I, like you, have jumped over a ditch for the fun of the experiment, and would not be disinclined to be once again in a highway with my brethren and companions. But Spartam nactus es, hanc orna. And you, I should think, though amongst the poor sinful blackguards of yearly multiplying convicts and convictidæ, may make some pretty thing out of your Sparta.
Nothing is very good anywhere, I am afraid. I could have gone cracked last year with one thing or another, I think, but the wheel comes round.
To ——
January 1852.
I certainly am free to tell you that while I do fully think that the Christian religion is the best, or perhaps the only really good religion that has appeared, on the other hand, as to how it appeared, I see all possible doubt. Whether Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the gospels, is profoundly dubious. St. Paul wrote his epistles, I should think, pretty certainly, but he had seen next to nothing. The religion of those epistles is very different from that of the gospels, or of St. James’s epistle. The whole origin of Christianity is lost in obscurity; if the facts are to be believed, it is simply on trust, because the religion of which they profess to be the origin is a good one. But its goodness is not proved by them; we find it out for ourselves by the help of good people, good books, &c. &c. Such is my present feeling, and the feeling of many. But I don’t urge it on any one, or mention it, except when I am specially asked, and seldom then. You remember you complained of my silence.
I mean to wait, but at present that’s what I think. A great many intelligent and moral people think Christianity a bad religion. I don’t, but I am not sure, as at present preached, it is quite the truth. Meantime, ‘the kingdom of heaven cometh not of observation,’ but ‘is in ourselves.’
To ——
London: January 1852.
The single life, according to the doctrine of compensation, has some superiorities, as, for example, that of being more painful, which, in a state of things that offers but little opportunity for elevated action, may be considered a temptation to the aspiring temper. To live in domestic comfort, toiling in some business not in itself of any great use, merely for the sake of bread for the household, does look at times a little ignoble, or at any rate unchivalrous. The Sydney project had some little relish of chivalry in it. What I looked forward to originally, in case of not going to Sydney, was unmarried poverty and literary work.
To ——