of beauty and life. "How thou fermentest," he exclaims, "and elaboratest in thy great fermenting vat and laboratory of an atmosphere, of a world. Oh, nature! or, what is nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou the 'living garment of God?' Oh, Heavens, is it, in very deed, He, then, that ever speaks through thee; that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?"

And to this pantheism the spirit of mysticism comes to seek a new worship. The Mythus of Christianity is obsolete. "The temple thereof, founded some eighteen centuries ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle, the habitation of doleful creatures." A worship and an ideal nevertheless must be found. Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices. Thought fatally leads to the abyss in which all things whirl in inextricable confusion, and in which nothing can be seen or known with certainty; for in the lowest deep a lower depth still opening, swallows the thinker and his thought, beyond plummet's sounding, yea, beyond the reach of fantasy. The end of life, therefore, is not to think but to act. Not that we might in morbid self-introspection eat our own hearts; projecting upon the world we rail at our diseased imaginations, have we emerged from the inane. Goethe is right. His immortal precept opens a new era and founds a new religion. Study, he says, how to live; that is, study how to make the most of life. "Fool! the ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself; thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or that, so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the actual, and criest bitterly to the gods for a kingdom wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth. The thing thou seekest is already with thee, here or nowhere,' couldst thou only see." Here or nowhere, study how to make the most of life. This is the path that leads upward from tartarean darkness and endless chaos to the light and serenity of cosmic harmony. Mr. Carlyle, most assuredly, is no materialist, he is no utilitarian; and just as little is he a sensualist or a scientific atheist. Against all these things his soul cries out in fiery and convulsive indignation. What an imperishable odor is there not in those "pig propositions" in which he gives us the materialist and utilitarian theory of the world? The universe is an immeasurable swine's trough. Moral evil is unattainability of pig's wash. Paradise, called also, state of innocence, age of gold, was unlimited attainability of pig's wash. It is the mission of universal pighood, and the duty of all pigs, at all times, to diminish the quantity of unattainable, and increase that of attainable. All knowledge and device and effort ought to be directed thither, and thither only.

1

Pig poetry ought to consist of universal recognition of the excel-
lence of pig's wash and ground barley, and the felicity of pigs
whose trough is in order, and who have had enough. Humph!
Who made the pig? Unknown ;-perhaps the pork butcher.
The cold and pitiless irony of Swift is here seething hot, like
molten lava.

Scientific atheism, too, with its superficial and self-conceited
rationalism, fills him with contempt, in which there is also an ele-
ment of fiery anger. "Thou wilt have no mystery and mysticism,
he exclaims; wilt walk through thy world by the sunshine of what
thou callest truth, or even by the hand-lamp of what I call attorney-
logic, and explain' all, 'account' for all, or believe nothing of it.
Nay, thou wilt attempt laughter; whoso recognizes the unfathom-
able, all-pervading domain of mystery, which is everywhere, under
our feet and among our hands; to whom the universe is an oracle.
and temple, as well as a kitchen and cattle-stall-he shall be a de-
lirious mystic; to him, thou, with sniffing charity, wilt protrusively
proffer thy hand-lamp and shriek, as one injured when he kicks
his foot through it." The universe is awful, mysterious. "Thy
daily life is girt with wonder, and based on wonder; thy very
blankets and breeches are miracles." The unspeakable divine sig-
nificance lies in all things. "Atheistic science babbles poorly of
it, with scientific nomenclatures, experiments, and what not, as if it
were a poor dead thing to be bottled up in Leyden jars and sold
over counters. But the natural sense of man, in all times, if he
will honestly apply his sense, knows it to be a living thing,—ah,
an unspeakable, Godlike thing, towards which the best attitude for
us after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and hu-
mility of soul; worship, if not in words, then in silence." This in-
dignant rebuke to atheism proceeds from a fervent soul.
is offensive to Mr. Carlyle, to whom whatever is, is divine, is God.
All religions he holds are good, if only men are sincere. The
only idolatry is that from which the sentiment has departed. To
worship sticks and stones with all one's heart and in downright
honesty, is better than all the conventional pieties of our modern
world. The value of religion is purely subjective; it is in the sen-
timent. The object is of small moment, for all possible symbols are
but representations of the mysterious unknown which lies beneath
appearance. But for Mr. Carlyle, as for all, who deny the exist-
ence of a personal God, man is the highest; and his religion is
hero-worship. His view is fixed upon this life alone; he knows no
other. Here or nowhere. Man rushes forth from nothing back
into nothing. To educate him for a future life, would be as absurd
as to educate him for a past life. In fact, as he had no past life, so
will he have no future life. Study, therefore, to make the most of

Impiety

this; and to teach this highest and only wisdom, should be the educator's aim and purpose. Mr. Carlyle, however, has no faith in any mechanism or system of education. A gerund-grinding pedagogue is to him no better than the wood and leather man, whom the Nurembergers were to build, and “who should reason as well as most country parsons." The curse of the age is its belief in mechanism. The soul of man, the soul of society, the soul of religion, is come to be considered the product of mechanical action. If the wheels, cogs, valves, pistons, and checks are in order, all is well. Man's happiness and worth are no longer believed to be within himself; his ideal is not a spiritual and divine something, but an outward condition, in which there will be a well-oiled and smoothly working machine for manufacturing everything; from patent creeds and codes to patent breeches. This is atheism, this is infinite evil, infinite despair, and no religion. "We have forgotten God," he says, "in the most modern dialect and very pith of the matter, we have taken up the fact of this universe as it is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal substance of things, and opened them only to the shows and shams of things. We quietly believe the universe to be intrinsically a great unintelligible PERHAPS; extrinsically clear enough it is a great, most extensive cattlefold and workhouse, with most extensive kitchen ranges, dining tables,-whereat he is wise who can find a place! All the truth of this universe is uncertain; only the profit and loss of it, the pudding and praise of it, are and remain very visible to the practical man. There is no God any longer for us! God's laws are become a greatest happiness principle, a parliamentary expediency; the heavens overarch us only as an astronomical timekeeper. . . . This is verily the plague-spot centre of the universal social gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and tap-root, with its world-wide upas-boughs and accursed poison. exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the fatal centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. "There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt." The blight of this faith in what is dead, godless and mechanic, corrupts our modern education, which regards only what is practical and economic, and wholly abandons to moral dry-rot man's spiritual and religious nature. The science of the age is physical, chemical, physiological. Even mathematics is valued only for its mechanic use, in building bridges, constructing forts, and indicating the proper angle for killing men at given distances. The inventor of the spinning-jenny and sewing-machine has his reward. The philosopher is without honor. Thought is

