not all the South American's ideas; they seem more materialistic. The story of the shoemaker and the gallows shows where Carlyle found Francia's excellence -he would make men honest by act of autocrat. Physical well-being and political obedience are all the strong man seems to care about to-day; the spiritual and moral development of his charge, "half devil and half child," seems to be a remoter interest. Some day, perhaps, our generation, or another, may move on toward a hero of higher quality-the spiritual hero, whom Carlyle himself preferred, who shall stand to some of our heroes, in and out of our books, as Cromwell and Luther stood to Dr Francia, and feel again, as Carlyle felt, the spiritual dignities and powers of Man.

Meanwhile, in the second place, along another line of thought and action, Carlyle's teaching is being fulfilled, and that so vigorously that it becomes yearly harder to understand what a pioneer Carlyle was. All he taught of work and poverty-new and strange as it was to the cultured and well-to-do of his day-is now finding fuller expression in action, individual, social and national. As men and as nations, we are realizing more and more fully the duties and responsibilities of wealth and culture and the sufferings and the needs of poverty. Legislation is more and more directed to bring within the reach of the poorest the possibilities of decent living, of constant work, of an old age with some other background than the workhouse. Not these alone, but the other needs of men, which Carlyle felt more keenly than some of his critics,-the needs of inward sustenance, of training for mind and soul, of education in the largest sense, these too fall within our outlook to-day, and more and more is done to meet them; and here too, if others were with him, Carlyle gave utterance to the craving as did no other man of letters of his century.

Finally, when we turn to the inmost things in man, do men re-affirm Carlyle's conviction of man's spiritual

nature, of the supreme value of belief, the imperative claims of duty, the significance of the Hero and of the Facts? Is there less thrashing of powdered straw? Are there signs of " a spiritual return to the open air?”

1

"The Highest Gospel was a biography," wrote Carlyle. "The Old World knew nothing of Conversion : instead of an Ecce Homo, they had only some Choice of Hercules. It was a new-attained progress in the Moral Development of man: hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms of the most Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera, is now clear and certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists and Methodists."2 "Look on our divinest Symbol: on Jesus of Nazareth, and his Life, and his Biography, and what followed therefrom. Higher has human Thought not yet reached: this is Christianity and Christendom; a Symbol of quite perennial, infinite character; whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest." What does the Symbol mean? Here is a passage from a letter to his brother: "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world' so said the wisest man, when what was his overcoming? Poverty, despite, forsakenness, and the near prospect of an accursed Cross. 'Be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.' These words on the streets of Edinburgh last winter almost brought tears into my eyes." 4

Duty and the Hero are his two fixed points, and to them Christian thought seems to be returning. In a wellknown work, which represents perhaps the strongest school of Christian thinkers to-day, the return to these great facts of experience as the basis of all Christian thinking and living is emphasized and developed as of fundamental significance. "The Christian's consciousness that God communes with him rests on two objective facts, the first

1 Boswell.

3

Sartor, bk. iii. ch. 3.

4

Sartor, bk. ii. ch. 10.

Early Life, ii. 378.

of which is the historical fact of the Person of Jesus. The second objective ground is that we hear within ourselves the demand of the moral law."1 These are the words of Wilhelm Herrmann, of Marburg. Are the thoughts not familiar to the reader of Carlyle in every variety of emphatic language?

But the man is more than his words, more than any thought that he can put into words. With all his mistakes in history and criticism (and they are not as many as might be supposed from the tone of certain writers)—with all his mistakes in life and character, he remains a great and helpful Man in virtue of his open eye and heart, his sincerity, his conviction of "the divine and awful nature of God's truth ”—

Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren,
Resolut zu leben.2

1 Herrmann, Communion with God (tr. 2nd ed. p. 103.)

It is perhaps significant that Carlyle at least twice misquotes this passage as above. In Goethe's Generalbeichte, the passage runs :

Uns vom Halben zu entwöhnen,
Und im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen,

Resolut zu leben.

INDEX

his enjoyment in writing, 124- Carlyle, Jane W., 288, 306-