hilosophy, based
upon calculations of profit and loss.

It was thus that Carlyle read the signs of the times. In such
circumstances what was needed? Nothing less than a spiritual rebirth.
Men must abandon their wrong attitude to life, and take up the right
attitude. Everything hinged on that. And that they might take up this
right attitude it was necessary first that they should be convinced of
life's essential spirituality, and cease in consequence to seek its
meaning and test its value on the plane of merely material things.

Carlyle thus throws passionate emphasis upon religion as the only
saving power. But it must be noted that he does not suggest a return
to any of the dogmatic creeds of the past. Though once the expression
of a living faith, these were now for him mere lifeless formulas. Nor
has he any new dogmatic creed to offer in their place. That mystical
crisis which had broken the spell of the Everlasting No was in a
strict sense--he uses the word himself--a conversion. But it was not a
conversion in the theological sense, for it did not involve the
acceptance of any specific articles of faith. It was simply a complete
change of front; the protest of his whole nature, in a suddenly
aroused mood of indignation and defiance, against the "spirit which
denies;" the assertion of his manhood against the cowardice which had
so long kept him trembling and whimpering before the facts of
existence. But from that change of front came presently the vivid
apprehension of certain great truths which his former mood had thus
far concealed from him; and in these truths he found the secret of
that right attitude to life in the discovery of which lay men's only
hope of salvation from the unrest and melancholy of their time.

From this point of view the burden of Carlyle's message to his
generation will be readily understood. Men were going wrong because
they started with the thought of self, and made satisfaction of self
the law of their lives; because, in consequence, they regarded
happiness as the chief object of pursuit and the one thing worth
striving for; because, under the influence of the current rationalism,
they tried to escape from their spiritual perplexities through logic
and speculation. They had, therefore, to set themselves right upon all
these matters. They had to learn that not self-satisfaction but
self-renunciation is the key to life and its true law; that we have no
prescriptive claim to happiness and no