st at which we can live and die, is still ahead of us, it would
appear!

"Ill-health" was the external cause; and, to all parties concerned,
to Sterling himself I have no doubt as completely as to any, the one
determining cause. Nor was the ill-health wanting; it was there in too
sad reality. And yet properly it was not there as the burden; it was
there as the last ounce which broke the camel's back. I take it, in this
as in other cases known to me, ill-health was not the primary cause
but rather the ultimate one, the summing-up of innumerable far deeper
conscious and unconscious causes,--the cause which could boldly show
itself on the surface, and give the casting vote. Such was often
Sterling's way, as one could observe in such cases: though the most
guileless, undeceptive and transparent of men, he had a noticeable,
almost childlike faculty of self-deception, and usually substituted
for the primary determining motive and set of motives, some ultimate
ostensible one, and gave that out to himself and others as the ruling
impulse for important changes in life. As is the way with much more
ponderous and deliberate men;--as is the way, in a degree, with all men!

Enough, in February, 1835, Sterling came up to London, to consult with
his physicians,--and in fact in all ways to consider with himself and
friends,--what was to be done in regard to this Herstmonceux business.
The oracle of the physicians, like that of Delphi, was not exceedingly
determinate: but it did bear, what was a sufficiently undeniable fact,
that Sterling's constitution, with a tendency to pulmonary ailments,
was ill-suited for the office of a preacher; that total abstinence from
preaching for a year or two would clearly be the safer course. To which
effect he writes to Mr. Hare with a tone of sorrowful agitation; gives
up his clerical duties at Herstmonceux;--and never resumed them there
or elsewhere. He had been in the Church eight months in all: a brief
section of his life, but an important one, which colored several of his
subsequent years, and now strangely colors all his years in the memory
of some.

This we may account the second grand crisis of his History. Radicalism,
not long since, had come to its consummation, and vanished from him in
a tragic manner. "Not by Radicalism is the path to Human Nobleness for
me!" And here now had English Priesthood risen like a sun, over the
waste ruins and extinct volcanoes of his dead Radical world, with
pr