danger. Once more, therefore, protesting against being supposed to represent Mr. Carlyle's formal and conscious opinions, we must make the following sketch of what we think is the practical creed to be found in his works. That all things are tending to a vast and as yet unimagined spiritual perfection; and that every thing, be it creed, or be it rite, which has had any extensive sway, has done or is doing its part in bringing about this result: that each of these, however, is of necessity partial and transient; that when it has done its work, it of necessity passes away, and ought to pass away. Accordingly, Mr. Carlyle sees much that is true and divine in Paganism and Mahommedanism. His notions of Odin and Scandinavian mythology are, many of them, just and striking and profitable in this way, though vitiated by a fallacy that runs throughout,-we mean the assumption, that man has had to start from imperfect and false religions, and gradually to rise to nobler and truer ones. But holy Scripture tells us of an original revelation made to the sons of men, and, consequently, views idolatry as apostasy, and condemns it as "without excuse. Modifying, however, Mr. Carlyle's teaching by these momentous considerations, we may derive much instruction from his lecture on Odin. The following paragraph suggests solemn thoughts indeed :— "And now, if worship of a star had some meaning in it, how much more might that of a hero! Worship of a hero is transcendent admiration of a great man. I say great men are still admirable; I say, there is at bottom nothing else admirable! No nobler feeling than this of admiration, for one higher than himself, dwells in the breast of man. It is to this hour and at all hours, the vivifying influence in man's life. Religion I find stand upon it; not Paganism only, but far higher and truer religions-all religion hitherto known. Hero-worship, heartfelt prostrate admiration, submission, burning, boundless, for a noblest godlike Form of Man,-is not that the germ of Christianity itself? The greatest of all heroes is One-Whom we do not name here. Let sacred silence meditate that sacred matter; you will find it the ultimate perfection of a principle extant throughout man's whole history on earth." Lectures on Heroes, pp. 17, 18. The ultimate perfection, indeed! Would that Mr. Carlyle would oftener write as if keeping in mind that it is so! For our complaint against him is, that he too frequently leaves the impression, that he ranks the everlasting Gospel among the stages of man's progress, itself in the course of that progress to be transmuted into something higher. What we desiderate in him is an abiding sense of some one enduring authority, among all the changes through which we have to pass a faith and a rule, "the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever," something that will remain true and obligatory, into whatever "varieties of untried being" society may have to pass. We want in him not merely reverence for the christian ideas, of which he has abundance, but the signs of a distinct objective faith in the christian creed. He too much reminds us of the following impressive picture: "No one can trace the progress of this silent revolution in philosophy (that from mechanical necessity to transcendental spiritualism) with out perceiving that it must affect men's theological views and apprehensions much more remarkably than any which has occurred since the time of Lord Bacon. A person who maintains that our understanding is not a court of ultimate appeal,-that the very constitution of our being involves that of which it can take no cognizance, will not, of course, speak of mysteries as essentially impossible or worthy of contempt. The tone in which the writers of last century treated them will seem to him not profane, but ridiculous. He will smile, with great exultation and self-complacency, at those who thought themselves privileged to smile at every one else. But it may be pretty surely conjectured, by those who know any thing of themselves, that with a tone of considerable contempt for certain kinds of philosophical infidelity, and of occasional compliment to the grand ideas of Christianity, there will be mixed in such thinkers no slight infusion of self-idolatry, no slight dislike of any thing that savours of humiliation. For all that he stands proclaiming that the reason lifts a man out of himself, and demands the infinite for its satisfaction, for all that he looks into the dark abyss of the will, and feels that it requires the ground of a Supreme Will to rest on,-you will find that he is very apt to make this necessarily self-dissatisfied reason, this necessarily dependent will, the real objects of his wonder and his worship. Still more apt will you find him to believe that these conclusions and discoveries respecting the reason and the will, are the highest and most amazing developments of the religious principle; that Judaism and Christianity were but vestibules to the inner shrine of the temple; that all the facts of both were well contrived to embody so much of those principles as man could apprehend (being important possibly, as facts, till an age of greater illumination,) and that their mysteries are exceedingly interesting studies for a person who has investigated the laws of his own being." We have already expressed our ignorance of what Mr. Carlyle's religious opinions may be; we are not entitled, therefore, to apply this description to him personally, but we do to his works. If it is not like himself, it is like what he would render his followers. Persons of the tone of thought in question, will perhaps object to our enforcement of the creed and the sacraments as obligatory always, and on all-that we are seeking to imprison the universal and infinite, under conditions of time and sense, conditions which their philosophy tells them are but laws of our own minds; unfit, therefore, to measure the great reality of things. Historical facts, they will say, cannot be more than phenomenal and accidental. We admit the truth of this: we admit that what is manifested to us under the conditions of our finite being, cannot be manifested in all its transcendent reality; and we remain where we were notwithstanding. We did not require to wait for German philosophers, or for Mr. Carlyle, to tell us this. St. Paul has told us so long since. He has Maurice's Kingdom of Christ, vol. i. pp. 325, 327. reminded us that we but "know in part, and prophesy in part," and taught us to wait for the time when that which is perfect shall have come; and that which is in part shall have been done away: that now we see through a glass darkly;" but that a day is coming, when we shall see things, as Coleridge sublimely expresses it, "in the depths of real being"-see" face to face, and know even as also we are known." The most dogmatic creed which the Church employs solemnly and with reiteration declares it. St. Augustine eloquently preaches it. Thus he enters on the task of expounding the opening words of St. John's Gospel-“ Aderit misericordia Dei, fortasse ut omnibus satis fiat, et capiat quisque quod potest: quia et qui loquitur dicit quod potest: Nam dicere ut est quis potest? Audeo dicere, Fratres mei, forsitan nec ipse Johannes dixit ut est, sed et ipse quod potuit, quia de Deo homo dixit: et quidem inspiratus a Deo, sed tamen homo. Quia inspiratus dixit aliquid; si non inspiratus esset, dixisset nihil: quia vero homo inspiratus, non totum quod est, dixit: sed quod potuit homo, dixit."* In truth, the objection might as well shake our faith in ourselves, or in the world around us, as in the Church or the creed, for it applies no less to the one than to the other. No man knows the commonest things around him as they really are. He apprehends them, as he does the truths of the creed, under the conditions of his own finite being, and therefore inadequately-in a particular perspective, as it were. While we are here our justest apprehensions of any thing must be but approximations. By the phenomena of the material world we apprehend the realities of external existence and the "action of being upon being" sufficiently for practical impression and guidance. By the revealed word and the sacraments we apprehend the realities of spiritual existence, and the relationships which hold among them in the same sufficiency. Both guide us aright, both are true, both make up all the truth which, in their respective provinces, we can at present attain. For all that a man learns to regard the outward world of phenomena and facts as but a set of forms to teach him truth, which he cannot otherwise apprehend, and which he cannot thus comprehend, his practical faith in them is never for one moment shaken. He never expects whilst here to rise above these forms, to be able to get at the truth except by them. Men require no reasoning to persuade them that there is not any conceivable progress of science, or improvement of our social condition, which shall enable mankind to learn the truth that is in the external world, except through the phenomena and facts of that world. Nor shall we ever, while here below, learn the truth that is in the spiritual world, except through what we may call its phenomena and facts-the history of redemption, the confessions of the creed, and the sacraments of the Church. We do not ask men to place these on any other footing, relatively to the truth of things, than * Augustin. in Johann. Evang. Tract i, |