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IRREVERENCE.

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thur's knights, and history is greater and wiser than we. Men think that a new era has come, so utterly different from all before, a light so much greater than anything before, that we have no need of reference to the past, but can consign history to the waste-paper basket. This is the beginning of the evils of irreverence, and right valiantly the leveling process goes on. The generation that has no reverence for history and knows nothing greater than itself has children who bethump with "dad" their fathers in the flesh, and priests who begin to joke with their Father in Heaven. Everybody will be as good as anybody, and the only way in which most can bring it about is by bringing others down to their own very small dimensions. "Unlimited liberty to slap any and every one, from deacon to governor, on the back, and call him 'old horse,' seems to many minds," says the morning paper, "the only practical witness that the millennial day of human equality has been ushered in.", "Such an one," said the old Goethe, "tries to prove himself my equal by being rude. He does not prove himself my equal; he only proves himself rude." I am not prepared to say — who can say how deep an element irreverence is in our American life. I should be loth to admit that our supply of reverence, comparing ourselves with other times, was "inexpressibly poor." It is a hard thing to measure. Irreverence does not necessarily go at all in company with impatience of old forms, social

forms or forms of thought, - Teufelsdröck himself would be quickest to emphasize this; reverence has had its true apostolic succession, since the world began, along the line of protestants and innovators. It is not so necessary, however, to dedetermine whether the exponent of our collective irreverence be six or seven, as to have the eye to recognize real irreverence where it shows itself and the heart to hate it. "To enlighten the principle of reverence for the great," says Carlyle, "to teach us reverence, and whom we are to revere and admire, should ever be a chief aim of education; indeed, it is herein that instruction properly both begins and ends.'

This here, not primarily by way of preaching, — though Carlyle would have us improve every occasion for that, — but to vindicate the right of the idealist and the optimist to find fault as he will without being called pessimist, and especially to vindicate Carlyle, as opposed to our easy-going prophets of smooth things, with their flattering notion that we are altogether good, and that earth is finally moving along a flowered bee-line to heaven, in declaring this all a dangerous and dreadful lie, and that if we believe it we are on the bee-line to the bottomless pit. Carlyle's complaints may not always be just and proportionate he was probably not always reading Aristotle; and his way out of the difficulties may not be the best one- to me it does not seem the best: but these things do not affect

CARLYLE'S LATEST PERIOD.

the matter.

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To the last point, for its own sake, we shall return in considering Carlyle's political philosophy.

V.

Here, before proceeding to our main inquiry, one most important consideration. In general, Carlyle had no doubt of improvement and prog ress. The universe would surely justify itself. The bad in our time would somehow yield to something better."This ignoble sluggishness,” he said,

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skeptical torpor, indifference to all that does not bear upon mammon, is not the natural state of human creatures, and it is not doomed to be their final one." That Carlyle believed, too, in ultimate justice to every soul of man there is no question. Every page of every book says that. Vindication and satisfaction to everything that is on God's side; while the bad will somehow or other be crushed and destroyed. This in general everybody must find in Carlyle. It has not been so generally observed, however, by most not observed at all, that while, during the period in which Carlyle was engaged upon the Frederick, he seemed more and more to deify pure will, to preach iron, and to have almost no good word for what most of us count instrumental to progress, he has since that time manifested greater kindness to the spirit of the age and let fall words which show a feeling that the

criticism of the forties and the fifties was too harsh. Professor Tyndall has remarked upon this softening, with reference to modern scientific theories. But the change was general and, as it seems to me, very material.

In Carlyle's religious views there was never any reaction. The sincere gospel of Sartor Resartus is reaffirmed with added emphasis in the Life of Sterling, whose eight months in the church Carlyle looked upon as a “baleful imbroglio," a "weltering in Hebrew old clothes." "No man of Sterling's veracity," he said, "had he clearly consulted his own heart, or had his own heart been capable of clearly responding, and not been dazzled and bewildered by transient fantasies and theosophic moonshine, could have undertaken this function. His heart would have answered, 'No, thou canst not. What is incredible to thee, thou shalt not, at thy soul's peril, attempt to believe! Elsewhither for a refuge, or die here. Go to perdition if thou must-but not with a lie in thy mouth; by the eternal Maker, no!'"

It is desirable, perhaps, that something farther should be said upon this particular point, and this is as proper a place as any to say it. Carlyle had small sympathy with our present ecclesiasticism, and was very savagely impatient with thoughtful men who compromised with the old creeds. The Church of England was to him "this great lying church;" and men of the Kingsley sort "the disap

CARLYLE AND THE CHURCH.

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pointed young ladies who had taken the veil." Do what you can with the old churches, he said, "nay, quit not the burnt ruins of them while you find there is still gold to be dug there. But, on the whole, do not think you can, by logical alchemy, distill astral spirits from them; or, if you could, that said astral spirits or defunct logical phantasms could serve you in anything." The Life of Sterling- especially the last chapter of Book I. and the first two chapters of Book II. — shows better perhaps than anything else Carlyle's standing on the church question. Of Sterling's attempt to find sanctuary in the English Church, he says: "My opinion must be recorded here in flat reproval of it, in mere pitying condemnation of it as a rash, false, unwise, and unpermitted thing. . . . . The time with its deliriums had done its worst for poor Sterling, . . . . offering will-o'-wisps for load-stars, intimating that there are no stars, nor ever were, except certain Old-Jew ones, which have now gone out.

... Into deeper aberrations it cannot lead him; this is the crowning error. . . . Alas, if we did remember the divine and awful nature of God's truth, and had not so forgotten it as poor doomed creatures never did before, should we, durst we, in our most audacious moments, think of wedding it to the world's untruth, which is also, like all untruths, the devil's? Only in the world's last lethargy can such things be done, and accounted safe and pious. It is not now known that religion is

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