new Reformers needed.

Doubtless it were finer, could we go along always in the way of _music_;
be tamed and taught by our Poets, as the rude creatures were by their
Orpheus of old. Or failing this rhythmic _musical_ way, how good were it
could we get so much as into the _equable_ way; I mean, if _peaceable_
Priests, reforming from day to day, would always suffice us! But it is
not so; even this latter has not yet been realized. Alas, the battling
Reformer too is, from time to time, a needful and inevitable phenomenon.
Obstructions are never wanting: the very things that were once
indispensable furtherances become obstructions; and need to be shaken
off, and left behind us,--a business often of enormous difficulty. It is
notable enough, surely, how a Theorem or spiritual Representation, so we
may call it, which once took in the whole Universe, and was completely
satisfactory in all parts of it to the highly discursive acute intellect
of Dante, one of the greatest in the world,--had in the course of
another century become dubitable to common intellects; become deniable;
and is now, to every one of us, flatly incredible, obsolete as Odin's
Theorem! To Dante, human Existence, and God's ways with men, were all
well represented by those _Malebolges_, _Purgatorios_; to Luther not
well. How was this? Why could not Dante's Catholicism continue; but
Luther's Protestantism must needs follow? Alas, nothing will _continue_.

I do not make much of "Progress of the Species," as handled in these
times of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much about it.
The talk on that subject is too often of the most extravagant, confused
sort. Yet I may say, the fact itself seems certain enough; nay we can
trace out the inevitable necessity of it in the nature of things. Every
man, as I have stated somewhere, is not only a learner but a doer: he
learns with the mind given him what has been; but with the same mind
he discovers farther, he invents and devises somewhat of his own.
Absolutely without originality there is no man. No man whatever
believes, or can believe, exactly what his grandfather believed: he
enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his view of the Universe, and
consequently his Theorem of the Universe,--which is an _infinite_
Universe, and can never be embraced wholly or finally by any view or
Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement: he enlarges somewhat, I say;
finds somewhat that was credible to his grandfather incredible