Carlyle’s reluctance was rooted in conscientious scruples. He began by questioning the authority of his Church; he went on to sift the authority of the Bible. Little by little the whole wondrous fabric of supernatural Christianity crumbled before him. He could not but be honest with himself; he could not but see how Hebrew legend had overgrown the stern ethical code attributed to Moses; how the glosses of Paul and Augustine and a hundred later religionists had changed or perverted the simple teaching of Christ. Awestruck, he beheld the God of his youth vanish out of the world. He wandered in the wilderness of doubt; he wrestled daily and nightly with despair. And then slowly, painfully, after brooding through long years, he saw the outlines of a larger faith emerge from the gloom. He fortified himself by acknowledging that, since righteousness is eternal, it cannot perish when we reject whatever opinions some Council of Westminster, of Trent, or of Nice may have resolved about it. Only earnest souls who have experienced the wrench which comes when we first break away from the bondage of an artificial religion, and perceive that the moral law may be something very different from dogmas, know the pang it costs. The dread of losing the truth when errors are thrown over--nay, the apparent hopelessness of being able to decide what is truth--causes many to hesitate, and some to turn back. Carlyle was not, of course, the first in Britain to tread the desolate path from Superstition into Rationalism. In the eighteenth century--to go no farther back--two very eminent minds had preceded him; but in both Hume and Gibbon the intellectual predominated over the moral nature, and to temperaments like theirs the pangs of new birth are always less acute. It is because in Carlyle the moral nature preponderated--intense, fiery, and enduring--that he became the spokesman of myriads who since him have had a similar experience. If we were to hazard a generalization which should sum up the nineteenth century, might we not affirm that the chief business of the century has been to establish a basis of conduct in harmony with what we actually know of the laws governing the universe? Hitherto, for ages together, men have not consciously done this, but they have accepted standards handed down to them by earlier men, who compounded these standards out of little knowledge, much ignorance, legend, and hearsay. Skeptics there have always been, but usually, like the skeptics who flourished in the last century, they have differed from the doubters in ours by the degree of their moral intensity. Whether we turn to Carlyle or to George Eliot, we find each tirelessly busy in substituting for the worn-out tenets of the past, springs of belief and conduct worthy to satisfy a more enlightened conscience.