,
and to the securing of 'that infinitesimallest product' on which the
teacher is ever insisting. It is the Supernaturalism which stirs men
first, until larger fulness of years and wider experience of life draw
them to a wise and not inglorious acquiescence in Naturalism. This last
is the mood which Mr. Carlyle never wearies of extolling and enjoining
under the name of Belief; and the absence of it, the inability to enter
into it, is that Unbelief which he so bitterly vituperates, or, in
another phrase, that Discontent, which he charges with holding the soul
in such desperate and paralysing bondage.

Indeed, what is it that Mr. Carlyle urges upon us but the search for
that Mental Freedom, which under one name or another has been the goal
and ideal of all highest minds that have reflected on the true
constitution of human happiness? His often enjoined Silence is the first
condition of this supreme kind of liberty, for what is silence but the
absence of a self-tormenting assertiveness, the freedom from excessive
susceptibility under the speech of others, one's removal from the
choking sandy wilderness of wasted words? Belief is the mood which
emancipates us from the paralysing dubieties of distraught souls, and
leaves us full possession of ourselves by furnishing an unshaken and
inexpugnable base for action and thought, and subordinating passion to
conviction. Labour, again, perhaps the cardinal article in the creed, is
at once the price of moral independence, and the first condition of that
fulness and accuracy of knowledge, without which we are not free, but
the bounden slaves of prejudice, unreality, darkness, and error. Even
Renunciation of self is in truth only the casting out of those
disturbing and masterful qualities which oppress and hinder the free,
natural play of the worthier parts of character. In renunciation we thus
restore to self its own diviner mind.

Yet we are never bidden either to strive or hope for a freedom that is
unbounded. Circumstance has fixed limits that no effort can transcend.
Novalis complained in bitter words, as we know, of the mechanical,
prosaic, utilitarian, cold-hearted character of _Wilhelm Meister_,
constituting it an embodiment of 'artistic Atheism,' while English
critics as loudly found fault with its author for being a mystic.
Exactly the same discrepancy is possible in respect of Mr. Carlyle's
own writings. In one sense he may be called mystic and transcendental,
in another b