praise, to the unswerving tenacity, the dauntless daring, and the heroic spirit of self-sacrifice which very often is the portion of the follower of the wandering fire. But lofty idealism without practical efficiency is of little avail. The efficient idealist is no melancholy, mild-eyed lotus eater, who muses and dreams and broods with half-shut eyes while the great currents of life sweep irresistibly by. Yet it is "In deeds he takes delight." All of life is not included in the "practical." As the hart panteth after the water brooks the spirit of man longs to rise, with wings as eagles, above the things of time and place. No life is so dark that it cannot be illumined by the presence of the heaven-born ideal; no heart is so despondent that it cannot pulsate with hope. The white water lily very often sheds its fragrance upon lonely moor and desolate fen. "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." Man can never live by bread alone. He must endure as seeing Him who is invisible.

VII

THE FUNDAMENTAL TEACHING OF

THOMAS CARLYLE1

WHEN Thomas Carlyle gave his inaugural address as Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh, memory threw around him the light of other days and he lived once more in that year of the long ago when he left the hills of Dumfriesshire for the ancient seat of learning in whose halls he once more stood. "It is now," he said, "fifty-six years gone last November since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite fourteen, to attend the classes here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I could little guess what, my poor mind full of wonder and awe-struck expectation." Unlike his American friend, Emerson, Carlyle did not spring from a line of scholars. He was the first of his race to grapple with the mysteries of books. His boyhood home was a peasant's cottage, and the greatest lessons of his life were those which he learned by its fireside. His strong,

1 By permission of The Methodist Review, Nashville, Tennessee.

sturdy, earnest, veracious father and his gentle, affectionate, yearning, solicitous mother were both fundamentally religious. Their religious heritage was Dissent. They belonged to the group known as "Burgher-Seceders," or "New Lichts." Their son tells us that "a man who awoke to the belief that he actually had a soul to be saved or lost was apt to be found among the dissenting people." The most tenderly cherished ambition of the Carlyles for their nobly endowed first-born son was that some day he should "wag his pow in the pulpit." It was to prepare him to be a spiritual leader that they toiled and sacrificed in order to send him to the university.

But, as has been true of many another father and mother, the hopes of James and Janet Carlyle were not to be realized in the way which they expected. In those years at Edinburgh the young student was called upon to battle with "spiritual dragons." In his life there came hours when he felt that the old faith, hallowed by the sweetest and most precious memories, was naught but the idle dream of a darkened age. It also became more and more apparent that a dyspeptic genius like Thomas Carlyle would by no means be an ideal pastor for any people. He was called upon to endure years of doubt and

drifting. But as the years passed one by one the clouds vanished from his sky.

It was in June, 1821, when he was twentysix years of age, when, as he says, he "authentically took the devil by the nose" and began to attain those convictions by which his later life was governed. In 1830, in speaking of this period of liberation, he says, "This year I found that I had conquered all my skepticisms, agonizing doubts, fearful wrestlings with the foul, vile, and soul-murdering mudgods of my epoch; had escaped from Tartarus, with all its Phlegetons and Stygian quagmires, and was emerging free in spirit into an eternal blue of ether where, blessed be heaven, I have, for the spiritual part, ever since lived, looking down upon the welterings of my poor fellowcreatures in such multitudes and millions still stuck in the fatal elements, and have no concern whatever in their Puseyisms, ritualisms, metaphysical controversies, and cobwebberies. I understood well what the old Christian people meant by conversion-by God's infinite mercy to them. I had in effect gained an immense victory, and for a number of years, in spite of nerves and chagrins, had a constant inward happiness that was quite royal and supreme, in which temporal evil was transient and insignificant, and which essentially re

mains with my soul, though far oftener eclipsed and lying deeper down than then. Once more thank heaven for its highest gift."

The doubts which so long like a fog had surrounded him had departed. In the battle with fear faith was triumphant. It could be said of him as Tennyson wrote of Arthur Hallam:

"He fought his doubts and gathered strength,
He would not make the judgment blind,

He faced the specters of the mind

And laid them; thus he came at length

"To find a stronger faith his own,

And power was with him in the night,

Which makes the darkness and the light,

And dwells not in the light alone."

From that time forth in many a noble volume, some of which the world will not willingly let die, Thomas Carlyle preached a gospel, which with "true prophetic eloquence" has reached the hearts of men. No man has spoken to our modern times with more of the spirit and power of the stern, militant, truthloving, truth-telling prophets of Israel. Over against the cynical doubt of the skeptic, Carlyle set the "Everlasting Yea" of the great God. He was a heaven-sent messenger proclaiming the law of truth, the nobility of