secreted by the brain; and poetry and religion are "a product of the smaller intestines." What other than a mechanical education is possible to men who breathe this mephitic, soul-stifling air? The mind is littered, as though it grew like a vegetable, with etymological and other compost; it is crammed with dead vocables; it is taught that its chief use is to calculate profit and loss; and when it is burnt out to a grammatical and arithmetical cinder, its education is complete.

"Alas, so is it everywhere, so will it ever be; till the hodman is discharged or reduced to hod-bearing; and an architect is hired, and on all hands fitly encouraged; till communities and individuals discover, not without surprise, that fashioning the souls of a generation by knowledge, can rank on a level with blowing their bodies to pieces by gunpowder; that with generals and field-marshals, for killing, there should be world-honored dignitaries, and were it possible, true God-ordained priests for teaching."

No hidebound pedant can educate.

Of man, such a one knows

only that he has a faculty called memory, and that it can be acted on through the muscular integument by birchen rods. To educate we must touch the mysterious springs of love, fear, and wonder, of enthusiasm, poetry, religion. These are the inward and vital powers of man; who cannot be roused into deep, all-pervading effort by any computable prospect of profit and loss, for any definite finite object, but only for what is invisible and infinite. "When we can drain the ocean into our mill-ponds, and bottle up the force of gravity, to be sold by retail in our gas-jars, then may we hope to comprehend the infinitudes of man's soul under formulas of profit and loss; and rule over this too, as over a patent engine, by checks and valves and balances."

One of Mr. Carlyle's great merits, is the vividness and force with which he brings out man's spiritual nature; his craving for the infinite; his inborn and necessary dissatisfaction with whatever is not eternal and all-perfect. Out of the meanness and littleness and emptiness of the world which surrounds him, he takes refuge in the eternities, the immensities, the veracities. It is at least singular that the most gifted and earnest writers of the England of the nineteenth century, in spite of their innumerable differences in thought and temper, should agree in their estimate of English life. That it is low and vulgar, selfish and insincere, without high ideals or generous impulses or noble aspirations, is the common testimony of Mr. Carlyle and John Stuart Mill, of Dickens and Thackeray, of Byron and Mr. Tennyson, of Mr. Ruskin and Mr. Matthew Arnold. Macaulay, indeed, is inclined to optimistic views in whatever concerns England, but he is purely literary; lives on the surface, which he rounds off with a polished and ornate phrase, and leaves untouched the deep central heart of things.

What gloomy energy is there not in the following words of Mr. Carlyle!

"Like the valley of Jehoshaphat it lies round us, one nightmare wilderness, and wreck of dead men's bones, this false modern world; and no rapt Ezekiel imaged to himself things sadder, more horrible and terrible, than the eyes of men, if they are awake, may now deliberately see.”

And in these other words, what depth of truth is there not discernible!

"Faith strengthens us, enlightens us, for all endeavors and endurances; with faith we can do all, and dare all, and life itself has a thousand times been joyfully given away. But the sum of man's misery is even this, that he feel himself crushed under the Juggernaut wheels, and know that Juggernaut is no divinity, but a dead mechanical idol."

And again, the angry voice breaks forth in sullen, almost despairing protest:

"Not Godhead, but an iron, ignoble circle of necessity embraces all things; binds the youth of these times into a sluggish thrall, or else exasperates him into a rebel. Heroic action is paralyzed; for what worth now remains unquestionable with him? At the fervid period, when his whole nature cries aloud for action, there is nothing sacred under whose banner he can act; the course and kind and conditions of free action are all but indiscoverable. Doubt storms in on him through every avenue; inquiries of the deepest painfullest sort must be engaged with; and the invincible energy of young years waste itself in skeptical, suicidal cavillings, in passionate questionings of destiny, whence no answer will be returned."

The weakness, the shallowness, the misery and selfishness which are the results of atheism and no-religion, are most clearly discerned and forcibly expressed by Mr. Carlyle. He sees that faith is something higher than himself, is the one thing needful for man; that to live for vulgar objects and selfish ends, is suicidal, is the denial and destruction of all that makes life worth having; and when men come with their schemes for making this earth a luxurious lubberland, where the brooks shall run wine, and the trees bend with ready-baked viands, and who bring their hand-lamp wherewith to dispel all darkness, he, without more ado, kicks his foot through it, and so leaves them and their paper contrivances. He has the gift of noble indignation. His very soul loathes all sham; he is the sworn enemy of cant, and holds sincerity to be the mother virtue. The sincere man is the divine man, the hero, the highest form which consciousness can assume. He comes to us at first hand, with tidings from the infinite unknown. The words he speaks are no other man's words: he comes from the inner fact of things, the heart of the world, the primal reality. That the hero have what men call faults is of small moment. We make too much of faults, says Mr. Carlyle. He is all fault who has no fault.