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It is a curious coincidence that at the same time Mr. Mill should have had Blanco White as a contributor to the "London Review." The latter appears to have been almost entirely accordant in sentiments with Mr. Sterling.

"During the summer of 1839, at Clifton, Sterling became acquainted with Mr. Francis Newman, the present Professor of Latin at the London University College, who soon became one of his most highly valued friends, and his esteem for whom he proved by leaving his eldest son under his guardianship."-p. cxliii.

The gentleman here referred to seceded from the Church of England many years ago, and became connected with the sect of Darbyites we believe; since which he is understood to have adopted views in religion generally in accordance with those of the Unitarians, or of the German Rationalists.

We find Mr. Sterling in the midst of all his theological speculations, continuing in habits of intimacy with all his early friends.

...

"Of all my own contemporary friends, I am not aware that there is one who thinks me entitled to write verses except Trench. . . . Carlyle writes to me that he likes the Hymns, which is a great deal for him to say of any verses of mine. I had the other day a very beautiful and most cordially affectionate letter from him."-p. cxlvi.

...

Shortly after we read the following:

"For some time he had also the pleasure of seeing Mr. John Mill, then at Falmouth, one of the friends whom for many years he had most loved, and esteemed, and admired."-p. cxlvii.

He appears to have thought that his friends were scarcely equal to the task before them.

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Pray believe that I am far from thinking it right to blaze up suddenly in the face of a nation's creed and customs. Nothing but reverence for truth should exceed our reverence for all objects of men's living faith; and I am most anxious to be preserved from a spirit of intemperate blame or of mocking levity. If I saw any hope that Maurice, and Samuel Wilberforce, and their fellows, could re-organize and re-animate the Church and nation, or that their own minds could continue progressive without becoming revolutionary, I think I could willingly wrap my head in my cloak, or lay it in the grave, without a word of protest against aught that is. But I am well assured that this cannot be."-p. cxlii.

We find allusions to other friends elsewhere.

"I have had a most cordial letter from Emerson, thanking me for

my poems."-p. cxliv.

"Carlyle, I have not heard from lately, but see many proofs that he is gradually doing his work, and convincing men's hearts that no belief can be adopted as useful, unless embraced as true, without being far worse than useless; a brief proposition of most revolutionary import in a day like ours."-p. cxlv.

"Carlyle is the only man I know of (unless M.) under sixty, who has shown himself the possessor of transcendent genius; and in him it all serves the purpose of moral and political exhortation, like that of the old Hebrew prophets."-p. clvi.

"Francis Newman, who, alone of my friends here, has spent his life in reflection and study, is just gone; and it will be long before I find his match."-p. clix.

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"I have seen very lately nothing that has much interested me, but Emerson's Essays. They are sometimes self-contradictory. ... but they have much of depth, of comprehensiveness, and of beauty, and express what at this time many minds among us require, and yet will hardly find in English."-p. clxii.

....

"The loss of Arnold, whom I never saw, has grieved me as if he had been a friend..... much, on your account, do I rejoice to hear that Bunsen is to be at Herstmonceux Arnold I believe to have been one of the very few, perhaps the only man in England, seeing the whole evil, and prepared to make such changes in the Church-system as might possibly have rendered it effectual for its nominal purpose among those who most need a moral reform. Here the real Church is Wesleyan; but over three-fourths of England there is, I fear, none.”—pp. cxcvii.-ix.

Of Ventnor, he says:

"The only serious disadvantage is the distance from Herstmonceux, and all places where I can see the face of a friend."-p. ccviii.

In his last illness, he writes, that the affection of his friends had been a real comfort.

"There was a note from Carlyle not long since, I think the noblest and tenderest thing that ever came from humane pen. Mill's letters have been almost equally remarkable, and considering the man are much more so. Newman has been all in word and deed that man could be. A letter of Emerson had more heart than one would suppose could be found in all America. Trench, in spite of much inward and outward separation, has shown himself what he always was, one whose feelings are pure as crystal, and warm as the sun. Of the Maurices and my brother I need not write."—p. ccxvi.

We have reserved for the last some further account of the connexion between Mr. Hare, the biographer, and Mr. Sterling.

It appears that their intimacy commenced at Cambridge, where Sterling became a pupil of Mr. Hare's, who writes thus on the subject.

....

"In the autumn of 1824, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became one of the pupils at my classical lectures Thus began an acquaintance, which subsequently ripened into one of the most precious friendships vouchsafed to me during my life."-p. ix.

He is thus held up to admiration :

"By sacrifices of these kinds he did seek Truth, with a stern self oblivion, and rejoiced in offering them up to her."-p. xxix.

"There are persons who . . . . are gifted with a sort of divining rod for drawing out what was hidden in the hearts of their brethren; and of such persons I have known no finer example than Sterling. For in him, as in such persons it must ever be, the nobleness of his outward look and gesture and manner betokened that of his spirit .... I know many witnesses might be collected out of all classes of society, who would rejoice to declare, that to him they owed the first awaking of a higher being, that from him they learnt what they were, and what they ought to be."

In 1834, Mr. Hare met Sterling at Bonn:

"In the course of conversation, I was delighted to find that the advice which I had given him some years before, to enter into the Christian ministry, had taken root in his mind, and was beginning to assume a definite form. He talked of spending a year or two abroad, with the view of gaining some insight into German philosophy and theology, and said he then hoped to take orders, if he could find any one to give him a title. I strongly urged him to execute this latter resolution, adding, that if when he did so, my own curacy was vacant, I should deem it a blessed privilege to enlist such a man in the service of the Church."—p. xlvii.

