or fools. I tread the common road,' he writes, in his last melancholy but touching letter to Carlyle-I tread the common road into the great darkness, without any thought of fear, ' and with very much of hope. Certainty, indeed, I have none.'

And so he played his part among us, and has now ended it: in this first half of the nineteenth century, such was the shape of human destinies the world and he made out between them. He sleeps now, in the little burying-ground of Bonchurch; bright, ever-young in the memory of others that must grow old; and was honourably released from his toils before the hottest of the day....

Like other such lives, like all lives, this is a tragedy: high hopes, noble efforts; under thickening difficulties and impediments, ever-new nobleness of valiant effort;-and the result death, with conquests by no means corresponding. A life which cannot challenge the world's attention; yet which does modestly solicit it, and perhaps on clear study will be found to reward it. ...

'A man of infinite susceptivity; who caught everywhere, more than others, the colour of the element he lived in, the infection of all that was or appeared honourable, beautiful and manful in the tendencies of his time;whose history therefore is, beyond others, emblematic of that of his Time.

'In Sterling's writings and actions, were they capable of being well read, we consider that there is for all true hearts, and especially for young noble seekers and strivers towards what is highest, a mirror in which some shadow of themselves and of their immeasurably complex arena will profitably present itself.'-Pp. 342, 343.

It is a bad look-out, indeed, for the Time, if its thinkers and workers, and honest fighters,' are only such as Mr. Sterling and Mr. Carlyle. Of Sterling we have nothing more to say. He may have been, according to his opportunities, a diligent and earnest inquirer after truth, though it was not given him to find it: the only proof that Mr. Carlyle gives us is, that he ardently pursued literature, and was drawn away by it from religion; and this is none at all. But Mr. Carlyle's claim to that title is becoming more questionable, every book that he writes; and this doubt arises, not from the conclusions to which he comes, but from the tone and spirit in which he speaks. Here is a man professing the most sacred reverence to truthfulness on the one hand, to earnestness and reality of mind and life on the other. Before his time, and widely spread, there has been a religion which has, eminently and without gainsaying, gathered to itself the flower of all excellence, in these later centuries of mankind; has been put to the proof by the truthful, and practically tried by the earnest, and has not failed them. And it still lasts and works: it is all round him, still believed in and trusted by truthful and earnest men. If it is not true, the light and hope of the world is put out: but, nevertheless, truth is truth-by wishing it, we cannot make a thing true that is not. But it is, at the first glance, a monstrous thing, that any man should touch on

such a contingency without feeling what he is doing; without showing that he is serious and knows what he is about. It is not bigotry, but the instinct of true feeling and common sense, which gives a summary judgment on any one who, in intermeddling with such tremendous interests, lets us discover those intellectual temptations, conceit, or pride, or gloom, or restlessness, or love of theory, which are as imperious over their victims as the coarser ones of sense, and if more subtle, are as real and as discernible. Into this position of seriously facing the question -and showing us that he is seriously facing it—whether, and how far Christian religion is what it is generally thought to be, Mr. Carlyle, while scornfully asking on all sides for earnestness and intelligible language, has, as far as can be seen, steadily declined to place himself. For every fact and principle that he has ever stated, its truth remains just as it was; but his writings go on the assumption that no man of sense and honesty believes it. Mr. Carlyle talks much of lies. It is on this lying assumption that he is now writing. Even he has not told us in so many words, what he ventures to disbelieve.

Mr. Carlyle has gained a great reputation for being a truehearted and earnest man; unless it is absolutely impossible_that he should be an impatient, a one-sided, an arrogant, a soured and querulous man, we see nothing to drive us to this belief. The invention of new words of sarcasm, and the applying them with pertinacity and keenness to the weak sides of all sides alike, is in itself a proof of no more than of a taste and a power for venting dislike and scorn. Many of the most vulgar-minded of our race have had the taste, at least, if they have not shared the power. And when Mr. Carlyle comes to the great questions on which the destiny of men and society hinges, he is, in substance, in his view and grasp of them-in spite of his power over detail and circumstance-as trivial, as cloudy, as unsatisfying, as destitute of any proof of powerful and solid thought, as the ordinary run of orators and scribblers, who furnish subjects for his sarcasm. Society has always been infested with imposture and sham. It is well to tell us so in sharp terms. But what more? Other phenomena it certainly has, equally striking and more attractive. What of them? True also, cant, and sham belief, and false belief, and innumerable confused forms of unreality and folly, float on the surface of religion, and overload the Church: so they have always done, and always will. It is no peculiarity of our days, evil though they be; and it is hard to imagine a poorer, or more vulgarly superficial view of religious history and belief than one which takes these accidents as the substance and core of them the really important and significant portion of them. Yet this is the philosophy which pervades and regulates Mr. Carlyle's

writings. He will not trouble himself with the whole state of the facts. He dislikes, and he wants to teach others to dislike; and he does so by appealing to feelings which are just as bad as any that he attacks. He appeals, against society, against the Church, against Christianity, not to earnestness, but to that counterfeit of earnestness which can be as severe and bitter as possible in its easy-chair; and takes for its guarantee, that it is original and in advance of the time-not as other men are, slow and behind it. His way of teaching us earnestness is by every means in his power to produce the impression, that earnestness cannot have anything more to do with the religion, laws, institutions, people, to whom we certainly owe all that we have, and from whom we cannot, if we would, divorce our feelings and ourselves. Voltaire attacked religion, not by contradicting it, but by mocking it. Mr. Carlyle does not contradict in words: he only brow-beats. It has outlived Voltaire. In a score of years, Mr. Carlyle will not be thought as formidable as Voltaire.

