_Truth_ on his
watch-seal;' no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives
by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. The man whom Nature has
appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that
openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being _in_sincere!
To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all hearsay
is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him
acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny
it, is ever present to _him_,--fearful and wonderful, on this hand and
on that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrecognised, because never
questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell,
Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard-of have this as the primary
material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, are
talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they have
learned by logic, by rote, at secondhand: to that kind of man all this
is still nothing. He must have truth; truth which _he_ feels to be
true. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in
all ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble
necessity of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about this world is
not mine, any more than Mahomet's was: but I recognise the everlasting
element of heart-_sincerity_ in both; and see with pleasure how
neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them is as _chaff_
sown; in both of them is something which the seed-field will _grow_.

Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them,--as
all like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe
as a kind of Moral Prudence: 'in a world where much is to be done, and
little is to be known,' see how you will _do_ it! A thing well worth
preaching. 'A world where much is to be done, and little is to be
known:' do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of
Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief;--you were miserable then,
powerless, mad: how could you _do_ or work at all? Such Gospel Johnson
preached and taught;--coupled, theoretically and practically, with
this other great Gospel, 'Clear your mind of Cant!' Have no trade with
Cant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in
your own _real_ torn shoes: 'that will be better for you,' as Mahomet
says! I call this, I call these two things _joined together_, a great
Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possib