g to
guide and help onward their fellow-men. And in what is this alienation
grounded? It is, as I believe, simply in the difference on that point:
viz. the clear, deep, habitual recognition of a one Living _Personal_
God, essentially good, wise, true and holy, the Author of all that
exists; and a reunion with whom is the only end of all rational beings.
This belief... [_There follow now several pages on "Personal God," and
other abstruse or indeed properly unspeakable matters; these, and a
general Postscript of qualifying purport, I will suppress; extracting
only the following fractions, as luminous or slightly significant to
us:_]

"Now see the difference of Teufelsdrockh's feelings. At the end of book
iii. chap. 8, I find these words: 'But whence? O Heaven, whither? Sense
knows not; Faith knows not; only that it is through mystery to mystery,
from God to God.

'We _are such stuff_
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'

And this tallies with the whole strain of his character. What we find
everywhere, with an abundant use of the name of God, is the conception
of a formless Infinite whether in time or space; of a high inscrutable
Necessity, which it is the chief wisdom and virtue to submit to, which
is the mysterious impersonal base of all Existence,--shows itself in the
laws of every separate being's nature; and for man in the shape of duty.
On the other hand, I affirm, we do know whence we come and whither we
go!--

... "And in this state of mind, as there is no true sympathy with
others, just as little is there any true peace for ourselves. There is
indeed possible the unsympathizing factitious calm of Art, which we
find in Goethe. But at what expense is it bought? Simply, by abandoning
altogether the idea of duty, which is the great witness of our
personality. And he attains his inhuman ghastly calmness by reducing the
Universe to a heap of material for the idea of beauty to work on!--

... "The sum of all I have been writing as to the connection of our
faith in God with our feeling towards men and our mode of action, may of
course be quite erroneous: but granting its truth, it would supply the
one principle which I have been seeking for, in order to explain
the peculiarities of style in your account of Teufelsdrockh and his
writings.... The life and works of Luther are the best comment I know of
on this doctrine of mine.

"Reading over what I have