Enough of this: though in speaking of Carlyle at this time it is impossible to pass it over in complete silence. I intend only to say something of Carlyle's teaching, which seems to be as much misunderstood by some critics as his character. It should require little impartiality or insight at the present day to do something like justice to a teacher who belonged essentially to a past generation. When Carlyle was still preaching upon questions of the day, my juvenile sympathies—such as they were—were always on the side of his opponents. But he and his opinions have passed into the domain of history, and we can, or at least we should, judge of them as calmly as we can of Burke and of Milton. In the year 1789 you might have sympathised with Mackintosh, or with Tom Paine, rather than with the great opponent of the Revolution; and you may even now hold that they were more in the right as to the immediate issues than Burke. But it would, indeed, be a narrow mind which could not now perceive that Burke, as a philosophic writer upon politics, towers like a giant amidst pigmies above the highest of his contemporaries; and that the value of his principles is scarcely affected by the particular application. Though Carlyle touched upon more recent events, we can already make the same distinction, and we must make it if we would judge fairly in his case.
The most obvious of all remarks about Carlyle is one expressed (I think) by Sir Henry Taylor in the phrase that he was 'a Calvinist who had lost his creed.' Rather we should say he was a Calvinist who had dropped the dogmas out of his creed. It is no doubt a serious question what remains of a creed when thus eviscerated; or, again, how long it is likely to survive such an operation. But for the present purpose it is enough to say that what remained for Carlyle was the characteristic temper of mind and the whole mode of regarding the universe. He often declared that the Hebrew Scriptures, though he did not adhere to the orthodox view of their authority, contained the most tenable theory of the world ever propounded to mankind. Without seeking to define what was the element which he had preserved, and what it was that he had abandoned, or attempting the perilous task of drawing a line between the essence and accidents of a creed, it is in any case clear that Carlyle was as Scottish in faith as in character; that he would have taken and imposed the Covenant with the most thoroughgoing and _ex-animo_ assent and consent; and that the difference between him and his forefathers was one rather of particular beliefs than of essential sentiment. He had changed rather the data upon which his convictions were based than the convictions themselves. He revered what his fathers revered, but he revered the same principle in other manifestations, and to them this would naturally appear as a profanation, whilst from his point of view it was but a legitimate extension of their fundamental beliefs.