The
question between them and other critics who assert that "he had renounced
Christianity" is to some extent, not wholly, a matter of nomenclature; it
is hard exactly to decide it in the case of a man who so constantly found
again in feeling what he had abandoned in thought. Carlyle's Religion was
to the last an inconsistent mixture, not an amalgam, of his mother's and
of Goethe's. The Puritan in him never dies; he attempts in vain to tear
off the husk that cannot be separated from its kernel. He believes in no
historical Resurrection, Ascension, or Atonement, yet hungers and thirsts
for a supramundane source of Law, and holds fast by a faith in the
Nemesis of Greek, Goth, and Jew. He abjures half-way houses; but is
withheld by pathetic memories of the church spires and village graveyards
of his youth from following his doubts to their conclusion; yet he gives
way to his negation in his reference to "old Jew lights now burnt out,"
and in the half-despair of his expression to Froude about the Deity
Himself, "He does nothing." Professor Masson says that "Carlyle had
abandoned the Metaphysic of Christianity while retaining much of its
Ethic." To reverse this dictum would be an overstrain on the other side:
but the _Metaphysic_ of Calvinism is precisely what he retained; the
alleged _Facts_ of Revelation he discarded; of the _Ethic_ of the Gospels
he accepted perhaps the lesser half, and he distinctly ceased to regard
the teaching of Christ as final.
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