sufficient to overthrow all, or almost all, the errors which we shall have to combat in these pages.

Mr. Carlyle cares little for metaphysical supports for his opinions; he has long listened to the great voices of life and history; but we think his early works afford us the philosophic explanation of his doctrine of hero-worship. On a pantheistic scheme of things, it seems unassailable. God being all, and all being God, and a great man being the highest visible manifestation, and as it were concentration of the universal divine essence, it is right to pay to the latter the homage of an unbounded admiration, to render him the only kind of worship possible to men.

But we mean not to assail Mr. Carlyle from this point: we likewise turn to the voice of history and the heart. We find him tracing all worship to admiration and reverence for great men; we find him asserting that the limits are not to be fixed for the veneration with which to regard true heroism in a man. We think the very word "hero-worship" utterly inadmissible under any interpretation; we assert that no religion ever had its origin in the admiration of men. Such the point in dispute; we turn to history.

Two great classes may be distinguished among the leaders. of mankind: those who have exercised their influence by power not moral, and those who made an appeal to the moral nature of man. We contend not for hair-breadth distinctions, we point out a difference which one glance along the centuries will show to be real and broad. By the first class, we mean such men as Napoleon, Cæsar, and Alexander; by the second, such men as Mohammed, Zoroaster, and Moses. The former were, viewed as we now regard them, mere embodiments of force; their soldiers trusted and followed them, because armies were in their hands as thunderbolts. The captain of banditti,

whose eye sees farther, and whose arm smites more powerfully, than those of his followers, exercises an influence in kind. precisely similar. Any thing analogous to worship is foreign to every such case; a fact rendered palpable and undeniable by the simple reflection, that there is no feeling of an infinite respect, as due to what is infinite, in these or the like instances. A supple-kneed Greek might have knelt to Alexander, “if Alexander wished," but no proclamations could make a Greek believe that Alexander could lay his hand on the lightning, or impart life to an insect. There is, however, another class of great men, with whose influence on their fellows worship has been ever and intimately connected: this we have represented by Mohammed, Zoroaster, and Moses. Here, then, the point at issue comes directly before us. Worship did originate in each of these cases. Whence did it arise? Mark the men in their work, and listen to their words. Mohammed arose and said, "Ye have been worshiping dumb idols, that are no gods: look up to Allah; there is no god but Allah!" His words were not in vain. Zoroaster arose and said, "Ye have wandered from the truth which your fathers knew and followed; I bring you it back fresh from the fountains of heaven." Men gave ear to him also. Moses came to the children of Israel, and said, “I AM hath sent me unto you." and followed him; through the cloven wilderness, whithersoever he listed. and worship in each of these cases? hammed, when he pointed his finger up to Allah? Did they obey the commandments of Moses, when he gave them the tables where God's hand had traced words under the canopy of cloud and fire? Surely, we may say with plainness and certainty, No. It was ever the Sender that was worshiped, not the sent; it was the belief in his alliance with an exterior, an

They heard the word, surges, into the howling Whom did men obey Did they worship Mo

infinite power, which won him his influence. He has brought us fire from heaven! Such, in all ages, has been the cry of men, as they looked, their eyes radiant with joy and thankfulness, on the priest or prophet, and ranged themselves under his guidanee. The crown and scepter which men have most highly honored, and most loyally obeyed, have always been believed to have come down from heaven; men have not worshiped the spirit of a man, or the breath in his nostrils, but the Spirit to whom he turned them. We suppose the rudest Polynesian islander regards with profounder veneration the black, unchiseled, eyeless idol to which he bows down, than the wisest and mightiest chieftain he knows: the one holds of the unseen and the infinite, the other he can look upon, and examine, and compass in his thought; to the one he may look in the day of battle, of the other he will think in the shadow of the thunder-cloud; the one he will respect and obey, the other alone will he worship. Go into the portrait-gallery of the Venetians, and mark there the "victorious Doges painted neither in the toil of battle nor the triumph of return, nor set forth with crowns and curtains of state, but kneeling always crownless, and returning thanks to God for his help, or as priests interceding for the nation in its affliction." That spectacle illustrates well the relative regards of men toward their greatest, and toward their God.

But we think we hear some one indignantly exclaim, Why, in the first place, all this is the extreme of triteness; and, in the second, Mr. Carlyle, by his doctrine of hero-worship, means really nothing more. We claim no great originality in this matter, and certainly the truth for which we contend, whatever it wants, is clothed in the majesty of age; we do not suppose even, so strictly in accordance with human instinct do we deem it, that it sounded very strangely in the

ears of men, when Moses, bidding them turn from those whose "breath was in their nostrils," was commissioned to write it down, an eternal truth for eternal remembrance, in the Book of Deuteronomy. But, however this may be, and even though our expression of the truth might be sanctioned by Mr. Carlyle, we are absolutely assured that it is enough to reverse his whole theory of human affairs. We find it perfectly sufficient to show that the term hero-worship is an absurdity, or worse; to indicate the true significance of those phenomena of universal history which Mr. Carlyle has categorized under that term; and at least to lead to the overthrow of his theory that law originates in revenge. It were difficult to compute the practical importance of the truths to which, under the name of hero-worship, he has directed our attention; but we must remember the true and pregnant remark of Mackintosh, that, in the construction of theory, partial truth is equivalent to error; and while we would not lose one grain of the real gold Mr. Carlyle has brought to the treasuries of the world, we would assign to all its own precise place, and no other. We grant that men have honored men; we grant that, in every department of human endeavor, the point to be aimed at, for health, prosperity, and advancement, is to obtain qualified men. But, when Mr. Carlyle associates this fact with worship, we at once declare him to have missed an all-important distinction, which reveals the highest lessons on what he names hero-worship. This distinction is, we grant, very simple. If a city is surrounded by armed squadrons and a line of circumvallation, if the townsmen are in terror that no quarter will be given them, but yet, because of a scorching thirst which threatens to kill them by slow torment, are proceeding to open their gates, if then suddenly one of their number discovers, in a spot hitherto un

thought of, a well of cool and abundant water; if his fellowcitizens crowd around him, and grasp his hand, and look on him with tears of joy-what shall we see in the spectacle? Respect for him, or delight at the discovery of the fountain? Entirely the latter. When a man looking heavenward, cries out, I see heaven opened, and the light streams forth-lift up your eyes, and see it for yourselves; when men hear, and believe, and bestir themselves, and exclaim, It is even so: we see the light, we feel ourselves being drawn nearer to it, and mayest thou be blessed for showing it to us--what shall we see in the spectacle? Shall we regard it as a testimony of man to man, or of man to God? Certainly as the latter. We look with Mr. Carlyle along human history; we see men paying the highest honor to their Mohammeds and Zoroasters; we see the character of whole epochs molded by this honor; we see nations gathering round these, and willing, one would say, to cement for them thrones in their hearts' blood; and from the whole we learn, not the divinity of man, but the fact that the deep human instinct has in all ages looked for a God. The louder the shouts arise of what Mr. Carlyle calls hero-worship, the more definitely and decisively will they proclaim to us that hero-worship, in any permissible or definable sense, is contradicted by the united voice of humanity. The two highest inferences to be drawn from all the great phenomena so magnificently illustrated by Mr. Carlyle under that name, seem to us to be these two:

I. In the breast of the human race is a belief in an Infinite Being.

II. There has been perennially in the heart of man an intense desire to reach a nearer knowledge of God, and a closer intimacy with Him-a sublime and inextinguishable yearning toward a divine Father.