Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/243

Rh main matter—which was that men should continue to believe that all things had originated in a supreme and infinite eternal, the reality of all realities, and should walk in that belief as their religion.

"One may be a Transcendentalist in philosophy, however, whether of the Idealistic or of the Realistic sort, and yet go through the world calmly and composedly. Not so with Carlyle. Jeffrey's laughing complaint about him in the first days of their acquaintance was that he was always 'so dreadfully in earnest'; and no one can study the records of his early life without seeing what Jeffrey meant. Carlyle's vitality from his youth upward was something enormous. There was nothing sluggish or sleepy or cool in his constitution, and no capacity for being sluggish or sleepy or cool. He was always restlessly awake; to whatever subject he addressed himself, he grasped it, or coiled himself round it, as with muscles all on strain and nerves all a-tingling; and, when he had formed his conclusions, he was vehement in announcing them and aggressive in their propagation. Necessarily this was the case most of all with his conclusions on subjects the greatest and most fundamental. 'Woe to them that are at ease in Zion' was a text quite after his own heart, and which he was fond of applying to those who seemed to him to be sufficiently right in the main in their private ways of thinking on the deepest problems, but not to be sufficiently earnest in fighting for their conclusions and rousing and agitating society to get them accepted. Plato himself, the supreme transcendentalist of antiquity, and to this day unapproached among mankind for the magnificent sweep of clear intellect and the beauty and gorgeousness of poetic expression with which he expounded Transcendentalism once for all to the philosophic world, was in this category with Carlyle. 'He was a gentleman very much at ease in Zion' was Carlyle's definition of him. In fact, with the exception of Shakespeare in Elizabethan England and of Goethe in more recent times, the calm and composed type of character, in matters of sublime concern, was not that which won Carlyle's highest regard.

"Dropping now all terms of scholastic nomenclature, we may say, more simply, that Carlyle went through the world as a fervid Theist. God, the Almighty, the Maker of all—through all the eighty-five years of Carlyle's life, all the seventy of his speech and writing, this was his constant phrase to his fellow-mortals. 'There is a God, there is a God, there is a God'—not even did the Koran of Mohammed fulminate this message more incessantly in the ears, or burn it more glowingly into the hearts, of the previously atheistic Arabs whom the inspired camel-driver sought to rouse, than did the series of Carlyle's writings fulminate it and try to make it blaze in a region and generation where, as be imagined, despite all the contrary appearances of organized churches and myriads of clergy and of pulpits, the canker of atheism was again all but universal. When he avoided the simple name 'God' or 'the Almighty,' and had recourse to those