But Carlyle has done this in all his books. A reticent writer may
veil his convictions on every subject save that on which he writes. An
avowed preacher or prophet cannot escape interrogation as to his text.
With all the evidence before us--his collected works, his friendly
confidences, his journals, his fragmentary papers, as the interesting
series of jottings entitled "Spiritual Optics," and the partial accounts
to Emerson and others of the design of the "Exodus from Hounds-ditch"--it
remains impossible to formulate Carlyle's Theology. We know that he
abandoned the ministry, for which he was destined, because, at an early
date, he found himself at irreconcilable variance, not on matters of
detail but on essentials, with the standards of Scotch Presbyterianism.
We know that he never repented or regretted his resolve; that he went, as
continuously as possible for a mind so liable to fits and starts, further
and further from the faith of his fathers; but that he remained to the
last so much affected by it, and by the ineffaceable impress of early
associations, that he has been plausibly called "a Calvinist without
dogma," "a Calvinist without Christianity," "a Puritan who had lost
his creed." We know that he revered the character of Christ, and
theoretically accepted the ideal of self-sacrifice: the injunction
to return good for evil he never professed to accept; and vicarious
sacrifice was contrary to his whole philosophy, which taught that every
man must "dree his weird.
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