Christendom. One reading of Gibbon—for the ground was already prepared—had been enough to sweep away all effective belief in revealed religion;[1] and the process then begun was completed by the influence of Hume, Voltaire, and the Encyclopaedists. This, however, was a merely negative result. And it was owing to the German writers—above all, to Goethe and Fichte—that he was able to work his way to a more spiritual creed; that he was able once more to find an intellectual basis for the religious instincts which were among the strongest and deepest things in his nature.
It was probably through the imagination, rather than by any purely intellectual process, that Carlyle first reached the ideas which, in this matter, were to remain with him to the end. And his imagination was first stirred by the poetry of Goethe. In such lyrics as the Song of the Earth-Spirit in Faust, or the opening hymn of Gott und Welt—in such imaginative prose as the passage about the three kinds of reverence in the Wanderjahre—he found the aptest and most pregnant expression for the thoughts which were dimly working in his own mind, but which, save for the imaginative appeal of Goethe's creations, might never have taken solid and definite shape. To conceive of God as working only in and through the world as we know it, to conceive of nature as the 'living garment of God', and of man as capable of becoming the highest revelation of His spirit, this was the 'natural supernaturalism' which seemed to satisfy both his intellect and his religious instincts, to reconcile his respect for the reasoned truths of science with his haunting fear that, if the world of sense were indeed all, the deepest cravings of man's nature—in the last resort, the very springs of his moral activity—would be dried up. And it was because Goethe appeared to hold the scales even between the world of sense and the world of spirit, between the seen world of which alone we have definite 'knowledge' and the
- ↑ Reminiscences, i. 102.
