e "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 sp