While hollow languor and vacuity is the lot of the upper and want and stagnation of the lower, and universal misery is very certain, what other thing is certain? That a lie cannot be believed! Philosophism knows only this: Her other relief is mainly that in spiritual suprasensual matters, no belief is possible.... What will remain? The five unsatiated senses will remain, the sixth insatiable sense (of vanity); the whole dæmoniac nature of man will remain.
Man is not what we call a happy animal; his appetite for sweet victual is too enormous.... (He cannot subsist) except by girding himself together for continual endeavour and endurance.
(French Revolution, t. I, passim.)
[134]: Past and Present, p. 185.
[135]: We have forgotten God;—in the most modern dialect and very truth of the matter, we have taken up the fact of this universe as it is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal substance of things, and opened them only to the shews and shams of things. We quietly believe this universe to be intrinsically, a great unintelligible Perhaps; extrinsically, clear enough, it is a great, most extensive cattlefold and workhouse, with most extensive kitchen-ranges, dining-tables,—whereat he is wise who can find a place! All the truth of this universe is uncertain; only the profit and loss of it, the pudding and praise of it are and remain very visible to the practical man.
There is no longer any God for us! God's laws are become a greatest-happiness principle, a parliamentary expediency: the Heavens overarch us only as an astronomical time-keeper; a butt for Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot sentimentalities at:—in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has lost the soul out of him; and now, after the due period,—begins to find the want of it! This is verily the plague-spot; centre of the universal social gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death. To him that will consider it, here is the stem with his roots and taproots, with its world-wide Upas-boughs and accursed poison-exsudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony. You touch the focal-centre of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There is no religion; there is no God; man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly: in killing kings, in passing Reform bills, in French revolutions, Manchester insurrections, is found no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, reappears in new force and desperateness next hour.
Past and Present.—Latter-day Pamphlets. Chartism.
[136]: It is his effort and desire to teach this and the other thinking British man that said finale, the advent namely of actual open Anarchy, cannot be distant now, when virtual disguised Anarchy, long-continued, and waxing daily, has got to such a height; and that the one method of staving off the fatal consummation, and steering towards the continents of the future, lies not in the direction of reforming Parliament, but of what he calls reforming Downing-street; a thing infinitely urgent to be begun, and to be strenuously carried on. To find a Parliament more and more the express image of the people, could, unless the people chanced to be wise as well as miserable, give him no satisfaction. Not this at all; but to find some sort of King, made in the image of God, who could a little achieve for the people, if not their spoken wishes, yet their dumb wants, and what they would at last find to have been their instinctive will,—which is a far different matter usually in this babbling world of ours.
A king or leader then, in all bodies of men, there must be; be their work what it may, there is one man here who by character, faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it.
He who is to be my ruler, whose will is to be higher than my will, was chosen for me in Heaven. Neither except in such obedience to the Heaven-chosen, is freedom so much as conceivable.