Accordingly in due time he became curate to Mr. Hare, at Herstmonceux, where "his intercourse" with his former tutor was to the latter "an unspeakable blessing" (p. lv.), and where an intimacy was formed, which Mr. Sterling himself described as that of "brothers" (p. lvi.).

He was compelled in 1834 to resign his parochial duties.

Considering that, as the biographer admits, "the tendency of his early education had been negative, after that mode of negativeness which we may remember as characteristic of such as drew their opinions from the oracles of the Edinburgh Review thirty years ago," and that only a "temporary reconciliation" was "wrought with that which is best and soundest in the faith and institutions of his countrymen" (p. cxxviii.), it seems to us, we confess, deeply reprehensible to have urged Sterling to take orders "some years before" (as he himself says) "his heart and prin

ciples were fixed in the line of practical Christianity" (p. xlv.); before he had seemed to himself "to enter decidedly and for the first time into possession of those blessings which are offered to all in Christ's redemption;" before, in fact, as far as we can judge, he had become a positive believer in Christianity! It seems to us, that the interests of Christian truth were wholly overlooked in such a proceeding as this.

Sterling appears to have been throughout, in habits of intimate friendship with Mr. Hare. To the instructions of his tutor, we presume, we may attribute his predilection for German theology; but the pupil ultimately followed the current of that theology into depths where Mr. Hare did not venture to follow him. He appears to have advanced further than some other of his associates and fellows, amongst whom he especially mentions Mr. Trench, as estranged by his views. Whether Mr. Sterling or Mr. Hare acted in consistency with their own principles, or whether they had either of them carried out those principles to the lengths which they may attain to in other hands, is a question on which different opinions will be held; but certain it is, that Mr. Hare represents his friend as a leader or avant-courier of those whose views are tending to the improvement of theology. His view of the matter is this:

"Among men of intellectual vigour, I will not say the majority, but undoubtedly a very large portion, are only withheld from open infidelity by giving up their thoughts entirely to the business of this world, and turning away with a compromising indifference from serious inquiries about religion. In such a state of things it becomes the imperative duty of all who love the truth in Christ, to purge it, so far as they can, from the alloy which it may have contracted in the course of ages, through the admixture of human conceits, and which renders it irreconcileable with the postulates of the understanding. This is, indeed, a very delicate work, and accompanied with many risks; and many will go astray in attempting to accomplish it. But still it must be done. We cannot arrest the winds or the waves; nor can we arrest the blasts and tides of thought. These, too, blow and roll where they list. We may, indeed, employ them both; but, to turn them to account, we must suffer ourselves to be impelled and borne along by them. Fresh obstacles

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are ever rising across our path, and we must assail them. If we do so, though some lives may be lost in the attack, one obstruction after another will gradually be removed. Now Sterling was one of the men whose nature commanded him to stand in the van of human progress. He belonged to the body-guard of him who might be called by the name of the heroic Prussian, Marshal Forwards."-pp. ccxxx.-xxxi.

The publication of the works of a writer whose main and leading object for many years was the subversion of belief in the super

natural character of the Christian Revelation affords, we think, some presumption that the editor himself has been making progress in the same direction. If Mr. Sterling's opinions are to be taken as a sample of the kind of teaching which may be expected from those whose avant-courier he is to be, there is, we think, serious ground for alarm at what is before us, and more especially when a man like Archdeacon Hare ventures openly to hold up a mind of this class to admiration. We might have expected from a believer a solemn warning against the causes of such aberrations as Mr. Sterling's. We might have anticipated some attempt to supply an antidote to the poison of unbelief which is thus placed before an unsuspecting public. But this, alas! is not Mr. Hare's view. He deems it expedient to be "impelled and borne along" by the blasts and tides of thought, even if they are infidel in their character. He endeavours to enlist our sympathies for the sceptic. He becomes the eulogist of one who, by his own admission, was, for almost the whole of his life, an unbeliever in the Divine authority of Christianity, and died in that unbelief. Such was the real position occupied by one whom Mr. Hare holds up to admiration as a hero "in the van of human progress. Of course he cannot condemn him. How could Mr. Hare condemn a man who had simply followed out his speculations under the guidance of Neander, Schleiermacher, and other writers recommended by his tutor?

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"If there is any man who, having exerted himself laboriously and perseveringly to pry into the hidden recesses of our nature, to pierce through the unfathomable abyss of evil, and to catch a glimpse of the light and glory beyond and behind, can say he has never been shaken or troubled in the calm composure of his faith, let him cast a stone at Sterling: I cannot."-p. ccxxviii.

Does not the warning which Mr. Hare gives in condemning the perusal of Strauss' Life of Jesus apply equally to the German Theology in general? "If we walk through mire, some of it will stick to us, even when we have no other aim than to make our way through it, much more when we dabble about it and sift it. Such, too, must be the case with those who pass through any sort of moral mire" (p. exxxiii.). And again, "When the utmost ingenuity of a dexterous advocate, scraping together the results of all that previous advocates have effected, is employed in picking holes in the New Testament, in fabricating absurdities, in detecting or devising inconsistencies and contradictions, how can one allow one's mind to dwell among such contemplations without having one's reverence impaired by them" (p. cxxxiv.). German philosophy arose at a period when the miraculous and supernatural

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