"And what is that Science, which the scientific head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the Doctor's in the Arabian tale) set in a basin, to keep it alive, could prosecute without shadow of a heart, but one other of the mechanical and menial handicrafts, for which the Scientific Head (having a soul in it) is too noble an organ? I mean that Thought, without Reverence, is barren, perhaps poisonous." 11

Let the scales drop from our eyes, and let us look:

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Then sawest thou that this fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; that through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through every Living Soul, the glory of a present God still beams." 12

Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends: one grinding in the mill of Industry; one, hunter-like, climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science; one, madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow-and then the Heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth, then plunge again into the Inane. . . But whence?-O Heaven, whither? Sense knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through Mystery to Mystery, from God and to God." 13

Section II.-His Transposition of German Metaphysics into English Puritanism

This vehement religious poetry, charged as it is with memories of Milton and Shakespeare, is but an English transcription of German ideas. There is a fixed rule for transposing-that is, for converting into one another the ideas of a positivist, a pantheist, a spiritualist, a mystic, a poet, a head given to images, and a head given to formulas. We may mark all the steps which lead simple philosophical conception to its extreme and violent state. Take the world as science shows it; it is a regular group or series, which has a law; according to science, it is nothing more. As from the law we deduce the series, we may say that the law engenders it, and consider this

11" Sartor Resartus," bk. i. ch. x.; Pre Reason.

12 Ibid. bk. iii. ch. viii.; Natural Supernaturalism.

13 Ibid.

law as a force. If we are an artist, we will seize in the aggregate the force, the series of effects, and the fine regular manner in which force produces the series. To my mind, this sympathetic representation is of all the most exact and complete: knowledge is limited, as long as it does not arrive at this, and it is complete when it has arrived there. But beyond, there commence the phantoms which the mind creates, and by which it dupes itself. If we have a little imagination, we will make of this force a distinct existence, situated beyond the reach of experience, spiritual, the principle and the substance of concrete things. That is a metaphysical existence. Let us add one degree to our imagination and enthusiasm, and we will say that this spirit, situated beyond time and space, is manifested through these: that it subsists and animates everything, that we have in it motion, existence, and life. When carried to the limits of vision and ecstasy, we will declare that this principle is the only reality, that the rest is but appearance: thenceforth we are deprived of all the means of defining it; we can affirm nothing of it, but that it is the source of things, and that nothing can be affirmed of it; we consider it as a grand unfathomable abyss; we seek, in order to come at it, a path other than that of clear ideas; we extol sentiment, exaltation. If we have a gloomy temperament, we seek it, like the sectarians, painfully, amongst prostrations and agonies. By this scale of transformations, the general idea becomes a poetical, then a philosophical, then a mystical existence; and German metaphysics, concentrated and heated, is changed into English Puritanism.

Section III.-Conception of God and Duty

What distinguishes this mysticism from others, is its practicality. The Puritan is troubled not only about what he ought to believe, but about what he ought to do; he craves an answer to his doubts, but especially a rule for his conduct; he is tormented by the notion of his ignorance, as well as by the horror of his vices; he seeks God, but duty also. In his eyes the two are but one; moral sense is the promoter and guide of philosophy:

"Is there no God, then: but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe, and seeing

it go? Has the word Duty no meaning; is what we call Duty no divine Messenger and Guide, but a false earthly Fantasm, made-up of Desire and Fear, of emanations from the gallows and from Dr. Graham's Celestial-Bed? Happiness of an approving Conscience! Did not Paul of Tarsus, whom admiring men have since named Saint, feel that he was the 'chief of sinners;' and Nero of Rome, jocund in spirit (wohlgemuth), spend much of his time in fiddling? Foolish Wordmonger and Motive-grinder, who in thy Logic-mill hast an earthly mechanism for the Godlike itself, and wouldst fain grind me out Virtue from the husks of pleasure-I tell thee, Nay!" 1

There is an instinct within us which says Nay. We discover within us something higher than love of happiness-the love of sacrifice. That is the divine part of our soul. We perceive in it and by it the God, who otherwise would continue ever unknown. By it we penetrate an unknown and sublime world. There is an extraordinary state of the soul, by which it leaves selfishness, renounces pleasure, cares no more for itself, adores pain, comprehends holiness.2

This obscure beyond, which the senses cannot reach, the reason cannot define, which the imagination figures as a king and a person; this is holiness, this is the sublime. "The hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine, Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most under the Temporary, Trivial; his being is in that.

His life is a

Virtue is a

piece of the everlasting heart of nature itself." revelation, heroism is a light, conscience a philosophy; and we shall express in the abstract this moral mysticism, by saying that God, for Carlyle, is a mystery whose only name is the Ideal.

