Carlyle holds that if we do our duty--the best work we can--and faithfully obey His laws, living soberly and justly, God will do the best for us in this life. As regards the next we have seen that he ended with Goethe's hope. At an earlier date he spoke more confidently. On his father's death (_Reminiscences_, vol. i. p. 65) he wrote:-- Man follows man. His life is as a tale that has been told: yet under time does there not lie eternity? ... Perhaps my father, all that essentially was my father, is even now near me, with me. Both he and I are with God. Perhaps, if it so please God, we shall in some higher state of being meet one another, recognise one another. ... The possibility, nay (in some way) the certainty, of perennial existence daily grows plainer to me. On the death of Mrs. Welsh he wrote to his wife: "We shall yet go to her. God is great. God is good": and earlier, in 1835-1836, to Emerson on the loss of his brother:-- "What a thin film it is that divides the living and the dead. Your brother is in very deed and truth with God, where both you and I are.... Perhaps we shall all meet YONDER, and the tears be wiped from all eyes. One thing is no perhaps: surely we shall all meet, if it be the will of the Maker of us. If it be not His will, then is it not better so?" After his wife's death, naturally, the question of Immortality came uppermost in his mind; but his conclusions are, like those of Burns, never dogmatic:-- The truth about the matter is absolutely hidden from us. "In my Father's house are many mansions." Yes, if you are God you may have a right to say so; if you are a man what do you know more than I, or any of us? And later-- What if Omnipotence should actually have said, "Yes, poor mortals, such of you as have gone so far shall be permitted to go farther"? To Emerson in 1867 he writes:-- I am as good as without hope and without fear; a gloomily serious, silent, and sad old man, gazing into the final chasm of things in mute dialogue with "Death, Judgment, and Eternity" (dialogue mute on both sides), not caring to discourse with poor articulate speaking mortals, on their sorts of topics--disgusted with the world and its roaring nonsense, which I have no further thought of lifting a finger to help, and only try to keep out of the way of, and shut my door against.