word is the wise healing word which all can believe
in. All blazes round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire
like his own. The dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him
forth. They did want him greatly; but as to calling him forth--! Those
are critics of small vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not the
sticks that made the fire?" No sadder proof can be given by a man of his
own littleness than disbelief in great men. There is no sadder symptom
of a generation than such general blindness to the spiritual lightning,
with faith only in the heap of barren dead fuel. It is the last
consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the world's history, we
shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable savior of his
epoch;--the lightning, without which the fuel never would have burnt.
The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of Great
Men.

Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universal
spiritual paralysis: but happily they cannot always completely succeed.
In all times it is possible for a man to arise great enough to feel that
they and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is notable,
in no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men's
hearts a certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine
admiration, loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted it may be.
Hero-worship endures forever while man endures. Boswell venerates his
Johnson, right truly even in the Eighteenth century. The unbelieving
French believe in their Voltaire; and burst out round him into very
curious Hero-worship, in that last act of his life when they "stifle
him under roses." It has always seemed to me extremely curious this
of Voltaire. Truly, if Christianity be the highest instance of
Hero-worship, then we may find here in Voltaireism one of the lowest!
He whose life was that of a kind of Antichrist, does again on this
side exhibit a curious contrast. No people ever were so little prone
to admire at all as those French of Voltaire. _Persiflage_ was the
character of their whole mind; adoration had nowhere a place in it. Yet
see! The old man of Ferney comes up to Paris; an old, tottering, infirm
man of eighty-four years. They feel that he too is a kind of Hero;
that he has spent his life in opposing error and injustice, delivering
Calases, unmasking hypocrites in high places;--in short that _he_ too,
though in a strange way, has fought like a