phrases—' the Immensities,' 'the Eternities,' 'the Silences,' 'the Infinite Unnamable'—which we now think of, perhaps smilingly, as peculiar forms of the Carlylian rhetoric, it was, as he himself tells us, because 'the old Numen' had become as if obsolete to 'the huge idly impious million of writing, preaching, and talking people,' and he would employ any synonyms or verbal shifts by which he could hope to bring back the essential notion. In his latter days, and always in his own pious self-communings, he seems to have preferred the simple old name he had learned from his father and mother, with its heart-thrilling and heart-softening associations."
Professor Masson then enters upon the question of Carlyle's relation to Christianity, which is too fully treated for insertion here. The curious reader is referred to the discussion itself, which is remarkably interesting. Professor Masson distinguishes between the Ethic, or the moral code of Christianity, and its Metaphysic, or body of supernaturally derived beliefs. Carlyle accepted the former, but rejected the latter, which. Professor Masson argues, is after all the essential and distinguishing attribute of Christianity. On this point he thus reasons:
"The ethic without this metaphysic may call itself Christianity, but is not, I hold, Christianity in any sense worth so special a name. To tell men, however earnestly, not to tell lies, not to commit fraud, to be temperate, honest, truthful, merciful, even to be humble, pious, and God-fearing, is very good gospel; but it did not require the events of Judea, as Christian theology interprets them, to bring that gospel into the world. The modern preacher who sermonizes always on the ethic and omits the accompanying metaphysic may sophisticate himself into a belief that he is preaching Christianity, but is preaching no such thing. Wherever Christianity has been of real effect in the world, and has made real way for its own ethic, it has been by its metaphysic—that set of doctrines respecting things supernatural which was to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness. Now, as Carlyle had wholly given up the metaphysic of Christianity, he can not be classed among the Christians, and thought it honest to avow that he could not be so classed. Indeed, more and more, his attitude toward Christian theology in any of its known and orthodox forms settled into positive antipathy, till at last he declared it to be inconceivable to him that any man of real intellect could be found in that camp without something of conscious insincerity, and looked askance, therefore, on even such ecclesiastical friends of his own as Bishop Thirlwall and Bishop Wilberforce. This feeling found vent in such violent phrases as shovel-hattedness, the Jew-God, etc.; and he had even been so daring as to project a book or pamphlet to be called 'Exodus from Houndsditch,' the purport of which was to be that people ought universally, as fast as they could, to come out of the land and atmosphere of all Jewish forms and traditions, older or later, only tak-