Section IV.-Conception of Christianity

This faculty for perceiving the inner sense of things and this disposition to search out the moral sense of things, have produced in him all his doctrines, and first his Christianity. This Christianity is very broad: Carlyle takes religion in the Ger

1" Sartor Resartus," bk. ii. ch. vii.; The Everlasting No.

2" Only this I know: If what thou namest Happiness be our true aim, then are we all astray. With Stupidity and sound Digestion man may front much. But what, in these dull, unimaginative days, are the terrors of Conscience to the diseases of the Liver!

Not on Morality, but on Cookery, let us build our stronghold: there brandishing our frying pan, as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the Devil, and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his Elect! "-" Sartor Resartus,' bk. ii. ch. vii.

3" Lectures on Heroes."

man manner: after a symbolical fashion. This is why he is called a Pantheist, which in plain language means a madman, or a rogue. In England, too, he is exorcised. His friend Sterling sent him long dissertations, to bring him back to a personal God. Every moment he wounds to the quick the theologians, who make of the prime cause an architect or an administrator. He shocks them still more when he touches upon dogma; he considers Christianity as a myth, of which the essence is the Worship of Sorrow:

"Knowest thou that 'Worship of sorrow'? The Temple thereof founded some eighteen centuries ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle, the habitation of doleful creatures: nevertheless, venture forward; in a low crypt, arched out of falling fragments, thou findest the Altar still there, and its sacred Lamp perennially burning." 1 But its guardians know it no more. A frippery of conventional adornments hides it from the eyes of men. The Protestant Church in the nineteenth century, like the Catholic Church in the sixteenth, needs a reformation. We want a new Luther:

"For if Government is, so to speak, the outward SKIN of the Body Politic, holding the whole together and protecting it; and if all your Craft-Guilds and Associations for Industry, of hand or of head, are the Fleshly Clothes, the muscular and osseous Tissues (lying under such SKIN), whereby Society stands and works;-then is Religion the inmost Pericardial and Nervous Tissue which ministers Life and warm Circulation to the whole . . .

Meanwhile, in our era of the World, those same Church Clothes have gone sorrowfully out-at-elbows: nay, far worse, many of them have become mere hollow Shapes, or Masks, under which no living Figure or Spirit any longer dwells; but only spiders and unclean beetles, in horrid accumulation, drive their trade; and the mask still glares on you with its glass-eyes, in ghastly affectation of Life—some generation and half after Religion has quite withdrawn from it, and in unnoticed nooks is weaving for herself new Vestures, wherewith to reappear and bless us, or our sons or grandsons." 2

Christianity, once reduced to the sentiment of abnegation, other religions resume, in consequence, dignity and importance. They are, like Christianity, forms of universal religion. "They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have taken them up." They are no quack's imposture or poet's

1" Sartor Resartus," bk. ii. ch. ix.;

The Everlasting Yea.

2 Ibid. bk. iii. ch. ii.; Church Clothes.

8" Lectures on Heroes," i.; The Hero as Divinity.

dream. They are an existence, more or less troubled by the mystery august and infinite, which is at the bottom of the uni

verse:

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Canopus shining down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-like brightness, far brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guiding through the solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with all feelings in it, with no speech for any feeling, it might seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing-out on him from the great deep Eternity; revealing the inner Splendour to him." "Grand Lamaism," Popery itself, interpret after their fashion the sentiment of the divine; therefore Popery itself is to be respected. "While a pious life remains capable of being led by it, . . let it last as long as it can." What matters if people call it idolatry?

"Idol is Eidolon, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a symbol of God. Is not all worship whatsoever a worship by Symbols, by eidola, or things seen? . . . The most rigorous Puritan has his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divine things, and worships thereby. . . All creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest religious feelings, are in this sense eidola, things seen. All worship whatsoever must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:-we may say, all Idolatry is comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only more idolatrous."

The only detestable idolatry is that from which the sentiment has departed, which consists only in ceremonies learned by rote, in mechanical repetition of prayers, in decent profession of formulas not understood. The deep veneration of a monk of the twelfth century, prostrated before the relics of St. Edmund, was worth more than the conventional piety and cold philosophical religion of a Protestant of to-day. Whatever the worship, it is the sentiment which gives it its whole value. And this sentiment is that of morality:

"The one end, essence, and use of all religion, past, present, and to come, was this only: To keep that same Moral Conscience, or Inner Light of ours, alive and shining. All religion was here to re

mind us, better or worse, of what we already know better or worse, of the quite infinite difference there is between a Good man and a Bad; to bid us love infinitely the one, abhor and avoid infinitely the other

4" Lectures on Heroes," i.; The Hero as Divinity.

Ibid. iv.; The Hero as Priest. • Ibid.