special relation to the Church. But
he was a man, and had relation to the Universe, for eight-and-thirty
years: and it is in this latter character, to which all the others were
but features and transitory hues, that we wish to know him. His battle
with hereditary Church formulas was severe; but it was by no means his
one battle with things inherited, nor indeed his chief battle;
neither, according to my observation of what it was, is it successfully
delineated or summed up in this Book. The truth is, nobody that had
known Sterling would recognize a feature of him here; you would never
dream that this Book treated of _him_ at all. A pale sickly shadow in
torn surplice is presented to us here; weltering bewildered amid
heaps of what you call 'Hebrew Old-clothes;' wrestling, with impotent
impetuosity, to free itself from the baleful imbroglio, as if that
had been its one function in life: who in this miserable figure would
recognize the brilliant, beautiful and cheerful John Sterling, with
his ever-flowing wealth of ideas, fancies, imaginations; with his frank
affections, inexhaustible hopes, audacities, activities, and general
radiant vivacity of heart and intelligence, which made the presence of
him an illumination and inspiration wherever he went? It is too bad.
Let a man be honestly forgotten when his life ends; but let him not be
misremembered in this way. To be hung up as an ecclesiastical scarecrow,
as a target for heterodox and orthodox to practice archery upon, is no
fate that can be due to the memory of Sterling. It was not as a ghastly
phantasm, choked in Thirty-nine-article controversies, or miserable
Semitic, Anti-Semitic street-riots,--in scepticisms, agonized
self-seekings, that this man appeared in life; nor as such, if the world
still wishes to look at him should you suffer the world's memory of him
now to be. Once for all, it is unjust; emphatically untrue as an image
of John Sterling: perhaps to few men that lived along with him could
such an interpretation of their existence be more inapplicable."

Whatever truth there might be in these rather passionate
representations, and to myself there wanted not a painful feeling of
their truth, it by no means appeared what help or remedy any friend of
Sterling's, and especially one so related to the matter as myself, could
attempt in the interim. Perhaps endure in patience till the dust
laid itself again, as all dust does if you leave it well alone? Much
obscu