What he did was inconsiderable enough; and as to what it lay in him to have done, this was but a problem, now beyond possibility of settlement.

Why had a Biography been inflicted on this man; why had not No-biography, and the privilege of all the weary, been his lot ?--Thirdly, That such lot, however, could now no longer be my good Sterling's; a tumult having risen around his name, enough to impress some pretended likeness of him (about as like as the Guy-Fauxes are, on Gunpowder-Day) upon the minds of many men: so that he could not be forgotten, and could only be misremembered, as matters now stood.
Whereupon, as practical conclusion to the whole, arose by degrees this final thought, That, at some calmer season, when the theological dust had well fallen, and both the matter itself, and my feelings on it, were in a suitabler condition, I ought to give my testimony about this friend whom I had known so well, and record clearly what my knowledge of him was.

This has ever since seemed a kind of duty I had to do in the world before leaving it.
And so, having on my hands some leisure at this time, and being bound to it by evident considerations, one of which ought to be especially sacred to me, I decide to fling down on paper some outline of what my recollections and reflections contain in reference to this most friendly, bright and beautiful human soul; who walked with me for a season in this world, and remains to me very memorable while I continue in it.

Gradually, if facts simple enough in themselves can be narrated as they came to pass, it will be seen what kind of man this was; to what extent condemnable for imaginary heresy and other crimes, to what extent laudable and lovable for noble manful _orthodoxy_ and other virtues;--and whether the lesson his life had to teach us is not much the reverse of what the Religious Newspapers hitherto educe from it.
Certainly it was not as a "sceptic" that you could define him, whatever his definition might be.

Belief, not doubt, attended him at all points of his progress; rather a tendency to too hasty and headlong belief.
Of all men he was the least prone to what you could call scepticism: diseased self-listenings, self-questionings, impotently painful dubitations, all this fatal nosology of spiritual maladies, so rife in our day, was eminently foreign to him.