It was for the men of this "sad time" that Carlyle wrote Teufelsdröckh's story; and he wrote it not merely to depict the far-reaching consequences of their pessimism but also to make plain to them their true path out of it. He desired to exhibit to his age the real nature of the strange malady from which it was suffering in order that he might thereupon proclaim the remedy.
What, then, is the moral significance of Carlyle's "symbolic myth"? What are the supreme lessons which he uses it to convey?
We must begin by understanding his diagnosis. For him, all the evils of the time could ultimately be traced back to their common source in what may be briefly described as its want of real religion. Of churches and creeds there were plenty; of living faith little or nothing was left. Men had lost all vital sense of God in the world; and because of this, they had taken up a fatally wrong attitude to life. They looked at it wholly from the mechanical point of view, and judged it by merely utilitarian standards. The "body-politic" was no longer inspired by any "soul-politic." Men, individually and in the mass, cared only for material prosperity, sought only outward success, made the pursuit of happiness the end and aim of their being. The divine meaning of virtue, the infinite nature of duty, had been forgotten, and morality had been turned into a sort of ledger-philosophy, based upon calculations of profit and loss.
It was thus that Carlyle read the signs of the times. In such circumstances what was needed? Nothing less than a spiritual rebirth. Men must abandon their wrong attitude to life, and take up the right attitude. Everything hinged on that. And that they might take up this right attitude it was necessary first that they should be convinced of life's essential spirituality, and cease in consequence to seek its meaning and test its value on the plane of merely material things.
Carlyle thus throws passionate emphasis upon religion as the only saving power. But it must be noted that he does not suggest a return to any of the dogmatic creeds of the past. Though once the expression of a living faith, these were now for him mere lifeless formulas. Nor has he any new dogmatic creed to offer in their place. That mystical crisis which had broken the spell of the Everlasting No was in a strict sense--he uses the word himself--a conversion. But it was not a conversion in the theological sense, for it did not involve the acceptance of any specific articles of faith. It was simply a complete change of front; the protest of his whole nature, in a suddenly aroused mood of indignation and defiance, against the "spirit which denies;" the assertion of his manhood against the cowardice which had so long kept him trembling and whimpering before the facts of existence. But from that change of front came presently the vivid apprehension of certain great truths which his former mood had thus far concealed from him; and in these truths he found the secret of that right attitude to life in the discovery of which lay men's only hope of salvation from the unrest and melancholy of their time.