The Eclipse of Faith | Page 3

depart in
some degree from my resolution. I intended to leave you to glean what
you could of our religious condition from such publications as might
reach you. But I am now constrained to write something about it. My
dear brother, you will hear it with a sad heart;--your nephew and mine,
our only sister's only child, has, in relation to religion at least, become
an absolute sceptic!
I well recollect the tenderness you felt for him, doubly endeared by his
own amiable dispositions and the remembrance of her whom in so
many points he resembled. What must be mine, who so long stood to
the orphan in the relations which his mother's love and my own
affection imposed upon me! It is hardly a figure to say I felt for him as
for a son. "Ah!" you will say as you glance at your own children, "my
bachelor brother cannot understand that even such an affection is still a
faint resemblance of parental love."
It may be so. I know that that love is sui generis; and as I have often
heard from those who are fathers, its depth and purity were never
realized till they became such. But neither, perhaps, can you know how
nearly such a love as I have felt for Harrington, committed to me in
death by one I loved so well,--beloved alike for her sake and for his
own,--the object of so much solicitude during his childhood and
youth,--I say you can hardly, perhaps, conceive how near such an
affection may approach that of a parent; how closely such a graft upon

a childless stock may resemble the incorporate life of father and son.
You remember what hopes we both formed of his youth, from the
promise alike of his heart and of his intellect, How fondly we predicted
a career of future usefulness to others, and honor and happiness to
himself! You know how often I used to compare him, for the silent ease
with which he mastered difficult subjects, and the versatility with
which he turned his mind to the most opposite pursuits, to the youthful
Theaetetus, as described in Plato's dialogue the movements of whose
mind Theodorus compares to the "noiseless flow of oil" from the flask.
He was just fourteen and a half when you left England; he is now,
therefore, nearly twenty-nine. He left me four years ago, when he was
just twenty-five,--about a year after the termination of his college
course, which you know was honorable to him, and gratifying to me.
He then went to spend a year, or a year and a half, as he supposed, in
Germany. His stay (he was not all the time in Germany, however) was
prolonged for more than three years. In the letters which I received
from him, and which gradually became more rare and more brief, there
was (without one symptom of decay of personal affection) a certain air
of gradually increasing constraint, in relation to the subject which I
knew and felt to be all-important. Alas! my prophetic soul took it aright;
this constraint was the faint penumbra of a disastrous eclipse indeed!
He was not, as so many profess to be, convinced by any particular book
(as that of Strauss, for example) that the history of Christianity is false;
nay, he declares that he is not convinced of that even now; he is a
genuine sceptic, and is the subject, he says, of invincible doubts. Those
doubts have extended at length to the whole field of theology, and are
due principally, as he himself has owned, to the spectacle of the
interminable controversies which (turn where he would) occupied the
mind of Germany. Even when he returned home he does not appear to
have finally abandoned the notion of the possibility of constructing
some religious system in the place of Christianity;-- this, as he affirms,
is a later conviction formed upon him by examining the systems of
such men as have attempted the solution of the problem. He declares
the result wholly unsatisfactory; that, sceptical as he was and is with
regard to the truth of Christianity, he is not even sceptical with regard

to these theories; and he declares that if 'the undoubtedly powerful
minds which have framed them have so signally failed in removing his
doubts, and affording him a rock to stand upon, he cannot prevail upon
himself to struggle further.
And so, instead of stopping at any of those miserable road-side inns
between Christianity and scepticism, through whose ragged windows
all the winds of heaven are blowing, and whose gaudy "signs" assure us
there is "good entertainment within for man and beast,"-- whereas it is
only for the latter,--Harrington still travelled on in hopes of finding
some better shelter, and now, in the dark night,