Chap. XVII. The Beginnings
Formulas the very skin and muscular tissue of a Man's Life: Living Formulas and dead. Habit the deepest law of human nature. A pathway through the pathless. Nationalities. Pulpy infancy, kneaded, baked into any form you choose: The Man of business; the hard-handed Labourer; the genus Dandy. No Mortal out of the depths of Bedlam but lives by Formulas. The hosts and generations of brave men Oblivion has swallowed: Their crumbled dust, the soil our life-fruit grows on. Invention of Speech; Forms of Worship; Methods of Justice. This English Land, here and now, the summary of what was wise and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. The thing called 'Fame.'
Book III.—The Modern Worker
Chap. I. Phenomena
How men have 'forgotten God;' taken the Fact of this Universe as it is not; God's Laws become a Greatest-happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency. Man has lost the soul out of him, and begins to find the want of it. The old Pope of Rome, with his stuffed dummy to do the kneeling for him. Few men that worship by the rotatory Calabash, do it in half so great, frank or effectual a way. Our Aristocracy no longer able to do its work, and not in the least conscious that it has any work to do. The Champion of England 'lifted into his saddle.' The hatter in the Strand, mounting a huge lath-and-plaster Hat. Our noble ancestors have fashioned for us, in how many thousand sense, a 'life-road;' and we their sons are madly, literally enough, 'consuming the way.'
Chap. II. Gospel of Mammonism
Heaven and Hell, often as the words are on our tongue, got to be fabulous or semi-fabulous for most of us. The real 'Hell' of the English. Cash-payment, not the sole or even chief relation of human beings. Practical Atheism, and its despicable fruits. One of Dr. Alison's melancholy facts: A poor Irish widow, in the Lanes of Endinburgh, proving her sisterhood. Until we get a human soul within us, all things are _im_possible: Infatuated geese, with feathers and without.
Chap. III. Gospel of Dilettantism
Mammonism at least works; but 'Go gracefully idle in Mayfair,' what does or can that mean?—Impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice and Saynothingism in Speech. No man now speaks a plain word: Insincere Speech the prime material of insincere Action. Moslem parable of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead sea: The Universe become a Humbug to the Apes that thought it one.
Chap. IV. Happy