" We know that he not only believed in God as
revealed in the larger Bible, the whole history of the human race, but
that he threatened, almost with hell-fire, all who dared on this point
to give refuge to a doubt. Finally, he believed both in fate and in
free-will, in good and evil as powers at internecine war, and in the
greater strength and triumph of good at some very far distant date. If we
desire to know more of Carlyle's creed we must proceed by "the method of
exclusions," and note, in the first place, what he did _not_ believe.
This process is simplified by the fact that he assailed all convictions
other than his own.
Half his teaching is a protest, in variously eloquent phrase, against all
forms of _Materialism_ and _Hedonism,_ which he brands as "worships of
Moloch and Astarte," forgetting that progress in physical welfare may
lead not only to material, but to mental, if not spiritual, gain.
Similarly he denounces _Atheism,_ never more vehemently than in his
Journals of 1868-1869:--
Had no God made this world it were an insupportable place. Laws without
a lawgiver, matter without spirit is a gospel of dirt. All that is good,
generous, wise, right ... who or what could by any possibility have
given it to me, but One who first had it to give! This is not logic, it
is axiom.... Poor "Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic specialities.
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