to him,
false to him, inconsistent with some new thing he has discovered or
observed. It is the history of every man; and in the history of Mankind
we see it summed up into great historical amounts,--revolutions, new
epochs. Dante's Mountain of Purgatory does _not_ stand "in the ocean of
the other Hemisphere," when Columbus has once sailed thither! Men find
no such thing extant in the other Hemisphere. It is not there. It must
cease to be believed to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever in this
world,--all Systems of Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from
these.

If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief waxes uncertain,
Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and miseries
everywhere more and more prevail, we shall see material enough for
revolution. At all turns, a man who will _do_ faithfully, needs to
believe firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage; if
he cannot dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own suffrage
serve, he is a poor eye-servant; the work committed to him will be
_mis_done. Every such man is a daily contributor to the inevitable
downfall. Whatsoever work he does, dishonestly, with an eye to the
outward look of it, is a new offence, parent of new misery to somebody
or other. Offences accumulate till they become insupportable; and are
then violently burst through, cleared off as by explosion. Dante's
sublime Catholicism, incredible now in theory, and defaced still worse
by faithless, doubting and dishonest practice, has to be torn asunder by
a Luther, Shakspeare's noble Feudalism, as beautiful as it once looked
and was, has to end in a French Revolution. The accumulation of offences
is, as we say, too literally _exploded_, blasted asunder volcanically;
and there are long troublous periods, before matters come to a
settlement again.

Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face of the matter,
and find in all human opinions and arrangements merely the fact that
they were uncertain, temporary, subject to the law of death! At bottom,
it is not so: all death, here too we find, is but of the body, not of
the essence or soul; all destruction, by violent revolution or howsoever
it be, is but new creation on a wider scale. Odinism was _Valor_;
Christianism was _Humility_, a nobler kind of Valor. No thought that
ever dwelt honestly as true in the heart of man but _was_ an honest
insight into God's truth on man's part, and _has_ an e