large, the
expression of what is best in their times, and having also the courage
to proclaim it, and take their stand upon it....

But in our day such visionaries are less and less possible. The spread
of shallow but clear knowledge, like the cold snow-water issuing from
the glaciers, daily chills and disenchants the hearts of millions once
credulous. Daily, therefore, does it become more probable that millions
will follow in the track of those who are called their betters. Thus
will they find in the world nothing but an epicurean stye, to be
managed, with less dirt and better food, by patent steam-machinery; but
still a place for swine, though the swine may be washed, and their
victuals more equally divided.

Is it not then strange that in such a world, in such a country, and
among those light-hearted Edinburgh Reviewers, a man should rise and
proclaim a creed; not a new and more ingenious form of words, but a
truth to be embraced with the whole heart, and in which the heart shall
find as he has found, strength for all combats, and consolation, though
stern not festal, under all sorrows? Amid the masses of English printing
sent forth every day, part designed for the most trivial entertainment,
part black with the narrowest and most lifeless sectarian dogmatism,
part, and perhaps the best, exhibiting only facts and theories in
physical science, and part filled with the vulgarest economical projects
and details, which would turn all life into a process of cookery,
culinary, political, or sentimental--how few writings are there that
contain like these a distinct doctrine as to the position and calling of
man, capable of affording nourishment to the heart, and support to the
will, and in harmony at the same time with the social state of the
world, and with the most enlarged and brightened insight which human
wisdom has yet attained to?

We have been so little prepared to look for such an appearance that it
is difficult for us to realize the conception of a genuine coherent view
of life thus presented to us in a book of our day, which shall be
neither a slight compendium of a few moral truisms, flavoured with a few
immoral refinements and paradoxes, such as constitute the floating
ethics and religion of the time; nor a fierce and gloomy distortion of
some eternal idea torn from its pure sphere of celestial light to be
raved about by the ignorant whom it has half-enlightened, and half made
frantic. But here, in our judg