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

1885.] GARLYLE AS PROFIlEr. 15
of Christian faith? The misconceptions, the partial views, the
mistakes and blunders about facts or the true reading and interpretation of facts, the intermingling of legend with history, of
notions and opinions with doctrine of faith, all the human, the
temporary, the accidental appendages which have got hung
about religion in its concrete forms, in pre-Christian or Christian
times, and have been associated with the belief in its dogmas and
facts in the minds of believers, have nothing to do wi~'h the
reality and the evidence of the genuine revelation. These accidents may be compared to the obsolete notions of Aristotle and
Ptolemy about the solar and stellar and telluric spheres. The
stars were there and were visible. The science of Copernicus,
Galileo, and Kepler did not blot out any of them or create new
ones. The stars in the heaven of religion disclosed to the eye
of faith, the wonderful events and sublime doctrines made known
by divine revelation, are not to be altered to suit theories.
Theory is to be conformed to the known facts and truths. What
is the order, intellectual, moral, spiritual, and universal, which
God has established, and the law which he has prescribed?
~Vhile I have been writing these latter pages, reading again
one of the later works of the matured genius of Lord Lytton~, I
have come across this sentence:
"The man, growing old in years, strode noiselessly on, under the gaslights, under the stars: gaslights primly marshalled at equi-distance; stars
that seem, to the naked eye, dotted`over space without symmetry or
method-Man's order, near and finite, is so distinct; the Maker's order,
remote, infinite, is so beyond Man's comprehension, even of what is
order!"
Is not, then, a theory, taken as a purely human and ~ priori
measure of the possible and real order of God's celestial plan
and operation, like the application of the order of street-lamps
to the order of the stars?
Here is another sentence from the same author:
"Man is always a blockhead and a blunderer when he mistakes a speck
in his telescope for a blotch in the sun of a system."
Plato taught that the most transcendental concept of God as
the All-Perfect is the concept of the Sovereign Good. Being
supremely good, he is incapable of envy, and diffuses good, only
good, by bringing the eternal idea and prntot~pe of good into
actual fOrm, 5Q far as that is possible in a term of his action essen