human
No, no; Lamb's skepticism has not come lightly, nor is he a skeptic [sic: Query, scoffer?]. The harsh reproof to Godwin for his contemptuous allusion to Christ before a well-trained child proves that he is not a skeptic [? scoffer]. His mind, never prone to analysis, seems to have been disgusted with the hollow pretences, the false reasonings and absurdities of the rogues and fools with whom all establishments, and all creeds seeking to become established, abound. I look upon Lamb as one hovering between earth and heaven; neither hoping much nor fearing anything. It is curious that he should retain many usages which he learnt or adopted in the fervour of his early religious feelings, now that his faith is in a state of suspended animation. Believe me, who know him well, that Lamb, say what he will, has more of the essentials of Christianity than ninety-nine out of a hundred professing Christians. He has all that would still have been Christian had Christ never lived or been made manifest upon earth. (Allsopp's Letters, etc., as cited, p. 46.) In connection with the frequently cited anecdote as to Lamb's religious feeling given in Leigh Hunt's Autobiography (rep. p. 253), also by Hazlitt (Winterslow, essay ii, ed. 1902, p. 39), may be noted the following, given by Allsopp:
gpt
After a visit to Coleridge, during which the conversation had taken a religious turn, Leigh Hunt ... expressed his surprise that such a man as Coleridge should, when speaking of Christ, always call him Our Saviour. Lamb, who had been exhilarated by one glass of that gooseberry or raisin cordial which he has so often anathematized, stammered out: 'Ne-ne-never mind what Coleridge says; he is full of fun.'
human
Did God Almighty come down and make wheel-barrows in a shop? [1847] Of his college life he told:
gpt
I studied the evidences of Christianity for several years, with the greatest desire to be convinced, but in vain. I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw that Christianity was not true. Then came the most trying time of my life. [1848] Goethe, he claimed, led him to peace; but philosophic peace he never attained.
human
He was contemptuous to those who held to Christian dogmas; he was angry with those who gave them up; he was furious with those who attacked them. If equanimity be the mark of a Philosopher, he was of all great-minded men the least of a Philosopher. [1849] To all freethinking work, scholarly or other, he was hostile with the hostility of a man consciously in a false position. Strauss's Leben Jesu he pronounced, quite late in life,
gpt
[1850] He was, in fact, so false to his own doctrine of veracity as to disparage all who spoke out; while privately agreeing with Mill as to the need for speaking out. [1851] Even Mill did so only partially in his lifetime, as in his address to the St. Andrews students (1867), when,