Carlyle as Prophet, Part II [pp. 1-17]

6 GARLYLE AS PJ?O?HET. [April,
tianity.... lle looks upon the middle age of Western Europe, with its
feudal body and Catholic soul, to have been the greatest realized ideal
ever yet attained by man; the greatest yet, but far, ineffably far, from what
mankind are capable of achieving. Its culminating point he places about
the time of Dante. Such a poet as Dante is, to him, the interpreter of
a whole cycle. Such a poem as the Cominedia comes as the consummate
flower and crown, the exponent and eternal representative of what men for
long ages had done and thought. Shakspere, too, he looks upon as another blossom of Catholicity, the poet of the external life of the middle
ages. as Dante was of the internal.... In about two hundred years, or
thereabouts, he calculates something like a foundation may turn up for the
world again.... With Carlyle this boasted nineteenth century is not
worthy to sit at the feet of any age animated by religious faith."
Mn Froude says:
"He was not always consistent in what he said of Christianity. He
would often speak of it, with Goethe,`as a height from which when once
achieved, mankind could never descend.' "*
Carlyle always retained a great veneration of the Bible as the
best and most wonderful of books. He regarded Jesus Christ
with profound reverence, and near the close of his life he told
Mr. Froude that in the dispute between Catholics and Arians
and Semi-Arians about the Homoousion of the Nicene Creed, "he
perceived Christianity itself to bave been at stake. If the Arians
had won it would have dwindled away into a legend" (ch. xxxv.)
"That the Christian religion could have any deeper foundation than
books, could possibly be written in the purest nature of man, in mysterious, ineffaceable`characters, to which books, and all revelations, and authentic traditions were but a subsidiary matter, were but as the light by
which that divine writing was to be read-nothing of this seems to have,
even in the faintest manner, occurred to him [Voltairej. Yet herein, as
we believe that the whole world has now begun to discover, lies the real
essence of the question, by the negative or affirmative decision of which
the Christian religion, anything that is worth calling by that name, must
fall, or endure for ever. We believe also that the wiser minds of our age
have already come to agreement on this question, or rather never were
divided regarding it. Christianity, the`Worship of Sorrow,' has been recognized as divine, on far other grounds than`Essays on Miracles,' and by
considerations infinitely dee~er than would avail in any mere`trial by
jury.' He who argues against it, or for it, in this manner, may be regarded
as mistaking its nature: the Ithuriel, though to our eyes he wears a body
and the fashion of armor, cannot be wounded by material steel" (Misc.
Essays: Voltaire).
"The Christian doctrine we often hear likened to the Greek philosophy, and found, on all hands, some measurable way su~enor to it; but
* Ut supr~