to lofty efforts, assert his dignity and
divinity, and strive to advance the world to its proper glory and
perfection. The authors of these exciting and flattering appeals do not
surround their theory with proper safeguards, nor do they tell the world
that they have served up a delectable dish of Pantheism for popular
deglutition. The case is stated clearly by one who understands the
danger of this tendency, and whose pen has already been powerful in
exposing its absurdity. "In our general literature," says Bayne, "the
principle we have enunciated undergoes modification, and, for the most
part, is by no means expressed as pantheism. We refer to that spirit of
self-assertion, which lies so deep in what may be called the religion of
literature, to that wide-spread tendency to regard all reform of the
individual man as being an evolution of some hidden nobleness, or an
appeal to a perfect internal light or law, together with what may be
called the worship of genius, the habit of nourishing all hope on the
manifestation of the divine, by gifted individuals. We care not how this
last remarkable characteristic of the time be defined; to us its
connection with pantheism, and more or less close dependence on the
teaching of that of Germany, seem plain, but it is enough that we
discern in it an influence definably antagonistic to the spirit of
Christianity."[163]

The parentage of literary Rationalism in England is attributable to
Thomas Carlyle. Having "found his soul" in the philosophy of Germany, we
hear him, in 1827, defending the criticism of Kant as "distinctly the
greatest intellectual achievement of the century in which it came to
light." But the opinions of Fichte and Richter have subsequently had
more weight with Carlyle, and he has elaborated them in many forms.
Fichte, in particular, has influenced him to adopt a theory which gives
a practical denial to the Scriptural declarations of the fallen state of
humanity. Effort being goodness, the exterior world is only tolerable
because it furnishes an arena for the contest of work. Man will never
receive any prize unless he bestir himself to the exercise of his own
omnipotence. Individual life is all the real life possessed by this
world, and it is gifted with a spiritual wand capable of calling up
wondrous forms of beauty and worth. It matters not so much what man
works for, since his effort is the important matter. All ages have had a
few true men. The assertion of self