This can only be formed and tested by time: and it is not easy to mark the moment, so bewildering becomes the work of introspection, when a conviction entailing such terrible results has been sufficiently ascertained. But let it have arrived: to testify to a positive truth, to a living principle, is not only a duty, but an animating and ennobling idea: it is not the same thing when a man has to bear witness to a blank, a void, an universal negative; when he is to deprive all his fellow-creatures, as to their moral being, of the clothing that covers them, the house that shelters them, the food that sustains them, and to present to them the great Nil in exchange. Such was the case of Mr. Blanco White: and although others may not have reached the very same extremes, yet upon the whole he had, as we have seen, but too ample countenance from example.

57. Nor is his case simply to be regarded as that of following a multitude to do evil. He saw, as he conceived, two classes in the priesthood. Of these, one taught what they believed to be false. But the others held and taught the same things upon an authority which he had satisfied himself was worthless, and would not suffer any to teach otherwise. Besides the preachers of what they did not believe, and the preachers who believed only in deference to the Church of Rome, there was no third class: there were none, with whom he could take refuge. The great men of heathen antiquity, too, who might present themselves as models to one in his circumstances, had, as he knew, dissembled more or less with regard to religion. And we must recollect that the duty of testifying to our own personal convictions, which is taught among us sometimes even to the disparagement of other duties, occupied no such place in the system under which he lived. It may

nevertheless remain true that he ought to have braved the Inquisition; nay, what was still more, that he ought to have placed his parents on the rack of mental agony by the disclosure of his unbelief: but we must think that his breach of duty in dissembling was one which comparatively few among those, whose minds might be crude enough to have fallen into his error, could have avoided.

58. Making all these admissions, however, the grave, the vast evil of the case remains clear. The moral consequences of maintaining a Christian profession for ten years upon a basis of Atheism-the Breviary* on the table, and the Anti-Christian writers of France in the closet-may have been fatal to the solidity and consistency of his inward life thereafter. At the very time when the mind may be said to have the last hand put to the formation of its determinate character-namely, from about twenty-five to thirty-five-it was his unhappy condition to be at first exercising all the offices, and to the last maintaining the profession of a Priest, though he knew that he had inwardly ceased to be a Christian. And surely it is not too much to say, while we sedulously disclaim the office of the judge, that after so long a period of contrast the most violent and unnatural-after the habits of mind belonging to such a position have been contracted, and hardened, as in so considerable a tract of time they must needs have been hardened-after the purposes and the general conduct of life have been so long and so entirely dissociated from inward convictions-it has become too late to reestablish their natural relations to one other. We cannot with impunity thus tamper with the fearful and wonderful composition of our spiritual being. Sincerity of intention,

* Doblado, p. 134.

after this, can only subsist in a qualified and imperfect sense. It may be in a manner sincere, so far as depends upon the contemporaneous action of the will; but it is clogged and hampered by the encumbering remains of former insincerity, and it can only reap a scanty share of the blessings that attend upon a virgin rectitude. Thus, even as the promises to the penitent become ambiguous, and at length barren, in the progress of the hardening of the heart, so the promises of guidance to the willing must be understood with reference not to the mere inclination of the moment, but to the bent of the character modified as it is by former conduct, and to those víπodes vóμot, those supernal laws of moral retribution, which by the structure of our minds we are made, every one of us, to administer against ourselves.

59. Sometimes in reading this work we have been reminded, by the intensity of the sufferings which the writer describes, and of the prostration they produced, of the religious melancholy or madness of one, whose name must be ever touching, ever dear; of Cowper, who was borne away by a rapid torrent into a strong sea."* We know not whether it be irrational to indulge the hope that bodily disease may have been in a greater or less degree the source of Mr. Blanco White's morbid speculations, and that the severity of its pressure may, at least at times, have placed his free agency in abeyance. With regard to all such possibilities, let us leave them to Him who knows and judges: only they may be useful in aiding us to check that impatience of the understanding, which so often leads us into premature and incompetent conclusions upon the personal merits of our fellow-creatures.

* Southey's Life, p. 115.

But however much, or however little, foundation there may be for a supposition of this kind, we confess we find in the long protracted contradictions between conscience and conduct of his early career, quite enough to account for the fact that, notwithstanding his subsequent anxiety to attain the truth, his foot missed the narrow path which leads to her lofty palaces.

60. There may, however, perhaps be persons inclined to the opinions of Mr. Blanco White, who may contend that we do to him, and still more to those opinions, an injustice, when we represent the latter periods of his life as essentially and deeply unhappy. It may be argued, that all symptoms of that character are fairly ascribable to the protracted and wearing, and sometimes acute maladies, under which he suffered, and to his frequent loneliness. But those of us, who have ever witnessed the triumphs of faith upon the bed of sickness, and indeed probably every candid observer, will not, we think, find in his circumstances any sufficient ground for that remarkable prevalence of gloomy recollections which marks his journal. There are, indeed, occasionally passages indicating comfort, and sometimes more than comfort, when the momentary transports of intellectual activity were upon him. But his record is like that "harp of Innisfail," which ever and anon

"Was tuned to notes of gladness;

But yet it oftener told a tale

Of more prevailing sadness."

Whenever he describes the general colour of his life, he describes it as miserable. So early as in the end of 1831, *"For the last eighteen years he has not enjoyed

he says

Life, I. p. 477.

*

one day of tolerable existence." In 1835 he had, if we may so speak, the honeymoon of his Unitarianism. But, in 1836, he began to wish habitually for death; and death with him had a terrible meaning. Latterly his greatest comfort appears to have been found in literature; "My only enjoyment of life arises from my books." In the year 1838 his complainings become almost incessant. Sometimes from being piteous they grow almost frightful. In the meantime, he says, his religious convictions, as they were fewer, were firmer than ever. This is generally the feeling of those who have just discarded what they think a falsehood, with regard to all they continue to hold. He was frequently in this very predicament. But we could easily prove from his pages, with a redundancy of dark detail, that these convictions were totally incapable of giving cheerfulness or even tranquillity to his life, and that the closing years described by this truthful man were years of habitual misery, mitigated only by intervals of partial relief.‡

61. We have seen, then, how slender, in the later life of this very unhappy man, were the relics of what once at least had been, in some sense, the majestic form of the Christian Faith. Was it not as when a single stone remains upon the ground, the solitary memorial of some mighty temple, in which it once had its appointed place, but it is now shifted from its base; sustaining nothing, and itself unsustained; wasting away beneath the pitiless elements. Wasting, we fear, but too rapidly, unless the process should have been arrested by some beneficent dis

*Life, II. p. 244.

† Ibid. 275, 342. See Life, III. 34, 13–15, 17, 22, 23, 35, 45, 55, 67, 70, 72, 89, 163, 183, 192, 198, 227.