;--in one
word, a godless world!

How mean, dwarfish are their ways of thinking, in this time,--compared
not with the Christian Shakspeares and Miltons, but with the old Pagan
Skalds, with any species of believing men! The living TREE Igdrasil,
with the melodious prophetic waving of its world-wide boughs,
deep-rooted as Hela, has died-out into the clanking of a
World-MACHINE. 'Tree' and 'Machine': contrast these two things. I, for
my share, declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does not
go by wheel-and-pinion 'motives,' self-interests, checks, balances;
that there is something far other in it than the clank of
spinning-jennies, and parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole,
that it is not a machine at all!--The old Norse Heathen had a truer
notion of God's-world than these poor Machine-Sceptics: the old
Heathen Norse were _sincere_ men. But for these poor Sceptics there
was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and hearsay was called truth.
Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be measured by the number
of votes you could get. They had lost any notion that sincerity was
possible, or of what sincerity was. How many Plausibilities asking,
with unaffected surprise and the air of offended virtue, What! am not
I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left but a Mechanical
life, was the characteristic of that century. For the common man,
unless happily he stood _below_ his century and belonged to another
prior one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay buried,
unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest man,
only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to work
himself half-loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, most
tragical way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!

Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as
the chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to be
said! It would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one
Discourse, to state what one feels about that Eighteenth Century and
its ways. As indeed this, and the like of this, which we now call
Scepticism, is precisely the black malady and life-foe, against which
all teaching and discoursing since man's life began has directed
itself: the battle of Belief against Unbelief is the never-ending
battle! Neither is it in the way of crimination that one would wish to
speak. Scepticism, for that century, we must consider as the decay of
old ways o