quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance of things, and
opened them only to the Shows and Shams of things. We quietly
believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great unintelligible
Perhaps; extrinsically, clear enough, it is a great, most extensive
Cattlefold and Workhouse, with most extensive Kitchen-ranges,
Dining-tables,--whereat he is wise who can find a place! All the Truth
of this Universe is uncertain; only the profit and loss of it, the
pudding and praise of it, are and remain very visible to the practical
man.

There is no longer any God for us! God's Laws are become a
Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency: the Heavens
overarch us only as an Astronomical Time-keeper; a butt for
Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimentalities
at:--in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has lost the _soul_ out of
him; and now, after the due period,--begins to find the want of it!
This is verily the plague-spot; centre of the universal Social
Gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him
that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and taproot,
with its world-wide upas-boughs and accursed poison-exudations, under
which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the
focal-centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of
diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there
is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt.
Vainly: in killing Kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French
Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, is found no remedy. The foul
elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, reappears in new force
and desperateness next hour.

For actually this is _not_ the real fact of the world; the world is
not made so, but otherwise!--Truly, any Society setting out from this
No-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two. The _Un_veracities,
escorted, each Unveracity of them by its corresponding Misery and
Penalty; the Phantasms, and Fatuities, and ten-years Corn-Law
Debatings, that shall walk the Earth at noonday,--must needs be
numerous! The Universe _being_ intrinsically a Perhaps, being too
probably an 'infinite Humbug,' why should any minor Humbug astonish
us? It is all according to the order of Nature; and Phantasms riding
with huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our existence,
astonish nobody. Enchanted St. Ives' Workhouses and Joe-Manton
Aristocracies; giant Working M