of ours; nor do I think you would care to hear much about it. The talk on
that subject is too often of the most extravagant, confused sort. Yet I

may say, the fact itself seems certain enough; nay we can trace out the
inevitable necessity of it in the nature of things. Every man, as I have

stated somewhere, is not only a learner but a doer: he learns with the
mind given him what has been; but with the same mind he discovers farther,

he invents and devises somewhat of his own. Absolutely without originality
there is no man. No man whatever believes, or can believe, exactly what

his grandfather believed: he enlarges somewhat, by fresh discovery, his
view of the Universe, and consequently his Theorem of the Universe,--which

is an _infinite_ Universe, and can never be embraced wholly or finally by
any view or Theorem, in any conceivable enlargement: he enlarges somewhat,

I say; finds somewhat that was credible to his grandfatherincredible to
him, false to him, inconsistent with some new thing he has discovered or

observed. It is the history of every man; and in the history of Mankind we
see it summed up into great historical amounts,--revolutions, new epochs.

Dante's Mountain of Purgatory does _not_ stand "in the ocean of the other
Hemisphere," when Columbus has once sailed thither! Men find no such thing

extant in the other Hemisphere. It is not there. It must cease to be
believed to be there. So with all beliefs whatsoever in this world,--all

Systems of Belief, and Systems of Practice that spring from these.
If we add now the melancholy fact, that when Belief waxes uncertain,

Practice too becomes unsound, and errors, injustices and miseries
everywhere more and more prevail, we shall see material enough for

revolution. At all turns, a man who will _do_ faithfully, needs to believe
firmly. If he have to ask at every turn the world's suffrage; if he cannot

dispense with the world's suffrage, and make his own suffrage serve, he is
a poor eye-servant; the work committed to him will be _mis_done. Every

such man is a daily contributor to the inevitabledownfall. Whatsoever
work he does, dishonestly, with an eye to the outward look of it, is a new

offence, parent of new misery to somebody or other. Offences accumulate
till they become insupportable; and are then violently" target="_blank" title="ad.强暴地；猛烈地">violently burst through,

cleared off as by explosion. Dante's sublime Catholicism, incredible now
in theory, and defaced still worse by faithless, doubting and dishonest

practice, has to be torn asunder by a Luther, Shakspeare's noble Feudalism,
as beautiful as it once looked and was, has to end in a French Revolution.

The accumulation of offences is, as we say, too literally _exploded_,
blasted asunder volcanically; and there are long troublous periods, before

matters come to a settlement again.
Surely it were mournful enough to look only at this face of the matter, and

find in all human opinions and arrangements merely the fact that they were
uncertain, temporary, subject to the law of death! At bottom, it is not

so: all death, here too we find, is but of the body, not of the essence or
soul; all destruction, by violent revolution or howsoever it be, is but new

creation on a wider scale. Odinism was _Valor_; Christianism was
_Humility_, a nobler kind of Valor. No thought that ever dwelt honestly as

true in the heart of man but _was_ an honest insight into God's truth on
man's part, and _has_ an essential truth in it which endures through all

changes, an lasting" target="_blank" title="a.永久的，无尽的">everlasting possession for us all. And, on the other hand,
what a melancholy notion is that, which has to represent all men, in all

countries and times except our own, as having spent their life in blind
condemnable error, mere lost Pagans, Scandinavians, Mahometans, only that

we might have the true ultimate knowledge! All generations of men were
lost and wrong, only that this present little section of a generation might

be saved and right. They all marched forward there, all generations since
the beginning of the world, like the Russian soldiers into the ditch of

Schweidnitz Fort, only to fill up the ditch with their dead bodies, that we
might march over and take the place! It is an incredible hypothesis.

Such incredible hypothesis we have seen maintained with fierce emphasis;
and this or the other poor individual man, with his sect of individual men,

marching as over the dead bodies of all men, towards sure victory but when
he too, with his hypothesis and ultimateinfallible credo, sank into the

ditch, and became a dead body, what was to be said?--Withal, it is an
important fact in the nature of man, that he tends to reckon his own

insight as final, and goes upon it as such. He will always do it, I
suppose, in one or the other way; but it must be in some wider, wiser way

than this. Are not all true men that live, or that ever lived, soldiers of
the same army, enlisted, under Heaven's captaincy, to do battle against the

same enemy, the empire of Darkness and Wrong? Why should we misknow one
another, fight not against the enemy but against ourselves, from mere

difference of uniform? All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them
true valiant men. All fashions of arms, the Arab turban and swift

scimetar, Thor's strong hammer smiting down _Jotuns_, shall be welcome.
Luther's battle-voice, Dante's march-melody, all genuine things are with

us, not against us. We are all under one Captain. soldiers of the same
host.--Let us now look a little at this Luther's fighting; what kind of

battle it was, and how he comported himself in it. Luther too was of our
spiritual Heroes; a Prophet to his country and time.

