PART II.
CHAPTER I.

CURATE.
By Mr. Hare's account, no priest of any Church could more fervently

address himself to his functions than Sterling now did. He went about
among the poor, the ignorant, and those that had need of help;

zealously forwarded schools and beneficences; strove, with his whole
might, to instruct and aid whosoever suffered consciously in body, or

still worse consciously" target="_blank" title="ad.无意识地；不觉察地">unconsciously in mind. He had charged himself to make the
Apostle Paul his model; the perils and voyagings and ultimate

martyrdom of Christian Paul, in those old ages, on the great scale,
were to be translated into detail, and become the practical emblem of

Christian Sterling on the coast of Sussex in this new age. "It would
be no longer from Jerusalem to Damascus," writes Sterling, "to Arabia,

to Derbe, Lystra, Ephesus, that he would travel: but each house of
his appointed Parish would be to him what each of those great cities

was,--a place where he would bend his whole being, and spend his heart
for the conversion, purification, elevation of those under his

influence. The whole man would be forever at work for this purpose;
head, heart, knowledge, time, body, possessions, all would be directed

to this end." A high enough model set before one:--how to be
realized!--Sterling hoped to realize it, to struggle towards realizing

it, in some small degree. This is Mr. Hare's report of him:--
"He was continually devising some fresh scheme for improving the

condition of the Parish. His aim was to awaken the minds of the
people, to arouse their conscience, to call forth their sense of moral

responsibility, to make them feel their own sinfulness, their need of
redemption, and thus lead them to a recognition of the Divine Love by

which that redemption is offered to us. In visiting them he was
diligent in all weathers, to the risk of his own health, which was

greatly impaired thereby; and his gentleness and considerate care for
the sick won their affection; so that, though his stay was very short,

his name is still, after a dozen years, cherished by many."
How beautiful would Sterling be in all this; rushing forward like a

host towards victory; playing and pulsing like sunshine or soft
lightning; busy at all hours to perform his part in abundant and

superabundant measure! "Of that which it was to me personally,"
continues Mr. Hare, "to have such a fellow-laborer, to live constantly

in the freest communion with such a friend, I cannot speak. He came
to me at a time of heavy affliction, just after I had heard that the

Brother, who had been the sharer of all my thoughts and feelings from
childhood, had bid farewell to his earthly life at Rome; and thus he

seemed given to me to make up in some sort for him whom I had lost.
Almost daily did I look out for his usual hour of coming to me, and

watch his tall slender form walking rapidly across the hill in front
of my window; with the assurance that he was coming to cheer and

brighten, to rouse and stir me, to call me up to some height of
feeling, or down to some depth of thought. His lively spirit,

responding instantaneously to every impulse of Nature and Art; his
generous ardor in behalf of whatever is noble and true; his scorn of

all meanness, of all false pretences and conventionalbeliefs,
softened as it was by compassion for the victims of those besetting

sins of a cultivated age; his never-flagging impetuosity in pushing
onward to some unattained point of duty or of knowledge: all this,

along with his gentle, almost reverential affectionateness towards his
former tutor, rendered my intercourse with him an unspeakable

blessing; and time after time has it seemed to me that his visit had
been like a shower of rain, bringing down freshness and brightness on

a dusty roadside hedge. By him too the recollection of these our
daily meetings was cherished till the last."[11]

There are many poor people still at Herstmonceux who affectionately
remember him: Mr. Hare especially makes mention of one good man

there, in his young days "a poor cobbler," and now advanced to a much
better position, who gratefully ascribes this outward and the other

improvements in his life to Sterling's generousencouragement and
charitable care for him. Such was the curate life at Herstmonceux.

So, in those actual leafy lanes, on the edge of Pevensey Level, in
this new age, did our poor New Paul (on hest of certain oracles)

diligently study to comport himself,--and struggle with all his might
_not_ to be a moonshine shadow of the First Paul.

It was in this summer of 1834,--month of May, shortly after arriving
in London,--that I first saw Sterling's Father. A stout broad

gentleman of sixty, perpendicular in attitude, rather showily dressed,
and of gracious, ingenious and slightlyelaborate manners. It was at

Mrs. Austin's in Bayswater; he was just taking leave as I entered, so
our interview lasted only a moment: but the figure of the man, as

Sterling's father, had already an interest for me, and I remember the
time well. Captain Edward Sterling, as we formerly called him, had

now quite dropt the military title, nobody even of his friends now
remembering it; and was known, according to his wish, in political and

other circles, as Mr. Sterling, a private gentleman of some figure.
Over whom hung, moreover, a kind of mysterious nimbus as the principal

or one of the principal writers in the _Times_, which gave an
interesting chiaroscuro to his character in society. A potent,

profitable, but somewhat questionable position; of which, though he
affected, and sometimes with anger, altogether to disown it, and

rigorously insisted on the rights of anonymity, he was not unwilling
to take the honors too: the private pecuniary advantages were very

undeniable; and his reception in the Clubs, and occasionally in higher
quarters, was a good deal modelled on the universalbelief in it.

John Sterling at Herstmonceux that afternoon, and his Father here in
London, would have offered strange contrasts to an eye that had seen

them both. Contrasts, and yet concordances. They were two very
different-looking men, and were following two very different modes of

activity that afternoon. And yet with a strange family likeness, too,
both in the men and their activities; the central impulse in each, the

faculties applied to fulfil said impulse, not at all dissimilar,--as
grew visible to me on farther knowledge.

CHAPTER II.
NOT CURATE.

Thus it went on for some months at Herstmonceux; but thus it could not
last. We said there were already misgivings as to health, &c. in

September:[12] that was but the fourth month, for it had begun only in
June. The like clouds of misgiving, flights of dark vapor, chequering

more and more the bright sky of this promised land, rose heavier and
rifer month after month; till in February following, that is in the

eighth month from starting, the sky had grown quite overshaded; and
poor Sterling had to think practically of departure from his promised

land again, finding that the goal of his pilgrimage was _not_ there.
Not there, wherever it may be! March again, therefore; the abiding

city, and post 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