merable. Of Chalmers it was eminently thus. In Scotland, he saw a people well-given to church-going or chapel-going, and zealous enough about creeds and church standards; but a people who needed to be admonished that creeds may exist as a lifeless orthodoxy, and that the best of forms may be without value, as being without power. He, too, felt that the great want of the age, and even of Scotland, was an earnest faith. To bring men truly to believe, what they nearly all professed to believe, was the great object of his life's hard labor. The place assigned by Mr. Carlyle to the religious element in man is stated in the following passage: "It is well said, in every sense, that a man's religion is the chief fact with regard to him. A man's, or a nation of men's. By religion, I do not mean here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he will sign, and in words, or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion; which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as that. But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his mere skepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels himself to be spiritually related to the unseen world or noworld; and I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, what religion they had."-Hero Worship, pp. 3, 4. On this topic, however, we think Mr. Carlyle greatly underrates the influence of the current beliefs of Christian men. In the case of the aforesaid Richard Brown, the creed professed does not appear to have wrought all the positive good that might have been expected from it. But it may be that, even on his defective temperament, it has prevented evil in a degree by no means inconsiderable; and that the direct good conferred by it is much greater than our haughty and superficial philosophy is at all likely to discover. If this same Richard, moreover, does not seem to be burdened with much anxious thought of a religious nature, or to be the subject of any very fervent and refined aspirations, perhaps, without traveling far, he could introduce our philosopher to certain plain and pious people, in whom the faith which Richard professes has given existence to soul-conflicts and earnest spiritual breathings, in a degree that would be censured as excessive and morbid. Of the soul-history of some myriads of many myriads of truly religious people in this country, we must suppose our author to be almost wholly ignorant. To his contemporaries he does not cede a tenth of the high qualities they possess in this respect; while towards certain sham religionists of remote times his charities are superabundant. The passage we are about to quote is from "Past and Present," and relates to the Abbot of St. Edmundsbury, and to the glebe-loving, feast-loving monks who did his bidding. It shows how discriminating and charitable Mr. Carlyle can be, when his humor inclines him that way. "Jocelin, we see, is not without secularity. Our Dominus Abbas was intent enough on the divine offices; but then his account books? One of the things that strike us most, throughout, in Jocelin's Chronicle, and, indeed, in Eadmer's Anselm, and other old monastic books, written evidently by pious men, is this-that there is almost no mention whatever of 'personal religion' in them; that the whole gist of their thinking and speculation seems to be the privileges of our order,' strict exaction of our dues,' 'God's honor,' (meaning the honor of our saint,) and so forth. Is not this singular? A body of men set apart for perfecting and purifying their own souls, do not seem disturbed about that in any measure: the Ideal' says nothing about its idea; says much about finding bed and board for itself! How is this? 66 6 Why, for one thing, bed and board are a matter very apt to come to speech: it is much easier to speak of them than of ideas; and they are sometimes much more pressing with some! Nay, for another thing, may not this religious reticence, in these devout, good souls, be perhaps a merit and sign of health in them? Jocelin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of Methodism; no doubt, or even root of doubt. Religion is not a diseased self-introclear to them, the way of supreme good plain, inspection, an agonizing inquiry: their duties are disputable, and they are traveling on it. Religion lies over them like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and life-element, whieh is not spoken of, which in all things is presupposed without speech. Is not serene or complete religion the highest aspect of human nature, as serene cant, or complete non-religion, is the lowest and miserablest? Between which two all manner of earnest methodisms, introspections, agonizing inquiries, never so morbid, shall play their respective parts, not without approbation."-pp. 80, 81. 66 Now here is a candor which can see the signs of something like a serene or complete religion," where, in fact, there is no sign of religion at all. Only allow a small portion of this charity exercised in favor of these stupid and worldly monks, to be exercised in favor of that somewhat dull and easy class of religionists among ourselves, towards whom Mr. Carlyle shows so little forbearance, and even these people would rise at once into a race of saints of the first water. Nor do we quite understand the fling at "Methodist introspections," except it be meant to say that, even in a nature like ours, the best condition of religion is that which makes the least demand on a man's cogitations or emotions-a doctrine not very consistent with the philosophy of the case, with the teaching of the Bible, or with the great drift of Mr. Carlyle's own writings. But so it is with our author. His contemporaries are of two classes-men whose