ion, the
deliverance of their souls from the devil and the pit. There burst forth
a sacred flame of joy in me.' With _Sartor Resartus_ his message to the
world began. It was printed in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833, but not
published separately until 1838. His difficulty in finding a publisher
embittered him. Style had something to do with this, the newness of his
message had more. Then for twenty years he poured forth his message.
Never did a man carry such a pair of eyes into the great world of London
or set a more peremptory mark upon its notabilities. His best work was
done before 1851. His later years were darkened with much misery of
body. No one can allege that he ever had a happy mind.

He was a true prophet, but, Elijah-like, he seemed to himself to be
alone. His derision of the current religion seems sometimes needless.
Yet even that has the grand note of sincerity. What he desired he in no
small measure achieved--that his readers should be arrested and feel
themselves face to face with reality. His startling intuition, his
intellectual uprightness, his grasp upon things as they are, his passion
for what ought to be, made a great impression upon his age. It was in
itself a religious influence. Here was a mind of giant force, of
sternest truthfulness. His untruths were those of exaggeration. His
injustices were those of prejudice. He invested many questions of a
social and moral, of a political and religious sort with a nobler
meaning than they had had before. His _French Revolution_, his papers on
_Chartism_, his unceasing comment on the troubled life of the years from
1830 to 1865, are of highest moment for our understanding of the growth
of that social feeling in the midst of which we live and work. In his
brooding sympathy with the downtrodden he was a great inaugurator of the
social movement. He felt the curse of an aristocratic society, yet no
one has told us with more drastic truthfulness the evils of our
democratic institutions. His word was a great corrective for much
'rose-water' optimism which prevailed in his day. The note of hope is,
however, often lacking. The mythology of an absentee God had faded from
him. Yet the God who was clear to his mature consciousness, clear as the
sun in the heavens, was a God over the world, to judge it inexorably.
Again, it is not difficult to accumulate evidence in his words which
looks toward pantheism; but what one may call the religious benefit of
pantheism, the sen