One Sunday morning in the month of October, two gentlemen were standing in the large room of the Hotel Sirene, at Sorrento, which commands so matchless a view of the beautiful Bay of Naples.
The two gentlemen were Mr. Blake—Mina Blake's uncle—and Mr. Earnscliffe. Although they were not acquainted, Mr. Blake and his new companion were engaged in an animated conversation on the state of Italy. Whilst they talk together, let us take a short retrospective glance over Mr. Earnscliffe's life since we saw him in Paris.
He carried out his original intention of spending a short time in Germany, and there, wandering from place to place, he traced out the plan of that book which had rendered Flora Adair so doubly unhappy. It was completed at Gottingen during a residence there of some four or five months.
No effort had been spared by him in order to render his reasoning forcible, and his burning indignation against her whom he loved—or, rather, against that religion which had made her what she was to him—lent to it the charm of which we have already spoken, namely, that of appealing to the heart as well as to the mind. Whilst the latter reasoned for him, the former burned with feelings which infused into his writing a passionate earnestness well nigh irresistible.
The title of his book gave a fair idea of its tendency. It sought to prove the destructive effect of an institution which claimed for itself unerring authority in its teaching, and demanded unquestioning obedience thereto. "Were it needful to recognise such an authority," he asked, "of what use would reason be to man?"
Dryden could have told him, had he chosen to be taught, that
"Dim as the borrow'd beams of moon and stars
To lonely, weary, wandering travellers,
Is reason to the soul: and as on high
Those rolling fires discover but the sky,
Not light us here; so reason's glimmering ray
Was lent, not to assure our doubtful way,
But guide us upward to a better day.
And as those mighty tapers disappear
When day's bright lord ascends our hemisphere,
So pale grows reason at religion's sight,
So dies and so dissolves in supernatural light."
But he listened only to the promptings of his proud will, and strove to deny the Divine light enlightening the world by authoritative teaching.
He was too well schooled a thinker not to know that the fact of a formal divine revelation being once recognised it naturally followed that it should be transmitted in an unerring manner, and not be left to the changeableness of human opinion. He struck, therefore, directly at the basis of all positive revelation by endeavouring to show that the only authority which claimed to speak exclusively in the name of God, sacrificed to its own thirst for domination all the best and highest powers of mankind. In thus losing sight of the distinction between what is human and what is divine in religion—branding St. Peter as an unworthy teacher because he was "a sinful man"—and therewith of the holy precepts of charity, he condemned alike God and man, by seeking the divine guide in the human and—without an unerring teacher—unenlightened conscience. In so doing he flattered pride and self-sufficiency—those two great sources of error in the world—and hence he obtained the erring world's applause.