Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/55

1789–90] Contract: such was verily the Gospel of that Era. And all men had believed in it, as in a Heaven's Glad-tidings men should; and with overflowing heart and uplifted voice clave to it, and stood fronting Time and Eternity on it. Nay smile not; or only with a smile sadder than tears! This too was a better faith than the one it had replaced; than faith merely in the Everlasting Nothing and man's Digestive Power; lower than which no faith can go.

Not that such universally prevalent, universally jurant, feeling of Hope could be a unanimous one. Far from that. The time was ominous: social dissolution near and certain; social renovation still a problem, difficult and distant, even though sure. But if ominous to some clearest onlooker, whose faith stood not with the one side or with the other, nor in the ever-vexed jarring of Greek with Greek at all,—how unspeakably ominous to dim Royalist participators; for whom Royalism was Mankind's palladium; for whom, with the abolition of Most-Christian Kingship and Most-Talleyrand Bishopship, all loyal obedience, all religious faith was to expire, and final Night envelop the Destinies of Man! On serious hearts, of that persuasion, the matter sinks down deep; prompting, as we have seen, to backstairs plots, to Emigration with pledge of war, to Monarchic Clubs; nay to still madder things.

The Spirit of Prophecy, for instance, had been considered extinct for some centuries: nevertheless these last-times, as indeed is the tendency of last-times, do revive it; that so, of French mad things, we might have sample also of the maddest. In remote rural districts, whither Philosophism has not yet radiated, where a heterodox Constitution of the Clergy is bringing strife round the altar itself, and the very Church-bells are getting melted into small money-coin, it appears probable that the End of the World cannot be far off. Deep-musing atrabiliar old men, especially old women, hint in an obscure way that they know what they know. The