"Machine:" contrast these two things. I, for my share,
declare the world to be no machine! I say that it does _not_ go by
wheel-and-pinion "motives" self-interests, checks, balances; that there
is something far other in it than the clank of spinning-jennies, and
parliamentary majorities; and, on the whole, that it is not a machine at
all!--The old Norse Heathen had a truer motion of God's-world than these
poor Machine-Sceptics: the old Heathen Norse were _sincere_ men. But
for these poor Sceptics there was no sincerity, no truth. Half-truth and
hearsay was called truth. Truth, for most men, meant plausibility; to be
measured by the number of votes you could get. They had lost any
notion that sincerity was possible, or of what sincerity was. How many
Plausibilities asking, with unaffected surprise and the air of offended
virtue, What! am not I sincere? Spiritual Paralysis, I say, nothing left
but a Mechanical life, was the characteristic of that century. For the
common man, unless happily he stood _below_ his century and belonged to
another prior one, it was impossible to be a Believer, a Hero; he lay
buried, unconscious, under these baleful influences. To the strongest
man, only with infinite struggle and confusion was it possible to work
himself half loose; and lead as it were, in an enchanted, most tragical
way, a spiritual death-in-life, and be a Half-Hero!

Scepticism is the name we give to all this; as the chief symptom, as the
chief origin of all this. Concerning which so much were to be said! It
would take many Discourses, not a small fraction of one Discourse, to
state what one feels about that Eighteenth Century and its ways. As
indeed this, and the like of this, which we now call Scepticism, is
precisely the black malady and life-foe, against which all teaching and
discoursing since man's life began has directed itself: the battle of
Belief against Unbelief is the never-ending battle! Neither is it in the
way of crimination that one would wish to speak. Scepticism, for that
century, we must consider as the decay of old ways of believing, the
preparation afar off for new better and wider ways,--an inevitable
thing. We will not blame men for it; we will lament their hard fate. We
will understand that destruction of old _forms_ is not destruction of
everlasting _substances_; that Scepticism, as sorrowful and hateful as
we see it, is not an end but a beginning.

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that w