... It is a
mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my
hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe.
But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and so failed to
attain to the Optimism after which he often strove. He held, with
Browning, that "God's in His heaven," but not that "All's right with the
world." His view was the Zoroastrian _*athanatos machae*_, "in God's
world presided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a "divine
infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who said "The world is a
lie, but God is truth," landed him in an _impasse_; he could not answer
the obvious retort,--Did then God make and love a lie, or make it hating
it? There must have been some other power _to eteron_, or, as Mill in
his Apologia for _Theism_ puts it, a limit to the assumed Omnipotence.
Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, inconsequently halts between them;
and his prevailing view of mankind adds to his dilemma.
[Footnote: Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist
Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer,"
ejaculated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er Remit nicht diese
verdarnmte Basse."]
He imposes an "infinite duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an
infinite punishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind sets
its hardest tasks to itself; or that, as Emerson declares, "the assertion
of our weakness and deficiency is the fine innuendo by which the soul
makes its enormous claim.
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