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human characteristics, and to elevate its professors into that largeness of intellectual glance, and that breadth of moral nobleness, which befitted the religion that cannot die.

In all this the practice of Carlyle presents, I repeat, a striking contrast to that of his master. It is no doubt true that Carlyle never speaks, except in reverential terms, of Jesus Christ. He agrees with Goethe that Christianity is the supreme religion, and that the race cannot recede from it. And yet he never, so far as I know, alludes, except contemptuously, to those Christian writers who have made it their aim to show how the Christian religion may embrace within its compass all real truth. Take the instance before us-that of Coleridge. Even if Carlyle succeeds in showing that there is no practical value in Coleridge's distinction between reason and understanding, it has still to be considered whether, in his work, The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, Coleridge did not do good service by substituting for the old superstitious theory of inspiration, which embraced the unnatural conception of men reduced to mere automata, writing down the Scriptures like machines, the intelligent idea of a succession of men feeling and exemplifying the inspiration they embodied and representing, in their life and writings, successive stages of the religious education of mankind.

Do we find, on examination, that Carlyle's view of the Christian ministry as obsolete, and bound to make way for men of letters, is practical and sagacious? I answer, No. In all ages hitherto the body of organised preachers of truth and performers of religious rites-in one word, the priesthood—have been recognised as playing a part which was of value in itself, and which was not superseded by the part played by the prophet. One of the main reasons, acknowledged by writers of all schools, why the old Hebrew system performed its inestimable service to the cause of spiritual civilisation, was that the

ordinary ministrations of the priest were in it harmoniously associated with the extraordinary ministrations of the prophet. The office of the prophet was more peculiar, honourable, and terrible than that of the priest; and the priesthood-the professional clergy-might prove false to the national faith, as in the days of Elijah, while the prophet risked his life in maintaining it. Since Carlyle insists strongly upon the perpetual existence of prophetic inspiration, and admits again and again that there is imperishable truth in Christianity, might not Coleridge have fairly urged that the clergy of the Christian Churches, on condition of their listening attentively to every accent of inspired moral genius, and reverently considering every demonstrated fact of science, could still do good service in their day and generation? No doubt Carlyle might reply that the Churches are fenced round with creeds and articles; but Coleridge might press him to mention where he has declared that a Christian clergy, not hedged in by creeds and articles, are justified in prosecuting their ministry, that is to say, in making the most of those symbols, which, on his own showing, are not to be cast aside until the sap and verdure of life have utterly gone. from them. I am not aware that Carlyle could silence Coleridge by any definite information on this point.

But Coleridge might take up a still stronger position against Carlyle by asking why, in deference to inspiration in the present, he virtually declares the inspiration of the past to be so far beneath the level of contemporary progress, that sincere faith in it, on the part of the Christian clergy, has become incredible and preposterous. If John Sterling allowed himself to be "hoodwinked" into orders as a sentimental girl is decoyed into a convent, there is not a word to be said for him, and we must agree with Carlyle that his taking orders was "the extreme point of spiritual deflection and de

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pression" in his career. But before we admit the validity of this precedent, as applied to the Christian clergy in general, we are bound to inquire what was the nature of the work which, while he acted as Archdeacon Hare's curate, Sterling performed. Let us read what Carlyle says on the subject. He quotes largely from Hare, but does not cast a shadow of suspicion on Hare's trustworthiness as a witness.

JOHN STERLING AS CURATE.

By Mr. Hare's account, no priest of any Church could more fervently address himself to his functions than Sterling now did. He went about among the poor, the ignorant, and those that had need of help; zealously forwarded schools and beneficences, strove, with his whole might, to instruct and aid whosoever suffered consciously in body, or, still worse, unconsciously in mind. He had charged himself to make the Apostle Paul his model; the perils and voyagings, and ultimate martyrdom of Christian Paul, in those old ages, on the great scale, were to be translated into detail, and become the practical emblem of Christian Sterling on the coast of Sussex in this new age. "It would be no longer from Jerusalem to Damascus," writes Sterling, "to Arabia, to Derbe, Lystra, Ephesus, that he would travel: but each house of his appointed Parish would be to him what each of those great cities was, a place where he would bend his whole being, and spend his heart for the conversion, purification, elevation of those under his influence. The whole man

would be for ever at work for this purpose; head, heart, knowledge, time, body, possessions, all would be directed to this end." A high enough model set before one-how to be realised! Sterling hoped to realise it, to struggle towards realising it, in some small degree. This is Mr. Hare's report of him.

