" The reader of the _Life of
Sterling_ is not left to doubt for a moment the author's malignant
hostility to the religion of the Bible. In that work, saving faith
is described as "stealing into heaven by the modern method of
sticking ostrich-like your head into fallacies on earth," that is
to say, by believing in the doctrines of the Gospels. How, after
this, could the Principal and Professors of the University, the
guardians of the faiths and morals of its inexperienced youth,
accompany to the Common Hall, and allow to address the students a
man who has degraded his powers to the life-labour of sapping and
mining the foundations of the truth, and opened the fire of his
fiendish raillery against the citadel of our best aspirations and
dearest hopes?
In the result, two men of genius--however diverse--were discarded, and
a Scotch nobleman of conspicuous talent, always an active, if not
intrusive, champion of orthodoxy, was returned by an "overwhelming
majority." In answer to intelligence transmitted to Mr. Carlyle of these
events, the president of the Association of his supporters--who had
nothing on which to congratulate themselves save that only the benches
of the rooms in which they held their meetings had been riotously
broken,--received the following previously unpublished letter:--
Chelsea, _16th December_ 1854.
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