and to do
much else which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did _not_ now
do: here lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong, all outward
went ever more and more wrong. Belief died away; all was Doubt,
Disbelief. The builder _cast away_ his plummet; said to himself, "What
is gravitation? Brick lies on brick there!" Alas, does it not still
sound strange to many of us, the assertion that there is a God's truth
in the business of god-created men; that all is not a kind of grimace,
an 'expediency,' diplomacy, one knows not what!--

From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled
_Papa_, you are no Father in God at all; you are--a Chimera, whom I
know not how to name in polite language!"--from that onwards to the
shout which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "_Aux
armes!_" when the people had burst-up against _all_ manner of
Chimeras,--I find a natural historical sequence. That shout too, so
frightful, half-infernal, was a great matter. Once more the voice of
awakened nations; starting confusedly, as out of nightmare, as out of
death-sleep, into some dim feeling that Life was real; that
God's-world was not an expediency and diplomacy! Infernal;--yes, since
they would not have it otherwise. Infernal, since not celestial or
terrestrial!--Hollowness, insincerity _has_ to cease;--sincerity of
some sort has to begin. Cost what it may, reigns of terror, horrors of
French Revolution or what else, we have to return to truth. Here is a
Truth, as I said: a Truth clad in hell-fire, since they would not but
have it so!--

A common theory among considerable parties of men in England and
elsewhere used to be, that the French Nation had, in those days, as it
were gone _mad_; that the French Revolution was a general act of
insanity, a temporary conversion of France and large sections of the
world into a kind of Bedlam. The Event had risen and raged; but was a
madness and nonentity,--gone now happily into the region of Dreams and
the Picturesque!--To such comfortable philosophers, the Three Days of
July 1830 must have been a surprising phenomenon. Here is the French
Nation risen again, in musketry and death-struggle, out shooting and
being shot, to make that same mad French Revolution good! The sons and
grandsons of those men, it would seem, persist in the enterprise: they
do not disown it; they will have it made good; will have themselves
shot, if it be not made good! To philosophers who had made