If it must be defined, it was that of a Theist with a difference. A
spirit of flame from the empyrean, he found no food in the cold _Deism_
of the eighteenth century, and brought down the marble image from its
pedestal, as by the music of the "Winter's Tale," to live among men and
inspire them. He inherited and _coute que coute_ determined to persist in
the belief that there was a personal God--"a Maker, voiceless, formless,
within our own soul." To Emerson he writes in 1836, "My belief in a
special Providence grows yearly stronger, unsubduable, impregnable"; and
later, "Some strange belief in a special Providence was always in me at
intervals." Thus, while asserting that "all manner of pulpits are as good
as broken and abolished," he clings to the old Ecclefechan days.
"To the last," says Mr. Froude, "he believed as strongly as ever Hebrew
prophet did in spiritual religion;" but if we ask the nature of the God
on whom all relies, he cannot answer even with the Apostles' Creed. Is
He One or Three? "Wer darf ihn nennen." Carlyle's God is not a mere
"tendency that makes for righteousness"; He is a guardian and a guide, to
be addressed in the words of Pope's _Universal Prayer_, which he adopted
as his own. A personal God does not mean a great Figure Head of the
Universe,--Heine's fancy of a venerable old man, before he became "a
knight" of the Holy Ghost,--it means a Supreme Power, Love, or Justice
having relations to the individual man: in this sense Carlyle believed in
Him, though more as Justice, exacting "the terriblest penalties," than
as Love, preaching from the Mount of Olives.
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