le might. Work while it is
called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.'

CHAPTER X

PAUSE

Thus have we, as closely and perhaps satisfactorily as, in such
circumstances, might be, followed Teufelsdroeckh through the various
successive states and stages of Growth, Entanglement, Unbelief, and
almost Reprobation, into a certain clearer state of what he himself
seems to consider as Conversion. 'Blame not the word,' says he;
'rejoice rather that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to
light in our modern Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. The
Old World knew nothing of Conversion; instead of an _Ecce Homo_, they
had only some _Choice of Hercules_. It was a new-attained progress in
the Moral Development of man: hereby has the Highest come home to the
bosoms of the most Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, and
to Socrates a chimera, is now clear and certain to your Zinzendorfs,
your Wesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists and Methodists.'

It is here, then, that the spiritual majority of Teufelsdroeckh
commences: we are henceforth to see him 'work in well-doing,' with the
spirit and clear aims of a Man. He has discovered that the Ideal
Workshop he so panted for is even this same Actual ill-furnished
Workshop he has so long been stumbling in. He can say to himself:
'Tools? Thou hast no Tools? Why, there is not a Man, or a Thing, now
alive but has tools. The basest of created animalcules, the Spider
itself, has a spinning-jenny, and warping-mill, and power-loom within
its head: the stupidest of Oysters has a Papin's-Digester, with
stone-and-lime house to hold it in: every being that can live can do
something: this let him _do_.--Tools? Hast thou not a Brain,
furnished, furnishable with some glimmerings of Light; and three
fingers to hold a Pen withal? Never since Aaron's Rod went out of
practice, or even before it, was there such a wonder-working Tool:
greater than all recorded miracles have been performed by Pens. For
strangely in this so solid-seeming World, which nevertheless is in
continual restless flux, it is appointed that _Sound_, to appearance
the most fleeting, should be the most continuing of all things. The
WORD is well said to be omnipotent in this world; man, thereby divine,
can create as by a _Fiat_. Awake, arise! Speak forth what is in thee;
what God has given thee, what the Devil shall not take away. Higher
task than that of Priesthood was allotted t