"It is as certain as Mathematics that no such thing has
ever been on earth." History is a perpetual revelation of God's will and
justice, and the stars in their courses are a perpetual miracle, is
his refrain. _This is not what Orthodoxy means_, and no one was more
intolerant than Carlyle of all shifts and devices to slur the difference
between "Yes" and "No." But having decided that his own "Exodus from
Houndsditch" might only open the way to the wilderness, he would allow
no one else to take in hand his uncompleted task; and disliked Strauss
and Renan even more than he disliked Colenso. "He spoke to me once," says
Mr. Froude, "with loathing of the _Vie de Jesus_." I asked if a true life
could be written. He said, "Yes, certainly, if it were right to do so;
but it is not." Still more strangely he writes to Emerson:--
You are the only man of the Unitarian persuasion whom
I could unobstructedly like. The others that I have seen
were all a kind of half-way-house characters, who I thought
should, if they had not wanted courage, have ended in
unbelief, in faint possible _Theism_; which I like
considerably worse than Atheism. Such, I could not but feel,
deserve the fate they find here; the bat fate; to be killed
among the bats as a bird, among the birds as a bat.
What then is left for Carlyle's Creed? Logically little, emotionally
much.
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