186

ART. VII.-The Mormons, or Latter-Day Saints: a contemporary History, with Memoirs of the Life and Death of Joseph Smith, the American Mahomet.' London: Office of the National Illustrated Library. 1851.

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A PARALLEL between the obscure sect, which dates its rise from the imposture of Joseph Smith, and the mighty gathering of nations upon whom the word of the false prophet of Arabia has left its impress, will be censured by the majority of our readers, as an historical paradox put forward merely for the sake of catching the attention of those whose curiosity must be stimulated before they can be induced to reflect. For our justification in repeating such a parallel, we can make no better appeal than to the silent authority of the Geographer's lines. Let the inquirer look out a recent map of the North American continent, and cast his eye upon those territories of the Far West, which, within a few years, were unknown by name to Europeans, but are now as familiar to us as the provinces of France. The first to arrest his notice will be the indented coast-line of the modern El Dorado, with its creeks and mountain ranges, that are tempting so many wanderers to peril their lives in an unprofitable search for the metal by which other hoards than their own are to be enriched. Leaving the Californian territory, let him observe the Debateable Land of Oregon, the seedplot, as it was thought, of the great quarrel in which our Transatlantic rivals were to strive with their Anglo-Saxon kinsmen for preeminence among the nations of the earth. Returning to the south, he will range over the fair territory which American ambition and cupidity have lately wrested from the inertness of the Mexican rulers, who claimed to be descended from the energetic Conquerors of the New World. But the map has not yet been duly studied. Between Oregon and New Mexico, bounded by California on the west and Nebraska on the east, lies a wide and tempting region, deficient in no gifts of nature, already marked out as the highway to the gold mines of the west. This remarkable tract of country, the table-land from whence flow the waters that mingle with two oceans, yesterday was not even known by the wandering missionary, or named on the outline of the geographer. Now it is a sovereign State, formally admitted by Congress to the great confederacy of the Western World,' a constituent

The latest accounts seem to render it doubtful whether this newly gained privilege has satisfied the ambitious race to whom it was granted. There has been a movement in favour of absolute independence.

portion of that Union, whose astonishing progress in wealth and power outstrips the ability of our travellers to describe, and our statists to calculate. Utah (so the new State is named) has been reduced, indeed, by the act of Congress, from the limits which its ambitious inhabitants traced out for the boundary of their dominions. But it extends even now from the inhospitable steeps of the Sierra Nevada almost to the Rocky Mountains; and though it has been forbidden to claim a seaboard on the Pacific, it is probable that the energetic emigrants, who have rescued its plains from their pristine wildness, will not fail to keep some ready communication with the Old World nurseries of their enterprise under their own control. Already, it is said, the highway of the Mississippi, with its subsequent land journey of 1,000 miles, has been exchanged for the less difficult voyage round Cape Horn, or the transit of the Isthmus of Panama. By one route or another the stream of emigration flows on, and every year witnesses the deportation of our mechanics and labourers to the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, in numbers of which each return shows a marked and astonishing increase.

These emigrants are the Mormonites, for whose creed and undertakings men of letters in England feel no other sentiment than that of profound contempt. We are inclined to think that this feeling will hardly be justified by the testimony of facts. The creed, indeed, is contemptible enough; but the enterprise that has been accomplished by its believers will bear comparison with the most memorable expeditions in the history of the world. For that very reason it may be doubted whether the doctrine, too, may not be more worthy of attention than the first glance at its blasphemous follies might lead us to suppose. If it be not the cause or mainspring of the great movement, yet its coexistence with so much energy and perseverance redeems it from the imputation of mere puerile absurdity, which its dogmatic statements provoke. It may appear, perhaps, that Mormonism, in common with other impostures, has met a want of the age, and has called forth the homage of feelings, for which existing religions seemed to offer too narrow a field. Even its grossest errors may help us to understand the state of mind to which those errors approved themselves. Its falsehoods will remind us of the truths on which they border; while its evil practices and crimes, if such there be, may be a warning of the moral consequences to which all falsehood inevitably tends.

It has been observed of Mahometanism, that the corruptions of all existing religious systems, which it found on the scene of its first promulgation, were the favourable conditions of its birth. When Mahomet began to make known his claims, there was no real faith in Arabia. Each system had departed from its own