professed faith is no faith, or men who believe only to become the victims of "a diseased self introspection." Not to be in earnest, is to be pronounced "a sham," and to be in earnest, is to be written down a fanatic. We believe in the somewhat wide existence both of religious formalism and of religious extravagance; but between these there is something much better than either, which Mr. Carlyle does not see, and to which, accordingly, he has never done justice. In support of our statement on this point, take the following estimate of the religion of our own age, as compared with the very different estimate of the monkish religion at Edmundsbury, which, from all that appears, began and ended in a tissue of cares and struggles about "bed and board." "To begin with our highest spiritual function, with religion, we might ask, whither has religion now fled? Of churches and their establishments we here say nothing, nor of the unhappy domains of unbelief, and how innumerable men, blinded in their minds, must live without God in the world; but taking the fairest side of the matter, we ask, what is the nature of that same religion, which still lingers in the hearts of the few who are called, and call themselves, specially the religious? Is it a healthy religion, vital, unconscious of itself; that shines forth spontaneously in doing of the work, or even in preaching of the word? Unhappily, no. Instead of heroic martyrconduct, and inspired and soul-inspiring eloquence, whereby religion itself were brought home to our living bosoms, to live and reign there, we have 'Discourses on the Evidences,' endeav oring with the smallest result to make it probable that such a thing as religion exists. The most enthusiastic evangelicals do not preach a gospel, but keep describing how it should and might be by a sacred contagion, is not their endeavor; but preached to awaken the sacred fire of faith, as at most, to describe how faith shows and acts, and scientifically distinguish true faith from false. Religion, like all else, is conscious of itself, listens to itself; it becomes less and less creative, vital; more and more mechanical. Considered as a whole, the Christian religion, of late ages, has been continually dissipating itself into metaphysics; and threatens now to disappear, as some rivers do, in deserts of barren sand."-Essays, iii. pp. 300, 301. We do not say that there are no appeartion of this sort. But, as we read it, we are ances among us to warrant a little declamaconstrained to ask our zealous censor-And wherein consisted the "heroic martyr conduct" of your monks of St. Edmundsbury? In fact, did that conduct ever rise higher than a somewhat piggish fight in defence of rich abbey lands, and of the good feed to be extracted from them? As to " Discourses on the Evidences," let there be an end to such discoursings as Mr. Carlyle and his friends are so often putting forth against the said evidences, and there may then be an end to such things in their favor. In the meantime, it is not unnatural that men who would fain put another gospel in the place of that of the New Testament, should be little pleased with efforts tending to demonstrate that this older gospel is a fixed and everlasting reality. With regard to metaphysics, these, if we mistake not, constitute the Bible of Mr. Carlyle himself, and certainly of a large class of his admirers. Of such elements must the inward illumination of whose sufficiency they boast purely consist. These should not, therefore, be in ill repute in such quarters. As to the "soulinspiring eloquence" which brings religion "home to our living bosoms," we are not aware that the philosophy of the age has shown itself to be more potent to this end than its Christianity. Its right to throw Of course, stones remains to be made out. Mr. Carlyle is not ignorant of these considerations. He could readily marshal them all, and many more, in favor of the religion of be so disposed. In the progress of his own our age, if sufficiently free from prejudice to Teufelsdröckh, from the "Everlasting no" to the "Everlasting yea," we see a Fire-baptism"--a great spiritual change brought about by philosophy, which has its full counterpart, 66 THOMAS CARLYLE. [Nov. and something more, in the change experi- | Advanced-Liberal or other, that the one end, enced by every mind which, in the "Evangel- essence, use of all religion past, present, and to ical" sense, is "born again;" the great differ- come, was this only: To keep that same Moral ence being, that for one instance in which Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shinthe lesser effect has been produced by philos-turbid media' were not essential for! ophy, the greater effect has been produced ion does here is to remind us, better or worse, of ing; which certainly the Phantasms' and the in a thousand instances by Christianity, and what we already know, better or worse, of the All religupon minds of a sort which your philosophy quite infinite difference there is between a Good can never reach. abhor and avoid infinitely the other,-strive infiman and a Bad; to bid us love infinitely the one, nitely to be the one, and not to be the other. religion issues in due Practical Hero-worship!' All He that has a soul unasphyxied will never want a religion; he that has a soul asphyxied, reduced to a though you rose from the dead to preach him one. succedaneum for salt, will never find any religion, If the mischief of all this ended with Mr. Carlyle, the circumference of the evil would be measurable enough. But it does not so end. Not a few among us, whose beards are only beginning to put on visibility, place an implicit faith in him. The natural effect follows. They learn to snuff at the old as