udge. With old Romans, I
conjecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for whom probably
they cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing unvirtuously,
which was their word for un_man_fully. And now what is it, if
you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he
calls his Worships and so forth,--what is it that the modern
English soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and
contemplate with entire despair? What is his Hell; after all
these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it? With
hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be: The terror
of "Not succeeding;" of not making money, fame, or some other
figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money! Is not that a
somewhat singular Hell?

Yes, O Sauerteig, it is very singular. If we do not 'succeed,'
where is the use of us? We had better never have been born.
"Tremble intensely," as our friend the Emperor of China says:
_there_ is the black Bottomless of Terror; what Sauerteig calls
the 'Hell of the English!'--But indeed this Hell belongs
naturally to the Gospel of Mammonism, which also has its
corresponding Heaven. For there is one Reality among so many
Phantasms; about one thing we are entirely in earnest: The
making of money. Working Mammonism does divide the world with
idle game-preserving Dilettantism:--thank Heaven that there is
even a Mammonism, anything we are in earnest about! Idleness is
worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at
anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things.
There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.

True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon-
Gospel, have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society;
and go about professing openly the totalest separation,
isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness; but rather,
cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair competition' and so
forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten
everywhere that _Cash-payment_ is not the sole relation of human
beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and
liquidates all engagements of man. "My starving workers?"
answers the rich Mill-owner: "Did not I hire them fairly in the
market? Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum
covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?"--Verily
Mammon-worship is a melancholy creed. When Cain, for his own
behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, "Where