As introductory to the whole, a remark about Idolatry will perhaps be in
place here. One of Mahomet's characteristics, which indeed belongs to all

Prophets, is unlimited implacable zeal against Idolatry. It is the grand
theme of Prophets: Idolatry, the worshipping of dead Idols as the

Divinity, is a thing they cannot away with, but have to denounce
continually, and brand with inexpiable reprobation; it is the chief of all

the sins they see done under the sun. This is worth noting. We will not
enter here into the theological question about Idolatry. Idol is

_Eidolon_, a thing seen, a symbol. It is not God, but a Symbol of God; and
perhaps one may question whether any the most benighted mortal ever took it

for more than a Symbol. I fancy, he did not think that the poor image his
own hands had made _was_ God; but that God was emblemed by it, that God was

in it some way or other. And now in this sense, one may ask, Is not all
worshipwhatsoever a worship by Symbols, by _eidola_, or things seen?

Whether _seen_, rendered visible as an image or picture to the bodily eye;
or visible only to the inward eye, to the imagination, to the intellect:

this makes a superficial, but no substantial difference. It is still a
Thing Seen, significant of Godhead; an Idol. The most rigorous Puritan has

his Confession of Faith, and intellectual Representation of Divine things,
and worships thereby; thereby is worship first made possible for him. All

creeds, liturgies, religious forms, conceptions that fitly invest religious
feelings, are in this sense _eidola_, things seen. All worshipwhatsoever

must proceed by Symbols, by Idols:--we may say, all Idolatry is
comparative, and the worst Idolatry is only _more_ idolatrous.

Where, then, lies the evil of it? Some fatal evil must lie in it, or
earnestprophetic men would not on all hands so reprobate it. Why is

Idolatry so hateful to Prophets? It seems to me as if, in the worship of
those poor woodensymbols, the thing that had chiefly provoked the Prophet,

and filled his inmost soul with indignation and aversion, was not exactly
what suggested itself to his own thought, and came out of him in words to

others, as the thing. The rudest heathen that worshipped Canopus, or the
Caabah Black-Stone, he, as we saw, was superior to the horse that

worshipped nothing at all! Nay there was a kind of lasting merit in that
poor act of his; analogous to what is still meritorious in Poets:

recognition of a certain endless _divine_ beauty and significance in stars
and all natural objects whatsoever. Why should the Prophet so mercilessly

condemn him? The poorest mortalworshipping his Fetish, while his heart is
full of it, may be an object of pity, of contempt and avoidance, if you

will; but cannot surely be an object of hatred. Let his heart _be_
honestly full of it, the whole space of his dark narrow mind illuminated

thereby; in one word, let him entirely _believe_ in his Fetish,--it will
then be, I should say, if not well with him, yet as well as it can readily

be made to be, and you will leave him alone, unmolested there.
But here enters the fatal circumstance of Idolatry, that, in the era of the

Prophets, no man's mind _is_ any longer honestly filled with his Idol or
Symbol. Before the Prophet can arise who, seeing through it, knows it to

be mere wood, many men must have begun dimly to doubt that it was little
more. Condemnable Idolatry is _insincere_ Idolatry. Doubt has eaten out

the heart of it: a human soul is seen clinging spasmodically to an Ark of
the Covenant, which it half feels now to have become a Phantasm. This is

one of the balefulest sights. Souls are no longer filled with their
Fetish; but only pretend to be filled, and would fain make themselves feel

that they are filled. "You do not believe," said Coleridge; "you only
believe that you believe." It is the final scene in all kinds of Worship

and Symbolism; the sure symptom that death is now nigh. It is equivalent
to what we call Formulism, and Worship of Formulas, in these days of ours.

No more immoral act can be done by a human creature; for it is the
beginning of all immorality, or rather it is the impossibilityhenceforth

of any moralitywhatsoever: the innermost moral soul is paralyzed thereby,
cast into fatal magnetic sleep! Men are no longer _sincere_ men. I do not

wonder that the earnest man denounces this, brands it, prosecutes it with
inextinguishable aversion. He and it, all good and it, are at death-feud.

Blamable Idolatry is _Cant_, and even what one may call Sincere-Cant.
Sincere-Cant: that is worth thinking of! Every sort of Worship ends with