Past and Present: Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.Carlyle, Thomas
Philosophy
Past and Present: Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.
Carlyle, Thomas
Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
Literature:--and look at Paul's Cathedral, and the Masonries and
Worships and Quasi-Worships that are there; not to speak of
Westminster Hall and its wigs! Men had not a hammer to begin with, not
a syllabled articulation: they had it all to make;--and they have made
it. What thousand thousand articulate, semi-articulate,
earnest-stammering _Prayers_ ascending up to Heaven, from hut and
cell, in many lands, in many centuries, from the fervent kindled souls
of innumerable men, each struggling to pour itself forth incompletely,
as it might, before the incompletest _Liturgy_ could be compiled! The
Liturgy, or adoptable and generally adopted Set of Prayers and
Prayer-Method, was what we can call the Select Adoptabilities, 'Select
Beauties' well edited (by [OE]cumenic Councils and other
Useful-Knowledge Societies) from that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers
already extant and accumulated, good and bad. The good were found
adoptable by men; were gradually got together, well-edited,
accredited: the bad, found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually
forgotten, disused and burnt. It is the way with human things. The
first man who, looking with opened soul on this august Heaven and
Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which we name Nature, Universe and
suchlike, the essence of which remains for ever Unnameable; he who
first, gazing into this, fell on his knees awestruck, in silence as is
likeliest,--he, driven by inner necessity, the 'audacious original'
that he was, had done a thing, too, which all thoughtful hearts saw
straightway to be an expressive, altogether adoptable thing! To bow
the knee was ever since the attitude of supplication. Earlier than any
spoken Prayers, _Litanias_, or _Leitourgias_; the beginning of all
Worship,--which needed but a beginning, so rational was it. What a
poet he! Yes, this bold original was a successful one withal. The
wellhead this one, hidden in the primeval dusks and distances, from
whom as from a Nile-source all _Forms of Worship_ flow:--such a
Nile-river (somewhat muddy and malarious now!) of Forms of Worship
sprang there, and flowed, and flows, down to Puseyism, Rotatory
Calabash, Archbishop Laud at St. Catherine Creed's, and perhaps lower!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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