"By this alone," wrote Dr. Chalmers, "he has done so much to vindicate
and bring to light the Augustan age of Christianity in England," adding
that it is the secret also of the great writer's appreciation of the
higher Teutonic literature. His sombre rather than consolatory sense of
"God in History," his belief in the mission of righteousness to constrain
unrighteousness, and his Stoic view that good and evil are absolute
opposites, are his links with the Puritans, whom he habitually exalts in
variations of the following strain:--
The age of the Puritans has gone from us, its earnest
purpose awakens now no reverence in our frivolous hearts.
Not the body of heroic Puritanism alone which was bound to
die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been,
and yet shall be immortal, has, for the present, passed away.
Yet Goethe, the only man of recent times whom he regarded with a feeling
akin to worship, was in all essentials the reverse of a Puritan.
To Carlyle's, as to most substantially emotional works, may be applied
the phrase made use of in reference to the greatest of all the series of
ancient books--
Hic liber est in quo quisquis sua dogmata quaerit,
Invenit et pariter dogmata quisque sua.
From passages like those above quoted--his complaints of the falling
off of old Scotch faith; his references to the kingdom of a God who has
written "in plain letters on the human conscience a Law that all may
read"; his insistence that the great soul of the world is just; his
belief in religion as a rule of conduct, and his sympathy with the divine
depths of sorrow--from all these many of his Scotch disciples persist in
maintaining that their master was to the end essentially a Christian.
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