of pain and terror, to press resolutely across
said deserts to the new firm lands of faith beyond; he preferred to
create logical _fata-morganas_ for himself on this hither side, and
laboriously solace himself with these."

The above mentioned step of Sterling--his entering the Church--is the
point on which Carlyle is most decidedly at issue with Archdeacon Hare.
The latter holds that had Sterling's health permitted him to remain in
the Church, he would have escaped those aberrations from orthodoxy,
which, in the clerical view, are to be regarded as the failure and
shipwreck of his career, apparently thinking, like that friend of
Arnold's who recommended a curacy as the best means of clearing up
Trinitarian difficulties, that "orders" are a sort of spiritual
backboard, which, by dint of obliging a man to look as if he were strait,
end by making him so. According to Carlyle, on the contrary, the real
"aberration" of Sterling was his choice of the clerical profession, which
was simply a mistake as to his true vocation:

"Sterling," he says, "was not intrinsically, nor had ever been in the
highest or chief degree, a devotional mind. Of course all excellence
in man, and worship as the supreme excellence, was part of the
inheritance of this gifted man; but if called to define him, I should
say artist, not saint, was the real bent of his being."

Again:

"No man of Sterling's veracity, had he clearly consulted his own
heart, or had his own heart been capable of clearly responding, and
not been bewildered by transient fantasies and theosophic moonshine,
could have undertaken this function. His heart would have answered,
'No, thou canst not. What is incredible to thee, thou shalt not, at
thy soul's peril, attempt to believe! Elsewhither for a refuge, or
die here. Go to perdition if thou must, but not with a lie in thy
mouth; by the eternal Maker, no!'"

From the period when Carlyle's own acquaintance with Sterling commenced,
the Life has a double interest, from the glimpses it gives us of the
writer, as well as of his hero. We are made present at their first
introduction to each other; we get a lively idea of their colloquies and
walks together, and in this easy way, without any heavy disquisition or
narrative, we obtain a clear insight into Sterling's character and mental
progress. Above all, we are gladdened with a perception of the affinity
that ex