in
Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth
which hath not kissed him." It would have helped him had he remembered,
that there were on all sides other workers engaged on the temple not
made with hands, although he could not hear the sound of their hammers
for the din he made himself. It would have changed his despair into joy,
and his pity into a higher moral quality, had he been able to believe
that, amidst all the millions against whom he hurled his anathemas,
there is no one who, let him do what he will, is not constrained to
illustrate either the folly and wretchedness of sin, or the glory of
goodness. It is not given to any one, least of all to the wicked, to
hold back the onward movement of the race, or to destroy the impulse for
good which is planted within it.

But Carlyle saw only one side of the truth about man's moral nature and
destiny. He knew, as the ancient prophets did, that evil is potential
wreck; and he taxed the power of metaphor to the utmost to indicate, how
wrong gradually takes root, and ripens into putrescence and
self-combustion, in obedience to a necessity which is absolute. That
morality is the essence of things, that wrong _must_ prove its
weakness, that right is the only might, is reiterated and illustrated on
all his pages; they are now commonplaces of speculation on matters of
history, if not conscious practical principles which guide its makers.
But Carlyle never inquired into the character of this moral necessity,
and he overlooked the beneficence which places death at the heart of
sin. He never saw wrong except on its way to execution, or in the death
throes; but he did not look in the face of the gentle power that led it
on to death. He saw the necessity which rules history, but not the
beneficent character of that necessity.

The same limitations marred his view of duty, which was his greatest
revelation to his age. He felt its categorical authority and its binding
force. But the power which imposed the duty was an alien power, awful in
majesty, infinite in might, a "great task-master"; and the duty itself
was an outer law, written in letters of flame across the high heavens,
in comparison with which man's action at its best sank into failure. His
only virtue is obedience, and his last rendering even of himself is
"unprofitable servant." In this he has much of the combined strength and
weakness of the old Scottish Calvinism. "He stands between the
indiv