[110]: For if Government is, so to speak, the outward SKIN of the Body Politic, holding the whole together and protecting it; and if all your craft-guilds, and Associations for industry, of hand or of head, are the fleshy clothes, the muscular and osseous tissues (lying under such SKIN), whereby Society stands and Works;—then is Religion the inmost pericardial and nervous tissue which ministers life and warm circulation to the whole.
Meanwhile, in our era of the world, those church-clothes have gone sorrowfully out at elbows: nay, far worse, many of them have become mere hollow shapes, or masks, under which no living Figure or Spirit any longer dwells; but only spiders and unclean beetles, in horrid accumulation, drive their trade; and the mask still glares on you with his glass-eyes, in ghastly affectation of life,—some generation and half after Religion has quite withdrawn from it, and in unnoticed nooks is weaving for herself new vestures, wherewith to reappear, and bless us, or our sons and grandsons.
[111]: On Heroes, 6, 191-92; 14, 217.—Past and Present.
Canopus shining down over the desert, with its blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-like brightness far brighter than we ever witness here) would pierce into the heart of the wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guiding through that solitary waste there. To his wild heart, with all feelings in it, with no speech for any feeling, it might seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing out on him from the great deep Eternity, revealing the inner splendour to him. (On Heroes, p. 14.)
[112]: Past and Present, p. 305, 270.
[113]: The one end, essence and use of all religion past, present, and to come, is this only: to keep the same moral conscience or inner light of ours alive and shining.... All Religion was here to remind us better or worse of what we already know better or worse of the quite infinite difference there is between a good man and a bad; to bid us love infinitely the one, abhor and avoid infinitely the other; strive infinitely to be the one and not to be the other. "All religion issues in due practical Hero-worship."
(Past and Present, p. 305.)
[114]: All true work is Religion; and whatsoever Religion is not work may go and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, spinning Dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbour. (Past and Present, p. 270.)
[115]: Heroes, p. 129, 245.—Miscellanies, passim.
[116]: Life of Sterling.