_firm-land's end_,--towards the end and extinction of what
Faithfulness, Veracity, real Worth, was in their way of life. Their
noble ancestors have fashioned for them a 'life-road;'--in how many
thousand senses, this! There is not an old wise Proverb on their
tongue, an honest Principle articulated in their hearts into
utterance, a wise true method of doing and despatching any work or
commerce of men, but helps yet to carry them forward. Life is still
possible to them, because all is not yet Puffery, Falsity,
Mammon-worship and Unnature; because somewhat is yet Faithfulness,
Veracity and Valour. With a certain very considerable finite quantity
of Unveracity and Phantasm, social life is still possible; not with an
infinite quantity! Exceed your certain quantity, the seven-feet Hat,
and all things upwards to the very Champion cased in tin, begin to
reel and flounder,--in Manchester Insurrections, Chartisms,
Sliding-scales; the Law of Gravitation not forgetting to act. You
advance incessantly towards the land's end; you are, literally enough,
'consuming the way.' Step after step, Twenty-seven Million unconscious
men;--till you are _at_ the land's end; till there is not Faithfulness
enough among you any more: and the next step now is lifted _not_ over
land, but into air, over ocean-deeps and roaring abysses:--unless
perhaps the Law of Gravitation have forgotten to act?

Oh, it is frightful when a whole Nation, as our Fathers used to say,
has 'forgotten God;' has remembered only Mammon, and what Mammon leads
to! When your self-trumpeting Hatmaker is the emblem of almost all
makers, and workers, and men, that make anything,--from
soul-overseerships, body-overseerships, epic poems, acts of
parliament, to hats and shoe-blacking! Not one false man but does
uncountable mischief: how much, in a generation or two, will
Twenty-seven Millions, mostly false, manage to accumulate? The sum of
it, visible in every street, market-place, senate-house,
circulating-library, cathedral, cotton-mill, and union-workhouse,
fills one _not_ with a comic feeling!

CHAPTER II.

GOSPEL OF MAMMONISM.

Reader, even Christian Reader as thy title goes, hast thou any notion
of Heaven and Hell? I rather apprehend, not. Often as the words are on
our tongue, they have got a fabulous or semi-fabulous character for
most of us, and pass on like a kind of transient similitude, like a
sound signifying little.

Yet it is well worth while for us to kn