ng, or live a true and divine life
in the world; and in the "Sartor" he has embodied and illustrated this
in the person and actions of his hero. He saw that religion had become
secular; that it was reduced to a mere Sunday holiday and Vanity Fair,
taking no vital hold of the lives of men, and radiating, therefore,
none of its blessed and beautiful influences about their feet and
ways; that human life itself, with all its adornments of beauty and
poetry, was in danger of paralysis and death; that love and faith,
truth, duty, and holiness, were fast losing their divine attributes in
the common estimation, and were hurrying downwards with tears and a
sad threnody into gloom and darkness. Carlyle saw all this, and knew
that it was the reaction of that intellectual idolatry which brought
the eighteenth century to a close; knew also that there was only one
remedy which could restore men to life and health,--namely, the
quickening once again of their spiritual nature. He felt, also, that
it was his mission to attempt this miracle; and hence the prophetic
fire and vehemence of his words. No man, and especially no earnest
man, can read him without feeling himself arrested as by the grip of a
giant,--without trembling before his stern questions, inculcations,
and admonitions. There is a God, O Man! and not a blind chance, as
governor of this world. Thy soul has infinite relations with this
God, which thou canst never realize in thy being, or manifest in thy
practical life, save by a devout reverence for him, and his
miraculous, awful universe. This reverence, this deep, abiding
religious feeling, is the only link which binds us to the
Infinite. That severed, broken, or destroyed, and man is an alien and
an orphan; lost to him forever is the key to all spiritual mystery, to
the hieroglyph of the soul, to the symbolism of nature, of time, and
of eternity. Such, as we understand it, is Carlyle's teaching. But
this is not all. Man is to be man in that high sense we have spoken
his robes of immortality around him, as if God had done with him for
all practical purposes, and he with God,--but for action,--action in a
world which is to prove his power, his beneficence, his usefulness.
That spiritual fashioning by the Great Fashioner of all things is so
ordained that we ourselves may become fashioners, workers, makers. For
it is given to no man to be an idle cumberer of the ground, but to
dig, and sow, and plant, and reap the fruits of his