_found_ a man great enough, a man wise and good enough: wisdom to discern
truly what the Time wanted, valor to lead it on the right road thither;
these are the salvation of any Time. But I liken common languid Times,
with their unbelief, distress, perplexity, with their languid doubting
characters and embarrassed circumstances, impotently crumbling down into
ever worse distress towards final ruin;--all this I liken to dry dead fuel,
waiting for the lightning out of Heaven that shall kindle it. The great
man, with his free force direct out of God's own hand, is the lightning.
His word is the wise healing word which all can believe in. All blazes
round him now, when he has once struck on it, into fire like his own. The
dry mouldering sticks are thought to have called him forth. They did want
him greatly; but as to calling him forth--! Those are critics of small
vision, I think, who cry: "See, is it not the sticks that made the fire?"
No sadder proof can be given by a man of his own littleness than disbelief
in great men. There is no sadder symptom of a generation than such general
blindness to the spiritual lightning, with faith only in the heap of barren
dead fuel. It is the last consummation of unbelief. In all epochs of the
world's history, we shall find the Great Man to have been the indispensable
savior of his epoch;--the lightning, without which the fuel never would
have burnt. The History of the World, I said already, was the Biography of
Great Men.

Such small critics do what they can to promote unbelief and universal
spiritual paralysis: but happily they cannot always completely succeed.
In all times it is possible for a man to arise great enough to feel that
they and their doctrines are chimeras and cobwebs. And what is notable, in
no time whatever can they entirely eradicate out of living men's hearts a
certain altogether peculiar reverence for Great Men; genuine admiration,
loyalty, adoration, however dim and perverted it may be. Hero-worship
endures forever while man endures. Boswell venerates his Johnson, right