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on, are of one mind and heart on this. The thought underlying all their thoughts of man is that "higher than love of happiness" in humanity which expresses the true link between man and God. The practical doctrine that with them underlies all others is, "Love not pleasure--love God. Love Him not alone in the light and amid the calm, but through the blackness and the storm. Though He hide Himself in the thick darkness, yet" give thanks at remembrance of His holiness. "Though He slay thee, yet trust still in Him." The hope to which they call us is not, save secondarily and incidentally, the hope of a great exhaustless future. It is the hope of a true life _now_, struggling on and up through hardness and toil and battle, careless though its crown be the crown of thorns. Even evangelicism indirectly, in great degree unconsciously, bears witness to the truth through its demand of absolute self-abnegation before God: though the inversion of the very idea of Him fundamentally involved in its scheme makes the self-abnegation no longer that of the son, but of the slave; includes in it the denial of that law which Himself has written on our hearts; and would substitute our subjection to an arbitrary despotism for our being "made partakers of His holiness." One of the sternest and most consistent of Calvinistic theologians, Jonathan Edwards, in one of his works expresses his willingness to be damned for the glory of God, and to rejoice in his own damnation: with a strange, almost incredible, obliquity of moral and spiritual insight failing to perceive that in thus losing himself in the infinite of holy Love lies the very essence of human blessedness, that this and this alone is in very truth his "eternal life." Among what may be called Essayists, two by general consent stand out as most deeply penetrating and informing the spirit of the age--Carlyle and Ruskin. To the former, brief reference has already been made. In the work then quoted from, one truth has prominence above all others: that with the will's acceptance of happiness as the aim of life begins the true degradation of humanity; and that then alone true life dawns upon man when truth and right begin to stand out as the first objects of his regard. Never since has Carlyle's strong rough grasp relaxed its hold of this truth; and howsoever in later works, in what are intended as biographical illustrations of it, he may seem to confuse mere strength and energy wi
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