. Boyd, who was shot with Torrijos in Spain), and of a gradual disenchantment from trust in mere political schemes for the regeneration of mankind,--a disease more common to the genial young men of his time than of ours. That while in the exercise of his duties as a parish-priest he was energetic, useful, and happy, the evidence in Mr. Hare's book is fully sufficient to show. It is impossible to say whether his scepticism would have come upon him had he continued in that active career; but it is certainly a gratuitous supposition of Mr. Carlyle that the ill-health which put an end to it was only the outward and ostensible cause of its termination, and does not appear to be borne out by a single letter or expression of Sterling's own. Indeed, for years after he left Hurstmonceaux, he seemed to continue as firm in his attachment to Christianity as when he was there; though, on the other hand, it may well be doubted whether a man of Sterling's intellect, who would surrender his beliefs to Strauss's _Leben Jesu_, is likely in the present day to keep them under any conceivable circumstances. We think that Mr. Hare on the one hand has attributed too exclusive an influence to Sterling's forced inactivity, and Mr. Carlyle has certainly not taken it sufficiently into account as a determining cause of his skepticism.