Excerpt from Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbour: A Letter to the Editor of the English Review

Clear of the downright falsehood: but he insinuates it repeatedly, in the shuffling manner which characterizes the whole article, complaining of my eulogizing a sceptic and an infidel, while he omits all mention of my having said anything shewing how I deplored and mourned over his errours, while I tried to explain their origin and pro gress. To me it seemed that such a course would be far more profitable to persons in a like state of mind, than if I had denounced and railed at them. Many will be softened and won by sympathy, and by an earnest attempt to enter into their difficulties, who would only be repelled and irritated by a summary condemnation, the injustice and harshness of which they would deeply feel and resent. I am well aware that a practice very different from this has in all ages been adopted by the bravoes of Orthodoxy, one of whose favorite employments has ever been to traduce and blacken the character of all such as, on whatsoever grounds, had incurred the imputation of heresy. Afraid of meeting their adversaries in honorable battle, they have shot at them with poisoned arrows. I am aware too that many good men have betrayed the weakness of their faith, and the slipperiness of their honesty, by their readiness in giving ear to and propagating the grossest calumnies with such a purpose. But surely their conduct is a most power ful warning to seek truth and pursue it with Singleness of aim, in the smallest things as well as in the greatest. The course which I have taken seemed to me moreover to be that set before us in the example of Him, who had compassion on our infirmities, and came to hear our sins in this way also, and who did not refuse to be called the Friend of publicans and sinners. In the Reviewer's copy of the New Testament, one might suppose, all thisportion must be left out: for he has no more notion of such a duty than if he had lived in the ages anterior to the Gospel. He sneers at me more than once (pp. 402, 439) by means of his favorite flower of speech, italics, for having spoken of the deep sympathy with the errours and faults, and even with the sins of rfiankind, manifested in Sterling's early writings, as a peculiar excellence, which is also found in some others among the great writers Of our age. To those who have ever thought of comparing the manner in which the lower orders, their vices, their sins, their temptations, their errours, are spoken of now, with the tone adopted toward them in former centuries, the contrast must be very striking: and though this spirit may be perverted, as every good Spirit may be, and may be turned into maudlin sentimentalism, or into a pantheistic obliteration of the differences between right and wrong, still in itself it is a good spirit, and, when properly directed and controlled, is so far a Sign that our age in this respect is endeavouring to fashion itself more according to the pat tern of Christ. Good too are the fruits which this spirit is bearing more and more every year, in the manifold schemes and institutions for improving the moral condition of the lower orders, - in all that is done to humanize and to Christianize them. The Reviewer however rejects all sym pathy with such a Spirit. He refers two or three times to the passage, where I say, with plain reference to the story of the woman taken in adultery, that he who is conscious of no sin in like matters, may cast a stone at Sterling, but that I cannot. He seems to think this very strange, very reprehensible. Doubtless he would readily have cast a stone at Sterling, or at the adultress, had he been present, nay, even at Him who did not condemn the adultress. A.

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