denying Methodist missionary meets
his death. The whole winding-up is unnatural, and the process of turning
the organizing chief of a great warlike confederacy into a Sunday-school
hero is only saved from being commonplace by being absurd. Far more
singular, however, was the central idea of "The Sea Lions," the story
that followed. This is certainly one of the most remarkable conceptions
that it ever entered into the mind of a novelist to create. It shows the
intense hold religious convictions were taking of Cooper's feelings, and
to what extremes of opinion they were carrying him. In "Wing-and-Wing"
the hero had been discarded because he was a thorough infidel. But
Cooper's sentiments had now moved a long distance beyond this
milk-and-water way of dealing with religious differences. In "The Sea
Lions" the hero merely denied the divinity of Christ, while he professed
to hold him in reverence as the purest and most exalted of men. But if
there was any one point on which the heroine was sound and likewise
inflexible, it was the doctrine of the Trinity. Whatever else she (p. 259)
doubted, she was absolutely sure of the incarnation. She would not
unite herself with one who presumed to "set up his own feeble
understanding of the nature of the mediation between God and man in
opposition to the plainest language of revelation as well as to the
prevalent belief of the Church." In this case the hero is converted,
apparently by spending a winter in the Antarctic seas. An important
agent in effecting this change of belief is a common seaman who improves
every occasion to drop into the conversation going on, some unexpected
Trinitarian remark. When the master has almost against hope saved his
vessel, and in the thankfulness of his heart invokes blessing on the
name of God, Stimson is on hand at his elbow to add, "and that of his
only and _true_ Son." This novel is, indeed, a further but unneeded
proof of how little Cooper was able to project himself out of the circle
of his own feelings, or to aid any cause which he had near to his heart.
He had had much to say about New England cant. Yet in this work he can
find no words sufficiently strong to praise what he calls the zealous
freedom and Christian earnestness of one of the most offensive canters
that the whole range of fiction presents. It would be unjust to deny
that when in "The Sea Lions" Cooper abandons his metaphysics and turns
to his real business, that he creates a powerful