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 Icontinue 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 through life,is capable of interesting the greatest man;that all men are to an unspeakable degree brothers,each man's life a strange emblem of every man's;and that Human Portraits,faithfully drawn,are of all pictures the welcomest on human walls.Monitions and moralities enough may lie in this small Work,if honestly written and honestly read;--and,in particular,if any image of John Sterling and his Pilgrimage through our poor Nineteenth Century be one day wanted by the world,and they can find some shadow of a true image here,my swift scribbling (which shall be very swift and immediate)may prove useful by and by.
