se that God is in his world, Carlyle often loses.

Materialism is to-day so deeply discredited that we find it difficult to
realise that sixty years ago the problem wore a different look. Carlyle
was never weary of pouring out the vials of his contempt on
'mud-philosophies' and exalting the spirit as against matter. Never was
a man more opposed to the idea of a godless world, in which man is his
own chief end, and his sensual pleasures the main aims of his existence.
His insight into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and
absorption in the outward never fails. Man is God's son, but the effort
to realise that sonship in the joy and trust of a devout heart and in
the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him cant or
superstition. The humble life of godliness made an unspeakable appeal to
him. He had known those who lived that life. His love for them was
imperishable. Yet he had so recoiled from the superstitions and
hypocrisies of others, the Eternal in his majesty was so ineffable, all
effort to approach him so unworthy, that almost instinctively he would
call upon the man who made the effort, to desist. So magnificent, all
his life long, had been his protest against the credulity and stupidity
of men, against beliefs which assert the impossible and blink the facts,
that, for himself, the great objects of faith were held fast to, so to
say, in their naked verity, with a giant's strength. They were
half-querulously denied all garment and embodiment, lest he also should
be found credulous and self-deceived. From this titan labouring at the
foundations of the world, this Samson pulling down temples of the
Philistines on his head, this cyclops heaving hills at ships as they
pass by, it seems a long way to Emerson. Yet Emerson was Carlyle's
friend.

EMERSON

Arnold said in one of his American addresses: 'Besides these
voices--Newman, Carlyle, Goethe--there came to us in the Oxford of my
youth a voice also from this side of the Atlantic, a clear and pure
voice which, for my ear at any rate, brought a strain as new and moving
and unforgetable as those others. Lowell has described the apparition of
Emerson to your young generation here. He was your Newman, your man of
soul and genius, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your
heart and imagination.' Then he quotes as one of the most memorable
passages in English speech: 'Trust thyself. Accept the place which the
divine providence has fo