MR. CARLYLE'S FAITH.
Zvi R. CARLYLE has mended his religious faith since he last described the damnable condition of the world in which he is compelled to live, and in his letter to Sir Joseph Whitworth on, the relations of capital and labour, he speaks of Almighty God! with a pious simplicity which is a surprise and a pleasure after those " Abysses" and " Eternities," and other ornate vaguenesses and paraphrastic plurals of his middle period. Of all " the un- veracities " which Mr. Carlyle used to denounce with so much vigour, it always seemed to us that the circumlocutions by which he himself avoided committing himself on the question whether the rule to which he was always exhorting us to submit was really the rule of wisdom or only the rule of brute neces- sities, were some of the worst ;—for he knew very well that to such creatures as we are it makes the most enormous difference whether we be in truth guided by a divine mind which is infinitely above us, or only propelled by an uudivine fate which has reached its chef d'ceurre in ourselves. In one who has always been so bitter on what he calla juggles, who has insisted that man's religion "consists not of the many things he is in doubt of and tries to believe, but of the few he is assured of, and has no need of effort for believing," it was not surely a laudable practice to adopt as he did an ambiguous religious jargon, the meaning of which it was impossible to define. In his denunciations of Jesuitism, it always seemed to us that some of the sharpest blows really de- scended upon himself. For instance, Man's religion, he said in the Latter-Day Pamphlets, "whatever it may be, is a discerned fact and coherent system of discerned facts to him ; he stands fronting the worlds and the eternities upon it : to doubt of it is not permis- sible at all! He must verify or expel his doubts, convert them into certainty of Yes or No, or they will be the death of his religion. But on the other hand, convert them into certainty of Yes and No; or even of Yea though No, as the Ignatian method is, and what will become of your religion ?" Now the fault we have always been disposed to find with Mr. Carlyle's religious exhortations is precisely this, that he left us with the im- pression on our minds that his religious belief consisted of certain- ties of " Yes and No," or " Yes though No," rather than explicit• beliefs and denials. What, for instance, does this dark saying about " Man fronting the worlds and the eternities " mean? Not clearly that he fronts God ; nor that he fronts a yeast of fermenting forces of which he is the product ; but rather that he fronts some- thing ambiguous between the two, which the mystic meaning of the word ' Eternities' suggests as partaking of spiritual qualities, though Mr. Carlyle declined explicitly to affirm them. Is not that,—and the passage is an excellent specimen of a large part of Mr. Carlyle's prophecy,—as near to suggesting that the answer to the question ' Do you believe in God,' should be " Yes, though No," as Mr. Carlyle could go ? But we should not now have called attention to the elaborate disguises and ambiguities of
Mr. Carlyle's religious prophecies of twenty years and more ago, if this last published letter of his had not been in a tone, as we think, so much simpler and higher: He is writing on the relations of labour and capital, and the little hope that political economy
(Mr. Carlyle's "dismal science ") will ever adjust these relations rightly—(a state of mind, by the way, in which every reasonable
man, economist or not, would, be believe, concur with Mr.
Carlyle, for Political Economy has nothing to do with moral Economy, and does not pretend to explain what is just in action, but rather certain inevitable tendencies to action due to the pressure of human self-interests, the practical influence of which it is not only open to men to modify most seriously, but which they usually do modify most seriously, and always ought to
modify most seriously on other than economical grounds). And he says : " The look of England is to me at this moment abundantly ominous, the question of capital and labour growing ever more anarchical, insoluble by the notions hitherto applied to it, pretty certain to issue in petroleum one day, unless some other gospel than that of the Dismal Science come to illumi- nate it. Two things are pretty sure to me. The first is, that capital and labour never can or will agree together till they both first of all decide on doing their work faithfully throughout, and, like men of conscience and honour, whose highest aim is to behave like faithful citizens of the universe, and obey the eternal com- mandment of Almighty God who made them. The second thing is, that a sadder object even than that of the coal strike, or any conceivable strike, is the fact that, loosely speaking, we may say all England has decided that the profitablest way is to do its work ill, slimly, swiftly, and mendaciously. What a contrast between now and, say, only one hundred years ago! At the latter date, or still more conspicuously for ages before it, all England awoke to its work with an invocation to the Eternal Maker to bless them in their day's labour, and help them to do it well. Now all England, shopkeepers, workmen, all manner of competing labourers, awaken as if it were with an unspoken but heartfeft prayer to Beelzebub, ' Oh ! help us, thou great Lord of shoddy, adulteration, and mal- feasance, to do our work with the maximum of slimness, swiftness, profit, and mendacity, for the Devil's sake.