"A year or two"of serious reflection "in some good German University,"or anywhere in the world,might have thrown much elucidation upon these confused strugglings and purposings of Sterling's,and probably have spared him some confusion in his subsequent life.But the talent of waiting was,of all others,the one he wanted most.Impetuous velocity,all-hoping headlong alacrity,what we must call rashness and impatience,characterized him in most of his important and unimportant procedures;from the purpose to the execution there was usually but one big leap with him.A few months after Mr.Hare was gone,Sterling wrote that his purposes were a little changed by the late meeting at Bonn;that he now longed to enter the Church straightway:that if the Herstmonceux Curacy was still vacant,and the Rector's kind thought towards him still held,he would instantly endeavor to qualify himself for that office.
Answer being in the affirmative on both heads,Sterling returned to England;took orders,--"ordained deacon at Chichester on Trinity Sunday in 1834"(he never became technically priest):--and so,having fitted himself and family with a reasonable house,in one of those leafy lanes in quiet Herstmonceux,on the edge of Pevensey Level,he commenced the duties of his Curacy.
The bereaved young lady has _taken_the veil,then!Even so."Life is growing all so dark and brutal;must be redeemed into human,if it will continue life.Some pious heroism,to give a human color to life again,on any terms,"--even on impossible ones!
To such length can transcendental moonshine,cast by some morbidly radiating Coleridge into the chaos of a fermenting life,act magically there,and produce divulsions and convulsions and diseased developments.So dark and abstruse,without lamp or authentic finger-post,is the course of pious genius towards the Eternal Kingdoms grown.No fixed highway more;the old spiritual highways and recognized paths to the Eternal,now all torn up and flung in heaps,submerged in unutterable boiling mud-oceans of Hypocrisy and Unbelievability,of brutal living Atheism and damnable dead putrescent Cant:surely a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals;Darkness,and the mere shadow of Death,enveloping all things from pole to pole;and in the raging gulf-currents,offering us will-o'-wisps for loadstars,--intimating that there are no stars,nor ever were,except certain Old-Jew ones which have now gone out.Once more,a tragic pilgrimage for all mortals;and for the young pious soul,winged with genius,and passionately seeking land,and passionately abhorrent of floating carrion withal,more tragical than for any!--A pilgrimage we must all undertake nevertheless,and make the best of with our respective means.Some arrive;a glorious few:many must be lost,--go down upon the floating wreck which they took for land.Nay,courage!These also,so far as there was any heroism in them,have bequeathed their life as a contribution to us,have valiantly laid their bodies in the chasm for us:of these also there is no ray of heroism _lost_,--and,on the whole,what else of them could or should be "saved"at any time?Courage,and ever Forward!
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!--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.
