Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his "sincerity." He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere,--of his being particularly anything! A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or "scholar" as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live--without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not "engrave _Truth_ on his watch-seal;" no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being _in_sincere! To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is a Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to _him_,--fearful and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrecognized, because never questioned or capable of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard of have this as the primary material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, are talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they have learned by logic, by rote, at second-hand: to that kind of man all this is still nothing. He must have truth; truth which _he_ feels to be true. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in all ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble necessity of being true. Johnson's way of thinking about this world is not mine, any more than Mahomet's was: but I recognize the everlasting element of _heart-sincerity_ in both; and see with pleasure how neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them is as _chaff_ sown; in both of them is something which the seedfield will _grow_. Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them,--as all like him always do. The highest Gospel he preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence: "in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known," see how you will _do_ it! A thing well worth preaching. "A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known:" do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief;--you were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you _do_ or work at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught;--coupled, theoretically and practically, with this other great Gospel, "Clear your mind of Cant!" Have no trade with Cant: stand on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in your own _real_ torn shoes: "that will be better for you," as Mahomet says! I call this, I call these two things _joined together_, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time.