What
a scene; how far vanished from us, in these unworshipping ages
of ours! The manner of men's Hero-worship, verily the innermost
fact of their existence, determining all the rest. On the whole,
who knows how to reverence the Body of man? Abbot Samson, at the
culminating point of his existence: Our real-phantasmagory of
St. Edmundsbury plunges into the bosom of the Twelfth Century
again, and all is over.

Chap. XVII. _The Beginnings_

Formulas the very skin and muscular tissue of a Man's Life:
Living Formulas and dead. Habit the deepest law of human nature.
A pathway through the pathless. Nationalities. Pulpy infancy,
kneaded, baked into any form you choose: The Man of business;
the hard-handed Labourer; the genus Dandy. No Mortal out of the
depths of Bedlam but lives by Formulas. The hosts and
generations of brave men Oblivion has swallowed: Their crumbled
dust, the soil our life-fruit grows on. Invention of Speech;
Forms of Worship; Methods of Justice. This English Land, here
and now, the summary of what was wise and noble, and accordant
with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. The
thing called 'Fame.'

Book III.--The Modern Worker

Chap. I. _Phenomena_

How men have 'forgotten God;' taken the Fact of this Universe as
it is _not;_ God's Laws become a Greatest-happiness Principle, a
Parliamentary Expediency. Man has lost the _soul_ out of him,
and begins to find the want of it. The old Pope of Rome, with
his stuffed dummy to do the kneeling for him. Few men that
worship by the rotatory Calabash, do it in half so great, frank
or effectual a way. Our Aristocracy no longer able to _do_ its
work, and not in the least conscious that it has any work to do.
The Champion of England 'lifted into his saddle.' The hatter in
the Strand, mounting a huge lath-and-plaster Hat. Our noble
ancestors have fashioned for us, in how many thousand sense, a
'life-road;' and we their sons are madly, literally enough,
'consuming the way.'

Chap. II. _Gospel of Mammonism_

Heaven and Hell, often as the words are on our tongue, got to be
fabulous or semi-fabulous for most of us. The real 'Hell' of the
English. Cash-payment, _not_ the sole or even chief relation of
human beings. Practical Atheism, and its despicable fruits. One
of Dr. Alison's melancholy facts: A poor Irish widow, in the
Lanes of Endinburgh, _proving_ her sisterhood. Until we get a
human _soul_ within us,