This leads us to his most emphatically asserted doctrines. No one could assert more forcibly, emphatically, and frequently than Carlyle that morality or justice is the one indispensable thing; that justice means the law of God; that the sole test of the merits of any human law is its conformity to the divine law; and that, as he puts it, all history is an 'inarticulate Bible, and in a dim intricate manner reveals the divine appearances in this lower world. For God did make this world, and does for ever govern it; the loud roaring loom of time, with all its French revolutions, Jewish revelations, "weaves the vesture thou seest Him by." There is no biography of a man, much less any history or biography of a nation, but wraps in it a message out of heaven, addressed to the hearing ear and the not-hearing.' It is needless to quote particular passages. This clearly is the special doctrine of Carlyle, embodied in all his works; preached in season and (often enough) out of season; which possesses him rather than is possessed by him; the sum and substance of the message which he had to deliver to the world, and spent his life and energy in delivering with emphasis. And yet we are constantly told that Carlyle was a cynic who believed in nothing but brute force. If such a criticism came only from those who had been repelled by his style from reading his books—or again, only from the shallow and Pharisaical, who mistake any attack upon the arrangements to which they owe their comfort for an attack upon the eternal laws of the universe—it might be dismissed with contempt. And this is, indeed, all that much of the average talk about Carlyle deserves. But there is a more solid ground in the objection, which brings us in face of Carlyle's most disputable teaching, and is worth considering.
We have, in fact, to consider the principle so often ascribed to him that Might makes Right; and this may be interpreted into the immoral doctrine that force is the one thing admirable, and success the sole test of merit. Cromwell was right because he cut off Charles's head, and Charles wrong because he lost his head. Frederick's political immorality is condoned because Frederick succeeded in making Prussia great; Napoleon was right so long as he was victorious, and was condemned because he ended in St. Helena. That, as some critics suppose, was Carlyle's meaning, and they very naturally denounce it as an offensive and cynical theory.