y certain that no personality is independent of his age and the
backing he finds in it, or the response which he may enlist for his
revolt from it. Both of these are true statements of the case; as to
which is ultimate, that is the old and rather academic question of
whether the oak or the acorn comes first. We repeat that it is
impossible, in this double play of cause and effect, to say which is the
ultimate cause and which the effect. The controversy which was waged in
the nineteenth century between the schools of Buckle and Carlyle is
likely to go on indefinitely through the future. But what concerns us at
present is this, that all paganism which finds expression in a
literature has existed in the age before it found that expression. The
literature is indeed to some extent the creator of the age, but to a far
greater extent it is the expression of the age, whose creation is due to
a vast multiplicity of causes.

Among these causes one of the foremost was political advance and
freedom--the political doctrines, and the beginnings of Socialistic
thought, which had appeared about the time when _Sartor Resartus_ was
written. The Reform Bill of 1832 tended to concentrate men's attention
upon questions of material welfare. Commercial and industrial prosperity
followed, keeping the nation busy with the earth. In very striking
language Lord Morley describes this fact, in language specially striking
as coming from so eminently progressive a man.[4] "Far the most
penetrating of all the influences that are impairing the moral and
intellectual nerve of our generation, remain still to be mentioned. The
first of them is the immense increase of material prosperity, and the
second is the immense decline in sincerity of spiritual interest. The
evil wrought by the one fills up the measure of the evil wrought by the
other. We have been, in spite of momentary declensions, on a flood-tide
of high profits and a roaring trade, and there is nothing like a roaring
trade for engendering latitudinarians. The effect of many possessions,
especially if they be newly acquired, in slackening moral vigour, is a
proverb. Our new wealth is hardly leavened by any tradition of public
duty such as lingers among the English nobles, nor as yet by any common
custom of devotion to public causes, such as seems to live and grow in
the United States. Under such conditions, with new wealth come luxury
and love of ease and that fatal readiness to believe that God h