"He was continually devising some fresh scheme for improving the condition of the parish. His aim was to awaken the minds of the people, to arouse their conscience, to call forth their sense of moral responsibility, to make them feel their own sinfulness, their need of redemption, and thus lead them to a recognition of the Divine Love by which that redemption is offered to us. In visiting them he was diligent in all weathers, to the risk of his own health, which was greatly impaired thereby; and his gentleness and considerate care for the sick won their affection; so that, though his stay was very short, his name is still, after a dozen years, cherished by many."

How beautiful would Sterling be in all this: rushing forward like a host towards victory; playing and pulsing like sunshine or soft lightning; busy at all hours to perform his part in abundant and superabundant measure! "Of that which it was to me personally," continues Mr. Hare," to have such a fellow-labourer, to live constantly in the freest communion with such a friend, I cannot speak. He came to me at a time

of heavy affliction, just after I had heard that the Brother, who had been the sharer of all my thoughts and feelings from childhood, had bid farewell to his earthly life at Rome; and thus he seemed given to me to make up in some sort for him whom I had lost. Almost daily did I look out for his usual hour of coming to me, and watch his tall, slender form walking rapidly across the hill in front of my window; with the assurance that he was coming to cheer and brighten, to rouse and stir me, to call me up to some height of feeling, or down to some depth of thought. His lively spirit, responding instantaneously to every impulse of Nature and Art; his generous ardour in behalf of whatever is noble and true; his scorn of all meanness, of all false pretences and conventional beliefs, softened as it was by compassion for the victims of those besetting sins of a cultivated age; his never-flagging impetuosity in pushing onward to some unattained point of duty or of knowledge: all this, along with his gentle, almost reverential, affectionateness towards his former tutor, rendered my intercourse with him an unspeakable blessing; and time after time has it seemed to me that his visit had been like a shower of rain, bringing down freshness and brightness on a dusty roadside hedge. By him, too, the recollection of these our daily meetings was cherished till the last."

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There are many poor people still at Herstmonceux who affectionately remember him; Mr. Hare especially makes mention of one good man there, in his young days "a poor cobbler,” and now advanced to a much better position, who gratefully ascribes this outward and the other improvements in his life to Sterling's generous encouragement and charitable care for him. Such was the curate-life at Herstmonceux. So, in those actual leafy-lanes, on the edge of Pevensey Level, in this new age, did our poor New Paul (on hest of certain oracles) diligently study to comport himself, and struggle with all his might not to be a moonshine shadow of the First Paul.

If Sterling was "hoodwinked" into this, he was hoodwinked into no base or trivial vocation, and can we rationally doubt that thousands of men might undertake such duties with entire sincerity of reason and of understanding? It would hardly be a safe or sober experiment to expel all those ministers, Conformist and Nonconformist, who are trying to awaken something of a Divine glow in the hearts of labourers, mechanics, farmers, and squires, and to leave their work to be done by Latter-Day prophets and by journalists. Thackeray makes it quite plain, by a remark here and there in his writings, that he regarded with a smile of his own gentle but penetrating disdain the

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big words in which many foolish men, and Carlyle alone among wise men, have denounced as an incubus the Christian ministry at present existing in England.

Under the influence of Carlyle, Sterling threw up his curacy and became a literary man. His success was fair, but not great. Carlyle informs us that "the want of the living, swift looks and motions, and manifold dramatic accompaniments," tells heavily against his writings.

What," says the biographer, who cannot help feeling that he is to some extent in the position of a Johnson writing the life of a Boswell, "can be done with champagne itself, much more with soda-water, when the gaseous spirit is fled!" I have no doubt that Sterling's brilliant talk afforded pleasure to many a clever listener, and that his essays and tales and letters have made time hang less heavily upon the hands of a few rich and polite people, and may even have had an elevating and ennobling effect upon a smaller number; but I cannot help doubting whether, after leaving Mr. Hare, he did so much real good in the world as when he worked among the "many poor people" who "still at Herstmonceux affectionately remember him," and when he succeeded in making a man of at least one "poor cobbler."

Carlyle proceeds on the assumption that no faith can be sincere unless it is unfaltering. He would have repelled with scorn the man who said to Christ, "Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief," and who was not told by the Saviour that there could be no true religion that was shadowed with doubt. "All weakness is not falseness," Browning has just been reminding us; and candid reflection will, I think, justify the assertion that, in ages when light is pouring in from many quarters upon the human mind,— in ages like our own, when science has revolutionised our knowledge of God's universe,-hesitation and doubt in matters of faith are presumptions in favour of sincerity,