he
tendencies of English thought, says: "It may not be flattering to Mr.
Carlyle, but we believe it to be true that by far the larger portion of
the best minds, whose early youth his writings have powerfully
influenced, will look back upon the period of such subjection as the
most miserably morbid period of their life. On awaking from such
delirium to the sane and healthful realities of manful toil, they will
discover the hollowness of that sneering, scowling, wailing,
declamatory, egotistical, and bombastic misanthropy, which, in the eye
of their unripe judgment, wore the air of a philosophy so
profound."[166] The time will also come when Carlyle will be revealed to
all in his true character: as the theologian preaching a pagan creed; as
the philosopher emasculating the German philosophy which he scrupled not
to borrow; as the stylist perverting the pure English of Milton and
Shakspeare into inflated, oracular Richterisms; and as the arch
demagogue who, despising the people at heart, assigned no bounds to his
ambition to gain their hearing and cajole them into the reception of his
unmixed Pantheism.

The periodical press has been a successful agency in the dissemination
of literary Rationalism throughout the British Islands. Years before the
recent discussions sprang up, the _Westminster Review_ was the ablest
and most avowed of all the advocates of the "liberal theology" of the
Continent. It still rules without a rival. Emboldened by the late
accession of sympathizers, it opposes orthodoxy and the Church with an
arrogance equal to that of the _Universal German Library_, whose editor,
Nicolai, is reported to have said: "My object is merely to hold up to
the laughter and contempt of the public the orthodox and hypocritical
clergy of the Protestant church, and to show that they make their own
bad cause the cause of their office and of religion, or rather that of
Almighty God himself,--to show that when they make an outcry about
prevailing errors, infidelity, and blasphemy, they are only speaking of
their own ignorance, hypocrisy, and love of persecution, of the
wickedness of their own hearts concealed under the mantle of
piety."[167]

From its character as a quarterly publication, the _Westminster Review_
has the constant opportunity to reply to every new work of Christian
apology, and to elaborate each new heresy of the Rationalistic thinkers.
Assuming a thoroughly negative position, it repels every tendency toward
a