Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Sartor Resartus: the life and opinions of Herr Teufelsdrocke by Thomas Carlyle
page 82 of 256 (32%)
zero to Should, and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to
Shall. Hereby was laid for me the basis of worldly Discretion, nay of
Morality itself. Let me not quarrel with my upbringing. It was rigorous,
too frugal, compressively secluded, every way unscientific: yet in that
very strictness and domestic solitude might there not lie the root of
deeper earnestness, of the stem from which all noble fruit must grow?
Above all, how unskilful soever, it was loving, it was well-meant, honest;
whereby every deficiency was helped. My kind Mother, for as such I must
ever love the good Gretchen, did me one altogether invaluable service: she
taught me, less indeed by word than by act and daily reverent look and
habitude, her own simple version of the Christian Faith. Andreas too
attended Church; yet more like a parade-duty, for which he in the other
world expected pay with arrears,--as, I trust, he has received; but my
Mother, with a true woman's heart, and fine though uncultivated sense, was
in the strictest acceptation Religious. How indestructibly the Good grows,
and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of Evil! The
highest whom I knew on Earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable,
before a Higher in Heaven: such things, especially in infancy, reach
inwards to the very core of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies
build itself into visibility in the mysterious deeps; and Reverence, the
divinest in man, springs forth undying from its mean envelopment of Fear.
Wouldst thou rather be a peasant's son that knew, were it never so rudely,
there was a God in Heaven and in Man; or a duke's son that only knew there
were two-and-thirty quarters on the family-coach?"

To which last question we must answer: Beware, O Teufelsdrockh, of
spiritual pride!


CHAPTER III.
DigitalOcean Referral Badge