So, it seems to me, we must reason with regard to Cromwell and the stern old Puritans, fierce and terrible as the old Berserkirs from the North. There was something superhuman in the English rebellion and revolution of the seventeenth century; and if Cromwell and his party were not specially moved by the Holy Spirit, as they believed, they must have been animated and driven on by the old Norse demon. So also of the old French Revolution, and of all those terrible convulsions which have ruined nations and shaken the world. Men are indeed in them, with their wisdom and their folly, their beliefs and their doubts, their virtues and their vices, but there is more in them than these. There is in them the fierce conflict of invisible powers, ever renewing and carrying on that fierce and unrelenting war which Lucifer and his rebel host dared wage against the Most High, and which must continue till time be no more. All history, if we did but understand it, is little else but the history of the conflict between these invisible powers; and till we learn this fact, in vain shall we pride ourselves on our philosophies of History. Carlyle has well exposed the shallow philosophy and absurd theories of our popular historians. Would he had himself gone deeper, and recognized the demonic and also the providential element in history, and not have attempted to explain its philosophy on human nature alone. Your Odins, Thors, Socrateses, Mahomets, Cromwells, Bonapartes, are not simply exponents of true, living, energetic manhood, and owe not their success, or their place in history to their clear perception and their instinctive adherence to the laws of true and genuine nature, as Carlyle would have us believe. The nature he bids us worship is the devil, the dark, subterranean Demon, that seizes us, blinds our eyes, and carries us onward, whither we know not, and by a power which we are not. It is the demon of the storm, the whirlwind, and the tempest, the volcano and the earthquake, and the Carlylean heroes are energumenes, Berserkirs, who spread devastation around them, who quaff the blood of their enemies, from human skulls, in the orgies of Valhalla, and leave as their monuments the ruins of nations. Carlyle has himself been touched with a German devil, and received a slight manipulation from the old Norse demon. But he has done well to say, “No sham can live;” he might have added, No sham is or can be productive. It is not by petty passions and petty tricks that nations are shaken to their centre, and fearful revolutions, which change the face of the world, are effected. Only what is real is, and only what is, can do. Under all the heavings and tossings of nature, there is a reality of some sort; and only by means of that reality can you explain the historical phenomena that arrest your attention.