Thus he made it his business to set before his contemporaries models worthy of veneration, for he recognized that worship is a primary moral need. “Great men,” he says, “are the inspired (speaking and acting) Texts of that divine _Book of Revelations_, whereof a Chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named _History_.” In this spirit he introduced Goethe, the latest of the heroes, to English readers, as the man who, from amid chaos similar to that which bewildered them, had climbed to a position where life could be lived nobly, rationally, well. “Close your Byron, open your Goethe,” was his advice to those in whom Byron’s mingled defiance and sentimentality found an echo. He showed in Cromwell how religious zeal is something very different from a phantom faith. He laid bare the truth in Mahomet. He made Luther live again. And all to the end that he might convince his dazed contemporaries that in no age, if we look deeply, shall we look in vain for concrete, living examples of those qualities which are indispensable to right action; that salvation--the purging of the character--is won by exercising virtues, and not by conforming to a stereotyped routine; that the authority of conscience is a present fact, not a mere mechanism which God wound up and gave to the Hebrews, and has been transmitted in poor repair by them to us. As an antidote to sterilizing doubt, Carlyle prescribed the simple remedy which sums up the wisdom of all the sages: “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee, which thou knowest to be a Duty! Thy second Duty will already have become clearer.” In this fashion did Carlyle discharge his mission as a moral regenerator. We live as individuals, and to the individual conscience he made his appeal, caring little for the organization of principles into institutions. Rather, like every individualist, did he incline to deprecate the numbing effect of institutions. Let each unit be righteous, in order that whatever the collective units shall establish may be righteous too.