The Life of John Sterling | Page 5

no longer be
my good Sterling's; a tumult having risen around his name, enough to
impress some pretended likeness of him (about as like as the
Guy-Fauxes are, on Gunpowder-Day) upon the minds of many men: so
that he could not be forgotten, and could only be misremembered, as
matters now stood.
Whereupon, as practical conclusion to the whole, arose by degrees this
final thought, That, at some calmer season, when the theological dust
had well fallen, and both the matter itself, and my feelings on it, were
in a suitabler condition, I ought to give my testimony about this friend
whom I had known so well, and record clearly what my knowledge of
him was. This has ever since seemed a kind of duty I had to do in the
world before leaving it.
And so, having on my hands some leisure at this time, and being bound
to it by evident considerations, one of which ought to be especially
sacred to me, I decide to fling down on paper some outline of what my
recollections and reflections contain in reference to this most friendly,
bright and beautiful human soul; who walked with me for a season in
this world, and remains to me very memorable while I continue in it.
Gradually, if facts simple enough in themselves can be narrated as they
came to pass, it will be seen what kind of man this was; to what extent
condemnable for imaginary heresy and other crimes, to what extent
laudable and lovable for noble manful orthodoxy and other
virtues;--and whether the lesson his life had to teach us is not much the
reverse of what the Religious Newspapers hitherto educe from it.
Certainly it was not as a "sceptic" that you could define him, whatever
his definition might be. Belief, not doubt, attended him at all points of
his progress; rather a tendency to too hasty and headlong belief. Of all
men he was the least prone to what you could call scepticism: diseased
self-listenings, self-questionings, impotently painful dubitations, all this
fatal nosology of spiritual maladies, so rife in our day, was eminently
foreign to him. Quite on the other side lay Sterling's faults, such as they
were. In fact, you could observe, in spite of his sleepless intellectual
vivacity, he was not properly a thinker at all; his faculties were of the

active, not of the passive or contemplative sort. A brilliant
_improvisatore_; rapid in thought, in word and in act; everywhere the
promptest and least hesitating of men. I likened him often, in my
banterings, to sheet-lightning; and reproachfully prayed that he would
concentrate himself into a bolt, and rive the mountain-barriers for us,
instead of merely playing on them and irradiating them.
True, he had his "religion" to seek, and painfully shape together for
himself, out of the abysses of conflicting disbelief and sham-belief and
bedlam delusion, now filling the world, as all men of reflection have;
and in this respect too,--more especially as his lot in the battle
appointed for us all was, if you can understand it, victory and not
defeat,--he is an expressive emblem of his time, and an instruction and
possession to his contemporaries. For, I say, it is by no means as a
vanquished doubter that he figures in the memory of those who knew
him; but rather as a victorious believer, and under great difficulties a
victorious doer. An example to us all, not of lamed misery, helpless
spiritual bewilderment and sprawling despair, or any kind of drownage
in the foul welter of our so-called religious or other controversies and
confusions; but of a swift and valiant vanquisher of all these; a noble
asserter of himself, as worker and speaker, in spite of all these.
Continually, so far as he went, he was a teacher, by act and word, of
hope, clearness, activity, veracity, and human courage and nobleness:
the preacher of a good gospel to all men, not of a bad to any man. The
man, whether in priest's cassock or other costume of men, who is the
enemy or hater of John Sterling, may assure himself that he does not
yet know him,--that miserable differences of mere costume and dialect
still divide him, whatsoever is worthy, catholic and perennial in him,
from a brother soul who, more than most in his day, was his brother
and not his adversary in regard to all that.
Nor shall the irremediable drawback that Sterling was not current in the
Newspapers, that he achieved neither what the world calls greatness nor
what intrinsically is such, altogether discourage me. What his natural
size, and natural and accidental limits were, will gradually appear, if
my sketching be successful. And I have remarked that a true
delineation of the smallest man, and his scene of pilgrimage