is the self-acting
machinery by which worship refreshes and recruits what is best in man.
Mr. Carlyle has another way. He carries the process a step further,
giving back to the great man what had been taken for beings greater than
any man, and summoning us to trim the lamp of endeavour at the shrine of
heroic chiefs of mankind. In that house there are many mansions, the
boisterous sanctuary of a vagabond polytheism. But each altar is
individual and apart, and the reaction of this isolation upon the
egotistic instincts of the worshipper has been only too evident. It is
good for us to build temples to great names which recall special
transfigurations of humanity; but it is better still, it gives a firmer
nerve to purpose and adds a finer holiness to the ethical sense, to
carry ever with us the unmarked, yet living tradition of the voiceless
unconscious effort of unnumbered millions of souls, flitting lightly
away like showers of thin leaves, yet ever augmenting the elements of
perfectness in man, and exalting the eternal contest.

Mr. Carlyle has indeed written that generation stands indissolubly woven
with generation; 'how we inherit, not Life only, but all the garniture
and form of Life, and work and speak, and even think and feel, as our
fathers and primeval grandfathers from the beginning have given it to
us;' how 'mankind is a living, indivisible whole.'[14] Even this,
however, with the 'literal communion of saints,' which follows in
connection with it, is only a detached suggestion, not incorporated with
the body of the writer's doctrine. It does not neutralise the general
lack of faith in the cultivable virtue of masses of men, nor the
universal tone of humoristic cynicism with which all but a little band,
the supposed salt of the earth, are treated. Man is for Mr. Carlyle, as
for the Calvinistic theologian, a fallen and depraved being, without
much hope, except for a few of the elect. The best thing that can happen
to the poor creature is that he should be thoroughly well drilled. In
other words, society does not really progress in its bulk; and the
methods which were conditions of the original formation and growth of
the social union, remain indispensable until the sound of the last
trump. Was there not a profound and far-reaching truth wrapped up in
Goethe's simple yet really inexhaustible monition, that if we would
improve a man, it were well to let him believe that we already think him
that which we would hav