—Amen." We cannot say, however, that we accept Mr. Carlyle's history. If all England ever awoke daily with a real prayer to God in its heart to do its daily work well, we believe that that generation would have rendered the present generation, living within a hundred years of it, a very different thing from what it is. Nothing's more really unattainable than a true knowledge of the average moral condition of any age, even the present ; and with respect to a past age, we believe such knowledge to be hopelessly beyond us. But whether England were ever before more genuinely in earnest than it now is, in its pious wish to do its work well, matters little, Mr. Carlyle's object being really only this, to persuade us that it is of the first moment that we should daily become more in earnest than we now are ; and that without becoming so, the talk about rights and penalties, and strikes and lock-outs, will result in mere destructive passion,— petroleum and general chaos. There we sincerely hold Mr. Carlyle to be wholly in the right. And we believe that no advice can be wholesomer for the purpose of averting the chaos, than that all par- ties alike should look up from the scene of bitter contention and competition to " the eternal commandments of Almighty God who made them." There is nothing that makes men so reason- able as the disposition to take themselves more strictly to task for their shortcomings, than their antagonists, and nothing which fosters that disposition like the faith that " Almighty God who made them" is expecting it of them. But we cannot help doubting if any sort of talk has done more to undermine this belief than Mr. Carlyle's old pantheistic practice of substituting ' the Im- mensities' and ' the Eternities' in the place of ' Almighty God.' We do not doubt that that practice was due to a certain sincerity in himself, though it produced on others the effect of that very am- biguousness and double meaning of which he was the bitterest denouncer. He did not, perhaps, fully believe in God,—the moat difficult thing in the world, we admit, though the most necessary, —and he could not dismiss the thought of a personal ruler; so be invented an answer to the question "God, or no God?" which was in effect what he himself calls the answer "Yes, though No," "yea in one sense, no in another," in fact, an ambiguity, the true answer being evaded and deferred. And the effect of the Carlylian paraphrase for God was, its our opinion, much more disastrous to the numerous devotees of Mr. Carlyle, than a blank assertion that the answer was " unknown and unknowable." It en- abled people to do exactly what Mr. Carlyle has always most severely conderaned,—clothe themselves in an unreal costume of sentimental awe which was neither piety nor its negation. The great difference, we take it, between Pantheism and Theism is this,—that genuine Theism humbles the mind, while genuine Pan- theism inflates it. You cannot believe that God exists for you ; you know that, on the contrary, you exist through God and for God. But when you put the ' Eternities' and ' Immensities' and Abysses' in the place of God, you are very apt indeed to feel what a wonderful fellow you must be to "front the worlds and the eternities" in that grand way. There is nothing definite enough in the " Immensities " to bumble you ; on the contrary, they are a credit to you ; they are grand ideal conceptions which add a certain distinction to your position on earth, and justify Hamlet's remark—" in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a God." We believe that Mr. Carlyle in inventing, as he did, this compromise between faith in God and no faith, did very much indeed to smooth the way into that irreligious state of mind which instead of simply praying to do its work well, admires itself for the emotion with which it " fronts the world and the eternities," while it is doing its work ill. There is a kind of imaginative thought which is a fascinating substitute for the simplicity and humility of devotion, and we know no higher or more marvellous master in that kind than Mr. Carlyle. His writings are full of graphic power and moral passion. He sees the strength and weakness, the wisdom and folly, the good and evil of human life, with a power and a humour which gives the mere act of following in the track of his thought an intellectual charm of its own ; and he has, more- over, an art of throwing a vague mystery over the whole, a splendid confusion of gorgeous tints and shadows, which makes his disciples feel as if their powers of insight and of moral passion had been indefinitely magnified during the time in which they are submitted to the spell of his genius. But all this is not only no substitute for religious faith, it is rather a gratifying stimulus which helps you to miss its absence less. It is therefore to our minds a most satisfactory thing to find Mr. Carlyle in his old. age dismissing 'the Immensities' and the Eternities' altogether, and coming back to the-simple advice to people inflated with the idea of the importance of their own rights, to pray to God to do their own work well. It is a. sound, and in the most wholesome sense a humiliating bit of counsel, of quite an opposite tendency from the advice which we used to hear so frequently from him, to front the eternities' veraciously. Theism, and Christianity as the highest Theism, are sobering faiths of which humility is the first word though not the last. Pan- theism—into whose scale Mr. Carlyle's influence had 'hitherto been thrown,—is an inebriating faith, of which vanity or sensa- tionalism is apt to be the first word though not the last.. It is compensation for much unwholesome teaching that Mr. Carlyle's latest and present vote is for the former faith, the faith which breeds sobriety and humility, and not that puffing-up of our mind with vain " Immensities," by which, as St. Paul once vividly re- marked, " theloolish heart is darkened."
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