noodles, and at the religion of the old as fitting enough for noodledom-a noodledom that is past. They affect to despise what many have counted wisdom, and in so doing regard themselves as giving sufficient evidence of their own deeper wisdom. have met with certain of this progeny, of We whom some fathers might be vain, but not, as we judge, the father of Sartor Resartus. Contempt is a costly tenant where the brain is empty. We scruple not to say that we regard the "introspecting" and "evangelical" portion of our English society as consisting, with all its faults, of a brave and high-souled race, if compared with anything that Mr. Carlyle's school of philosophy has to place in comparison with them. We would readily travel far to witness the success of an attempt to raise humanity from a condition so low to a position so high, through any other means than those by which in this case it has been accomplished. Nor is it enough that Mr. Carlyle should thus underrate the current beliefs of Christian men, and especially of living men, as compared with the men of past times. Inasmuch as the creeds of men are seen to affect their character, at the best, but imperfectly, the strange leap is made, that the supposed relation between what a man believes, and what a man is, must be of little reality or value. Hence the hollowness and ineffectiveness attributed by our author to all the more received forms of religious doctrine and usage among us, are such as to leave nothing to constitute religion in any man, save his own self-derived conviction as to duty, and his own self-governed action in conformity with that conviction. "But, indeed, when men and reformers ask for 'a religion,' it is analogous to their asking, 'What would you have us to do?' and such like. They fancy that their religion, too, should be a kind of once, and all will be well. Resolutely once gulp Morrison's pill, which they have only to swallow down your religion, your Morrison's pill, you affairs, your no-affairs, go along money-hunting, have it all plain sailing now; you can follow your pleasure-hunting, dilettanteing, dangling, and miming, and chattering like a Dead Sea ape; your notions are very strange! Morrison will do your business for you. Men's of Nature, any Pill or Religion of that character. is not, was not, nor ever will be in the wide circle Brother, I say there Man cannot afford thee such; for the very gods it is impossible. I advise thee to renounce Morrison; once for all, quit hope of the Universal Pill. For body, for soul, for individual or society, there has the void imbroglios of Chaos only, and realms of not any such article been made. Non extat. In created nature it is not, was not, will not be. In Bedlam, does some shadow of it hover, to bewilder and bemock the poor inhabitants There." "The Makers' Laws, whether they are protion, or quite otherwise promulgated, are the Laws mulgated in Sinai Thunder, to the ear or imaginaof God; transcendent, everlasting, imperatively thou, if there be any soul left in thee, canst know demanding obedience from all men. out any thunder, or with never so much thunder, This, withof a truth. The Universe, I say, is made by Law; the great Soul of the World is just, and not unjust. great, shoreless Incomprehensible: in the heart of Look thou, if thou have eyes or soul left, into this mad-Time Vortexes, is there not silent, eternal, an its tumultuous Appearances, Embroilments, and controlling Power of the Whole? This is not a All-just, an All-beautiful, sole Reality and ultimate figure of speech; this is a fact. The fact of gravitation, known to all animals, is not surer than this inner Fact, which may be known to all men." know more or less, the history of these; the rise, "Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder; I progress, decline, and fall of these. Can thunder from all the thirty-two Azimuths, repeated daily God-like to me? Brother, no. Perhaps I am for centuries of years, make God's laws more thunder and the terror any longer! Perhaps I grown to be a man now, and do not need the am above being frightened; perhaps it is not fear, 1849.] but Reverence alone that shall now lead me! Revelations, Inspirations? Yes: and thy own god-created Soul; dost thou not call that a 'revelation? Who made THEE? Where didst thou come from? The Voice of Eternity, if thou be not a blasphemer and poor asphyxied mute, speaks with that tongue of thine! Thou are the latest Birth of Nature; it is the Inspiration of the Almighty' that giveth thee understanding! My brother, my brother!"-Past and Present, pp. 305 309. 6 they never do well under a régime of partialities and favoritisms. We sympathize very largely, however, with Mr. Carlyle in his doctrine on this point. We go far with him in his kindly ingenuities as he labors to give a pleasant meaning to the wild mythology of our rude Northmen. True, the material is somewhat stubbornhard to bend to his purpose-but he labors at it with a resoluteness worthy of some brave old sea-king. What, for example, could be less promising than the cosmogony of these our remote progenitors? The giant Ymer is slain-slain at last. The gods consult, and having Ymer's substance, consisting of warm wind, frost, fire, and other strange things at their service, they resolve to make a world out of this dead great one. His blood becomes the sea, his flesh the land, his bones the rocks, his skull the immense The only conclusion fairly deducible from these passages-and the writings of Mr. Carlyle abound with such-seems to be, that the man who would realize his true destiny will do well to eschew everything recorded as distinctively Christian, in place of looking to that source for any special assistance. All that man needs