egotist cannot arise from anything but a pure inability to grasp
Carlyle's gospel. "Ruskin," says a critic, "did, all the same, verily
believe in God; Carlyle believed only in himself." This is certainly a
distinction between the author he has understood and the author he has
not understood. Carlyle believed in himself, but he could not have
believed in himself more than Ruskin did; they both believed in God,
because they felt that if everything else fell into wrack and ruin,
themselves were permanent witnesses to God. Where they both failed was
not in belief in God or in belief in themselves; they failed in belief
in other people. It is not enough for a prophet to believe in his
message; he must believe in its acceptability. Christ, St. Francis,
Bunyan, Wesley, Mr. Gladstone, Walt Whitman, men of indescribable
variety, were all alike in a certain faculty of treating the average man
as their equal, of trusting to his reason and good feeling without fear
and without condescension. It was this simplicity of confidence, not
only in God, but in the image of God, that was lacking in Carlyle.

But the attempts to discredit Carlyle's religious sentiment must
absolutely fall to the ground. The profound security of Carlyle's sense
of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has
the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets--humour. A man
must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity. No Neo-Pagan
delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysus, no vague, half-converted
Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of
cracking jokes on the matter. But to the Hebrew prophets their religion
was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of
its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow.
So it was with Carlyle. His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and
literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity. Other writers had
seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of