But Evil oscillates in certain bounds.
Ten thousand causes check the rage of man:
His utmost crimes a wall of brass surrounds;
Mere weariness exhausts War’s yelling hounds;
And, if all fail, Death comes with his great wave,
That levels all the hollows and the mounds
Of human life. Who then shall be so brave
As of Confusion found in God’s large thoughts to rave?”
Readers familiar with the writings first and last of Mr. Carlyle, will readily call to mind many a terse utterance in vindication of the Divine authorship and Divine authority of order. Disorder he pronounces to be a thing which “veracious created Nature, even because it is not Chaos and a waste-whirling baseless Phantasm,” rejects and disowns. “Disorder, insane by the nature of it, is the hatefullest of things to man, who lives by sanity and by order.” “All Anarchy, all evil, all injustice, is, by the nature of it, ... suicidal, and cannot endure.” “Arrangement is indispensable to man; Arrangement, were it grounded only on that old primary evangel of Force, with Sceptre in the shape of Hammer!” Such sentences admit of almost infinite multiplication. “Anarchy, hateful as Death, is abhorrent to the whole nature of man; and so must itself soon die.” Hence this philosopher’s partiality for “heroes,” even of the least estimable type, provided they have will and force to replace confusion by order. Cortès is not among the specified Heroes of his special Hero-worship; but he deserves a place by reason of the preamble to that code of ordinances, as the conqueror of Mexico himself terms them, which he set forth in restraint of his army: the essential purport of this preamble being, that in all institutions, whether Divine or human (if the latter have any worth), order is the great law.
It was in support of the cause of social order that Luther took to exposing the dangers due to ignorant innovators, and strenuously declared that “God Himself constituted certain authorities to direct the world; for it is a great feature in His magnificent system, that there shall be order here below.” Doctor Martin may, in this respect, be called a man after our Hero-worshipper’s own heart; such another as the one of whom he wrote,—“Wheresoever Disorder may stand or lie, let it have a care; here is the man that has declared war with it, that will never make peace with it. Man is the Missionary of Order; he is the servant, not of the Devil and of Chaos, but of God and the universe.” And Christian doctrine teaches that the order and beauty of the outward world are symbols of that inward order and symmetry, that peace and purity of heart, that universal harmony between God’s will and man’s will, which it is one great object of Christianity to establish.