The more one reads Carlyle the further one traces the consequences of this belief. The Puritan creed, one may say, is not popular at the present day for reasons which might easily be assigned; and those who dislike it in any form are not conciliated by the omission of its external peculiarities. And, on the other hand, the omission naturally alienates many who would otherwise sympathise. When Carlyle speaks of 'the Eternities' and 'the Silences,' he is really using a convenient periphrasis for thoughts more naturally expressed by most people in the language peculiar to Cromwell—the translation is often given side by side with the original in the comments upon Cromwell's letters and speeches—and his mode of speech is dictated by the feeling that the old dogmatic forms are too narrow and too much associated with scholastic pedantry to be appropriate in presence of such awful mysteries. He is, as Teufelsdröckh would have said, dropping the old clothes of belief only that he may more fittingly express the living reality.
To Carlyle, for example, the later developments of Irvingism, the speaking with tongues, and so forth, appeared as simply contemptible, or, when sanctioned by the friend whose memory he cherished so pathetically, as inexpressibly pitiable. It was a hopeless attempt to cling to the worn-out rags, a dropping of the substance to grasp the shadow; ending, therefore, in a mere grotesque caricature of belief which made genuine belief all the more difficult of attainment. You are seeking for outward signs and wonders when you should be impressed by the profound and all-pervading mysteries of the universe; and therefore falling into the hands of mere charlatans, and taking the morbid hysterics of over-excited women for the revelation conveyed by all nature to those who have ears to hear. Has not the word 'spiritual,' till now expressive of the highest emotions possible to human beings, got itself somehow stained and debased by association with the loathsome tricks practised by impostors aided by the prurient curiosity of their dupes? The perversion of the highest instincts which leads a man in his very anxiety to find a true prophet and spiritual leader to put up with some miserable Cagliostro—a quack working 'miracles' by sleight of hand and phosphorus—appeared to Carlyle, and surely appeared to him most rightly, as the saddest of all conceivable aberrations of human nature; saddest because some men with a higher strain of character are amenable to such influences. But when Carlyle came to specify what was and what was not quackery of this kind, and included much that was still sacred to others, he naturally had to part company with many who would otherwise have sympathised. Miss Martineau, he tells us, was described as not only stripping herself naked, but stripping to the bone. Carlyle seems to some people to be performing this last operation, though to himself it appeared in the opposite light.