to know concerning the nature and laws of the Infinite, every man who has a soul left in him may know from himself. External utterances can add noth-concave above us, and his brains the floating ing to his "inner light." "Rituals, liturgies, credos, Sinai thunders," these can add nothing to the revelation which every man has in what he himself is. By one grown to be a man," such externalities can be of no value. Mr. Carlyle's belief, accordingly, never rises to the height of a mystical rationalism-it is a devout, we had almost said a methodistical sort of deism. The faith he so much extols is thus limited as to its object, and derives all its supposed worth from the moral courage and that may spring from it. energy We wish we could regard it as embracing any properly Christian element, but this, we presume, Mr. Carlyle himself does not expect from any man who has read with attention what he has written; and it is high time, we think, that all mystification on this material point should come to an end, and that the fact of the case should be stated in definite and honest speech. II. What we say of the doctrine of Mr. Carlyle concerning Faith, we say of his doctrine concerning the Veracities to be found in all Religions-it is a truth, a weighty truth, but a truth pushed so far as to become the parent of error, and to cease to be itself a pure truth. The Faith which kindles the .fires of the auto-de-fé may be earnest; and the Philosophy which ends in atheism may not be wanting in catholicity. Earnestness and catholicity have their worth, but the value of these qualities depends very much on their relations to others, and on the limits to which they are restricted in consequence of such relations. It is with our faculties and our virtues, as it is with our households, clouds! One Norse god is before us "brew- of Exeter Hall. An unspeakable religious- | ness struggles in the most helpless manner to speak itself in Puseyisms and the like. Of our cant, all condemnable, how much is not condemnable without pity; we had almost said without respect! The inarticulate word and truth that is in England goes down yet to the foundations."-Past and Present, p. 396. common sentiment of mankind, and give a perilous advantage to the philosophical assailant of Revelation. It is not always borne in mind by our religious teachers, that there is an ascertainable distinction between morality and piety; and that actions may be evangelically defective-defective as to their source and object-without ceasing to be moral. There is no surer mode of making Christianity repulsive, than to place it at issue with what is essential to our manhood and responsibility. But, as we have said, an error does not cease to be such because you can trace it to its source. Some men have made idols of church-creeds. Seeing this, our philosopher says-Let us have no more to do with churches or with creeds. Not that he really so means. His meaning rather is, that literary or philosophical churches should take the place of existing churches, and that the old creeds should give place to a creed much narrower, simpler, and more flexible, making small appeal to the logic of the age, more to its intuitions, its conscience, its emotions. Here it is : Christian theologians have themselves to thank for much of the extravagance observable in this respect in Mr. Carlyle and in many beside. Too often, our divines have seemed to forget, that the Bible and nature are from the same source. Because humanity, as now conditioned, includes much that the Bible must condemn, not a few have been too ready to assume that it can include nothing the Bible may approve. Sufficient care has not been always taken to cede to the moral nature of man the portion of worth which, according to the testimony of Revelation itself, is still reserved to it. Nor has a wise discrimination been always made between the true and false religions, disowning those elements only which have given to them their falseness. Judging from the manner in which some of our very orthodox preachers express themselves, we should suppose that they see no moral difference between the least depraved among the children of Adam and the most depraved-be-truth without damage to himself; no one million tween Rush the murderer, and the most amiable of their own children, who does not happen to be a Christian. Of course the persons who, from negligent usage, or to give an imaginary cohesiveness to a theological system, indulge in expressions to this effect, do not really believe what they seem to teach. Their daily conversation and conduct in relation to the non-Christian members of their families and connexions, furnish abundant proof to the contrary. But great mischief comes from the technical affectation of seeming to believe after this manner. Mr. Carlyle's doctrine is a revolt against this grave error. Some men will assert that there can be good of no kind in human nature apart from Christianity; and the natural reaction against this error is in the assertion that all the good really attainable by man may be attained without the least help from Christianity. The one party will see no good in human nature that has not come to it from the Gospel, and the other will see no good in the Gospel that has not come to it from human nature. The extremes of some of our theologians in this form run sadly counter to the general language of the Bible, and to the "Nature's laws, I must repeat, are eternal: her small still voice, speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under terrible penalties, be disregarded. No one man can depart from the of men, no twenty-seven millions of men. Show Nature Believe singular to say, it is fact all this. Cocker's Arith- |