" Yes, if you are
God you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do
you know more than I, or any of us?
And later--
What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor
mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted
to go farther"?
To Emerson in 1867 he writes:--
I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily
serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final
chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and
Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to
discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their
sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring
nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger
to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my
door against.
There can be no question of the sincerity of Carlyle's conviction that
he had to make war on credulity and to assail the pretences of a _formal
Belief_ (which he regards as even worse than Atheism) in order to grapple
with real Unbelief. After all explanations of Newton or Laplace, the
Universe is, to him, a mystery, and we ourselves the miracle of miracles;
sight and knowledge leave us no "less forlorn," and beneath all the
soundings of science there is a deeper deep. It is this frame of mind
that qualified him to be the exponent of the religious epochs in history.
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