en that
believe in truth. There is no communion possible among men who believe
only in hearsays. The heart of each is lying dead; has no power of
sympathy even with _things_,--or he would believe _them_ and not
hearsays. No sympathy even with things; how much less with his
fellow-men! He cannot unite with men; he is an anarchic man. Only in a
world of sincere men is unity possible;--and there, in the longrun, it
is as good as _certain_.

For observe one thing, a thing too often left out of view, or rather
altogether lost sight of, in this controversy: That it is not
necessary a man should himself have _discovered_ the truth he is to
believe in, and never so _sincerely_ to believe in. A Great Man, we
said, was always sincere, as the first condition of him. But a man
need not be great in order to be sincere; that is not the necessity of
Nature and all Time, but only of certain corrupt unfortunate epochs of
Time. A man can believe, and make his own, in the most genuine way,
what he has received from another;--and with boundless gratitude to
that other! The merit of _originality_ is not novelty; it is
sincerity. The believing man is the original man; whatsoever he
believes, he believes it for himself, not for another. Every son of
Adam can become a sincere man, an original man, in this sense; no
mortal is doomed to be an insincere man. Whole ages, what we call ages
of Faith, are original; all men in them, or the most of men in them,
sincere. These are the great and fruitful ages: every worker, in all
spheres, is a worker not on semblance but on substance; every work
issues in a result: the general sum of such work is great; for all of
it, as genuine, tends towards one goal; all of it is _additive_, none
of it subtractive. There is true union, true kingship, loyalty, all
true and blessed things, so far as the poor Earth can produce
blessedness for men.

Hero-worship? Ah me, that a man be self-subsistent, original, true, or
what we call it, is surely the farthest in the world from indisposing
him to reverence and believe other men's truth! It only disposes,
necessitates and invincibly compels him to disbelieve other men's dead
formulas, hearsays and untruths. A man embraces truth with his eyes
open, and because his eyes are open: does he need to shut them before
he can love his Teacher of truth? He alone can love, with a right
gratitude and genuine loyalty of soul, the Hero-Teacher who has
delivered him out of darkness int