Had all traditions, arrangements, creeds, societies that
men ever instituted, sunk away, this would remain. The certainty of
Heroes being sent us; our faculty, our necessity, to reverence Heroes
when sent: it shines like a polestar through smoke-clouds,
dust-clouds, and all manner of down-rushing and conflagration.

Hero-worship would have sounded very strange to those workers and
fighters in the French Revolution. Not reverence for Great Men; not
any hope or belief, or even wish, that Great Men could again appear in
the world! Nature, turned into a 'Machine,' was as if effete now;
could not any longer produce Great Men:--I can tell her, she may
give-up the trade altogether, then; we cannot do without Great
Men!--But neither have I any quarrel with that of 'Liberty and
Equality;' with the faith that, wise great men being impossible, a
level immensity of foolish small men would suffice. It was a natural
faith then and there. "Liberty and Equality; no Authority needed any
longer. Hero-worship, reverence for _such_ Authorities, has proved
false, is itself a falsehood; no more of it! We have had such
_forgeries_, we will now trust nothing. So many base plated coins
passing in the market, the belief has now become common that no gold
any longer exists,--and even that we can do very well without gold!" I
find this, among other things, in that universal cry of Liberty and
Equality; and find it very natural, as matters then stood.

And yet surely it is but the _transition_ from false to true.
Considered as the whole truth, it is false altogether;--the product of
entire sceptical blindness, as yet only _struggling_ to see.
Hero-worship exists forever, and everywhere: not Loyalty alone; it
extends from divine adoration down to the lowest practical regions of
life. 'Bending before men,' if it is not to be a mere empty grimace,
better dispensed with than practised, is Hero-worship,--a recognition
that there does dwell in that presence of our brother something
divine; that every created man, as Novalis said, is a 'revelation in
the Flesh.' They were Poets too, that devised all those graceful
courtesies which make life noble! Courtesy is not a falsehood or
grimace; it need not be such. And Loyalty, religious Worship itself,
are still possible; nay still inevitable.

May we not say, moreover, while so many of our late Heroes have worked
rather as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every Great Man, every
genuine man, is by the nat