CHAPTER I. THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE. In perusing The Tale of Goethe, a piece which is wonderful even among the works of that supreme literary artist, and which his worthy exponent and interpreter, Mr. Carlyle, has deemed, no doubt with perfect correctness, a picture, in the colors indeed of fantasy and dream, yet, to the seeing eye, nowise indefinite, of the whole future, attention can scarce fail to be arrested by the destiny there appointed for the Christian religion. In the Temple of the Future, the little hut of the fisherman, to which former and darker generations had looked for aid in every great emergency of existence, still found a place. The light of reason entering in breathed through it a new life and an immortal beauty. "By virtue of the Lamp locked up in it, the hut had been converted from the inside to the outside into solid silver. Ere long, too, its form changed; for the noble metal shook aside the accidental shape of planks, posts, and beams, and stretched itself out into a noble case of beaten ornamented workmanship. Thus a fair little temple stood erected in the middle of the large one; or, if you will, an altar worthy of the temple." The whole passage, of which this forms a part, is perhaps the finest illustration to be found of a certain wide-spread and multiform intellectual phenome |