w or Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement: he enlarges
somewhat, I say; finds somewhat that was credible to his grandfather
incredible to him, false to him, inconsistent with some new thing he
has discovered or observed. It is the history of every man; and in the
history of Mankind we see it summed-up into great historical
amounts,--revolutions, new epochs. Dante's Mountain of Purgatory does
_not_ stand 'in the ocean of the other Hemisphere,' when Columbus has
once sailed thither! Men find no such thing extant in the other
Hemisphere. It is not there. It must cease to be believed to be there.
So with all beliefs whatsoever in this world,--all Systems of Belief,
and Systems of Practice that spring from these.

If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief waxes uncertain,
Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and miseries
everywhere more and more prevail, we shall see material enough for
revolution. At all turns, a man who will _do_ faithfully, needs to
believe firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage;
if he cannot dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own
suffrage serve, he is a poor eye-servant; the work committed to him
will be _mis_done. Every such man is a daily contributor to the
inevitable downfall. Whatsoever work he does, dishonestly, with an eye
to the outward look of it, is a new offence, parent of new misery to
somebody or other. Offences accumulate till they become insupportable;
and are then violently burst through, cleared off as by explosion.
Dante's sublime Catholicism, incredible now in theory, and defaced
still worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest practice, has to be
torn asunder by a Luther; Shakspeare's noble feudalism, as beautiful
as it once looked and was, has to end in a French Revolution. The
accumulation of offences is, as we say, too literally _exploded_,
blasted asunder volcanically; and there are long troublous periods
before matters come to a settlement again.

Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face of the
matter, and find in all human opinions and arrangements merely the
fact that they were uncertain, temporary, subject to the law of death!
At bottom, it is not so: all death, here too we find, is but of the
body, not of the essence or soul; all destruction, by violent
revolution or howsoever it be, is but new creation on a wider scale.
Odinism was _Valour_; Christianism was _Humility_, a nobler kind of
Valour.